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This verse is taken from:
Amos 2. 9-16
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“search the scriptures” John 5:39
Jeroboam II sat upon the throne of Israel. The longest reigning monarch of the northern kingdom, one of the dynasty promised to Jehu, his reign brought security and material prosperity to the nation. Yet the contemporary prophets, Hosea and Amos, exposed the moral laxity into which the people had descended.
Amos, the farmworker from Tekoa, had no ambition or expectation in respect of the prophetic office. He was just going about his daily business when the Lord laid hold on him and gave him a chilling message of impending judgement, in view of the nation’s departure and idolatry.
Amos was not parochial in his thinking. He acknowledged that God is sovereign over all people and nations and all in turn are responsible before Him; his message to them was of the long- suffering of God, ‘For three transgressions … and for four’, the mercy of God had withheld judgement. Now, however, righteous retribution was about to fall.
The sin of Israel and Judah was compounded. They were a people privileged above all nations, yet they had ‘despised the law of the Lord’, 2. 4. Israel, the northern kingdom, in particular, had flouted the laws of common decency in their materialistic passion, vv. 6-8, even seeking to silence the voice of the prophets and corrupt the integrity of those who did make an effort to live for God, v. 12.
The image before us today of the cart filled with sheaves admits to two possible interpretations. Some suggest that the voice of the Lord is heard through the prophet, feeling the weight and burden of sins built up over the years, like corn sheaves in the harvest field stacked upon the straining cart.
Others, with equal justification, hear the voice of Jehovah pronouncing His intended action, ‘I will press them down’ RV, JND. Whichever way we choose to look at this, the result is the same. The strong, the mighty and the swift in the nation will be bowed in weakness, v. 14. Their military strength will be broken, v. 15, and courage will be turned into cowardice. Just fifty years after Amos spoke these words, the northern kingdom of Israel was over-run and taken by the armies of Assyria.
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