Context No. 1676 of 4322 · Amos
Context · Reflection
Amos 4:1-13: in context
1Listen to this word, you cows of Bashan, who are on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who tell their husbands, “Bring us drinks!” 2The Lord GOD has sworn by his holiness, “Behold, the days shall come on you that they will take you away with hooks, and the last of you with fish hooks. 3You will go out at the breaks in the wall, everyone straight before her; and you will cast yourselves into Harmon,” says the LORD. 4“Go to Bethel, and sin; to Gilgal, and sin more. Bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days, 5offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened, and proclaim free will offerings and brag about them; for this pleases you, you children of Israel,” says the Lord GOD. 6“I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and lack of bread in every town; yet you haven’t returned to me,” says the LORD. 7“I also have withheld the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest; and I caused it to rain on one city, and caused it not to rain on another city. One field was rained on, and the field where it didn’t rain withered. 8So two or three cities staggered to one city to drink water, and were not satisfied; yet you haven’t returned to me,” says the LORD. 9“I struck you with blight and mildew many times in your gardens and your vineyards, and the swarming locusts have devoured your fig trees and your olive trees; yet you haven’t returned to me,” says the LORD. 10“I sent plagues among you like I did Egypt. I have slain your young men with the sword, and have carried away your horses. I filled your nostrils with the stench of your camp, yet you haven’t returned to me,” says the LORD. 11“I have overthrown some of you, as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were like a burning stick plucked out of the fire; yet you haven’t returned to me,” says the LORD. 12“Therefore I will do this to you, Israel; because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God, Israel. 13For, behold, he who forms the mountains, creates the wind, declares to man what is his thought, who makes the morning darkness, and treads on the high places of the earth: The LORD, the God of Armies, is his name.”
Amos confronts the comfortable of Samaria, the wealthy who oppress the poor and crush the needy while calling for their drinks. He mocks their busy but empty religion at Bethel and Gilgal. Then comes a drumbeat: God recounts the calamities he has sent, famine, drought, blight, locusts, plague, overthrow, and after each one the same refrain falls like a hammer: yet you have not returned to me. Finally: therefore prepare to meet your God, O Israel.
The refrain is the heart of it: yet you have not returned to me, repeated after disaster upon disaster. God is telling Israel that the hardships they suffered, the failed harvests, the drought, the blight and locusts and plague, were not random misfortunes; they were his calls, meant to turn them back to him. Each calamity was a summons: come back to me. And the tragedy, sounded again and again, is that they did not hear it; they endured the hardships, absorbed the losses, and went on as before, never reading in their troubles the voice of God calling them home. Five times the refrain falls, and five times the summons is missed. This presses a searching question about how we read our own hardships. When trouble comes, loss, failure, sickness, the collapse of things we counted on, we naturally want it simply to pass, to get through it and back to normal. But Amos suggests that hardship can be God's summons, a call to return to him, to examine our lives, to turn back from whatever we have drifted into. The danger is that we endure our troubles without ever hearing the call in them, that we get through the hard season unchanged, having missed what God was saying. Not every hardship is a specific summons, and we must be careful not to read too much into every misfortune. But the question Amos raises is worth carrying: when hard things come, do I merely wait for them to pass, or do I ask whether God is calling me through them to return to him? Prepare to meet your God, Amos says at last; the calamities were mercies meant to turn them back before that meeting, mercies they refused.
When hardship comes into my life, do I only want it to pass so I can return to normal, or do I ask whether God may be calling me through it to return to him, lest I endure my troubles unchanged and, like Israel, miss the summons in them again and again?