Scripture Notes: “I Am No Prophet” (Amos 7)

Amos spoke a stern warning against the Northern Kingdom of Israel. In the years since the North split from the South, ten northern tribes from two southern ones (Judah and Benjamin), the North had drifted (perhaps ran) far into idolatry. Its rulers did not want the people returning to the Temple in Jerusalem for worship, for they feared a movement toward reunion and their subsequent loss of power.

So those rulers set up new sanctuaries in the North, two of them, one at Bethel and the other at Dan, and they put an idol in each of those sanctuaries, a golden calf. This was obviously a serious backslide on the part of the Israelites, a deliberate return to their apostasy years ago in the desert as they were leaving Egypt. The Israelites went back to worshiping the gods they had worshiped in Egypt, blended with the gods of the pagan peoples around them. The one God they were not worshiping was God Himself.

So God called Amos to speak up and say so. God called him to be a prophet. And people hated Amos for it. In fact, one of the priests of the Northern Kingdom, Amaziah by name, essentially told Amos to get lost, to go to Judah and never prophesy at Bethel again. It was the “king’s sanctuary,” the priest announced haughtily, and “the temple of the kingdom.” Indeed, and that was the whole problem. It was not God’s sanctuary or God’s temple but the work of human beings who had decided to worship idols.

Amos replied, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son.” He was a simple shepherd who cared for both sheep and sycamore trees until God called him. The whole prophet thing was decidedly not his idea, but he loved and trusted God and therefore obeyed Him. And Amos would continue to do so no matter what the consequences to himself. He would continue to tell the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom that God was highly displeased and would punish them if they failed to repent of their idolatry and return to Him. Amos had to speak with tough love when he said, “Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land” on account of its sins. And he was right.