What's AMOS about?

The book of Amos was written around the time that the northern part of the land was being invaded by the Assyrians. This was a disaster that made no sense of God having promised from ancient times to give this land to the people. Amos is the first person to interpret history as illustrating that while God loves and is faithful to the people, if the people exploit and oppress the poor, then punishing consequences will happen.

God is the God of justice for everyone

Amos is the first prophet ever to make this claim, and his insights influenced all the subsequent prophets. However, the book of Amos comes towards the end of the Hebrew Bible and is listed as one of the “minor prophets”. This is misleading because the traditional order of the books placed them roughly in order of how long each was—not the order in which they were written, and “minor” meant “shorter”, not less important.

Until Amos, everyone had assumed that things went wrong when some country more powerful than yours had attacked you. Amos claims that isn’t what happens—when we forsake the poor, that’s what causes disasters.

At the start of the book, Amos depicts God as condemning the practices of surrounding nations and then turns the tables and condemns God’s people for doing exactly the same things. It is hard for us to imagine how insulting such a declaration was—it must have taken enormous courage to tell the people and their leaders that they had become as filthy and horrible as the nations that God had commanded them to exterminate. As the book continues, Amos becomes specific about how wealthy leaders and individuals have totally abandoned God’s care for every person and have become concerned only with their own wealth. Amos contains some of the most excoriating criticisms of selfish wealth found anywhere in the Bible.

How Amos is helpful to us

The culture of our time enacts the same horrors that Amos’ did, only we do it on a global scale where many of us hardly notice that people in other parts of the world are suffering and dying from malnutrition and slave-wages to provide us with everything we need. If that seems horrific, then we have heard Amos speaking. And it turns out Amos is right—if wealthy countries hoard vaccines and don’t make them available to the world’s poor, then the chances of new pandemics affecting us increases. Amos was right—there are dreadful consequences for not ensuring the poor have dignity. It can hurt to read Amos and realize he is talking about us, and not just about Israelites seven hundred years before Jesus, but that’s exactly what he did—he spoke about the horrors done by other countries and then said his own people were doing exactly the same thing. Once we’ve heard, then we have a chance to turn and follow the God of justice and care for all.