Amos Exhortation

Amos the Prophet, Gustave Dore

Amos, one of the earliest of the Hebrew prophets, flourished during the reign of Uzziah, about 790 B.C., and was consequently a contemporary of Hosea and Joel. In his youth he lived at Tekoa, about six miles south of Bethlehem, in Judaea, and was a herdsman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit (Amos i, i; vii, 14). This occupation he gave up for that of prophet (vii, 15), and he came forward to denounce the idolatry then prevalent in Judah, Israel, and the surrounding kingdoms.

The first six chapters of his book contain his denunciations of idolatry; the other three, his symbolical vision of the overthrow of the people of Israel, and a promise of their restoration. The style is remarkable for clearness and strength, and for its picturesque use of images drawn from the rural and pastoral life which the prophet had led in his youth.

Amos Exhort: by Henry Morris, PhD

He Who Made the Stars

"Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is His name" (Amos 5:8).

This striking exhortation is inserted in the midst of a prophetic rebuke by God of His people Israel. They were rapidly drifting into pagan idolatry, and Amos was trying to call them back.
His exhortation, given almost 3,800 years ago, is more needed today than it ever was before. Modern pagan scientists have developed elaborate but absurdly impossible theories about the chance origin of the universe from nothing, and the evolution of stars, planets, and people from primordial hydrogen. But the mighty cosmos and its galaxies of stars - even the very constellations, such as Orion and the Pleiades (the "seven stars"), as well as the solar system - were made. All of these had to be made by an omniscient, omnipotent Creator, who certainly had a glorious purpose for it all.

Similarly, the global evidences that waters once covered all the earth's mountains (i.e., marine fossils and water-laid sediments at their summits) cannot possibly be explained - as evolutionary geologists try to do - by slow processes acting over aeons of time. God, the Creator, had to call massive volumes of water forth from their original reservoirs and pour them out on the earth in His flood judgment on a rebellious world.

All of these witness to the fact of creation and judgment, not to impotent "gods" personifying natural forces. Men urgently need to seek the true God of creation and salvation before judgment falls again, for "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Hebrews 10:31). HMM