INSIGHTS FROM AMOS, PART II
God is not looking for lineage or human qualification in the one who speaks for Him. He is looking for ordinary people who are willing to be extraordinarily radical, not for the sake of showiness, but for the sake of His Name.
Amos was an ordinary man who found himself in a precarious time in Israel’s history. God may have wanted to speak through the “trained” prophets but truth be told, most of them were compromised.[1] Jesus suggests that if people do not step up and do the will of God then rocks and stones might begin to cry out in their place.[2] Enter Amos.
Amos may have been in some sense an ordinary man, but his DNA was anything but ordinary. He dared to step forth to cry out against the injustice, lethargy, and disintegration of Israel’s faith in and fidelity to God. There are times when ordinary people are called on extraordinary missions.
The kind of DNA God deposits in His prophets and preachers is a willingness to call out things as they truly are, to specifically oppose that which is keeping the people of God from walking in covenantal purity with God, and to be unafraid to risk their comfort or their life to address where leadership has compromised their duties before God or people have acted unrighteously toward each other. They may be called to go where no one wants to go and compelled to say what no one wants to say.
We see this abundantly in the preaching and prophesying of Amos. While he rails against the nations that have sinned against God, he does not spare Israel and Judah. This is an hour to find the cry that is deep within your heart and to bring it to God so that He can purify it and calibrate it with what He Himself is currently crying out.
What was Amos crying out? He cries out against the disintegration of honesty, and moral decency, and people trying to suppress the prophetic voice and the purity of wholehearted commitment to God. Folks were trying to get those those with Nazarite vows to go out drinking, and they are telling the prophets not to prophesy.[3] Amos speaks of Bethel and Gilgal both of which housed “schools of the prophets” that had gone astray.
He tells them that they are God’s chosen family and that they are not walking in agreement with Him. He tells them not to be “at ease in Zion.” He sees a plumb-line descending from heaven that is revealing much crookedness. All these elements—commitment to the purposes ofGod, holiness, purity, singleness of heart, and passion for righteousness are in the DNA of the radical. Lament for what is not right, not straight, not in harmony with the heart of God rises up from the hidden places of prayer and spills out of the heart onto the street. Amos is calling, calling, calling for a people to return to their God.
Do you feel any of this? Is your heart beating faster reading this? Are your eyes a fountain of tears?
Do not think it odd….it is the Spirit of God calling out in the earth, waiting to hear the heart cries of His ordinary radical ones echoing back to Him that which He longs to do. It is the way of God.
Amos says, “Surely the Lord God does nothing unless He reveals His secrets to His servants the prophets.”[4] God is looking to partner with people to bring to fruition the fullness of His kingdom and His purposes. That is why there is almost always a prophetic witness somewhere somehow. The torch of the testimony of the glory of God and His saving plan for His people passes through history and is never lost. Think of who told you about Jesus and then think about who told that person and who told the person before that—you will soon be overwhelmed with the amazing grace of how the purposes, plan, and message of God is passed along through history by ordinary people like you and me. All of us can be ordinary radicals. Oh, excuse me, all of us should be ordinary radicals!
We must cry out against everything that stands against the Kingdom of God coming in fullness in our midst. We must cry out for an earthquake to shake us out of our acedia. For our cries will be heard and met from heaven for “the days are coming says the lord when the plowman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes and who sow seed.”[5] We cry out because we cannot but cry out. We long for the day of His return when “the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.”[6]
This is not the day of singular prophets but of a company of ordinary men and women who will stand and speak for the purposes of God in their generation and who will not love their lives even unto death. They will follow the Lamb wherever He leads them, saying what He tells them to say, going where He tells them to go. Will you be one of them?
Rose-Marie Slosek came to know the Lord in the early seventies and has a passion for organic church and the maturing of the Body of Christ. She serves on the Emmaus Online Lead Team, leads Maranatha Northeast, and a local home fellowship. She can be reached at rmslosek@comcast.net.
[1] Jeremiah 14:14; Zechariah 10:2; Ezekiel 13:1-7
[2] Luke 19:40
[3] Amos 2:11
[4] Amos 3:7
[5] Amos 9:13
[6] Habakkuk 2:14
