Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today we drop in on a sheep herding fig farmer named Amos who happens to be a

minor profit in a spare time and one of my favorites at that. Not only do I like wool and figs, but Amos is also a brilliant writer.

The timeline hasn't really moved ahead for us in a few days.

We're just reading things from various people written in the same era.

So a lot of what Amos says is doubling down on what we read from Isaiah yesterday.

Lately, the people of Israel have been doing really well financially and they think it's a sign

of God's blessing. They keep offering up meaningless sacrifices to him because they think

it keeps them in good standing with him and they anticipate the day when he will rain down judgment on their enemies.

However, God is about to flip everything they think on its head, as per Amos.

The book opens with eight separate statements from God. Here's how those

break down. The first seven statements are against the nation surrounding

the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Of those seven, the first six speak specifically to the

nations that don't know Yaway as their God. Despite not being in relationship

with Yaway, they're still held to his baseline moral standard.

But when it comes to the seventh nation, it's the southern kingdom of Judah,

and they do know Yaway as their God.

They've seen what he's capable of.

They're in covenant with him, so they probably think They've seen what he's capable of.

They're in covenant with him, so they probably think they get a pass since he obviously likes them so much.

On the contrary, he says they're held to an even higher standard because of that.

They're accountable for what they know.

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