Third Presbyterian Sunday Morning Bible Study - February 21, 2021

Below is the Bible Study written by Jim Rudiger for his Sunday School Class which meets at Third Presbyterian Church, Norfolk, Virginia. It's based on Amos 6:1-8, 11-14.

What does it mean to be selfish?  Caring too much about yourself.  Not wanting to share.  The ‘it’s mine” mentality.  Is it easy for a selfish person to have friends?  A lot of children are notoriously selfish.  They don’t want to share with their brother or sister.  It doesn’t have to be something big.  In fact, it can be something very small.  I remember not sharing a marble with my brother, Jack, especially if it was steely and we were playing a game of cut throat marbles with Dickie Hux, and I was on the verge of wiping out Hux.  There I go - trying to justify being selfish.  Being selfish about something gives you a little power because you know the other person really wants something and is willing to give up something for it.  With Jack it always led to bargaining - what did Jack have that I could use?  “I’ll let you use my steely if you give me your latest Batman comic book.”  “You can sit next to Dottie Hinkle if you give me that lemon-lime popsicle you’ve been saving all week.”  I’ve never known anybody like Jack, who was willing to give up a bonafide treasure for a passing pleasure.

In today’s study, Amos piles on the Israelites for being selfish.  Not everybody in Israel, but the rich guys, the political and religious leaders.  So far, Amos hasn’t been easy on Israel.  In the first lesson he was on them because they treated the poor and needy like they existed only to make life easier for the guys in charge.  The little guy didn’t have much, but what they had was more than they deserved.  And this didn’t apply just to the poor, the righteous were exploited too.  How did the bosses rig the courts so that the poor and righteous always got the short end of the stick?  Bribing the judges. Most of all, the Israelites were accused of making a show of religion, but not really meaning it.  Then Amos gave them God’s warning about the way they had been living and it all started with “For three crimes of Israel and for four, I won’t hold back the judgement.”  God is fed up with his chosen people making a mockery of His commands and living like they were entitled to pervert their position with God.  God is ready to act.  They are about to be told what their arrogance has bought them

And that brings us to Chapter 6.  

Amos 6:1 Woe for those who are at ease in Zion, and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria, the notables of the first of the nations to whom the house of Israel resorts!  2 Cross over to Calneh, and see; from there go down to Gath of the Philistines.  Are you better than these kingdoms?  Or is your territory greater than their territory,

How does these verses start?  Woe.  What does woe mean?  Grief. Trouble. Distress.  Not something anybody wants.  Who gets this projected woe?  People who are at ease.  Where are they taking it easy?  In Zion.  Where are the people who feel secure?  On Mount Samaria.  What is special about Zion and Mount Samaria?  Zion is the name of the hill that Jerusalem was built on.  Jerusalem was in the southern kingdom of Judah and was the capital of the kingdom.  What about Mount Samaria?  It was in the northern kingdom of Israel and on Mount Samaria was built the town of Samaria which was the capital of Israel.  So, who is Amos fussing with?  The leaders of both the northern and southern kingdoms.

Both Jerusalem and Samaria were not only capitals of their kingdoms, both were located on the top of a hill.  Every body in this room who has ever seen John Wayne movies knows that it’s a lot better to be shooting down at an invader than to be shooting up at one  It was even more important when the weapons were arrows and spears.  That’s why castles were built on hills and that is where the big wigs and leaders in Judah and Israel lived.  Since it was so safe, the people could relax and not always be looking over their shoulders.  What do you do to be safe and secure during a virus invasion?  Stay six feet apart and avoid crowds.  That means no more athletic events.  No more movies.  No more big weddings and, the most important "no more" thing, no more church services.  You wear one or more masks even if you don't plan to rob a bank.  All of this to make us feel safe and secure.  Has it worked?  Do you feel safe and secure?  Amos tells them that they ain’t as safe and secure as they think, either.

To underline that warning, Amos brings up three cities - Calneh, Hamath and Gath.  In their day, they were great cities.  Both Calneh and Hamath were located in Syria.  Calneh was in the far north while Hamath was on the banks of the Orontes River.  Gath was a Philistine city located on the border between Philistia and Judah.  Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly why Amos picked these cities.  One thing is for certain, the people hearing the message knew about them.  Probably, they had been prosperous cities which also were built on hills like Jerusalem and Samaria and thought that made them immune from attack only to be invaded and destroyed.  Amos was telling Judah and Israel that they weren’t any better or safer than these cities and the same thing could happen to them.

The nobles in Samaria were examples of the elite of the world - powerful and influential.  They based their security on the idea that the city Samaria was invincible.  Since they lived in the city and controlled it, it was also a symbol of their own strength.  For guys like that, their whole world revolved around Samaria.  This was THE city and these were THE men.  What they didn’t think about was that there were other cities with nobles who thought their city was the center of the world too.  But, all great cities aren’t equal.  There will always be a city which on a given day will beat the tar out of them.

Amos 6:3  O you that put far away the evil day, and bring near a reign of violence?  4 Woe for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the stall; 5 who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise on instruments of music;  6 who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!  7 Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away

Amos introduces seven activities that make men deserving doom.  What is doom?  Inevitable destruction or ruin.  One thing to note as Amos speaks these verses, they never end with God pronouncing punishment.  These doom statements describe a God who is sorry for the woe these acts will bring.  God takes no joy in knowing the harm these men are doing to themselves and their safe cities.  And what were they doing?

They ignore the evil day and make violent rule draw near.  Anybody want to take a shot at what Amos is talking about here?  Let’s break it up into smaller pieces.  They ignored the evil day.  When we ignore something, we don’t take seriously what we hear and see.  What Amos is saying is that the leaders turned their head and looked the other way while evil things were done.  They knew it was wrong, but they chose to live and let live.  As a result of not taking a stand against evil, evil was free to increase and cause more chaos.  In other words acting like there was no evil made evil rule come even sooner.

Do we see this same thing happening today?  Actions that for centuries we have always known were, if not evil, certainly led to evil ends.  Now we have changed our view, opened the box and let evil out.  And it is done reasoning that we are helping people.  You never help anyone by first sprinkling them with evil.  The real danger we face today is that evil enters our lives without telling us why.  Like what happened in the riots in our cities last summer.  Our culture now demands that we can’t even call these people what they are - evil.  We have to find excuses for their evil behavior.  It will be because they dropped out of school, they had bad parents, their evil wants are more important than the widow's needs.  Evil is evil and there are no excuses for evil.  If we are taught not to recognize evil, not to call evil by it's name, then evil will take over.  Evil will succeed when we act like it doesn’t exist.  Just so we know what Amos is talking about, he gives examples.

There's the rich guy who lies on beds of ivory.  I’m pretty sure they got them at the last Haynes sale for a good discounted price.  Is there a problem with rich guys laying on an expensive couch cradling the remote?  Doesn’t sound as bad as burning down a city.  The secret of why laying on an ivory bed was so bad may rest in that little word - "lie".  The word translated as "lie" in Hebrew can mean sexual activity.  Amos might be talking about these rich guys spending all of their time arranging for affairs rather than helping out the poor and needy.  But they not only lie down, they stretch out.  When we lie down, don’t we all stretch out?  Feel those muscled disengage.  Why is Amos picking on them for doing something so natural?  What Amos was really pointing out was how rich people ate supper in those days.  They stretched out on couches, resting on one elbow grabbing the best food on the low table. 

But, something else separated them from the poor.  What did they grab?  Lambs and young bulls.  In other words lots of courses of tender lamb chops and veal cutlets.  They would be living high on the hog if it weren’t for being Jews.  This was being done when the everyday Joe couldn’t afford chitlings much less a veal cutlet.

If all of this wasn’t bad enough, they sang idle songs accompanied by a harp.  So they sang a few old favorites after supper.  Anything wrong with that?  The Hebrew word used means to scatter words or to babble.  Ever been with Uncle Henry on Christmas Eve night after he has been sampling the eggnog for three hours and hear him breaking out with Christmas Carols.  Maybe Amos is describing men who had drank so much wine they burst out singing.  But these men not only sang, they thought that their impromptu songs were just as good as anything David had written.  Again, the Hebrew words used could mean shouting while they imagined they sounded like Bing Crosby.

It’s a good possibility that the underlying charge in verse 5 is drunkenness.  Verse 6 confirms it as it describes men drinking to excess.  How much wine did they drink?  Bowls full.  Some people say that Amos is talking about the men drinking from sacrificial bowls which would make it a sacrilege.  In all likely hood, Amos was talking about the quantity of wine consumed and not so much container used.  In those days there weren’t bottles of wine served at the table.  The wine was served in bowls and you tipped the bowl to fill your cup.  What Amos is accusing them of is forgetting good manners and drinking from cups like civilized men, but lifting the whole bowl to their lips and drink with the wine dribbling out of the corners of their mouth staining their tunics.  In modern terms, Amos was accusing them of drinking straight from the bottle.  

Now after eating until they couldn’t hold another lamb rib and scoffing down bowls of wine all of the time singing Sweet Adeline, what did they do?  Anointed themselves with oil.  Not the cheap stuff you can get at Big Lots.  I mean the pricey stuff you order  from Nordstrom’s.   Did they anoint themselves to worship of God or did they do it to try and convince others how righteous they were?  It was all an act.  What is Amos talking about when he says “the ruin of Joseph”?  The chosen people represented by Joseph were falling further and further away from what God had expected of them. You see, they didn’t give a toot about the people's relationship with God.  They only cared about their relationship with their money.   Amos gives those rich guys a warning.  When the conquering country brings down Israel, these same rich guys - these political and business leaders - will be the first to be sent into exile.  Why send the business leaders into exile first?  They are the ones who will lose the most, so they would be the ones to try to stir up the people to revolt and get back what they had before the invasion.  When the Assyrians conquered Israel, what happened?  Just what Amos said would happen.

Amos 6:8 The Lord God has sworn by himself (says the Lord, the God of hosts):, I abhor the pride of Jacob and hate his strongholds; and I will deliver up the city and all that is n it.  

9 If ten people remain in one house, they shall die.  10 And if a relative, one who burns the dead, shall take up the body to bring it out of the house, and shall say to someone in the innermost parts of the house, "Is anyone else with you?  The answer will come, "No."  Then the relative shall say, "Hush!  We must not mention the name of the Lord. 11 See, the Lord commands and the great house shall be shattered to bits, and the little house to pieces.

Up to now, Amos has been addressing the rich guys and rulers.  Now he has a warning for the everyday guy. First of all, what had God done?  Solemnly sworn.  When you say you have sworn to do something, what are you saying?  On your honor, come hell or high water, you will do it.  Some people swear on their Sainted Mother or on their children.  When you swear like that, it’s a written in stone thing, because you have involved someone who means the world to you.  Now, God has sworn on his sacred honor to do something to Israel.  Not a good place for Israel to be in.  First, he lets them know why he has taken this vow.  

At the top of the list is that he rejects what?  Their pride.  What was their pride?  They were too powerful to fall.  They took pride in their fortifications.  They took pride in their army.  They took pride in their lifestyle.  They probably took pride in being the chosen people.  Maybe this is  where we learn that pride goes before a fall.  You, see the pride they had, was that all by themselves they had come up with a 100% safe city.  How smart they were!  How great were their military defenses!  They were confident in the way they have set up things.  The backbone of their whole defense system was that they were a proud people.  The only problem was that there was nowhere in their pride any room to ask humbly the same God who had freed them from Egypt or had led them through the wilderness to the promised land to protect them.  God was left out of the defense system.  How did all of their plans for building the perfect fortress make God feel?  He hated the fortresses.  So what is God going to do about it?  Hand over the city.  Which city?  Samaria.

Can the city save them?  God says if there are as few as ten men a house, they all shall die.  What if one guy is quietly hiding in a closet, will he survive?  When the invaders find him, they will ask him if there are any others hiding with him, he will admit that he is alone.  And that's the truth about Israel.  They will be all alone and that fortified house won't change that. Earlier, Amos had indicated that ten percent will survive, now none  

In fact, at God’s command, what will happen? The houses of the rich and the poor will be shattered.  And how will God do this shattering?  When the Assyrians invaded, they tore up a lot of real-estate, but maybe God was talking about raising up an outside nation to invade and destroy Israel.  God can use natural events too like parting the sea or maybe even an earth quake two.  Remember back in the first lesson, Amos received his first prophesy two years after the quake.  A quake so severe that it was still remembered.  And now God is saying that there will be another big one which will lay flat all the houses in Israel.  Regardless of whether God will use an earth quake or the Assyrians, one thing is sure, God’s judgement of them will result in their homes being destroyed.  Now, these are people who take pride in thinking of themselves as God’s chosen people.  Is what God is planning to do to his chosen people going to be easy for them to swallow?

Amos 6:12 Do horses run or rocks?  Does one plow the sea with oxen?  But you have turned justice into poison and the fruit of righteousness into worm wood--- 13 you who rejoice in Lo-debar who say, "Have we not by our own strength taken Karnaim for outselves? 14 Indeed, I am raising up against you a nation, O house of Israel, says the Lord, the God of hosts, and they shall oppress you from Lebo-hamath to the Wadi Arabah.

There is no question that these verses talk about an invading army.  Amos asks two questions.  What are they?  What is the obvious answer?  No.  Running horses on rocks would cripple them.  And I don’t believe anyone has ever successfully plowed the sea and planted butterbeans.  What’s Amos’ point?  The Jewish leaders were doing something just as dumb as plowing the ocean.  What were they doing?  They were turning justice into poison.  How did they do that?  Remember that they bought the judges so they got the ruling they wanted.  Sooner or later the shoe would be on the other foot and that perverted justice will be used against them.  They turned the fruit of righteousness into bitterness.  When did they do that?  When they perverted trials by having people lie against the righteous.

What did they rejoice in?  Another way to put it is what did they brag about?  Lo-debar and Karniam.  Should that make any difference to us?  Maybe not, but it meant something to the Israelites.  Just recently Jeroboam II had defeated these two cities in a military adventure to increase Israel's borders.   People took a lot of pride in winning those wars.  Amos downplays the value of these triumphs.  Evidently, these were very weak cities ripe for the picking.  The wins really weren’t worth bragging about.   Amos has a little fun playing with the names.  Lo-debar in Hebrew could mean “a thing of nothing”, in other words a big nothing.  Karniam translates as “horns” which is a symbol of the strength of a bull.  Put the two together and you get “bullish strength got you nothing”.  Amos is telling them to stop bragging about beating up a small weak neighbor.  A boy scout troop with slingshots could have done it quicker.

What do we have?  The rich and rulers were selfish in protecting their way of life and didn’t give a fig about the life that most Israelites faced everyday.  They deluded themselves in believing that this was owed to them because they had constructed the safest city in the world.  Other countries quaked at the thought of facing Israel on the battlefield because of what Israel had done to Lodebar and Karniam.  It was like the USA declaring war on Pungo.  Is it just me or does this prophesy resonate in our country today?  Are we trying to build that impregnable fortress on a hill?  Maybe it's about time to ask God how he would handle our fear of the COVID.  Are we the new Israel and need to act on Amos’ prophesy while there is still time?

Prayer: Father, open our eyes to the needs of those around us and empower us to use the gifts we have received to provide the safety that only comes from you.  Amen.