Lesson 5: The Angry Men I Learned From

Words to Know

Prophet — someone who tells the powerful what God thinks of what they are doing now.

Sacrifice — an animal killed and offered at the Temple as worship.

Justice — in the books of the prophets, it almost always means fair courts, fair pay, and fair scales. Not a feeling.

I did not invent any of this.

That matters. Your church makes me sound like I arrived out of nowhere with a brand new message.

I did not. I came at the end of a long line of people. Most of them were poor. All of them were furious. And every one of them got in trouble.

Not “trouble” the way a man gets a stern letter. Micaiah told a king he was going to lose a battle and was slapped in the face and put in a cell on bread and water (1 Kings 22:24–27). Jeremiah was locked in the stocks (Jeremiah 20:2), and later lowered on ropes into a cistern with mud at the bottom (Jeremiah 38:6). A prophet named Uriah son of Shemaiah said the same things Jeremiah was saying, ran for Egypt, and was dragged back and killed by the king’s men (Jeremiah 26:20–23).

Keep Uriah. He is the precedent, and he comes back in Lesson 6 and Lesson 12.

Men like these are called prophets.

First, forget what you think a prophet is.

A prophet is not a fortune teller.

A prophet is somebody who says: this is what God thinks about what you are doing right now.

When they do talk about the future, it is almost always one sentence: if you keep doing this, here is what happens to you. That is not magic. That is what anyone says to a friend who is drinking himself to death.

Look at who these men actually were.

Amos kept animals and took care of fig trees, which is farm labor. He says himself that he had no religious training at all (Amos 7:14). He came from Tekoa, a hill town in the south, in Judah.

He walked north — into the other country — to Bethel, which was the king’s own chapel, and started shouting. The king was Jeroboam the Second, and this was around 760 BC (Amos 1:1; 7:10–13).

Understand why that was a provocation. Bethel was not just a shrine. After the country split over taxes, as you saw in Lesson 4, the first northern king set up shrines at Bethel and Dan so that his people would stop walking to Jerusalem to worship (1 Kings 12:26–30). Bethel was a government building with an altar in it.

So: a farmhand from the rival country walked into a state chapel and accused the management.

Now look at what he was angry about.

Here is what will surprise you. Go read the book of Amos. It is nine chapters. It takes twenty minutes.

Here is his list of crimes:

They sell poor people for silver, and needy people for the price of a pair of sandals (Amos 2:6).
They take bribes in court and push the poor aside (Amos 5:12).
They cheat with the scales. He names the trick: make the measure small and the weight heavy (Amos 8:5).
They cannot wait for the holy day to end so they can get back to selling.
They lie on expensive furniture and eat the best meat and are not bothered at all (Amos 6:4–6).

Now count how much of that is about anybody’s private life.

None of it. Not one line.

It is fraud, bribes, stealing wages, and rigged scales.

And then he says the thing that should be carved over every church door.

God is speaking:

I hate, I despise your festivals… Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5:21–24).

Read that again slowly.

That is God saying: your worship disgusts me. Your music is noise. Stop singing until you fix the courts.

He was not the only one.

Isaiah opens his whole book that way: what do I care about all your sacrifices? Then he says what to do instead: seek justice, help the oppressed, defend the orphan, stand up for the widow (Isaiah 1:11–17).

Micah asks whether God wants offerings, and answers his own question with three things. Not one of them is a belief. Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly (Micah 6:6–8).

Hosea says it in five words: I desire mercy, and not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6).

I quoted that line out loud twice in my life, because it could not be improved (Matthew 9:13, 12:7).

Here is what happened to these men.

Watch carefully, because this is the most useful thing in the lesson.

Amos is standing in the king’s chapel. The priest in charge is named Amaziah. He does not argue with Amos. He does not say the scales are honest. He does not answer the charge at all. He sends a report to the king, and then he turns to Amos.

He says this: Go away. Go back where you came from and earn your bread there. Never prophesy here again. This is the king’s chapel (Amos 7:12–13).

You are nobody. This is not your building. Go home.

And look at who is saying it. Amaziah is the king’s priest, at the king’s chapel, living off the arrangement Amos is attacking. He is not confused about the facts. He answers with jurisdiction because the facts are not the problem he has.

That was about 760 years before I was born, and about twenty-seven hundred years before you, and the move has barely changed since.

The three questions.

When somebody with no power tells powerful people what they are doing, three answers come, always in this order:

Who do you think you are?
Who is paying you?
Why are you so angry?

And never, in all that time, the only question that matters: are you right?

One more thing. Forget the paintings.

You have seen pictures of prophets. Robes. Beards. A calm light behind the head. One hand raised.

We did not look like that. We were not calm.

We were the person you cross the street to avoid. Loud, dirty, badly dressed, standing where nobody asked us to stand, saying the thing that makes the room go quiet.

Here is how you tell a real one. If a man is comfortable, respected, well fed, and welcome at the tables of powerful people, he is not in this line.

That is not an opinion. That is the definition.

And you are still doing it.

You have watched it happen in your own lifetime. So have I. More than once, in more than one country.

Somebody stands up who has no business standing up. No office. No title. Nothing behind them. They bring a charge that would be easy to answer if there were an answer.

Nobody answers it.

Instead: they are too young. Then they are rude. Then something is wrong with them. Then somebody must be paying them. And finally, always finally, the problem is their tone, and how much more persuasive they would be if they were nicer about it.

Grown adults who run countries will spend a week on a stranger’s manners rather than one afternoon on the charge.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Amos 5:21–24.

You will find: God saying he hates their worship and wants justice instead.

Then look up: Amos 7:12–13 — what the priest says back to Amos. Notice that the priest never denies a single accusation.

The Short Version

I came out of a long line of poor, angry men called prophets.

They were furious about money, courts, wages, and rigged scales — not private behavior.

They said God finds worship disgusting while the poor are being cheated.

When they spoke, the powerful attacked them instead of answering the charge. That has never changed.

Think About It

Think of someone in the news you found annoying. Did you ever get as far as asking whether they were right?

Amos said to stop the music until the courts are fixed. What would that look like in your church?