“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 unable to endure all his words. For thus Amos says, “Jeroboam will die by the sword and Israel will certainly go from its land into exile.”’ Then Amaziah said to Amos, ‘Go, you seer, flee away to the land of Judah and there eat bread and there do your prophesying! But no longer prophesy at Bethel, for it is a sanctuary of the king and a royal residence’” (Amos 7:10-13).
The purpose of this brief narrative is to highlight yet another example of our refusal to listen to, and to believe, the words of God’s prophets. And why should we? They refuse to agree with the lies we tell ourselves, with the alibis of self-justification that our inner lawyers have sold us. Instead, they tell us the inconvenient and uncomfortable truth. Not the fictional world as we imagine it to be, but the real world as God sees it.
…we must read, heed, and believe the words of our prophets who, starting from Moses, foretold the coming of the Prophet like Moses.
But if there is one lesson to be learned from the Bible, it is this: refuse to follow blindly after the crowds or after dictates rooted not in God’s wisdom revealed in Scripture, but in religious authority and rote tradition. Rather, we must read, heed, and believe the words of our prophets who, starting from Moses, foretold the coming of the Prophet like Moses (Deut 18:15, 18-19).
O the joy of freedom that comes when we choose to listen to God’s prophets. My father had bitterly opposed my mother’s decision to believe in Yeshua, thereby “betraying our people.” But after watching my mother change for the better over the course of a few years, he asked her to explain why she believed, as long as she did not read from the New Testament. After hearing Isaiah 53 for the first time, my father said, “Lorraine! I told you I didn’t want to hear the New Testament.” But when he discovered that this passage about “Yeshua” was located in “our side of the Bible,” his spiritual journey out of the world of make-believe began, and he came to believe in the Messiah of Israel as defined by God’s inspired prophets rather than a make-believe Messiah invented by the religious traditions of men.
