What is it that God requires?
By Dan Etheridge

Amos is one of my favourite books of the bible. It’s a strange choice as it’s full of judgement, woe, more judgement, some plagues, locusts, a lot more judgement and just a few verses that give any sense of hope that God will say anything else. I don’t count myself as a pessimist, or a sadist smugly and self righteously enjoying the judgement of others, so why is it that time and time again when I read through the writings of this 8th century (BC) prophet I hear God speak so clearly?

I think the basic answer is that, as with the life of Jesus, the book of Amos will timelessly expose hypocrisy, illustrating loud and clear the life and faith God expects of us. Obviously this is expressed throughout the whole of the biblical story in many different ways, but in Amos this message is conveyed in a particularly devastating fashion. For me, Amos offers the flipside of Micah’s ‘And what does the Lord require of you’ by quite strongly stating what God doesn’t require of us…

Slating everyone
Amos is a genius. He was from a town called Tekoa in the country of Judah. In those days, Judah and Israel had split apart, being two separate nations. Interestingly Amos felt the words given to him were specifically applicable to Israel (the Northern kingdom that bordered Judah). Seeing that the message Amos brought wasn’t too positive, it’s likely he wasn’t received too well. It’s like me, a southern Englishman heading up North, walking round Leeds shouting aloud that everyone works in a mine and eats too many pies (not true of course). However, what Amos had to say wasn’t a matter of north/south prejudice and rivalry… it was true! So, you can guess the kind of response he got.

To be fair he wasn’t that obvious. The beginning passages of Amos are all about the nations surrounding Israel and Judah. Amos lets out a torrent of abuse on every single bordering and nearby country… Damascus gets in trouble for it’s treatment of the captured region of Galilee (1v3), Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon and Ekron, all Philistine cities, are also slated for selling captive communities into slavery (1v6f). The sequence goes on for quite a while. You can imagine that as Amos hurls abuse and judgement towards Israel’s hated neighbours, his audience become more animated; people stop and listen with everyone thinking ‘at last, a prophet who condemns the philistines!’ They follow him as his argument and rebuke builds to a dramatic crescendo, the crowds anticipating what he will say next.

… but they obviously don’t. Suddenly he turns to Judah and criticises the southern kingdom because of a lack of respect for ‘the law of the Lord’ (2v4). Finally he singles in to focus purely on Israel, launching into a critique that lasts for the rest of the book! A very clever technique, he pulls in his audience only to end up completely abusing them. Still, as Amos makes clear, the point is that those God has rescued, journeyed with and entered into a special relationship with are expected to behave in certain ways. God had given the law to Israel, a law that intended to guide their relationship with him. The law was to provide ways in which the community acted as a community, as a whole equal people group - there were even regulations to ensure slaves were freed after a specific time period for God intended his people for freedom, a point made pretty clear during the Exodus narrative.

In a sense by doing this, Amos highlights that those God knows and has a relationship with have a burden upon them: to act in His ways and stand up for what He stands up for. It’s the same point Jesus made when summing up the parable about the watchful servants:

”From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked”
(Luke 12v48)

It’s hard to say this sort of stuff and still remember our God is a God of grace… but sometimes I feel God places this same burden on us as we try and follow him today.

What not to do
In this respect Amos is quite helpful. If we want to commit to wholeheartedly following God, there are many options open to us. Loving and serving others can take an infinite variety of forms, most of which Amos leaves to our imagination. However, he’s pretty explicit about the things that anger God – the ‘what not to do’s’ of following Jesus. Here’s a few examples…

The first reason for God’s imminent judgement is made pretty explicit:

’They sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.
They trample on the heads of the poor
as upon the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed’
(2v6f goes onto mention acts of sexual immorality too)

I always found the first section of this verse interesting. Amos implies that the ‘needy’ are ‘righteous’ simply because of their situation of poverty and oppression. An interesting side thought… perhaps!

Amos goes on to suggest that God will use the bordering nations to rise up against Israel because of the ‘oppression among her people’ (3v9). He implies that despite this ‘oppression’, certain Israelites are relatively well off, having several houses adorned in luxurious ivory (3v14). In fact in historical context, Israel was prospering, having a time of relative expansion and freedom from the surrounding superpowers. Money was being earned as Israel controlled specific well-used trade routes and charged merchants to pass through their lands unharmed. In this sense whilst some, largely connected to the monarchy, prospered, the majority suffered. They faced unjust courts (5v12), dishonest salesman, slavery and debt (8v5f).

This makes the God Amos speaks on behalf of furious. He claims the wealthy are complacent (6v1) and full of pride (6v8). The sense is that God is not at all happy when some prosper both, at the expense of others and as these others remain poor or grow poorer.

Through the eyes of Amos we see a rich comfortable ruling group, satisfied with their position in society, ignoring the growing poverty of those less fortunate than they. These elites, fulfilling their religious obligations, eagerly call out for the ‘day of the Lord’, when God would act and meet with his people – a wholly positive experience. However, Amos, turns this notion on its head and argues instead that ‘the day of the Lord will be darkness not light’ (5v20). The day of the Lord Amos encourages the Israelites to remember is one where they are judged for the state of their ‘complacent’ relationship with God and the growing injustice within society.

So what does Amos tell us to not do… to not get complacent or proud, making sure that our relationship with God reflects his heart for justice and more practically a society free from oppression of one group by another. This is a message that we should still take seriously…

Redefining Worship
We’re pretty use to the term worship: singing songs, spending time focusing on God on our own or with others. All this is great and important to developing our relationship with our father. However, Amos warns us pretty harshly that the worship God requires cannot be from a complacent, proud or arrogant heart. Furthermore Amos indicates that worship is intrinsically linked to justice and that God detests ritualised acts of worship when idolatry (5v26) and justice are denied (5v15, 24).

Amos tells us that a life of worship is incompatible with a life that perpetuates injustice. We find here a God who is angered by complacency and pride… a God who stands up for the rights of the poor and sees beyond the apparent prosperity and wealth, to a society that has forgotten it’s definitive call to be God’s people.

If I’m honest (because usually I’m not) this stuff is pretty harsh. When we look at our society we see a western world that has, at times, profited where others have grown weaker and poorer. Even on a basic level, I get complacent in my relationship with God. Knowing he loves me I easily forget that his heart cries out for justice within society. It’s not easy to ‘not do’ the stuff that Amos is pretty livid about, especially where an act of simply buying shoes or having a bank account can perpetuate poverty in the lives of the poorest in our global community.

Importantly, Amos reminds us that God is gracious, that he does love us and that he judges as well as restores (9v15ff). However, the enduring message of Amos, the message that shocks me into action every time I hear it, is the call to live out our faith with integrity, avoiding hypocritical and ritualised worship, instead combining our love of God with our actions.

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