Reflecting on Amos

Sermon reflecting on Amos 7:7-15

When I started to think on this it became very apparent that the title for this should be “Don’t shoot the Messenger”!  With a second line of, “is the plumb line or the wall that you see?”

So we read from Amos “This is what He showed me.  The Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line with a plumb line in His hand.  And the Lord said to me “Amos, what do you see?”  And I said “A plumb line.” 

The name Amos is from the Hebrew “to lift a burden”.  So Amos is a burden bearer.  He was a native of the southern kingdom of  Judah from the town of Tekoa, which is about 6 miles south of Bethlehem, 12 miles south of Jerusalem and 18 miles west of the Dead Sea.   Tekoa was the centre for a large sheep farming district.  

Amos had three occupations.  Shepherd, he tended a particularly small rugged speckles variety of sheep which required less food and could live well in the desert, and which produced a wool of superior quality and great value.  H was also a herdsmen tending the cattle.  And finally he was a cultivator of sycamore figs.  This was a wild fig which exuded a ball of sap which hardened into a sort of edible fruit, which the lower classes were able to afford.  These trees were found in lower altitudes than Tekoa so Amos undoubtedly had to do some travelling to tend these trees.

Amos’s occupations thus meant that meant that his travels would have taken him around Israel and Judah and in this way he will have learned first-hand the military, social and economic conditions and practices of rich and poor alike.

He had never considered himself special, just a farmer.  He had no training in the prophetic schools and he lived about 760 BC.  God led Amos using the plumb line and the wall.  And the Lord said to him that he would be setting a plumb line amongst the people of Israel and He was going to spare them no longer.

This was a time when the fortunes of Israel had reached one of its highest points of prosperity and peace.   Jeroboam was able to extend his borders almost to those of the old Davidic kingdom.  There was also peace with Judah.  This was after a long period of conflict.  It was a time of economic well being and national strength.  The increase in wealth also led to extensive building programmes.  The simple brick of earlier days had given way to buildings of hewn stone and ivory decorations.  With this increased wealth there was an associated rise in those social evils – the rich became very rich and the poor became even poorer.  There was a complete lack of social concern in the land.  The rich would stop at nothing to increase their profits including exploitation of the poor.  Even the legal system was corrupted and the poor had no recourse even in the courts.

Suddenly Amos has been given some of the most crucial information for a whole race of people.  And God goes on and says that the high places of Isaac will be destroyed and the sanctuaries of this world will be ruined and with a sword He will rise against the house of Jeroboam.  So Amos goes and travels to deliver God’s prophecy.  But Amaziah who is the priest of Bethel sent a message to Jeroboam the King of Israel tell him that Amos was raising a conspiracy against him.  He didn’t mention that it was God’s word, God’s prophecy but just that Amos was starting a conspiracy and he goes on that Jeroboam will die by the sword and Israel will go into exile away from their native land.  So Amaziah said to Amos “Sling your hook!  Go back to the land of Judah where you come from.  Earn your bread there, do your work there, prophecy there.  Amaziah’s the priest and yet he’s got this bloke who suddenly appeared and prophesied from God.    So he says to him don’t prophesy any more in Bethel because this is the king’s sanctuary and the temple of the kingdom – their special place.  The prophets of that area had degenerated into time servers.  Religion certainly flourished in the nation, but it was a religion that was completely divorced from reality.  There was a great deal of activism and outward show, with crowds thronging the shrines at the times of the great festivals.  Ritual was elaborate but there was no true life and no evidence that true spiritual values had any place.  It was a religion that was empty in content.  Amos insisted that God had no time for ritualistic religion without heart.

But Amos , who was only just a humble chap,  clearly wasn’t phased by this situation because God was there with him.  He said “I am neither a prophet or a prophet’s son, just a shepherd and I also take care of my fig trees.  But the Lord took me from tending my flock and said ‘Go and prophesy to my people Israel.‘”

So we’ve got a situation where God is using an ordinary person to deliver an extraordinary message of condemnation and He’s doing it straight to the top, not by creating a revolution through the masses but by going straight to the king and the chief priest.  It was a black and white message.  You can’t curve a plumb line.  It’s either straight or it’s not. 

So if we come forward in time now by about 790 years, God had spoken through prophets throughout the Old Testament and then came Jesus who some people said was a prophet, but we know was God incarnate as a man on earth, who died a man.  God sent Jesus into a world of sin to teach, to encourage, to counsel, and also to fulfil some prophesies of the Old Testament.  Jesus didn’t threaten retribution, but a life eternal or salvation.  He let people judge themselves.  The free will we were given, that he encourages us to use to set our own building regulations.  To create our own foundations to build our own properties – our lives.

No come to the present day.  What about modern day prophets?  We may have thought about Mother Theresa, Billy Graham, but I want to think instead about each one of us, that in Old Testament God sent particular people to prophesy, then Jesus.  But now it’s us.  It’s us that God uses.  We are his hands and his feet.  So when you look at the world now do you see a plumb line or a wall?  And when you look in your own lives do you see a plumb line or a wall.  We probably see the plumb line because that’s new.  What we probably don’t see is the wall because the wall is our life with all of its imperfections, but because it’s been there a long while we no longer see it.  The dark days in which Amos lived called for man of sturdy moral fibre and fearlessness.  Such was Amos.  His character moulded in the harsh terrain of the wilderness of Tekoa enabled him to stand before the priest and the people proclaiming the word God had given him.  At the call of God he left his home in Judea as a mere layman.  So God through Amos challenged Jeroboam the king, God through Jesus God incarnate challenged His peoples.  And God today challenges us.  Once we have straightened out our own personal wall, what then of the bigger walls? What then the injustices in the world?  Do we wait for others to speak out, or is God waiting for us to be that prophet?

We do not view ourselves as prophets anymore, we are disciples.  We can’t say “Oh I haven’t had any training, I couldn’t do that.”  God took Amos a farmer, a tree chap.  Jesus took fishermen and tax collectors.  God through the Holy Spirit chooses us.  Do you feel able today to take up your plumb line and personally measure the trueness of your own life, and then go out and measure the trueness of the world?