Biblical Text

You can read Amos 2.6-16 here.

Sermon Video

You can watch the sermon video here.

Sermon Transcript

[Note: The actual sermon will differ somewhat from what I had typed.]

In a remarkable turn of phrase, the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” However, the church father, Augustine of Hippo wrote, “The cost of obedience is small compared with the cost of disobedience.” And Edwin Louis Cole, founder of the Christian Men’s Network, said,  “Obedience is an act of faith; disobedience is the result of unbelief.” Who is right? Thoreau or Augustine and Cole?

Before we attempt to answer that question, let me warn you. In today’s message, I will be bringing up some difficult to handle topics. In order to give full disclosure, let me list some of these difficult issues. We will be discussing a matter of holy war and genocide because these rise directly from today’s text. But precisely because they are difficult to handle, I will not be able to address them in the nuanced manner they deserve. 

However, I have been assigned the task of expounding on the second chapter of Amos and I can either water down his message because I don’t want to bring up difficult topics or I can remain true to scripture. I choose the latter. But I request any of you who have any questions related to something I say today to please ask me about it. While I don’t claim to have all the answers, I can accompany you in your struggles as we come to terms with the difficult parts of our scriptures.

The book of Amos is a difficult book to read. Anyone who is faint of heart should stay away from it because the book is violent and descriptive and the prophet does not steer clear of unsettling topics. As Caleb mentioned last week, Amos was from the southern kingdom of Judah. However, he prophesied primarily in the northern kingdom of Israel. So in other words, he was kind of like the enemy who was prophesying to the kingdom of Israel.

Think about it. How would Indians feel if a Pakistani came here and told us about our sins? We might not take it very kindly. But Amos had a message from God and he also had a wise strategy. He begins his message by announcing God’s judgment on the neighbors of Israel. I’m going to describe his strategy with geographic references from your perspective. So north is up, south is down, east is your right and west is your left. Got it? North, south, east and west; up, down, right, left. 

He begins in the northwest with Damascus, comes down to the southwest with Gaza and then to the west with Tyre. In this way, he has covered all the regions to the north and west of Israel. Having swept through the regions west of Israel, Amos then turned his gaze eastward. But now he goes in the opposite pattern. He begins in the southeast with Edom, then sweeps to the northeast with Ammon and then to the east with Moab. In this way, he covers all the regions to the east of Israel. 

And as he does this he has the hypnotic lilting way of introducing the judgments: “For three sins of Damascus, even for four.” It’s as though he had thought of one more to add to the list of sins even as he was compiling the list, stirring the people of Israel into a frenzy as they heard the message that God was judging all the enemies that surround them for their numerous sins. In these first six messages, Amos has covered all but one of Israel’s neighbors.

And then finally Amos comes closer and announces judgment on Judah, Israel’s southern sister nation. And you can almost imagine the cries of delight as Amos denounced this southern neighbor who tried to be so high and mighty by claiming that true worship could only take place in Jerusalem. They denounced Israel’s worship centers in Samaria and Bethel and claimed that the Israelites had fallen away from their covenant with Yahweh. Yes, Amos had won over his audience. 

And so now they were primed to receive his true message. You see, his real message was not to Damascus, Gaza and the other pagan nations. Nor was it to Judah. Rather, as we read in Amos 1.1, his prophecy was primarily to Israel. So now that he had a captive audience, he says, “For three sins of Israel, even for four” and the crowd that had been bellowing with shouts of joy suddenly went silent. “What was that?” someone in the crowd whispered to his neighbor.

And Amos proceeds to announce God’s judgment on Israel. The crowd had listened with joy and laughter as one enemy nation after another had been denounced. But now it was their turn. What was God judging them for? What exactly was their sin? In a nutshell, human trafficking, slavery, economic exploitation, temple prostitution, disenfranchisement of the poor. This had been the people God had chosen to be a light to the other nations, to draw the other nations to the true God, Yahweh.

Instead, what they had spread was the deepest darkness, blaspheming the name of Yahweh with all their atrocities. Instead of being a light that drove away the darkness that had enslaved the nations, Israel had embraced the darkness and fallen into slavery itself. Instead of being a beacon of freedom from the enslaving fallen powers, Israel had become an instrument of oppression for the fallen powers. Amos had a huge task before him. 

Mind you, some of the practices I just mentioned are practices that can only take root in a society that is experiencing quite a high level of prosperity. While poor societies have their own problems, the enslavement of other humans and the disenfranchisement of the poor are problems that are peculiar plagues of prosperous nations. How do you shake such a nation to its senses? How can you speak the truth of God’s judging word to a people drowning so deep in its delusions?

As the saying goes, “Set a thief to catch a thief.” The movie Catch Me If You Can, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, is based on the life of Frank William Abagnale, who wrote fraudulent checks to the tune of $2.5 million while posing as a pilot, a doctor, a lawyer and a professor. He now works with the US government to identify instances of fraud because he was so good at it. He knows the mind of the con artist and so is qualified to spot them.

Amos does a similar thing. In order to catch the people of Israel in their lies, he tells them a lie. “What?” I hear you say. “Never! The bible does not lie. The bible contains only truths.” Let’s consider this for a moment. Amos says, “Yet I destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of cedars, and who was as strong as oaks; I destroyed his fruit above, and his roots beneath.” According to this, God had utterly destroyed the Amorites from the root to the fruit.

Those of you who have been coming for the bible study on Deuteronomy may remember Sihon king of Heshbon, and Og king of Bashan, both Amorite kings who reigned in the region east of the Jordan whom the Israelites defeated. This clearly indicates that the Israelites had destroyed some of the Amorite nations. So the claim that Amos was making might seem to be correct, especially to us who live so many centuries after Amos or to those who are unfamiliar with scripture.

We might be further convinced when we look at Joshua 10.40 where we read “So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.” It is understandable if we thought this meant that all the Amorites were slaughtered during the conquest of Canaan.

Then why is it that in 1 Samuel 7.14 we read, “And there was peace between Israel and the Amorites”? If there was peace with the Amorites, then that must mean the Amorites were still around at the time of Samuel and Saul. And why is it that in 1 Kings 21.26 we read, “Ahab did very abominably in following idols, according to all that the Amorites did”? If Ahab was following the practices of the Amorites, there must have been Amorites to mimic.

Indeed, in Joshua 9, we read that the Israelites were duped by the Gibeonites, an Amorite group, into making a treaty with them. So even if the Israelites slaughtered all the other Amorites, they did not kill the Gibeonites. And indeed, as a reminder of this, the prophet Ezekiel taunts the people of Judah about their mixed heritage by stating, “Your ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.”

When Amos says, “I destroyed the Amorite before them… I destroyed his fruit above, and his roots beneath” he is saying something that his audience knew to be false. Why would he do that? He did that precisely because he knew that the Israelites would protest. There were still Amorites in their midst. How then could Amos say that the Amorites had been completely destroyed? You see, in the face of claims that there are no objective truths, there is only one way forward.

The way forward is to ensure the other side claims something to be objectively true or false. For example, if someone tells you that there is no such thing as universal objective truth, please remind them that they are making a universal objective truth claim, which if it were true, would be false. Here Amos was stating something that was evidently false so that, if the Israelites objected to the claim, he could then hammer home something that no Israelite could claim was false.

He says, “I  brought you up out of Egypt and led you forty years in the wilderness to give you the land of the Amorites.” Amos reminds the Israelites of the time when the nation was formed. God had delivered the people of Israel from their enslavement in Egypt. But the journey that was supposed to take less than two weeks, ended up taking forty years. And if anyone asked why the journey had been delayed so much, the evident answer was that Israel had not trusted Yahweh.

Remember that account? The Israelites had sent twelve spies to scout the land and to bring back a report about it. When they returned, they brought back a sample of the produce of the land – a single cluster of grapes so large that it took two of them to carry it, and some pomegranates and figs. They also reported that the people of the land were huge – descendants of Anak, who themselves were descendants of the Nephilim of Genesis 6.

In Deuteronomy we read about how big one of these Amorites was. King Og of Bashan is said to have had a bed that was thirteen and a half feet long and six feet wide. And so ten of the twelve spies recommended that the Israelites turn tail and return to Egypt because there was no way they could defeat such massive opponents. Only Caleb and Joshua maintained their trust in Yahweh and stated that, if Yahweh had promised the land to Israel, he would defeat their foes for them.

But the people of Israel chose to side with the ten spies who wanted to return to Egypt, fearing that, should they proceed to attack the Amorites, their wives and children would be taken as plunder. And the consequence of their lack of trust was that God made them wander in the desert for forty years until all those who had distrusted him had died. This delay would serve as an object lesson for the very children whom the distrusting generation feared would be taken captive.

In Deuteronomy 8.2-3 we read, “Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that humans do not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

In other words, rather than being taken captive, the children of the distrusting generation would inherit the promised land. And they would learn to trust the loving, living, enlivening word of God. For the children of the distrusting generation, this forty year delay would have been a long, long wait. But in the larger scheme of things, it was a small delay and to understand that we need to look at Genesis 15 where God made the covenant with Abraham.

God tells Abraham, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

In this vision, Abraham learns a number of things. First, he would not inherit the promised land; his descendants would. Second, his descendants would be enslaved for four hundred years. Third, after the period of enslavement, God would rescue Abraham’s descendants from the land of slavery and they would leave that land with a lot of possessions. Fourth, the reason for the long delay had something to do with the sin of the Amorites.

We read about the nature of the sin of the Amorites in Leviticus 18.24-30, where we read, “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. 

“But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you (for the people of the land, who were before you, did all of these abominations, so that the land became unclean), lest the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For everyone who does any of these abominations, the persons who do them shall be cut off from among their people. 

“So keep my charge never to practice any of these abominable customs that were practiced before you, and never to make yourselves unclean by them: I am the Lord your God.” Here a word on how the word ‘these’ functions. When God says to the Israelites, “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things” what does ‘these’ refer to? Does it refer to things that came before or things that are being introduced?

Most often in the bible the word is used to introduce the upcoming section. So when we read, in Genesis 5.1, “These are the generations of Adam,” it is clearly an introduction to Adam’s lineage and not a way of referring back to chapter 4. Similarly, in Exodus 20, when the Ten Commandments are introduced we read, “And God spoke all these words” following which we read the words that God spoke to Moses on the mountain. 

A classic modern day usage of this technique is in the way each episode of Star Trek is introduced. We hear the words, “These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise” and know that the voyages are being introduced, not summarized. In a similar manner, Genesis 2.4 introduces the second creation account with the words, “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”

The fact that this is the fourth verse of chapter 2 indicates that those who introduced the chapter divisions often misunderstood the narrative and we can find many such examples of improper chapter divisions. The division between Leviticus 18 and 19 is one such instance because the current division seems to indicate that ‘these things’ in Leviticus 18.24 refers to what came before in chapter 18 and leads us to think that God is most concerned about incest and menstruation.

However, if we link ‘these things’ to what is in Leviticus 19 we get to see a bigger vision – honoring our parents, keeping the Sabbath holy, rejecting idolatry, providing for the poor, respecting what belongs to others, not profaning God’s name, not oppressing a fellow citizen, paying a daily wage worker promptly, helping those who have physical disabilities, being impartial in the courts, refraining from slander, not hating another Israelite, and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

If this list is indicative of what the Israelites were to do over against what the Amorites practised, we can see what kind of behavior is in mind when the Israelites are warned in Leviticus 18.24-25 with the words “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.”

The passage in Amos 2, lists a lot of similar things. And Amos indicates that God’s judgment is going to come on the people of Israel precisely because they followed the horrible practices of the Amorites. And here we must ask a question that will give rise to an answer that many, if not most, of us would find difficult to stomach. “Why, despite the clear instructions of the Torah, did the Israelites end up following the horrible practices of the Amorites?”

According to René Girard, “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” This is the foundation of his theory of mimesis and from that theory we can understand that we humans are incapable of knowing how to behave and learn behavior from others. Human behavior is infinitely malleable and is shaped by acceptable behaviors to which we are exposed.

This is why children born to Indian parents will have an Indian worldview and children born to Chinese parents will have a Chinese worldview. This is why children born to Kenyan parents will develop a taste for Kenyan food and children born to Brazilian parents will fancy Brazilian food. But this is also why teenagers, after being immersed in their native cultures, can rebel and form perspectives on the world that differ from those of their native cultures.

And this is why the phrase, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is a fact for dogs, but is a derogatory statement when used in reference to another human. So why, despite the clear instructions of the Torah, did the Israelites end up following the horrible practices of the Amorites? Simply because there were Amorites around to put those practices on display. During the conquest of the Promised Land, the Israelites had failed to exterminate the Amorites.

And as a result there were Amorites living alongside the Israelites, who showcased these abominable practices. But just because something is on display does not mean it is attractive to us. This leads us to another question: “Why did the Israelites pick up the practices of the Amorites?” Let us attempt to answer this by considering some contrasts that highlight the differences between the two perspectives on what the good life is.

According to the Torah, once every fifty years, there had to be an economic reset. Debts had to be forgiven and property returned to those who had the ancestral right to the property. To the contrary, the Code of Hammurabi, incidentally a monarch of Amorite descent, only focuses on restitution of things stolen or pledged. There is absolutely no recognition that the passage of time would introduce economic disparity within society. For a rich person, which is easier to follow?

According to the Torah, idolatry was prohibited. The Israelites were not supposed to make any representations of Yahweh. This is because, according to Genesis 1, God had already placed his image on earth – the humans who were supposed to represent him to each other and to the rest of creation. The prohibition on idols is based on the creational view that this creation is the good work of a good God. To the contrary, idols were commonplace in Amorite culture. 

Now, which is easier – to recognize and live into our image bearing vocation and that of other humans or to surrender that vocation to entities, real or imagined, and give our senses some tangible way of perceiving the imperceptible?

The Torah also never linked a person’s intimacy with God to the observance of the rituals. The rituals were only ways to deal with the taint of death in the camp, permitting God to live among his people. 

However, the Amorite practices clearly linked the rituals to intimacy with the gods. Sex with temple prostitutes was believed to enhance the intimate connection between the devotee and the deity and to increase the fecundity of the devotee. Which is easier – to believe in a mysterious God whose ways are inscrutable or to believe in a formulaic approach in which certain actions, conducted at specific times and by specific people, have definite and predictable outcomes?

You can see that the Amorite version of spirituality was much easier to follow. What Yahweh required from his people was far more difficult. Hence, it was almost certain that the people of Israel would be attracted to the Amorite practices. I dare say, we have the same issue in the church today. We want easy answers to life’s toughest questions. We want predictable routines to our faith instead of a genuine walk with a person who has mysterious ways of interacting with us.

By allowing the Amorites to live in their midst, the Israelites opened themselves up to the temptations of Amorite worship in their midst. And it was seductive and they were seduced into accepting these practices. Instead of a sober, sacred spirituality, the Israelites flung themselves into drunken, debased debaucheries. And it is in this context that Amos announces God’s judgment on the nation of Israel. The judgment is an indication of the cost of disobedience.

The Israelites had disobeyed God by allowing the Amorites to live in their midst. And over the years, they had been drawn into the Amorite practices that supported and encouraged economic disparity, idolatry and ritualism. These three things deal with three aspects of our lives as the people of God. Let us consider each of these in turn to see how they impact our lives individually as well as the corporate witness of the church in the world.

When we support economic disparity, we are saying that the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. The richest 1% of the population owns over 40% of the world’s wealth. During the current pandemic global billionaire wealth increased by $3.9 trillion while global workers’ combined earnings fell by $3.7 trillion. If Christians with influence do nothing about this, we indicate that we are worshipping not Yahweh but Amurru, the Amorite deity.

If the Church does nothing to reduce economic disparity, we are saying that we do not love our neighbors as ourselves and that we do not even want to.

When we make idols, we are saying that we are unable or unwilling to live up to our God given calling to be the true image of the living God on this earth. We are saying that we reject this vocation and are telling God that he needs to find other means by which to govern his creation.

When we reject the call to be God’s image bearers in the world we are telling God that we do not have a high enough view of ourselves that enables us to believe he has placed us on this earth to represent him. In other words, the making of idols is a declaration that we are unwilling to love our neighbors as ourselves precisely because we do not know what it means to love ourselves because we have forgotten and perhaps forbidden the practice of our original vocation.

When we reject our vocation of being God’s image bearers we indicate that we are worshipping not Yahweh but Amurru who institutionalized a class system in which only a select few were able to represent the gods to other people and to the rest of creation.

And when we fall into ritualism, we are saying that we do not want a genuine relationship with God that is dynamic and, like all genuine relationships, characterized by ups and downs. 

We are saying that we want to treat God like some cosmic genie who only exists to grant us this or that boon so that our lives would become smoother. And when we do this, we indicate that we are worshipping not Yahweh but Amurru, who never wants a genuine relationship with his devotees but mindless ritualists who treat the encounter with the divine as some sort of magic in which mastery of the ritual guarantees blessings and prevents curses.

This is not what we were created for. This is not what we were called to practice. We were called to love the Lord our God and so to reject ritualism. We were called to love ourselves and so to embrace our vocation as God’s image bearers. And we were called to love our neighbors and so to eradicate disparities in this world. We have a choice. We can accept this lofty and deep calling or we can embrace a middling, shallow view of ourselves.

But if we have any qualms with accepting the divine call to love God, ourselves and our neighbors, we need only look at Amos 2 and be reminded of the devastating cost of disobedience.