JOHN183 - I See Why Amos Was Unpopular in Israel, but That Doesn’t Make Him Wrong

0:17 Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and we are on a side quest right now from where we're currently located in the season, which is in John chapter four. This one little itinerary detail that John gives us about the travels of Jesus, where it says that Jesus is traveling through Samaria, that is, through Samaritan country.

0:37 The original audience would have been like, oh, this is gonna get crazy because Jesus is shaping up to look like the Jewish Messiah. And the Samaritan country, that's like the repugnant cultural other neighboring people group that the Jews really don't like, and they really don't like the Jews, and there's a lot of history to it.

0:57 And we're working through the history of it right now to try to understand the tensions in John chapter four between these two groups, the way the original audience would. And that journey has wended and winded around to taking us to the book of Amos, where we get one of my favorite kind of scenes, even if it makes me very uncomfortable.

1:16 It's one of those scenes where one very bold person who thinks things that are very much the opposite of the majority walk into the middle of a whole bunch of people who really hate his ideas, and boldly goes on to say the ideas. The gentleman in question is somebody who is apparently an average shepherd and fig farmer who was recently thrust into the role of prophet by God himself.

1:45 His name is Amos. He's from the southern kingdom of Judah, but God was like, You're going to go to the northern kingdom of Israel as an unwanted guest and tell them they're wrong about everything. And well, we're quite a ways into a long list of grievances that God has against the wicked northern kingdom of Israel in the 700s BC in the years running up to their ultimate demise at the hands of Assyria.

2:09 And Amos has wandered into the religious headquarters in Bethel of this corrupt northern kingdom's religious system, and he's having an awkward showdown with one of their high priests, one of their religious leaders, a guy named Amaziah. And all of this is very relevant to our understanding of the origins of the age-old tensions between the Samaritans and the Jews.

2:35 There we go. You heard yesterday and you heard the first couple things I said here, then you're all set up. Let's get to the showdown here in Amos 7. Let's get to the actual very spicy passage right here. Amos 7, 10. Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, so again, that's the religious center of the northern kingdom of Israel, sent a message to Jeroboam, king of Israel.

2:59 Amos is raising a conspiracy against you in the very heart of Israel. The land cannot bear all his words, for this is what Amos is saying, quote, Jeroboam will die by the sword, and Israel will surely go into exile away from their native land. Then Amaziah, this is the priest from Bethel in the north, said to Amos, Get out, you seer!

3:22 Go back to the land of Judah and earn your bread there and do your prophesying there. Don't prophesy anymore at Bethel, because this is the king's sanctuary and the temple of the kingdom. Yikes! Well, this guy, this Amaziah fellow, he's like the high priest of the entire religious class of the north.

3:43 They have fancy buildings, they have fancy outfits. Everybody, the hundreds, thousands of people gathered around are all rooting for Amaziah and cheering him on and applauding him, and probably even breathing out murderous threats against completely outnumbered fig farmer Amos. And Amaziah comes out and he's looking for a plausible reason that he can give everybody to just dismiss these prophecies.

4:07 You're just doing it for money, says Amaziah. Yeah, just fishing for clicks. Now he's doing the old Roger Stone trick, which is deny and then counter-accuse and accuse the other person of exactly what you're doing. And that narrative's gonna play for all the people in the north who like what they're doing and don't like being told that they're wrong and that God is against them.

4:31 They can all then have an internal narrative that makes them feel good, which is yeah, you're just doing it for money and clicks. Yeah, not like our prophets, who are, you know, honorable and tell the truth. You're just a dirty liar. Get out of here, you dirty liar. That's how I know your prophecy isn't true, and I don't have to worry about it.

4:50 Get out of here. That's the play. Well, you what's Amos gonna do, right? He's just one guy. He's totally surrounded. I mean, his life could be forfeit here. Is he just gonna crumble? Is he gonna apologize? Maybe he'll just offer a Twitter style apology. I am so sorry. I had no idea the harm my words were going to cause.

5:13 I was ignorant of the history involved, but some things have been brought to my attention, and I'm going to try to do better moving forward. Please don't kill me. Please still like me. Please still give me clicks. Is he gonna do that? Or is he going to say, in for a penny, in for a pound? I think God's the one telling me to do this.

5:31 I'm just gonna see the thing through. Well, apparently Amos is made of sterner stuff than most internet apologizers. He goes with this I was neither a prophet nor a son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore fig trees. But the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, Go prophesy to my people Israel.

5:53 Now then, hear the word of the Lord. You say, Do not prophesy against Israel and stop preaching against the house of Isaac. Therefore, this is what the Lord says. Your wife will become a prostitute in the city, and your sons and daughters will fall by the sword, your land will be measured and divided up, and you yourself will die in a pagan country, and Israel will certainly go into exile, away from their native land.

6:22 And that's the end of the scene. We don't get any more. I'm sure the crowd, it's not hard to picture how they probably responded. I mean, I can't imagine. They were like, Well, great points. Thank you. That was really helpful. I'm sure they were deeply offended and made offended gaffaw sounds. Oh, how could oh, where do you get how?

6:40 Who do you? I'm sure they made all of those kind of sounds that that people make in large crowds when things get said that are true but that they don't like. And Amos's words are very harsh. Also, Amos's words were all true. Now you might be saying, wait a dang minute. Didn't Amos say that Jeroboam would die by the sword?

6:59 And hang on, does the Bible say he died by the sword? Wait, he died peacefully. But the thing is, Amos didn't say Jeroboam would die by the sword. Amaziah tried to rile up Jeroboam by misquoting Amos, saying that Amos said that Jeroboam would die by the sword. What Amos did say was that the house of Jeroboam was done, that it was going to be wiped out and destroyed.

7:24 The high places of Isaac will be destroyed, and the sanctuaries of Israel will be ruined with my sword, I will rise against the house of Jeroboam. So Amos's prediction about the demise of the royal line of Jeroboam is true. His prophecy about what happens when the Assyrians come to town and what they do to your women and your children is true.

7:46 His prophecy that the destruction was on its way was true. His prophecy about being sent into exile and dying in a pagan country was true for the individuals involved and for the whole movement. People gaffawed and yelled and shouted and were offended, but everything here was right. But let's go back to this Amaziah character because that guy is a representative of the kind of person that the kings of Assyria had to choose from when they decided to pick a single priest who had been deported from Bethel, from the northern kingdom, and bring that one single priest back to teach the relocated pagans from around the Assyrian Empire how to worship the God of Abraham.

8:36 That's your guy, right there. I mean, maybe it's not literally that guy, Amaziah, but it's it's somebody from this office. It's somebody who had the same training and the same thinking and the same rationale. It's somebody from the same religious leadership who did nothing to respond to the oracles of God, saying, You guys are rich but deeply evil, fix it, repent immediately.

9:04 It's somebody who did not lead a repentance of the people. It's somebody who did not shepherd their people well as a priest. It's somebody who did not understand the character of God. It's somebody who was from a religious establishment that had a whole lot of soft spots for every imaginable foreign God, but couldn't be bothered to get the things of the one true God, who at least ostensibly they were supposed to lead the people in worshiping.

9:31 They couldn't be bothered to get things right about him. So there you go. That's a pretty helpful little snapshot of what the priest situation looked like in Israel around the time that the Assyrians were gonna have to pick a deposed priest to send back into Israel to teach everybody about their religion to get rid of a plague of lions, of all things.

9:53 That's what started all of this. Well, if this is what you have to choose from, guys like Amaziah, this is gonna be a clown show. They're not gonna know what to do. This is the blind leading the blind, and this isn't just one voice. This is gonna be the only voice that sets the trend for things vaguely related to the stuff of the God of Abraham for all the people through all the centuries moving forward in Samaria.

10:21 Stuff's about to get weird. Cool. On the way out the door, I would like to complain once again about snow babies. That's right, you know who you are. I got another snow baby in the mail here a little while ago, and I just wanted you to know that I hate it. If you're new to this program, maybe you don't know that from time to time people send me snow babies, they're knick-knack trinkets with little babies that get dressed up in like a little snow outfit and then they're in delightful, gleeful poses.

10:48 I don't have any problem with the babies I get. I mean, they're I like babies and I like snow. I just don't like snow babies, and I don't know what the deal is, but you all just keep sending me. I have so many snow babies. I feel bad throwing them away, so they're just on my shelf, arranged in a delightful little pattern to look like a winter wonderland.

11:10 So thanks, but no thanks if you know who you are for sending me another snow baby. Someday I'm gonna die, and people are gonna go through all my effects, and they're gonna be like, well, the one thing you can say about Matt Whitman is he truly loved snow babies. Dang it. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast.

11:29 Let's do this again soon.