Amos 7 explained: Three Visions and a Prophet Sent Away

Vision of locusts (vv. 1-3)

Amos sees locusts stripping the land bare of the late growth that comes up after the king's share of the harvest has been cut. He begs for forgiveness because Israel, called Jacob after its ancestor, is too small and weak to survive this, and the LORD holds back.

Vision of fire (vv. 4-6)

The fire dries up even the great deep, the waters people believed lay beneath the earth, and interpreters have taken it as a picture of severe drought or of an invading army. Amos pleads again in the same words, and again the LORD holds back.

Vision of the plumb line (vv. 7-9)

A plumb line is a weight on a string used to check that a wall stands straight, so the image shows Israel being measured and found crooked. This time Amos does not plead, and judgment is announced on the hilltop shrines and on King Jeroboam's family.

The priest reports Amos (vv. 10-11)

Amaziah, the chief priest at Bethel, tells the king that Amos is plotting treason. He sharpens Amos's words, since Amos spoke of Jeroboam's family falling, not of the king himself dying by the sword.

Go home to Judah (vv. 12-13)

Amaziah calls Amos a "seer" with contempt and tells him to earn his living back in his own southern kingdom. Bethel was the king's official shrine, so to Amaziah criticism spoken there was an attack on the state itself.

Amos answers back (vv. 14-17)

Amos says he is no professional prophet trained in a prophets' circle, just a herdsman and a tender of sycamore figs whom the LORD called away from his flock. He then announces a brutal fate for Amaziah: his wife forced into prostitution, his children killed, his land divided among others, and his own death in a foreign land, the kind of horrors that followed an ancient conquest.

Key verse: Amos 7:8

Where Christians differ

Christians differ on what it means that the LORD changed course after Amos prayed: some take it at face value as God truly responding to prayer, while others hold that God does not change and the language describes how things look from a human point of view.

Something to think about

When someone brings a warning that powerful people find inconvenient, how do you decide whether they are a troublemaker or someone worth hearing?