Tuesday, July 3

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In yesterday’s post we explored the person behind the book of Amos; if you weren’t able to catch that you can read it here. Having explored who Amos is, I wanted to spend today’s post diving into what his message was all about. At nine chapters the book of Amos is a fairly lengthy read compared to many of the other Minor Prophets, but the book has one central theme running throughout all nine chapters. That theme that defines Amos’ message can be summed up in these four words: God hates dead religion.

Although those words aren’t directly said anywhere in the book as your read through it it’s clear that they’re right at the heart of what Amos is teaching. To understand the message though we’ve got to start with understanding its context. In the first verse of the book we discover that Amos prophesied, “…two years before the earthquake, when Uzziah was king of Judah and Jeroboam son of Jehoash was king of Israel.” Although there’s a little debate on the exact date of his ministry we can safely date Amos prophesying somewhere between the years of 765 and 760 B.C. The importance of that date is this: Amos was prophesying before the Assyrian or Babylonian exiles happened.

Amos was speaking to a nation that was prospering economically and politically. Although Israel had gone through, and would go through difficult economic times Amos ministry didn’t fall during one of those times. On the contrary Amos was speaking to a nation full of well off, comfortable people. It was that wealth and comfort though that brought the harshest rebuke from YHWH. In Amos 6 God proclaims through Amos, “Woe to those who are comfortable in Zion.” The picture that is painted throughout the book of Amos is of a people who while rich materially, physically, and emotionally were dead spiritually.

Throughout the book Amos will give a few different markers of dead religion. He’ll point out a few different tell-tale signs to help us identify dead religion from true religion. The sign that Amos returns to time and time again though is summed up in his first rebuke to the Israelite’s in Amos 2:6-7,

“For three sins of Israel, even for four, I will not turn back my wrath. 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.”

The great sin of Israel in the time of Amos, and the greatest marker of her dead religion was her economic sin. We’ll cover this in more depth in tomorrow’s post but for now I just want to make it clear that at the center of dead religion in Amos’ time was a disregard for the poor and daily increasing levels of comfort and leisure for the rich.

God hates dead religion. Religion can be dead for any number of reasons, but a failure to empathize and care for the poor was a sure marker in Amos’ time of its death, and it remains a sure marker for us today. It seems fitting to close this post with the words of James, a man who would write hundreds of years after Amos. James summarizes true religion in this way in James 1:27, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” God hated dead religion in Amos day, and he continues to hate it in ours. Make sure to check in tomorrow as we see the other markers of dead religion we’re given in Amos.

Grant Diamond