Amos’ words to Israel sound like something a sheriff or vigilante might have said in an old Western: “Shoot ‘em up.” While the words might sound like they ought to be said with a southern drawl and spurs jangling in the background, Amos’ words were not directed to a Western outlaw but to God’s very own chosen people.
Background on Amos and His Times
Amos was a prophet to Israel and a contemporary of Hosea and Jonah. Unlike Isaiah, who was of the court, or Jeremiah, who was a priest, Amos was a farmer. His polished skill with words and range of knowledge rejects the notion he was a peasant, but commonplace labors formed the foundation of his daily life.
It is interesting to note that God used Amos to speak a warning to the people of Israel, but a message of grace and love through Hosea. Just as we are wise to read the whole Bible in order to get a complete picture of His heart, God sent more than one man to speak to His children.
Each prophet was sent with needed and true messages but packaged quite differently. Amos’ words of warning aimed at the return and repentance of Israel. Hosea’s words spoke kindness, love, and grace over the people in pursuit of their return and repentance as well.
We all need a mixture of truth and love in our spiritual journeys, and the messages of these two contemporary prophets illustrate a piece of God’s work to meet us from whatever direction He can.
Background on Amos’ Culture
During the days Amos prophesied, Israel had reached new political and economic heights. Her prosperity led to decadence, paganism, oppression of the poor, corruption of justice, and a new depth of spiritual smugness.
God’s previous corrections were long forgotten, and everyone was quite secure in their rejection of God’s ways. Throughout the book, Amos repeats the theme of corrupted justice in his warnings to Israel.
What Amos Meant by ‘Prepare to Meet Your God’
When Amos told the people of Israel to prepare to meet their God, He was saying, “Get your spiritual house in order fast!”
Judgment was coming to Israel because of all her corruption, and God’s warning through Amos was a plea for God’s children to repent from their wrongdoings.
This wasn’t a figurative language. It was a literal warning for the soon-coming death that would overtake Israel’s current ease and apparent security.
Jonah, another contemporary of Amos, had a similar message for the Gentile people of Assyria. If they would repent of their sin, both Jonah’s Gentiles and Amos’ Israelites (which in both cases hurt people, oppressed those who could not defend themselves, and spread sinful behaviors that continued this cycle of preying upon those weaker than themselves) God would relent in His plan to execute destructive justice on them.
As a kid growing up in church, I heard about God’s wrath for those who practiced idolatry. I got the kid-friendly explanation of idolatry, and it left me wondering why such a big God cared so much about little statues.
Could my children’s toys be considered idols? Was I also on a path of condemnation? No one quite adequately explained all this, so I kept my unintentionally heretical line of questioning tucked away in my heart.
When I went to seminary, we studied the idolatry of Bible days, and the “little children” idolatry notion was entirely uninformed. God wasn’t upset because people had shelves with little figurines on them in their foyers. Their idolatry wasn’t contained to statues, large or small.
While we could argue idolatry, by definition, cannot be contained but rather consumes everything in a person’s life, the widespread, cultural idolatry practiced in the Bible had a violent and literal stronghold on every part of life in the communities it reigned over.
It led them to force their young children to become temple prostitutes, and we call this human trafficking and slavery. It led them to throw their babies into fires stoked to please and appease the gods so their crops might grow that year.
The people were chained to the bloody demands of these pagan gods, all the while breaking from those chains through personal belief was intolerable to the community at large.
The gods demanded full allegiance so a “free thinker” in the culture might anger the gods and enact punishment upon everyone.
So, the bloodthirsty wheel of conformity and destruction rolled over anyone who dared not offer the gods all they wanted. At some point, God would step in and put an end to their death and destruction in what I call the smoke-the-whole-box discipline method.
Like a kid in an old movie who was caught sneaking a smoke and was then made to smoke the whole box of cigars until he was sick, God would end the destruction in a similar way.
If they wanted so much death instead of choosing life as He’d directed them to, then He’d give them the death and destruction they apparently craved until they were sick of it.
And for a time, it would end the children forced into trafficking and babies being thrown into fire pits. The kind of idolatry the Bible addresses isn’t just a figurative concept or little carved figures on a shelf.
It had realities you and I would have screamed about if we were forced to watch. Realities that God was actually quite patient in resolving.
Not only was God growing weary of idolatry’s demands on His people, but they were simultaneously bringing sacrifices to the Lord without heartfelt love behind them.
Their Lord had become to them just another genie in the bottle whose lamp they would also half-heartedly rub. They lost their zeal for truth and justice, and the whole culture was beginning to smell of human arrogance.
God goes on to tell His children:
Prepare to meet your God, O Israel For behold, He who forms mountains and creates the wind And declares to man what are His thoughts, He who makes dawn into darkness And treads on the high places of the earth, The LORD God of hosts is His name (Amos 4:12b-13).
God had called Israel into intimacy with Him by sharing His thoughts and heart with them, yet they flippantly turned away, as if they had forgotten He was the one who made and rules over everything in existence.
What Does This Mean?
On a personal level, we may or may not have strongholds of idolatry to ferret out of our hearts, but we are wise to take Amos’ words seriously and search ourselves for the ways we, too, have followed after the world around us.
Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way (Psalm 139:23-24).
On a cultural level, we are wise to be burdened to pray for our culture and world that has, in so many ways, spurned God’s goodness and let His gifts make us trust in our perceived security more than in our Lord, just as Israel did so long ago.
For further reading:
How the Prophet Amos Warns Us against Fake Worship
Photo Credit: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/Bohdan Bevz
April Motl is a pastor’s wife, homeschool mom, and women’s ministry director. When she’s not waist-deep in the joys and jobs of motherhood, being a wife, and serving at church, she writes and teaches for women. You can find more encouraging resources from April here and here.
