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 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 judgment, because we're all

guilty. Specifically, God says the first six nations are guilty of

cruelty, slave trade, treachery, harboring a grudge, murder, greed, and desecrating a corpse.

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