The Beginnings of Hope
After all the tough talk Amos begins a reconstruction. If things are as bad as he says, what can these people hope for? What can they do?
The first step is a recognition of where they are. No excuses. No special pleading. Hope springs, not from blind Panglossian optimism but from realism. But this is not the same as saying ‘things will have to get worse before they get better.’ The first sign of hope is when you see 1,000 men going to war and 900 body bags coming back and you can say, ‘All right. I agree. Something has gone drastically wrong’.
The next step is to avoid the temptation, yet again, to escape to Bethel and Gilgal. They may be the traditional watering places of yesteryear for people who wanted to ‘seek the Lord’. For Amos they are simply old-fashioned folk religion. They are a return to the old habits before they embraced the new revelation with its fresh opportunities. Amos sees them as an escape. Leave them alone is his wisdom. They are doomed. Better to start somewhere else. When the Quakers rejected traditional forms of worship, including the sacraments, in favour of silence it was because they wanted to start in another place. They wanted to find God everywhere. Everything would be holy. Every meal would be a sacrament. It may not be the whole gospel but at least it was an attempt to get back to first principles and concentrate on something which they felt had been lost and in which everybody could be engaged.
For Amos and his generation, it meant learning to surrender all the security they had built around themselves (houses of stone) at the expense of other people and the artificial structures they had created to insulate themselves from the hazards of living (shortage of wine). Sadly, vv 16-17 give little grounds for hope that anybody listened. After all the tough talk Amos begins a reconstruction. If things are as bad as he says, what can these people hope for? What can they do? Well how about a change of attitude?