God Will Never Forget – Amos 8:4-7

A text – Amos 8:4-7

⁴ Hear this, you who trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land,
⁵ saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale?
We will make the ephah smaller and the shekel heavier and practice deceit with false balances,
⁶ buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”

⁷ The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.

A reflection:

This passage of the book of the prophet Amos is part of his preaching to the Northern Kingdom of Israel when it was at peace and prosperous. But if we hear Amos’s words, we discover that the prosperity it was enjoying was built on cheating the poor. They were living in an unjust culture, and God sent Amos to call them out on that score.

What is happening? The needy are trampled upon and the poor are brought to ruin. How is it being done? The ephah is a unit of measurement; they are downsizing it so that the same price buys less product. Not only that, they are actually making false weights, so they can charge more (or pay people less for what they are bringing to trade, as the case may be). They are even buying and selling people who are in debt – people are worth only silver (not gold) – only as much as would buy a pair of sandals.

Adding insult to injury, the merchants are champing at the bit for the Sabbath to be over so they can start buying and selling in these corrupt ways again – there is no enjoyment of Sabbath for rest for all people, poor and rich, for animals, for all. There is no break for anyone. The system in which people live their lives in broken. God sends Amos to say these things because the people have forgotten or thrown out the system God gave them as they became a nation based on God’s commands for them. God gave them the law so that they would live in a trustworthy society doing honest things with one another. God wanted their life together to reflect the very character of God – being just, being trustworthy.

What will be the result of these happenings that Amos is calling out? God will never ever forget any of these deeds.

We all live in a world that has both honesty and corruption in it. We all buy things every day that we truly don’t know all the means of production for – we like to think we are honest and not involved in corruption, but it’s pretty easy to hide from the awful truth that some of what we have and want and do is caught up in untrustworthy practice somewhere. If we want to work with God as co-creators of a trustworthy world, we can look at what we can see every day and make sure that we are being trustworthy, contributing to the trustable systems whenever we can. And, no matter what, whenever we see the poor being exploited, we can remember that God will never ever forget those deeds.

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us Amos’s prophesies to Israel, reminding them of what God does not forget and how they are meant to live. Help us to learn from that preaching to make the world a more just place in all of our dealings.  Amen.