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Hey, Bible nerds.
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This is Dr. Manny Arango and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast.
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Powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan.
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We created to help you read the.
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Entire Bible in a year.
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You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan.
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And join the journey.
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Let's be honest, a lot of us are still treating digital ministry like it's a backup plan from 2020. But discipleship isn't just happening on Sundays anymore. People need gospel centered connection every day of the week. And if you're stuck juggling five different platforms, one for giving, another for sermons, something else for events, it's no wonder engagement feels off. That's not ministry. That's a mess. Subsplash changes that one platform. Everything you need, media, giving, events, messaging, your app, your website built specifically for churches. No hacks, no workarounds, just clarity and simplicity. Because every day you wait, families scroll past your sermons, new guests click away from clunky sites, and real people miss real moments with Jesus. Don't waste another summer stuck in digital survival mode. Use it to get ahead, simplify, upgrade, get back to what matters. Head to subsplash.combible-dept and schedule a free no pressure demo. And let this be the summer your church gets focused and fully equipped.
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Family. Welcome to day 183. We are in the Book of Amos. And I'm going to be honest with you, before studying this content, I wasn't a big fan of the Book of Amos, but man, am I a fan now. And so I hope that I can lead you on a journey where you become a fan of the Book of Amos, because I think that it is very, very relevant, very, very helpful. And so, like always, I'm going to give you context clues, gonna give you as many nerdy nuggets as I can. Always gonna finish off with a Thomas Truth. If you've done the reading, which is just two short chapters, just Amos chapter one and two, if you've done the reading, then everything I'm gonna say is gonna make a whole lot of sense. If you haven't done the reading, if you're trying to cheat the system, it's probably not gonna make a lot of sense. Like what I'm saying is not gonna make a ton of sense because you don't have context. So Amos chapter one and two. Let's dive in. So with Joel, we have no idea when Joel was written. I mean, scholars take their best guess. Okay, so Joel could have been written late. It could have been written early, we really don't know. But in terms of themes, there's a bunch of themes in the book of Joel that carry on the other prophets. So we put it up front, we put it first as a fact, like Amos is our first traditional, like, preaching prophet, whereas Jonah wasn't really a preaching prophet. It was a, it was a lot of narrative. Amos is like hardcore. Like, this is what the prophetic books really, really feel like. So I'm pumped to dive in. First question, who was Amos? Okay, so Amos is not. So with every prophet, you'll realize they're either prophesying to the northern kingdom of Israel or the southern kingdom of Judah. Amos is from the southern kingdom of Judah, but he travels up to the north in order to prophesy to the northern kingdom of Israel. So if you're looking at a list, he's gonna be on a list of the kings that are prophesying to the northern kingdom of Israel. So he's from Tekoa. Whereas Tekoa, it's six miles from Bethlehem, which is in Judah. Yet Amos is called to Israel. So he's living in Tekoa, but he's called to Israel. Next thing that we learn is, is that Amos is a shepherd. Okay? So he's not a professional court prophet. He's not full time vocational ministry prophet. There are people like Elijah in Elisha. Like Elisha burns all of his oxen, right? And he leaves his secular profession in order to follow Elijah around and to create a school of the prophets. That's not the case with Amos. Okay? Amos is a shepherd. There's nothing that tells us that he stops being a shepherd, but he's called to Israel. And not only is he called to Israel, and this is what's really fascinating. He's called to the ruling classes of Israel. So this book is going to focus a lot on injustice, okay? Social justice, social injustice. Now, I feel like there's this divide, at least in the American church, where the way that we define righteousness is kind of like at odds. So if you are, let's say, a conservative or evangelical, then you would say that righteousness is found in morality, right? Like, hey, we don't believe that homosexual lifestyles are right or sexually deviant lifestyles are okay. We don't believe in murdering unborn children. Like, we would say, we would stake our righteousness on morality. And that's, that's actually good. That's biblical. Then on the more progressive or liberal side of the aisle, righteousness would be more like, hey, we Treat the poor well, like we open our borders to immigrants. And that polarization has created a false dichotomy that's actually not biblical. Because what you're going to find out through the Book of Amos is, is that righteousness for God is both. It is both morality and justice. Morality and justice equals biblical righteousness. So what we have right now, especially in the. In. If you're listening to this and you don't live in America, then you can just, you know, now you know another thing about America, but this may not be relevant for you, but for anybody listening to this or watching this, and you're American, then you're very, very aware that on the conservative side of things, conservative Christians really, really, really define righteousness by morality. And then more progressive or liberal Christians would define righteousness by justice. And God just goes, that's a false dichotomy. I want you to love God and love your neighbor. So act righteously is to love God, which means you don't have sex with people you don't know have a strict sexual ethic. And to love God means that we don't sacrifice our children in the fire. So, like, yeah, it means we're against abortion, we're against all types of things like that. So it means to love God. But then to love your neighbor does mean that I'm generous with the orphan and the widow, and I care about poverty and I care about immigration. And like, of course I would clothe those who are naked. This is Jesus words. Hey, when did we clothe the naked? And when did we visit prisoners? And when. Hey, you do. When you did it for the least of these. You did it for me. So biblical righteousness is both morality and justice. All right? Amos is going to carry a massive theme of justice. I don't want anybody to hear that and go, oh, that's that liberal progressive gobbledygook. No, that's the bi. That's just the Bible. Like, no, the Bible tells us to act with justice towards our neighbors. Okay? And so Amos is going to spell out what that looks like. And honestly, that was refreshing and challenging. It's refreshing to hear what the Bible has to say about topics and not just what our society has to say about topics. So studying this book has really helped me. Let's do a little bit more context. Where does Amos go to preach? This is fascinating. He goes to Bethel. If you remember, all the stuff that we learned in first and Second Kings is that there's a wicked king by the name of Jeroboam who sets up a temple in Bethel that is in opposition to the temple in Jerusalem. And so Amos prophesies at Bethel at the house of God. And I put that in air quotes. House of God. Because really the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom had a battle of the houses, whereas the southern kingdom has the temple, which is the house of Yahweh. Bethel is going to have the house of God. And Amos then prophesies at Samaria, which is the capital of the northern kingdom founded by King Omri. Amos is a Jewish shepherd, speaks to the most powerful ever king in Israel, who's Jeroboam ii. So Jonah and Amos both prophesying to Jeroboam ii. We're going through the prophets in chronological order. That helps to maybe orient you who ruled from the borders of Judah to the Euphrates River. Now, Amos is going to do something that I think is brilliant. He's going to start his prophecies not by attacking Israel, but he's actually going to get a bunch of amens came from the crowd. He's actually going to prophesy against seven of Israel's neighbors, which means that the people of Israel, like we like this prophet. All right, now, I teach communicators to always lead. Like the beginning of your sermon should be what I call you should be preaching for confirmation bias. I never put things that are hard to hear at the beginning of a sermon. I always put the things that I know are going to get guaranteed amens at the beginning of a sermon. And then once I've won an audience, then I start saying things that are harder to hear. Once a room likes me, once an audience has been warmed up to what I have to say, Amos is going to do the exact same thing. So in chapter one, verse three to five, he's going to prophesy against Damascus. Then in verses six to eight of chapter one, he's going to prophesy against the Philistine cities. Then in chapter one, verse nine and ten, he's going to prophesy against Tyre, which is going to be the Phoenicians. T Y R E the Phoenicians, they live in Tyre. They're on an island called Tyre. And then he's going to prophesy against Edom, and then he's going to prophesy against Ammon, and then he's going to prophesy against Moab, and then he's going to prophesy against Judah. And you need a map to see this, but he's literally prophesying against everyone who neighbors Israel and Really, Everybody would have been like, yeah, Amen. You know what I'm saying? Them Arameans are trash. Amen. Them Philistines are trash. Amen. Them Phoenicians are trash. And, you know, Amen. Amen. Amen. And then after he prophesied against Damascus, the Philistines, the Phoenicians, the Edomites, Ammonites, the Moabites, and of course Judah, after he prophesies against seven nations, then he hits the bullseye. So he circles the bullseye and then hits the bullseye. And then in chapter two, starting in verse six, he hits them with a sucker punch. This is what the Lord says. For three sins of Israel, even for four. This is an idiom, actually, that you're going to see all the way through. He's going to actually do this with all the nations. For three sins of Damascus, even for four. For three sins of Gaza, even for four. For three sins of Tyre, even for four. Which is actually a way of saying, I've lost count of your sins. So it's not literally saying there's only three things I have against you. Oh, no, there's four actually, in this. Like a Jewish idiom that's actually saying, I got three things against you. Actually, I got four. Actually, I have five. You know what? I got six. It's actually saying you're supposed to continue it in your head is how it's supposed to function, as on a literary level. For three sins of Israel, even for four, I will not turn back my wrath. They sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals. So immediately he's going after you don't care for the. For the righteous or the needy. You trample on the heads of the poor as upon the dust of the ground, and deny justice to the oppressed. Father and son use the same girl, and so profane my holy name. Now, that one verse. There's so many debates on how to translate that one verse. When you read this in the niv, it could seem like it's talking about sexual immorality, like a father and a son both have sex with the same girl. But let's think about it. What's being talked about prior to that line is social injustice, justice to the oppressed, trampling on the poor, the needy. And then let's see what's after it in verse eight, as they lie down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge, which means you're. You're taxing people. You're making people. The thing that helped you buy clothes is taking pledges from your own brethren. So we're back to really this is a dis track to wealthy people about how they treat the people that are around them. That is what Amos is doing. So above the line about the father and son using the same girl and then beneath the line about the father and son using the same girl is back to in the house of their God, they drink wine. Taken as fines. Fines would be taxes. Okay, this line here, father and son use the same girl and so profane my name. We're into nerdy nuggets. By the way. I gave you all the context I I needed to give you. Now we're down in a nerdy nuggets. There's actually these pagan festivals that only the elite wealthy were able to go to. And actually there's a lot of scholars who believe that this align in proper historical context. What it means is that you're so wealthy you're able to bring your son with you to these elite dinner parties and you're using the same waitress, like the same servant girl is serving you and your son and it's so expensive for you to even get in. But now two people are able to get in and you're using the same girl. Which means it's almost like saying, you know, you went to the nicest club in Vegas and you got bottle service and you brought your son. So it's not. I don't think there's sexuality at play here because if you read the verses before and after it, sexual immorality would kind of seem random. It would actually seem like that doesn't fit because everything that God's talking about through the prophet Amos seems to be, you know, really targeted when it comes to injustice, wealth, the poor, the oppressed, justice and injustice. That gets us into just the text. Let's get a little bit more nerdy nuggets and then we'll get a timeless truth. I think that if there's a book that like the American church probably wants to like, omit, it's Amos. Because. Because like, honestly, like if you're an American, even if you're on welfare, like you're, you're wealthy in comparison to the world, like in comparison to global standards. Like, we're privileged. The fact that we have groups of people in our country debating about who's more privileged is just kind of one of the goofiest things to me ever. Because we're all privileged, man. We have this thing called American privilege regardless of like where you come from. Like my parents were. I grew up really poor and Then I remember going my first mission trip to Guatemala and was like, maybe I wasn't poor. Okay? Because we don't know poverty. Like, we don't know the level of poverty that the rest of the world knows. And so we are very privileged. And I think a book like Amos is easy to just go, ah, nah, we don't need to read that. But for the next couple of days, we're gonna camp out in Amos. And I actually think that there's gonna be a lot of challenge that hopefully the Lord begins to help us with family.
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The wait is over. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos, is out now and available everywhere.
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Books are sold. Literally. Today I walked into a Barnes and.
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Noble and I signed a bunch of copies at a physical location. So you can grab this book at a physical Barnes and Noble or you.
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Can go to a Books A Million.
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Or Amazon or anywhere books are sold and grab a copy of. If you enjoy reading the Bible from an ancient perspective, if you understand that.
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The beauty of scripture is actually knowing.
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It in context, then you'll love this book. And if there's any chaos in your personal life, I think that reading the Bible from an ancient perspective can actually help to crush the chaos in your life. I think this book is going to.
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Be a New York Times bestseller. I really do.
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I think we wrote a good one. I think you should get a copy today. All right, back to the episode.
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All right, let's kind of. I want to give you a little bit more, just some nerdy nuggets. The temple in Jerusalem is called the house of Yahweh. This is second Samuel, chapter seven. Bethel is called the house of God. Two temples, two houses, which is right. Jerusalem represents David, true worship of Yahweh, loyalty to God. Bethel represents Jeroboam the first, who polluted the worship of Yahweh, who represents disloyalty to God, who rejects the chosen king. Okay, so the whole northern nation of Israel represents the rejection of David in David's house. Okay, so David's descendants are going to reign in Judah. And really, I mean, it would honestly imagine that the southern states seceded from the United States way back in the 18. What is that, 1850s? And Abraham Lincoln was just like, eh, y' all can go and imagine there being a civil war that actually ended in there being two Americas, okay, the northern states and the southern states. That's exactly what happened to Israel. David, Saul, David and Solomon represent the united monarchy after Solomon, Rehoboam is going to reign in the south, which is one of David's. Descendants. And Jeroboam is going to reign in the North. They are going to have a civil dispute and they're going to decide we are just like North Korea and South Korea. We are ethnically the same, but we are going to form two different nations. So that's exactly what's happening. I think a lot of Christians don't realize that there's a northern kingdom of Israel and a southern kingdom of Judah, that these are not one country, but they are two post Solomon. So two temples, two houses, which is right. Jerusalem represents David, which represents true worship, loyalty to God. Bethel, which was established by Jeroboam in response to Rehoboam, Solomon's son, represents polluted worship of Yahweh, disloyalty to God and a rejection of Yahweh's chosen kingly line, which is the Davidic line. It's a rejection of a chosen king, place, priesthood, festivals, et cetera. Amos also represents history repeating itself. This is a nerdy nugget that I want to. I just love this. If you go back to first kings, chapter 13, okay, I pulled it up in logos one kings chapter 13. Obviously we studied that probably a month or so ago. It says this in verse 1. By the word of the Lord, a man of God came from Judah to Bethel. As Jeroboam was standing by the altar to make an offering by the word of the Lord, he cried out against the altar, okay, this pagan idolatrous altar, altar, altar. This is what the Lord says. A son named Josiah will be born to the house of David on you. He will sacrifice the priests of the high places who make offerings here. And human bones will be burned on you. Human bones being burned and meaning this site will be desecrated and you can't even use it anymore because BAAL won't even let you use it anymore. It's not just destroying it, but desecrating it. There's a prophecy from someone from Judah coming up to Bethel. So Amos is honestly history repeating itself. Here's another man from the south coming up to Bethel and judging what the northern kingdom of Israel is doing. Not only is we looking back at First Kings 13, but we're looking ahead at John chapter 4. John chapter 4. Jesus meets a Samaritan woman by Jacob's well, when she realized he's a prophet, she asked a question. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain. That mountain is Bethel. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain. But you, she's looking at Jesus saying, you people of Judah, the people of the south, of the Southern kingdom say that Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship. This is John 4:20. Which temple was the right one was still being argued in Jesus's time. So this is something that goes all the way back to First Kings. It's also at the center of the argument in Amos. And it's gonna be argued in Jesus times. This is a big deal like this. It matters to learn this. And what is Jesus response? None of these temples are gonna matter. I'm the temple is really Jesus's response. All right, Thomas Truth. The sins of these nations are a list of injustices, violence, death against others. God sees the way we treat each other and protects those who cannot protect themselves. God really does care for the vulnerable in society. Now, in my own personal language, I don't like the word victim. I think it creates victimhood and victim identity and victim mentality. But that doesn't mean that there aren't vulnerable people in our society. And I think that on the conservative side of the argument, conservatives, and I happen to be someone who would say I'm conservative, would almost label anyone who's been through any trauma as someone who's like, no, you're not a victim. You can't choose to be a victim. And I'm also Pentecostal, so I think that there's power in claiming a victim identity. But sometimes we can throw the baby out with the bathwater and we can have a blind spot that doesn't acknowledge. But there are oppressed people in society and there are vulnerable people in society. And you know what? I think in a culture that really has created polarization, the church really does need to, like, hold things in tension, not balanced. Because sometimes when you're trying to balance multiple things, you can't really stand for anything. But I think you do need to hold truth, intention. And so Amos is really, really helpful because I think it's a timeless truth that how we treat the most vulnerable people in society, how we treat oppressed people, groups in society, really does say a lot about who we are and the God that we serve. And I want to be a part of a church that cares for the orphan, the widow, the immigrant, the prisoner, the homeless, the most vulnerable people in our society. And I think that's really, really, really important. I don't think that is enabling people to remain victims. I think that that's just doing what Jesus has called us to do as a church. I do think that it is a timeless truth that the way that God defines righteousness is not just by morality or just by justice. But by both. And I think that we need a church that can actually do both and do them well. So that's a Thomas truth that I think that these chapters of Amos that I would say that we should take with us, that we should fight for tension, not necessarily for balance, but to hold these truths in tension. All right, tomorrow we've got Amos chapters three, four, five, and six. So today we only had two chapters, but tomorrow we got four chapters. So g your loins. We got a little bit more reading tomorrow than today. Amos chapter three to six. I'll see you right here tomorrow. If you're on a streak, don't break it. I'm so proud of you. I love you so much. I'll see you right here as we continue our trek through the prophets and through the Book of Angus. Peace.
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Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. You can find us online and learn more about the show at the Bible Department and on Instagram. Hebibledepartment. If you enjoyed this episode and want.
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To dive deeper into the Bible, you.
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Can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.