Amos [Part 2] - God is Looking for a Relationship With You

Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.

Shalom. My name is Joseph Shulam, and in partnership with Brad TV, we are studying the prophets. We are now in the second lesson about Amos.

In the first lesson, I didn’t wear a jacket and a tie, on purpose. I wore a leather jacket because Amos says that he is not a prophet or a son of a prophet, but he is a farmer, a shepherd. So I didn’t feel like I should start teaching Amos with a shirt and tie.

But now we are in the second lesson of Amos. In the first lesson, the major point was that the God of Israel is not only the God of the Jewish people, the God of the nation of Israel, he’s the God of the whole world. And almost all the prophets, except of Obadiah, prophesy about all of our neighbors, about the whole Middle East, about Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Babylon, Tyra. God is the God of the whole world, and this is an aspect that people forget.

Especially, we Jewish people, forget that God is not in our pocket and that we don’t own him, and that he cares as much for us as he does for all the nations. And the nations around us also happen to be our enemies. Not new enemies, old enemies, the same enemies that were bothering Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Moabites, and the Midianites. They’re all still here, just by different names.

So in this second lesson, I am going to chapter four of the book of Amos that deals with the worship, the cults, the sociology and the relationship between us and God in our obligation to praise and worship and serve. Amos is very clear.

He prophesied in the eighth century BC, or BCE, the way scientifically it’s listed, about the same time, similar time to Hosea, to Jeremiah, to Isaiah. He prophesied in a time in which there was a big upsurge, I would say inflation of religion. Jeroboam built a temple in Bethel and in Dan in the northern of Israel. And there was another temple in Samaria.

And the kings of Israel that were semi-pagan were very religious. They were Israelites, but they were very religious, but the wrong kind of religion. And Amos concentrates on that. And sometimes he uses very, very strong language, and I can’t help it. I really can’t help it that he uses strong language. I have to repeat that language and I hope nobody’s offended.

But if you’re offended, get offended at Amos, not at Joseph Shulam. I am starting with verse one of chapter four. That starts this diatribe about the relationship of God, the people of Israel, and worship, service, to God and to people.

Okay, here we go. Amos is on the podium.

“Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are on the mountains of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to your husbands, bring wine, let us drink. The Lord God has sworn by his holiness, Behold, the day shall come upon you when he will take you away with fishhooks, carry you out like that, like trout out of a river, and your posterity with fishhooks. And taken out of the city, each one through the hole in the wall of the city, straight ahead, and flung on the refuge heap, on the garbage heap.”

The word in Hebrew is very complicated; it’s translated in different ways in English, but it means the surge of the garbage heap. “Thus declares the Lord.”

That’s the opening statement of Amos in chapter four, where he’s going to start dealing with the way people worship and with the way they relate to God. But this phrase, “cows of Bashan,” is an interesting phrase, because Isaiah also talks about the same topic. He doesn’t call the women of Bashan cows, but he does say that when they walk in the streets of Jerusalem, they play the drum with their behinds.

What can I do? That’s the language of our prophets. But it’s the right language, in my opinion. Because what are we hearing here in the relationship between God and Israel? We hearing that the women are in control of the spiritual atmosphere in the home, but not only in the home, in society.

Look, I am 76 years old, very soon, 77 years old. I’ve been around the world many, many times. I have taught the gospel in more than 50 countries. And in most of the world, including in Jerusalem, in the Orthodox Jewish community, the women take the lead on spirituality, on the, how should I say, the religious atmosphere in the home.

It’s not bad, it’s just bad when they do it in the wrong way, with the wrong motives. It’s just bad when they don’t respect either the laws nor the community.

And especially, not in this case of Amos, in his day in the eighth century; the poor, the needy, the people that are not on the same class of society as the spiritual religious leadership of the rabbis and the deacons and the servants in the synagogues and in the churches. That’s a fact, folks.

Amos is addressing these issues. And he’s addressing it with very sharp language, and essentially says, “If you guys continue that, the city will fall and you will not march out of the gate of the city, you’ll be taken out with fishhooks through a hole in the wall that was breached by the enemy, to exile, of course.” That’s what happened. They ended up going to Babylon to exile.

I’m continuing to read from chapter four. “Says the Lord, Come to Bethel, and transgress, and Gilgal, multiply your transgression. Bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days. Offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving with leaven. Proclaim and announce the freewill offering. For this is your love. You children of Israel, says the Lord God.”

“That’s what you like to do. You like to go to these high places, to Bethel, to the Gilgal.”

Of course, remember what was in Gilgal. Gilgal is when the children of Israel crossed the Jordan River, left Moses on the other side of the Jordan with Joshua and the elders of Israel. They crossed the Jordan River. At Gilgal they dedicated themself publicly. The men got circumcised in Gilgal, because they haven’t been circumcised for 40 years.

And they made it a high place. They made a center of worship when they crowned the first king of Israel officially in front of all the tribes. King Saul, the son of Kish. They did it at Gilgal the third time, which was the most important time; which was official, not just between Samuel, the prophet and Saul, and his servant, but in front of all the tribes of Israel.

So Gilgal is a big center of worship on the edge of the Jordan River in the middle of the country. Bethel, where Jacob experienced a dream where the angels of God were going up the ladder and down the ladder, and God stood over him and said, “I will guide you. I will lead you. I will protect you. I will serve you.”

So in these places there were famous, I’m going to say kind of a western term, there were famous churches there, with famous pastors there, fancy, beautiful, decorated, big, popular centers of worship. And these people from Samaria, from the Galilee, from the sea coast, wanted to go and worship in these fancy churches, in these fancy places of worship.

That was the popular place to go. You had to dress up nice. They made it “a social event.” That’s what Amos is talking about. They made their faith into a social event. Ignoring the poor, ignoring the needy, ignoring the society around them, they became the spiritual elite of Israel.

Amos says, “Folks, that isn’t going to work. God is going to take you, going to throw you out of the land with fishhooks, and he is going to send you to exile,” which was promised already in the book of Leviticus chapter 26 and 27. It’s not a new thing.

Exile is not a new thing that happened just by the whim of God. No, it was planned ahead of time, before the children of Israel entered the land of Israel. In the book of Leviticus, exile was already a part of the promise of God, that if we don’t live right and we don’t do right, we’re going to be kicked out of the land, the land is going to vomit us. That’s the language of Leviticus; and it has.

When I’m thinking about the society in Israel, most of society in Israel, even today, were not born in Israel. They were born all over the world. We have immigrants from India. We have immigrants from China, Chinese Jews. We have immigrants from Siberia, from Russia, recently from Ukraine. We have immigrants from South America, from every continent, from the Philippines, from all over. We’re a country of immigrants.

Why are we a country of immigrants? Because God threw us out, threw us out on our ear, because we didn’t listen to people like Amos, Hosea, Zechariah, Micah, Joel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. We didn’t listen to the prophets. We didn’t listen to Moses. That’s why we’re in exile.

And now, in fulfillment of God’s promises, he’s bringing us back. But he wants us to learn from the past so that we don’t repeat the same mistake that our forefathers did, that caused them to be thrown out of the land.

Amos’ statement is that the people can go to a place of worship, offer sacrifices, bring money, donations, sing and praise and worship, and still be displeasing to God. Why? Because God doesn’t look at the decoration of the building and at the musical band playing.

He looks into the people’s hearts, into their hands, that they be clean and not guilty of bloodshed, of abuse of the poor. God is looking not for grilled meat on the altar. He is looking not for a donation inside an envelope that people come to the front and put in a box or in a plate that passes between the aisles.

Yes, what God is looking for is into our hearts. And if we worship without the right intention, without the right motives, without the heart for social reasons, like the Pharisees are accused of doing in Matthew 23, Yeshua says, “They do it to be seen by men,” then our worship becomes an abomination. Paul said it in Mars Hill.

A summary, short summary of what is said in Mars Hill, is here expanded by, thousands of years, no, many hundreds of years after Amos. Yes, in Greece, in Athens, on Mars Hill, Paul gives his speech and says, “God is not in need of houses made by men, of temples.

He doesn’t need your gift, He’s the owner of the whole world. What He needs is that you seek Him, have a relationship with Him. Because He appointed a day in which he will judge all flesh by a man whom He has appointed and raised Him from the dead.” Of course, he’s talking about Yeshua, about Jesus.

So the same paradigm that Amos is presenting here over two or three chapters, is presented by one speech of Paul in Athens at the Aeropagus, at the Supreme Court of the Athenians. Yes, but Isaiah said it already in chapter one of the book of Isaiah.

Jeremiah said it in chapter seven of the book of Jeremiah. This is not Paul’s invention and it’s also not Amos’s invention. And Amos essentially laments, cries out about Israel in the next chapter, chapter five. I’m going to read you a little bit of chapter five, verse four to ten, of Amos’s lament for the people of Israel.

“For thus says the Lord to the house of Israel, ‘Seek me and live, but do not seek Bethel nor enter Gilgal, nor pass over Beersheba. For Gilgal shall surely go into captivity and Bethel shall come to nothing.’” I’m going to stop with the reading and tell you.

When I was... right after the Yom Kippur war in 1973, they called me back to the army. They called a lot of people my age back to the army, to rebuild the army. Where did I serve? In a base, military base, right on Bethel. I mean, we walked from the center of the base in between the ruins of ancient Bethel. We could have gone every day there to the ruins of ancient Bethel, to the place where Jacob saw the dream of the latter coming from heaven.

So it says, “Bethel shall come to nothing.” It’s nothing now. It’s not even a mosque there, there is nothing. It’s a barren hill with a little bit of archaeological remains. That’s all of the ancient Bethel. There is a big Israeli army base there, near there.

But the words of the prophet came through. “Seek the Lord and live, lest he breaks out like fire in the house of Joseph and devours it with no one to quench it in Bethel. You turn justice into wormwood and lay righteousness to the rest of the earth. He made the Pleiades and Orion.”

These two great groups of stars in the Milky Way. “He turned the shadow of death into morning and makes the day dark at night. He calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the face of the earth.”

We know what a tsunami is. We have seen great tsunamis in my lifetime, in Japan, in South India, the Pacific Ocean.

“He calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the face of the earth. The Lord is his name. He reigns ruin upon the strong so that fury comes upon the fortress. They hate the one who rebukes in the gate and they abhor the one who speaks uprightly.” That means the prophet himself.

They hate the prophets. They persecute the prophets. We have seen that in the life of Jeremiah more than the other prophets. But we have seen it today as well. But we have got the same paradigm, my dear brothers and sisters, in the New Testament.

We’ve got the same teaching in the New Testament. Yeshua in the gospel of Matthew has that whole scene of the judgment, that whole scene of the judgment, that in the end he says to those that say, “We have worshiped you, we have praised you. We’ve cast out demons in your name,” “Depart from me, you workers of iniquity, I don’t even know you,” because of the same thing that Amos spoke 800 years earlier, where religion becomes putrid, it becomes fancier.

The buildings become fancier. The worship becomes fancier. But without the heart, without the social interest of taking care of the poor and the needy, our religion is worthless. For as much, Yeshua says, “For as much as you’ve done to one of the least of these, the poorest, the meanest,” mean from the not mean, “meanness,” but mean from the point of view of “insignificant,” “you have done it unto me.”

Yes, that’s the message of Amos, one of the most interesting prophets of the eighth century BC. May the Lord bless us all, inspire us, and please read the prophets. Read the book of Amos. It doesn’t take too long. It’s only nine chapters. It’s easy to read. In less than an hour you’ll read it twice.