Stop! Have mercy! He said to God.
It was too much for too small of a people. God was sending a devastating locus swarm. Amos prayed to God that it would stop and the LORD relented.
Then God was sending fire and it devastated the land. Amos prayed for mercy on the people and the Lord relented.
Then the LORD said it was through the sword he would bring judgment. This time he wasn’t going to relent as Israel had persisted in evil.
At this point the high priest sent a message to the king that Amos was a conspiracy theorist and needed to be stopped. So the king called him in to tell him to stop. Go to Judah and prophecy.
Amos responded that he wasn’t a prophet. He was a shepherd. But that God had told him to speak and he wasn’t going to stop.
He stood in front of the man who could easily kill him on the spot, and he obeyed what the Lord told him to do—prophecy against the king.
“Therefore this is what the LORD says:
“Your wife will become a prostitute in the city, and your sons and daughters will fall by the sword. Your land will be measured and divided up, and you yourself will die in a pagan country. And Israel will certainly go into exile, away from their native land” (v. 17).
Wow.
Can you imagine standing before an evil king who killed on a whim and telling him that kind of stuff?
But the LORD told him to. So he did.
And I think there’s greatness to absorb here.
We obey the LORD, not men.
Yes, it could cost us our lives. But our lives in the hands of the LORD for eternity.
I just hope when that time comes for me, that I too will be like Amos and be courageous no matter the outcome.
