What more could he do, he wondered. He’d sent prophet after prophet to his chosen people, Israel. He had blessed them with every blessing, spiritual and material. And by the time he called a herdsman named Amos to speak for him, he was coming perilously close to running out of patience. God running out of patience? Yes, even God’s patience has limits. Yes, even God’s love cannot forever be scorned without the inevitable result of finding oneself (or a nation) alone, unutterably, irrevocably alone. Christ called it the unpardonable sin—one of the most terrifying words in any language—un-pardonable—beyond pardon, beyond hope.

So God the Father, with the tenderness of a mother hen, reached out once more through the voice of a common man, a herdsman. Maybe they’ll listen to him he thought. At a time of evident, nearly unparalleled prosperity, God was trying to shout over the din of the dishonest trade deals, the crack of the lash of the corporate and private slave owners, and the flagrant judicial miscarriages of justice—I love you, I love you, I love you! He had never wanted anything but the most abundant joy and happiness for his chosen people, and his dream had always been that their joy in his love would prove contagious, and the surrounding nations would get excited about following Yahweh, too.

But his plans had gone so tragically wrong. Saul had proved to be a tall, handsome failure. David had allowed Satan to overwhelm him with the old, tried, and true temptation to lust, and Solomon, though the wisest man who ever lived, had proved how big a fool a wise man can be. Then shortly, after his death, the kingdom had broken in two and it had been almost all downhill from there. Near the point of no return for the northern kingdom of Israel, Amos came visiting the outback, the towns, and the villages—a solitary voice in an appallingly self-indulgent land.

After proclaiming God’s judgments on Israel and her neighbors and warning of imminent exile that would destroy family and nation, God sent five visions—the first two horrific—locusts by the millions, judgment by fire; two that were hopeful—the plumb line and the summer fruit; and one of terrible finality—no escape for the lost. Although the basket of summer fruit has always been esteemed a thing of beauty and delight and has been immortalized by countless artists through the centuries in classic still lifes, the jarring juxtaposition of summer fruit with howlings, dead bodies flung everywhere, and silence in Amos 8:1–3, makes painfully clear that though the skins of the fruit might be unblemished, God saw in the Israelite basket of fruit overwhelming internal rot and decay.

To the casual onlooker, the Israelites were still industrious—planting and harvesting the fruit and grain, still religious—they kept the Sabbath right up till sundown, the family unit was still intact, businesses were thriving and court system was functioning. But to the eyes of the All-Seeing One, the final grains in their prophetic hour glass were falling. Soon, chillingly soon, it would be too late. A famine was coming, not for physical food, but for spiritual nourishment. In the final words of the vision a frightening scene is described by Amos—men staggering from sea to sea and north to east, searching, searching, searching—but the "word of the Lord" is nowhere to be found. Amos sees them falling "never to rise again " (8:9 last line). It’s too late; too late.

Some scholars refer to "The end has come for my people Israel" (8:2) and "never to rise again" (8:9) declarations as the "Absolute No" of God. Rudolf Smend believes that "Amos speaks the No of God, not the Yes of God, he announces wrath and not grace." But Klaus Koch disagrees, "Amos certainly proclaims unconditional disaster, but he does not proclaim it wholesale." Certainly one of the most heartening and hope-instilling themes of Scripture is that of the "remnant." It appears that God has always had a remnant. Never, in human history, has everyone "bowed the knee to Baal." In the book of Amos, that remnant, however minuscule it might prove to be, surfaces (5:3, 15; 9:8, 9:14).

Revelation 3:14–22, and Matthew 23 with the woes pronounced by the rejected Messiah—of God’s people being like whitened tombs (read "the unblemished skins of the fruit"), but full of decay and dead men’s bones on the inside is of urgent relevance. In this time of eschatological "shaking" (9:8, 9), the words of Christ are especially relevant: "everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise many who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock" (Matt.7:24, 25).

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