The Struggle to Hope
The first of five visions. Amos struggles to find a ray of hope. The locusts threatened but were not as disastrous as at first appeared. There was a fire eating up the land but it stopped short of total destruction. In both cases deliverance seemed like an answer to prayer. In the first there was the possibility of natural healing and recovery. In the second, what the fire had consumed had gone, but something had been left. Then we have the plumb line.
There are translation problems here and we don’t have space to go into details. There is no evidence that the Hebrews ever had anything like a plumb line, as we understand it. ‘Tin’ nowadays is the preferred equivalent; tin, mixed with bronze, made weapons of destruction and the Assyrians were using it. So envisage God standing on a wall with similar unconquerable weapons ready to strike. Surely from this there can be no escape.
To appreciate the force of this vision try to enter into the emotions of a man who has faced death twice (perhaps with a life-threatening operation) and come through miraculously, but just when he is beginning to re-build his life the third threatens, far more potentially damaging than the other two. How can you expect him to go on hoping? It is the mood of a nation threatened for years by an enemy, twice having seen them off and then finding them once more at the gates begging for blood. Or think of a marriage which has gone through the same experience. Or parents whose child has run away once and returned but this time may not come back at all.
It is the moment when there is no answer. In the first two visions Amos pleaded (successfully) with God. This time there isn’t even a request. Things are so bad it isn’t even worth trying. Imagine Amos simply picking up his bags, heaving a sigh of grief and setting off home, muttering, ‘I sometimes wonder why I bother.’ It is the cry of dereliction. There are times when there is no hope. Those are the moments when we have to go on hoping.