For additional notes and resources check out Douglas’ website.
This lesson explores Amos 3:1-15.
Introduction (vv.1-2)
- Redemption, then mission.
- With privilege comes responsibility!
Hearing the roar and responding accordingly (vv.3-8)
- Stimulus and response
- Action and reaction
- Cause and effect
- The lion has roared; we must respond!
- The true prophet cannot ignore the voice of Yahweh any more than a sensible person can ignore the roar of a lion.
- Do I feel that I must speak, that I cannot keep quiet?
- “If I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak any more in his name, there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones; and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” (Jeremiah 20:9).
- “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:16b).
- How about us?
- How's my evangelism?
- Am I willing to engage in earnest discussion with Christians who have drifted from the Lord and need a word from him?
- Am I having conversations at work? with family members? with neighbors?
- "To a person endowed with prophetic sight, everyone else appears blind; to a person whose ear perceives God's voice, everyone else appears deaf. No one is just; no knowing is strong enough, no trust complete enough. The prophet hates the approximate, he shuns the middle of the road. Man must live on the summit to avoid the abyss. There is nothing to hold to except God. Carried away by the challenge, the demand to straighten out man's ways, the prophet is strange, one-sided, an unbearable extremist." – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets
The boom will fall (vv.9-15)
- The announcement is to be made in the hearing of Ashdod and Egypt, peoples south of Samaria, who could serve as witnesses of Yahweh’s righteous punishment (as they fell to Assyria at a later time). Israel would have considered themselves morally superior to Ashdod and Egypt.
- Samaria
- The city, which was the capital of the northern kingdom, was built by Omri and Ahab his successor, rose up 300 feet, and seemed impregnable. Its fortification walls were massive.
- But massive fortifications offer no protection if our lives are weakened with corruption! Samaria will fall!
- Two houses (like Ahab's regular house in Jezreel, and winter house in Samaria [at a higher elevation], 1 Kings 21:1,18) are excessive when many have no home of their own. Opulence is inappropriate when the poor are being dispossessed (5:11).
- Yahweh offended not only by exploitation but also by conspicuous consumption.
- Amos saw that neither reform nor even revolution could bring Israel back to God. Domestic politics had no hope. Only international intervention – the exile threatened in Deuteronomy – could succeed.
- The imagery of v.12 is that of a lion attack. All that remains of the materialistic, idolatrous city are fragments of fine furniture.
Conclusion
- As hard-hitting as these words would have been—or should have been—to their original hearers, they should hit us even harder!
- And the prophet isn’t done yet–not by a long shot!
Advanced
- The Asiatic lion was found in Palestine until about 1300 AD, and is mentioned often in scripture (Judges 14:6; 1 Samuel 17:34-36; 2 Samuel 23:20, etc). God himself is compared to a lion at least 10x in the O.T.
- With respect to v.8, Amos could not have deviated from his commission. Recall the anonymous prophet of Judah who was rebuked by the older northern prophet (from Bethel) for violating the revealed word of God (1 Kings 13). The young prophet was killed by a lion!
- Archaeological excavation of Samaria revealed great storehouses in the palace complex “store up violence” (v.10)? In one storeroom, 200 ivory plaques were uncovered (see 1 Kings 22:39: "houses of ivory").
- In v.12 the imagery alludes to proof of attack, as in Exodus 22:10-13. Only fragments of Israel's extravagance will remain after the attack!