The Bible Study Podcast, episode 749.

Today, the Bible Study podcast starts the study of the book of Amos.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast.

I'm your host, Chris Christensen.

We're going to start the study of Amos.

Amos has nine chapters, so three times the length of Joel.

We'll be doing this for about two months, roughly.

And it starts like this.

The words of Amos, one of the shepherds of Tochoa, the vision he saw concerning Israel two years before the earthquake,

when Uzziah was king of Judah and Jeroboam

son of Joash was king of Israel. He said, the Lord roars from Zion and thunders from Jerusalem,

the pastures of the shepherds dry up, and the top of Carmel withers.

The next section is all one section, so let's just stop here for a second. It's interesting

that Amos doesn't go to prophet school or something like that. He is just a shepherd. And God

chooses him to get this word out about things that he wants to say. So really, prophets might come

from anywhere. They aren't necessarily teachers of the law or they aren't necessarily this professional

or that.

In fact, I can't think of many of the prophets that we know what they did before they were a prophet.

And so it's interesting that we do learn that Amos was a shepherd.

He is this vision concerning Israel, and it's two years before the earthquake.

And so the earthquake would have been significant at the time to the people reading it.

We've obviously had a lot of earthquakes between now and then.

...