God is searching for a body, a community of people to care for the things God cares about.
God gives power and blessing so that justice and righteousness will be upheld for those who are denied them.
This is what God is like. This is what God is about. This is who God is.
To forget this, to fail to hear the cry, to preserve prosperity at the expense of the powerless, is to miss what God has in mind.
At the height of their power, the Israelites misconstrued God’s blessings as favoritism and entitlement. They became indifferent to God and to their priestly calling to bring liberation to others.
There’s a word for this. A word for what happens when you still have the power and the wealth and the influence, and yet in some profound way you’ve blown it because you’ve forgotten why you were given it in the first place.
The word is exile.
Exile is when you forget your story.
Exile isn’t just about location; exile is about the state of your soul.
Exile is when you fail to convert your blessings into blessings for others.
Exile is when you find yourself a stranger to the purposes of God.
And it’s at this time that we meet the prophets, powerful voices who warned of the inevitable consequences of Israel’s infidelity.48
The prophet Amos said, “Hear this word, people of Israel, the word the LORD has spoken against you—against the whole family I brought up out of Egypt: . . . ‘See the great unrest within her and the oppression among her people. They do not know how to do right,’ declares the LORD, ‘who store up in their fortresses what they have plundered and looted.’ ”49
One of Amos’s first charges is that some people are being neglected while others are stockpiling surplus. But then he says that because of this, Jerusalem is going to be destroyed: “ ‘I will tear down the winter house along with the summer house; the houses adorned with ivory will be destroyed and the mansions will be demolished,’ declares the LORD.”50
The prophet Isaiah tells the people of Israel that when they pray, God says, “I will hide my eyes from you” because “your hands are full of blood.”51 God sees their military bases, chariots, and warhorses for what they are—unacceptable costs of empire.
And the prophets didn’t stop with condemning the empire; they reserved their harshest critiques for the religion that animated it all. Isaiah declares that God hates “with all [his] being” their feasts and festivals and “evil assemblies.”52
God calls their church services “evil assemblies”?53
God hates their religious gatherings?
When God is on a mission, what is God to do with a religion that legitimizes indifference and worship that inspires indulgence?
What is God to do when the time, money, and energy of his people are spent on ceremonies and institutions that neglect the needy?
Amos says, “Hear this word, you cows of Bashan on Mount Samaria, you women who oppress the poor and crush the needy.”54
The cows of Bashan were known for how big and healthy and well fed they were. Amos compares the wealthy women of Israel to cows who graze gluttonously while others starve. God doesn’t have a problem with eating and drinking and owning things. It’s when those things come at the expense of others’ having their basic needs met—that’s when the passionate rants of the prophets really kick in.
And that word Amos uses: oppression? We first heard that word in Egypt.
Amos insists that God hates their worship: “Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! . . . You who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land, . . . buying the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.”55
God is patient but also pragmatic. God has a plan. God cares about the suffering of the world and will not allow the indifference of his people to stand in the way of his plans to relieve that suffering.
Through Amos, God delivers the crushing blow: “Therefore you will be among the first to go into exile; your feasting and lounging will end.”56
Amos predicts that the oppressors will be the first to be hauled away to a foreign land. How offensive would this be if you were a leader of Israel living in Jerusalem?
Amaziah the king, a descendant of Solomon, says in response to Amos’s rants, “Get out! . . . Don’t prophesy anymore . . . because this is the king’s sanctuary and the temple of the kingdom.”57
Of course the king hates this message. How dare Amos bring these crushing words into the inner sanctum of power! Amos answers, “I was neither a prophet nor the disciple of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees. But the LORD took me from tending the flock and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ . . . 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. . . . And Israel will surely go into exile, away from their native land.’ ”58
The scene is overwhelming. A simple shepherd confronting the most powerful man in the nation with the message that the king is about to lose it all, the empire is over, it will not last, and when the king kicks him out, Amos says, “Oh, and by the way, your wife will become a prostitute and all your kids are going to be murdered.”
Isaiah, Amos, Hosea—the prophets came to remind the people of Sinai, to bring the people back to the covenant they made with their God, to help them remember that God is looking for a body.
But Israel doesn’t listen. It’s written in 2 Chronicles that God sent them these prophets because God “had pity on his people and on his dwelling place.”59
God wants to live among the people in the sacred union of the divine and human, but they aren’t interested.
Chronicles continues, “But they mocked God’s messengers, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets.”60
Amos gets kicked out of the palace,
Jeremiah gets beaten up and put in stocks and thrown in a pit, and the people don’t change.
They don’t remember Egypt.
They’ve forgotten Sinai. They’re too comfortable.
The system works for those with the power and influence to change the system. They can’t hear the cry.
And so God suffers,61 God is patient, God waits, but there comes a point when nothing more can be done.
Eventually “the king of the Babylonians . . . killed their young men with the sword in the sanctuary, and spared neither young man nor young woman, the elderly or the aged. . . . He carried to Babylon all of the articles from the temple of God, both large and small, and the treasures of the LORD’s temple and the treasures of the king and his officials. They set fire to God’s temple and broke down the wall of Jerusalem; they burned all the palaces and destroyed everything of value there. He carried into exile to Babylon the remnant, who escaped from the sword,