June 14 - God Is Not Fooled Amos 5:14

Sunday School Commentary Lesson
By
Dr. Jason Thrower
June 14
God Is Not Fooled, Amos 5:14-15, 18-27
When I was in college, I had a roommate who was from Liberia, Forkpa Korlawala. There was
much he had never been exposed to, such as the essential value of a good alarm clock. One
Saturday night, I came in late, set my alarm and went to bed. The next morning just as it was
going off, I rolled over and hit the snooze alarm. Well, Forkpa, thought it would be nice if he
just unplugged the alarm clock so I could sleep in peace. He was trying to be kind, but I still
needed the jarring, disturbing alarm to arouse me from my slumber. Unfortunately, without
the aid of my alarm clock, I over slept and was late for church the next morning.
Amos' words for the northern Kingdom were words of judgement, because it was way too late
for them to escape judgement. The good news is, for us, it is still not too late. Amos provides
an alarm for us today to recognize our responsibility to aid those who are poor and hungry.
Why Do You Want The Day of the Lord?
By this point in the book, it has become clear that Amos expects the disaster that God will
bring upon Israel in the near future to be so extensive that Amos must speak of the nation's
death. It is a terrible thought. Consider any of the small nations of the world today, and
imagine being a citizen of a neighboring country and going to that small nation to inform its
people that soon they would no longer exist as a nation. Worse yet, imagine trying to convince
them that this was the will of their god. How could such destruction and death be the will of
any god? That is the theological problem Amos and other pre-exilic prophets created for their
people, and the problem remains for us.
Where Is Your Brother Abel?
Amos was convinced that Israel soon would fall to an invader. Israelite theology had taught him
to see the hand of God in every event. Perhaps Amos believed that this would take place in two
different ways. The invader (and Amos does not seem to know it will be Assyria) might be seen
as the enemy of God and God's people, and Amos might have spoken of God's forthcoming
judgement of them as later prophets did in their writings against the nations (Isaiah 37:22-29;
Jeremiah 50-51; Ezekiel 25). Instead Amos was inspired to recognize that those in the daily life
of Israel had completely given up the ethical standards of living in a covenant relationship with
God. Whether he thought in terms of "covenant theology" or not, clearly he saw the treatment
of the poor in Israel as a fundamental rejection of the relationship that God had established
with Israel. This relationship required obedience not only in worship but also in the
maintenance of a just society. In a very real sense, Amos sought to be his brother's keeper by
sounding the alarm to the Israelites; God was not fooled by their shallow worship that made no
real and lasting change in the lives of those who were poor and hungry. We might describe his
evaluation this way: It was an unhealthy society, so sick it could not survive much longer. But
Amos spoke of God's activity in history. The death of Israel would not be from "natural causes";
it would be God's work. We must not then conclude that God prefers to work via killing and
burning. God allows human beings to chart their own courses then finds ways to work through,
or in spite of, what they do. The Assyrians would have come against Israel anyway, for their
own reasons, and the later prophets will insist that God judges the Assyrians for their cruelty.
But God has also found ways to accomplish His divine purpose through even such sinful acts.
Amos shows no indication that he knows what that ultimate purpose is (unless Amos 9:15-16 is
a hint of it). He speaks of death, but later prophets saw beyond that to new life to be created
even out of the turmoil and agony of empire building in the ancient Near East.
Who Told You That You Were Naked?
Justice is probably the word most often associated with Amos because of Amos 5:24, but the
word itself occurs only in Amos 5:7, 15, 24; 6:12. Without question, it is the perversion of
justice that Amos has diagnosed as the major cause of Israel's fatal illness. This has brought the
book of Amos out of its relative obscurity in Jewish and Christian history with the rise of the
social gospel late in the nineteenth century and of liberation theology late in the twentieth.
Amos should not be distorted into a social gospel tract, however, for Amos was not a reformer;
neither was he a liberation theologian, for "the end has come for my people Israel" is a strange
kind of liberation.
Who Is Wise Enough to Count the Clouds?
Amos has no program for change; it was too late for that. He offers an explanation of what has
gone wrong and why it is so wrong that God must intervene in a drastic way. Later generations
would see that he was right when he said the end was near, and they would accept his
explanation of it as true. For them his words became an imperative to take his advocacy of the
law with uttermost seriousness, as they saw what failure to establish justice had done. The
explicit and post-exilic Jewish communities set about to make sure their society was such that
no prophet like Amos need rise again. As long as we are convinced it is not too late and believe
we still have a chance, we also should read the book of Amos the way those exiles read it - as a
challenge not to make the mistake ancient Israel made.
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