In a remarkable turn of phrase, the American philosopher Henry David

Thoreau wrote, “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The

obedient must be slaves.” However, the church father, Augustine of

Hippo wrote, “The cost of obedience is small compared with the cost of

disobedience.” And Edwin Louis Cole, founder of the Christian Men’s

Network, said, “Obedience is an act of faith; disobedience is the result

of unbelief.” Who is right? Thoreau or Augustine and Cole?

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Before we attempt to answer that question, let me warn you. In today’s

message, I will be bringing up some difficult to handle topics. In order

to give full disclosure, let me list some of these difficult issues. We will

be discussing a matter of holy war and genocide because these rise

directly from today’s text. But precisely because they are difficult to

handle, I will not be able to address them in the nuanced manner they

deserve.

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However, I have been assigned the task of expounding on the second

chapter of Amos and I can either water down his message because I

don’t want to bring up difficult topics or I can remain true to scripture. I

choose the latter. But I request any of you who have any questions

related to something I say today to please ask me about it. While I don’t

claim to have all the answers, I can accompany you in your struggles as

we come to terms with the difficult parts of our scriptures.

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The book of Amos is a difficult book to read. Anyone who is faint of

heart should stay away from it because the book is violent and

descriptive and the prophet does not steer clear of unsettling topics. As

Caleb mentioned last week, Amos was from the southern kingdom of

Judah. However, he prophesied primarily in the northern kingdom of

Israel. So in other words, he was kind of like the enemy who was

prophesying to the kingdom of Israel.

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Think about it. How would Indians feel if a Pakistani came here and

told us about our sins? We might not take it very kindly. But Amos had

a message from God and he also had a wise strategy. He begins his

message by announcing God’s judgment on the neighbors of Israel. I’m

going to describe his strategy with geographic references from your

perspective. So north is up, south is down, east is your right and west is

your left. Got it? North, south, east and west; up, down, right, left.

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He begins in the northwest with Damascus, comes down to the

southwest with Gaza and then to the west with Tyre. In this way, he has

covered all the regions to the north and west of Israel. Having swept

through the regions west of Israel, Amos then turned his gaze eastward.

But now he goes in the opposite pattern. He begins in the southeast with

Edom, then sweeps to the northeast with Ammon and then to the east

with Moab. In this way, he covers all the regions to the east of Israel.

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And as he does this he has the hypnotic lilting way of introducing the

judgments: “For three sins of Damascus, even for four.” It’s as though

he had thought of one more to add to the list of sins even as he was

compiling the list, stirring the people of Israel into a frenzy as they

heard the message that God was judging all the enemies that surround

them for their numerous sins. In these first six messages, Amos has

covered all but one of Israel’s neighbors.

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And then finally Amos comes closer and announces judgment on Judah,

Israel’s southern sister nation. And you can almost imagine the cries of

delight as Amos denounced this southern neighbor who tried to be so

high and mighty by claiming that true worship could only take place in

Jerusalem. They denounced Israel’s worship centers in Samaria and

Bethel and claimed that the Israelites had fallen away from their

covenant with Yahweh. Yes, Amos had won over his audience.

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And so now they were primed to receive his true message. You see, his

real message was not to Damascus, Gaza and the other pagan nations.

Nor was it to Judah. Rather, as we read in Amos 1.1, his prophecy was

primarily to Israel. So now that he had a captive audience, he says, “For

three sins of Israel, even for four” and the crowd that had been

bellowing with shouts of joy suddenly went silent. “What was that?”

someone in the crowd whispered to his neighbor.

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And Amos proceeds to announce God’s judgment on Israel. The crowd

had listened with joy and laughter as one enemy nation after another had

been denounced. But now it was their turn. What was God judging them

for? What exactly was their sin? In a nutshell, human trafficking,

slavery, economic exploitation, temple prostitution, disenfranchisement

of the poor. This had been the people God had chosen to be a light to the

other nations, to draw the other nations to the true God, Yahweh.

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Instead, what they had spread was the deepest darkness, blaspheming

the name of Yahweh with all their atrocities. Instead of being a light that

drove away the darkness that had enslaved the nations, Israel had

embraced the darkness and fallen into slavery itself. Instead of being a

beacon of freedom from the enslaving fallen powers, Israel had become

an instrument of oppression for the fallen powers. Amos had a huge task

before him.

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Mind you, some of the practices I just mentioned are practices that can

only take root in a society that is experiencing quite a high level of

prosperity. While poor societies have their own problems, the

enslavement of other humans and the disenfranchisement of the poor are

problems that are peculiar plagues of prosperous nations. How do you

shake such a nation to its senses? How can you speak the truth of God’s

judging word to a people drowning so deep in its delusions?

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As the saying goes, “Set a thief to catch a thief.” The movie Catch Me If

You Can, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Leonardo DiCaprio

and Tom Hanks, is based on the life of Frank William Abagnale, who

wrote fraudulent checks to the tune of $2.5 million while posing as a

pilot, a doctor, a lawyer and a professor. He now works with the US

government to identify instances of fraud because he was so good at it.

He knows the mind of the con artist and so is qualified to spot them.

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Amos does a similar thing. In order to catch the people of Israel in their

lies, he tells them a lie. “What?” I hear you say. “Never! The bible does

not lie. The bible contains only truths.” Let’s consider this for a

moment. Amos says, “Yet I destroyed the Amorite before them, whose

height was like the height of cedars, and who was as strong as oaks; I

destroyed his fruit above, and his roots beneath.” According to this, God

had utterly destroyed the Amorites from the root to the fruit.

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Those of you who have been coming for the bible study on

Deuteronomy may remember Sihon king of Heshbon, and Og king of

Bashan, both Amorite kings who reigned in the region east of the Jordan

whom the Israelites defeated. This clearly indicates that the Israelites

had destroyed some of the Amorite nations. So the claim that Amos was

making might seem to be correct, especially to us who live so many

centuries after Amos or to those who are unfamiliar with scripture.

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We might be further convinced when we look at Joshua 10.40 where we

read “So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country,

the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with

all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who

breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.” It is

understandable if we thought this meant that all the Amorites were

slaughtered during the conquest of Canaan.

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Then why is it that in 1 Samuel 7.14 we read, “And there was peace

between Israel and the Amorites”? If there was peace with the Amorites,

then that must mean the Amorites were still around at the time of

Samuel and Saul. And why is it that in 1 Kings 21.26 we read, “Ahab

did very abominably in following idols, according to all that the

Amorites did”? If Ahab was following the practices of the Amorites,

there must have been Amorites to mimic.

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Indeed, in Joshua 9, we read that the Israelites were duped by the

Gibeonites, an Amorite group, into making a treaty with them. So even

if the Israelites slaughtered all the other Amorites, they did not kill the

Gibeonites. And indeed, as a reminder of this, the prophet Ezekiel taunts

the people of Judah about their mixed heritage by stating, “Your

ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an

Amorite and your mother a Hittite.”

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When Amos says, “I destroyed the Amorite before them... I destroyed

his fruit above, and his roots beneath” he is saying something that his

audience knew to be false. Why would he do that? He did that precisely

because he knew that the Israelites would protest. There were still

Amorites in their midst. How then could Amos say that the Amorites

had been completely destroyed? You see, in the face of claims that there

are no objective truths, there is only one way forward.

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The way forward is to ensure the other side claims something to be

objectively true or false. For example, if someone tells you that there is

no such thing as universal objective truth, please remind them that they

are making a universal objective truth claim, which if it were true,

would be false. Here Amos was stating something that was evidently

false so that, if the Israelites objected to the claim, he could then

hammer home something that no Israelite could claim was false.

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He says, “I brought you up out of Egypt and led you forty years in the

wilderness to give you the land of the Amorites.” Amos reminds the

Israelites of the time when the nation was formed. God had delivered

the people of Israel from their enslavement in Egypt. But the journey

that was supposed to take less than two weeks, ended up taking forty

years. And if anyone asked why the journey had been delayed so much,

the evident answer was that Israel had not trusted Yahweh.

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Remember that account? The Israelites had sent twelve spies to scout

the land and to bring back a report about it. When they returned, they

brought back a sample of the produce of the land - a single cluster of

grapes so large that it took two of them to carry it, and some

pomegranates and figs. They also reported that the people of the land

were huge - descendants of Anak, who themselves were descendants of

the Nephilim of Genesis 6.

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In Deuteronomy we read about how big one of these Amorites was.

King Og of Bashan is said to have had a bed that was thirteen and a half

feet long and six feet wide. And so ten of the twelve spies recommended

that the Israelites turn tail and return to Egypt because there was no way

they could defeat such massive opponents. Only Caleb and Joshua

maintained their trust in Yahweh and stated that, if Yahweh had

promised the land to Israel, he would defeat their foes for them.

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But the people of Israel chose to side with the ten spies who wanted to

return to Egypt, fearing that, should they proceed to attack the Amorites,

their wives and children would be taken as plunder. And the

consequence of their lack of trust was that God made them wander in

the desert for forty years until all those who had distrusted him had died.

This delay would serve as an object lesson for the very children whom

the distrusting generation feared would be taken captive.

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In Deuteronomy 8.2-3 we read, “Remember how the Lord your God led

you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test

you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would

keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then

feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had

known, to teach you that humans do not live on bread alone but on

every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

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In other words, rather than being taken captive, the children of the

distrusting generation would inherit the promised land. And they would

learn to trust the loving, living, enlivening word of God. For the

children of the distrusting generation, this forty year delay would have

been a long, long wait. But in the larger scheme of things, it was a small

delay and to understand that we need to look at Genesis 15 where God

made the covenant with Abraham.

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God tells Abraham, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your

descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they

will be enslaved and mistreated there. But I will punish the nation they

serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great

possessions. You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be

buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will

come back here, for the sin of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

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In this vision, Abraham learns a number of things. First, he would not

inherit the promised land; his descendants would. Second, his

descendants would be enslaved for four hundred years. Third, after the

period of enslavement, God would rescue Abraham’s descendants from

the land of slavery and they would leave that land with a lot of

possessions. Fourth, the reason for the long delay had something to do

with the sin of the Amorites.

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We read about the nature of the sin of the Amorites in Leviticus

18.24-30, where we read, “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of

these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you

have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished

its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.

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“But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these

abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you

(for the people of the land, who were before you, did all of these

abominations, so that the land became unclean), lest the land vomit you

out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was

before you. For everyone who does any of these abominations, the

persons who do them shall be cut off from among their people.

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“So keep my charge never to practice any of these abominable customs

that were practiced before you, and never to make yourselves unclean

by them: I am the Lord your God.” Here a word on how the word

‘these’ functions. When God says to the Israelites, “Do not make

yourselves unclean by any of these things” what does ‘these’ refer to?

Does it refer to things that came before or things that are being

introduced?

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Most often in the bible the word is used to introduce the upcoming

section. So when we read, in Genesis 5.1, “These are the generations of

Adam,” it is clearly an introduction to Adam’s lineage and not a way of

referring back to chapter 4. Similarly, in Exodus 20, when the Ten

Commandments are introduced we read, “And God spoke all these

words” following which we read the words that God spoke to Moses on

the mountain.

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A classic modern day usage of this technique is in the way each episode

of Star Trek is introduced. We hear the words, “These are the voyages of

the starship Enterprise” and know that the voyages are being

introduced, not summarized. In a similar manner, Genesis 2.4 introduces

the second creation account with the words, “These are the generations

of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the

Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”

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The fact that this is the fourth verse of chapter 2 indicates that those

who introduced the chapter divisions often misunderstood the narrative

and we can find many such examples of improper chapter divisions. The

division between Leviticus 18 and 19 is one such instance because the

current division seems to indicate that ‘these things’ in Leviticus 18.24

refers to what came before in chapter 18 and leads us to think that God

is most concerned about incest and menstruation.

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However, if we link ‘these things’ to what is in Leviticus 19 we get to

see a bigger vision - honoring our parents, keeping the Sabbath holy,

rejecting idolatry, providing for the poor, respecting what belongs to

others, not profaning God’s name, not oppressing a fellow citizen,

paying a daily wage worker promptly, helping those who have physical

disabilities, being impartial in the courts, refraining from slander, not

hating another Israelite, and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

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If this list is indicative of what the Israelites were to do over against

what the Amorites practised, we can see what kind of behavior is in

mind when the Israelites are warned in Leviticus 18.24-25 with the

words “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by

all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean,

and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land

vomited out its inhabitants.”

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The passage in Amos 2, lists a lot of similar things. And Amos indicates

that God’s judgment is going to come on the people of Israel precisely

because they followed the horrible practices of the Amorites. And here

we must ask a question that will give rise to an answer that many, if not

most, of us would find difficult to stomach. “Why, despite the clear

instructions of the Torah, did the Israelites end up following the horrible

practices of the Amorites?”

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According to René Girard, “Man is the creature who does not know

what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We

desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” This is the

foundation of his theory of mimesis and from that theory we can

understand that we humans are incapable of knowing how to behave

and learn behavior from others. Human behavior is infinitely malleable

and is shaped by acceptable behaviors to which we are exposed.

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This is why children born to Indian parents will have an Indian

worldview and children born to Chinese parents will have a Chinese

worldview. This is why children born to Kenyan parents will develop a

taste for Kenyan food and children born to Brazilian parents will fancy

Brazilian food. But this is also why teenagers, after being immersed in

their native cultures, can rebel and form perspectives on the world that

differ from those of their native cultures.

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And this is why the phrase, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is a

fact for dogs, but is a derogatory statement when used in reference to

another human. So why, despite the clear instructions of the Torah, did

the Israelites end up following the horrible practices of the Amorites?

Simply because there were Amorites around to put those practices on

display. During the conquest of the Promised Land, the Israelites had

failed to exterminate the Amorites.

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And as a result there were Amorites living alongside the Israelites, who

showcased these abominable practices. But just because something is on

display does not mean it is attractive to us. This leads us to another

question: “Why did the Israelites pick up the practices of the

Amorites?” Let us attempt to answer this by considering some contrasts

that highlight the differences between the two perspectives on what the

good life is.

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According to the Torah, once every fifty years, there had to be an

economic reset. Debts had to be forgiven and property returned to those

who had the ancestral right to the property. To the contrary, the Code of

Hammurabi, incidentally a monarch of Amorite descent, only focuses

on restitution of things stolen or pledged. There is absolutely no

recognition that the passage of time would introduce economic disparity

within society. For a rich person, which is easier to follow?

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According to the Torah, idolatry was prohibited. The Israelites were not

supposed to make any representations of Yahweh. This is because,

according to Genesis 1, God had already placed his image on earth - the

humans who were supposed to represent him to each other and to the

rest of creation. The prohibition on idols is based on the creational view

that this creation is the good work of a good God. To the contrary, idols

were commonplace in Amorite culture.

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Now, which is easier - to recognize and live into our image bearing

vocation and that of other humans or to surrender that vocation to

entities, real or imagined, and give our senses some tangible way of

perceiving the imperceptible?

The Torah also never linked a person’s intimacy with God to the

observance of the rituals. The rituals were only ways to deal with the

taint of death in the camp, permitting God to live among his people.

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However, the Amorite practices clearly linked the rituals to intimacy

with the gods. Sex with temple prostitutes was believed to enhance the

intimate connection between the devotee and the deity and to increase

the fecundity of the devotee. Which is easier - to believe in a mysterious

God whose ways are inscrutable or to believe in a formulaic approach in

which certain actions, conducted at specific times and by specific

people, have definite and predictable outcomes?

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You can see that the Amorite version of spirituality was much easier to

follow. What Yahweh required from his people was far more difficult.

Hence, it was almost certain that the people of Israel would be attracted

to the Amorite practices. I dare say, we have the same issue in the

church today. We want easy answers to life’s toughest questions. We

want predictable routines to our faith instead of a genuine walk with a

person who has mysterious ways of interacting with us.

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By allowing the Amorites to live in their midst, the Israelites opened

themselves up to the temptations of Amorite worship in their midst. And

it was seductive and they were seduced into accepting these practices.

Instead of a sober, sacred spirituality, the Israelites flung themselves into

drunken, debased debaucheries. And it is in this context that Amos

announces God’s judgment on the nation of Israel. The judgment is an

indication of the cost of disobedience.

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The Israelites had disobeyed God by allowing the Amorites to live in

their midst. And over the years, they had been drawn into the Amorite

practices that supported and encouraged economic disparity, idolatry

and ritualism. These three things deal with three aspects of our lives as

the people of God. Let us consider each of these in turn to see how they

impact our lives individually as well as the corporate witness of the

church in the world.

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When we support economic disparity, we are saying that the needs of

the few outweigh the needs of the many. The richest 1% of the

population owns over 40% of the world’s wealth. During the current

pandemic global billionaire wealth increased by $3.9 trillion while

global workers’ combined earnings fell by $3.7 trillion. If Christians

with influence do nothing about this, we indicate that we are

worshipping not Yahweh but Amurru, the Amorite deity.

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If the Church does nothing to reduce economic disparity, we are saying

that we do not love our neighbors as ourselves and that we do not even

want to.

When we make idols, we are saying that we are unable or unwilling to

live up to our God given calling to be the true image of the living God

on this earth. We are saying that we reject this vocation and are telling

God that he needs to find other means by which to govern his creation.

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When we reject the call to be God’s image bearers in the world we are

telling God that we do not have a high enough view of ourselves that

enables us to believe he has placed us on this earth to represent him. In

other words, the making of idols is a declaration that we are unwilling to

love our neighbors as ourselves precisely because we do not know what

it means to love ourselves because we have forgotten and perhaps

forbidden the practice of our original vocation.

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When we reject our vocation of being God’s image bearers we indicate

that we are worshipping not Yahweh but Amurru who institutionalized a

class system in which only a select few were able to represent the gods

to other people and to the rest of creation.

And when we fall into ritualism, we are saying that we do not want a

genuine relationship with God that is dynamic and, like all genuine

relationships, characterized by ups and downs.

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We are saying that we want to treat God like some cosmic genie who

only exists to grant us this or that boon so that our lives would become

smoother. And when we do this, we indicate that we are worshipping

not Yahweh but Amurru, who never wants a genuine relationship with

his devotees but mindless ritualists who treat the encounter with the

divine as some sort of magic in which mastery of the ritual guarantees

blessings and prevents curses.

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This is not what we were created for. This is not what we were called to

practice. We were called to love the Lord our God and so to reject

ritualism. We were called to love ourselves and so to embrace our

vocation as God’s image bearers. And we were called to love our

neighbors and so to eradicate disparities in this world. We have a

choice. We can accept this lofty and deep calling or we can embrace a

middling, shallow view of ourselves.

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But if we have any qualms with accepting the divine call to love God,

ourselves and our neighbors, we need only look at Amos 2 and be

reminded of the devastating cost of disobedience.

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