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 his 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 nations surrounding the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Of those seven,

the first six speak specifically to the nations that don't know Yahweh as their God. Despite

not being in relationship with Yahweh, 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 Yahweh as their God.

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.

And God makes it clear through these chapters that in order for him to be a God of justice,

no one can escape judgment, whether it's the base level judgment or the higher accountability

...