Visions concerning the disasters coming on Israel
7
📚This is what the Lord God showed me✭: I saw that he was forming a swarm of locusts✭ at the beginning of the late crop, and saw it was the late crop after the king’s mowing. 2 📚And it came about when it had finished eating the grass of the land, that I said✭,“O Lord God, forgive, I beg you.
How can Jacob✭ stand?
For he is small”.
3 📚The LORD relented✭ about this. “It will not be✭”, said the LORD.
4 📚This is what the Lord God showed me: I saw the Lord God calling to contend by fire✭, and it consumed the great deep, and was eating up a part of the land.
5 📚Then I said, “O Lord God, stop, I beg you. How will Jacob stand? For he is small”.
6 📚The Lord relented about this. “This also will not be”, said the Lord God.
7 📚✭This is what he showed me: I saw the Lord standing on a wall made with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. 8 📚And the LORD said to me,
“Amos, what do you see?”
And I said, “A plumb line”.
Then the Lord said, “See, I will set a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel. And I will not pass by them any longer.
9 📚✭“And the high places of Isaac✭
will become desolate,
and the sanctuaries of Israel
will be laid waste;
and I will rise against the house
of Jeroboam✭ with the sword”.
The ruin to come on Amaziah the priest
10 📚✭Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent word to Jeroboam king of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the house of Israel. The land is not able to bear all his words✭. 11 📚✭For Amos says this:
‘Jeroboam will die by the sword,
and Israel will surely be led away
captive from their own land.’ ”
12 📚Also Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer✭, go! Run away to the land of Judah, and eat food there, and prophesy there. 13 📚✭But do not prophesy any more at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and the king’s court”.
14 📚✭Then Amos answered and said to Amaziah, “I was not a prophet, and not the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and a gatherer of sycamore figs. 15 📚And the LORD took me as I followed the flock, and the LORD said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ 16 📚Now therefore, hear✭ the word of the LORD. You say,
‘Do not prophesy against Israel,
and do not drop your words
against the house of Isaac.’
17 📚✭“Therefore thus says the LORD:
“‘Your wife will become a prostitute
in the city,
and your sons and your daughters
will fall by the sword,
and your land will be divided by line,
and you will die in a defiled land,
and Israel will surely go into captivity
out of his land.’ ”