You're the WORST!

Amos begins his message to Israel ensnaring them into understanding the same truth that the Lord had shown him against a plumb line. He leads up to Israel's sin with a 3-4 beat. Take a few moments to read Amos 1:3-2:5 noting both the redundancy of the 3-and-4  statements and the individual sins of the nations that surrounded Israel.

At each beat, Amos announces the sins of Israel's neighbors, some of which were transgressions against Israel herself. They would have remembered these transgressions and would have been in full agreement with God's pronouncements. Let's take a quick look at these sins:

1. Damascus: "threshed Gilead" . . . they cruelly crushed the Israelites.
2. Gaza (i.e., Philistia): "exiled a whole people" . . . they sold them into slavery.
3. Tyre (i.e., Phoenicia): "delivered a whole people to Edom" . . . they sold them into slavery.
4. Edom: "pursued his brother with a sword" . . . these descendants of Esau, Israel's brother, fought against their own relatives.
5. Ammon: "ripped open pregnant women in Gilead" . . . these, more relatives of Israel, in war, greedy for territory, did heinous things to Israel.
6. Moab: "burned to lime the bones of the king of Edom" . . . these, again relatives of Israel, apparently desecrated the dead.
7. Judah: "rejected the law of the Lord."

Realize this, as Israel read or heard this prophecy, they would have been expecting the culmination of the 3-and-4 pattern to bring them to the point. They probably started off by agreeing with Amos . . . saying something like "yeah Lord, do what you gotta do to them." They might have become confused though, when he went beyond Edom, the 4th country listed. The prophecy didn't culminate with the 4 sins of one country of these neighbors. . . each of these countries had only one sin listed. It wasn't 4 countries . . . there were 7 listed before themselves. 


The Lord compared Israel to the nations around her essentially pointed out that she was worse than the rest. Israel had these four sins listed:

1. "trample the head of the poor" . . . exploit and abuse the poor.
2. "turn aside the way of the afflicted" . . . neglect the downtrodden and helpless.
3. "go into the same girl" . . . exploit women via prostitution. Poor women were likely forced to enter into prostitution at the temples for financial subsistence.
4. "lay themselves down beside every alter on garments taken in pledge" (see Ex 22:26) and "in the house of their God they drink the wine of those who have been fined" . . . both of these statements indicated the use ill-gotten gain in worship and self indulgence.

We know that the Lord hates these things, so we check ourself at how we treat the poor . . . at home and in neighboring nations.

Hear what this guy has to say about how Western corporations treat the poor: