Today is the 10th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It's great to be here with you today as we bring another week to a close and gather ourselves around the global campfire for another step forward together.

We are moving through a lot of territory quite rapidly as we've been talking about over the last couple of days. So we have some new territory to move through in the Old Testament today.

We read in its entirety the book of Joel yesterday, which leads us today to the book of Amos.

And good many biblical scholars believe that Amos may very well be the earliest collection of prophetic utterances that have been written down that are found in the Bible.

Amos prophesied in the mid 8th century BC. This is a time when the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah were experiencing peace and prosperity.

And into that comes Amos who wasn't a pre-stored or trained for religious worship or leading religious worship. He seems to be an ordinary person living a basic life, the life of a shepherd and farmer.

We don't know if he was like a commoner, like a day laborer or even a shepherd or whether he owned his flocks and groves.

We can tell that he was educated. We can tell that he was socially aware of what was going on around him. He lived in the city of Takawa.

And that's about 10 miles south of Jerusalem. So his home then would be in the southern kingdom of Judah.

Ironically his mission was to prophesy in the northern kingdom of Israel.

And so probably he was sent just across the border to the city of Bethel.

We may remember when the kingdoms divided. There was Solomon's son Rehoboam. And there was his other guy that sort of the leader of the labor force Jeroboam.

And the kingdoms split with the 10 northern tribes making Jeroboam their king. And he led the northern tribes into idolatry setting up golden calves at the extremes of his kingdom.

Up in Dan and in Bethel just at the border. Bethel was a hub for trade and commerce and idolatry.

But the northern and the southern kingdoms were both experiencing peace and prosperity.

The kind of widespread peace and prosperity that they hadn't seen since Solomon.

So it may be weird that God would send some ordinary person to deliver a very, very severe message of judgment that was on its way.

It would have been hard to deliver this message, but that's exactly what Amos was told to do.

Because peace and prosperity had opened the door in the culture for corruption which was everywhere.

And the way that this was being experienced or made visible is that the poor were being oppressed and greed was ruling the hearts of the leaders.

And Amos steps in and denounces this.

The noun says praying upon the less fortunate which makes social justice a major theme in this book.

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