Amos Chapter 8: god's Silence

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God declares He will remove access to His word from those who refuse to listen.

Outline

• 1–3 Vision of summer fruit
• 4–10 Judgment on cheating businessmen
• 11–14 A famine of hearing God’s word

God's Silence

At the end of this chapter, God states there would be a famine of hearing the word of God. That is, there would be no prophet or teacher able to give God’s guidance to the people. Why would God be silent? Why wouldn’t He answer when His people called?

While God does not explicitly explain the reason here, the context of Amos points to this reason: God withheld His guidance because the people had ignored Him for so long. That is, God finally gave them what they wanted.

This explanation fits the larger biblical narrative that when people sin, God sends prophets (today, pastors and preachers) to teach and warn them to repent, and if they reject the warning, God eventually sends judgment (Genesis 6:3; Proverbs 1:24–28; 1 Samuel 28:6; Jeremiah 7:13–16; Zechariah 7:11–13; Romans 1:21–28). In the context of Amos, this judgment was God’s silence.

Imagine the story like this. An Israelite boy named Benjamin grows up in a godly home. Every week, he hears teaching from his city’s teacher of the Law, Lehab. He understands the principle of just weights, loving your neighbor as yourself, and worshipping only God, yet he decides he can do better. He wants to live his way, and he does. He opens his own business and runs it how he sees fit, cheating customers with an unbalanced weight. Yet, every Sabbath, he listens to Lehab, nodding along as if he believed every word.

Now, Benjamin is an old man. He is sick. No doctor knows what is happening. Benjamin remembers the local priest and how God’s prophets once spoke His words. So, Benjamin sends servants, but the man of God can’t be found. In fact, no teacher or prophet can be found. Benjamin ignored God so long that God gave Benjamin what he had long desired: silence.

That’s tragic, but it happened to Israel. Is it happening today? Probably. Is it happening to you? Has God been telling you the same thing day after day, but you don’t listen? Are you in danger of God granting your wish of being left alone?

We think of God as loving, kind, and gracious. He certainly is those things. However, He is also just and allows us to reap the fruit of our choices (Galatians 6:7–8). If you don’t want to hear God, eventually, God will grant your request: He will give you silence.

May this truth encourage you to diligently obey God when He speaks and fervently pray for those who refuse to hear Him.

Reflection

• Have you neglected God so long that you no longer listen when He speaks?

Verse by Verse Study

1–3 God used the image of a basket of summer fruit to symbolize that the end had come to the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The fruit may have been ripe and delicious. However, it had been removed from the trees. Before long, it would rot. As a side note, the fruit also signified the end of the harvest in the sense that God had finished picking the good fruit out of the land—the remaining fruit was left to await the decay and cold of winter. Therefore, the “dead bodies” may very well symbolize the rotten fruit of sinners who have refused to repent of their evil ways.

4–7 The evildoers in the Northern Kingdom were irritated by God’s law and holy days. They wanted the religious services to be over quickly so they could return to gaining wealth by deceitful means. Today, the parallel would be those who are so obsessed with their jobs and money that even while sitting in church, their minds are on work and how they can make a profit. The result of such thinking is devastating: God promises never to forget their works, bringing judgment on them.

8 The effects of sin are not isolated to the sinner. Everything that the sinner touches suffers—friends, family, work, and even the land. Recall Genesis 3:17-18. God placed a curse on the whole earth because of Adam’s sin. Today, we still see thorns because of that curse. On top of that, God will send specific judgments to nations, families, and individuals for their sins.

9–10 The description here could be literal or figurative. On the Day of the Lord mentioned by prophets throughout Scripture, the sun will be struck in judgment. However, given verse 10, this passage seems to be more immediate, referencing how God will turn the sinners’ joy into sorrow. While sin may be enjoyable for a moment, its long-term effects are misery and death.

11-14 If verses 9-10 are taken figuratively, this passage is then the literal punishment God will send for the people’s sins. And it is poetic. The people wanted to ignore God, doing as they pleased, so God promised to withhold His Word from them. Therefore, when they genuinely sought God’s guidance, they would not find it. God gave them the silence they desired. A similar spiritual decline can be seen in 2 Kings 22:8–20, where a priest in the Southern Kingdom finds the Scriptures while cleaning the Temple. The book had been neglected for so long that no one—not even the priests—knew what was written in it or that it even existed. If the Southern Kingdom had forgotten God’s word (and they were the ones who taught the travelers from the Northern Kingdom), we can safely assume that knowledge of God’s word had greatly diminished in the Northern Kingdom as well.

This judgment parallels the thoughts in Genesis 6:3 and Romans 1:28 that God will not always strive to correct a person but will, at some point, turn that person over to a reprobate mind. What a tragic state: to reject God so many times that when you seek Him, God is silent.

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