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

Today we finished our 19th book of the Bible. Congratulations. All right, let's wrap up the back half of Amos.

He starts by calling out the leaders of the land who relax into lives of luxury and pay no

mind to the needy and poor and who fail to notice that they've gotten so far off track in their

relationship with God.

He promises destruction for all the ways they've forsaken God.

In Chapter 7, God shows Amos three different images,

and they all foretell destruction. Twice Amos pleads with God to relent, and he does. Remember how

the prophet Jonah didn't want the people of Nineveh to repent, and God pointed out how ridiculous

that was? Amos is the opposite of Jonah. He begs God to stay his hand.

But when the third vision appears, Amos starts to get the point that this is inevitable, a necessary

part of God's process to turn his people's hearts back to himself.

The first vision was of locusts eating a field and devouring all the farmer had to live on after he'd paid the king with the first portion of growth.

The second was of a fire devouring everything.

And while both of those visions involved land, the third vision is a construction image.

Amos sees a plum line, which is a tool used to make sure a wall is straight.

It's like a level, but vertical instead of horizontal. If a wall isn't vertical, it's going to

collapse eventually. Leaning Tower of Pisa, your days are numbered. The metaphor God is setting up here

is that the northern kingdom of Israel is about to collapse

because they're so far off the standard and can't be set right.

As you can imagine, none of this sits well with Amaziah, who was the priest at the time.

Amaziah goes to King Jerry 2, accuses Amos of conspiring against him and twist the prophecies to help his point.

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