Hello and welcome to the scriptures are real.

This is the podcast where we talk about elements of the scriptures that have become more real to us

because we believe that helps us draw more power into our lives.

I'm your host, Kerry Mielstein, and this short cast is just going to cover a couple of the elements and symbols of judgment

and then at the end hope that we find in the book of Amos.

And I'm just going to give you a little preview, a bullet point list of the things we're going to talk about.

We're going to cover the prophecies against other nations and see if we can make some sense of them. Then we're going

to look at some specific images of judgment pronounced against Judah and Israel and why and what we

should learn from them. A couple of them are a little bit difficult. And then we're going to look at the message of hope that it's at the end of the book of Amos.

So let's jump in.

We're going to look at chapter one.

And we see that it starts out by using kind of an idiom, I guess, a way of saying things in ancient Israel, where he's

going to prophesy against Damascus, but he says, for three transgressions of Damascus and for

four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof. So that's, that's like saying, yeah, for like nine or

ten things, you're in trouble, right? It's just a little phrase like that, like 99 or 100 things or whatever.

It's just similar to that, okay?

But this is what he accuses Damascus, and that's the capital of Syria.

So this is him talking about Syria.

And in verse three of chapter one, he says it's because they have

threshed Gilead with threshing instruments of iron. So Gilead is an area across the river Jordan

that is in modern day Jordan, but it was an area that was inhabited by Israelites. It was part of

the territory of Manasseh and so on.

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