Amos 7:1-9 is a great passage for visual learners! We go from one image to another: locusts, fire, and a plumb line. The first two certainly signal calamity. Locusts are a plague that would cause devastating famine, the likes of which we’ve read in the prophet Joel. The next image, “judgment by fire; it dried up the great deep and devoured the land,” (vs. 4) is an end-of-the-world type of image. God is turning up the heat in what he shows Amos, and we, the reader of Scripture, know the stakes are high! Amos the prophet sees the vision of destruction and begs the Lord to forgive, to stop, and in both cases makes the same appeal: “How can Jacob survive? He is so small!” In the days of Jeroboam, the nation of Israel was strong. Their strength made them proud, and if you read the whole book you’ll find that Amos has something to say about mistreatment of the poor in this strong and wealthy society. Sin can make a great nation weak and cause even the strongest to stumble. Jeroboam would not appreciate hearing his nation called small. Yet Amos never loses sight of the fact that any nation, regardless of wealth or military might, cannot stand up to the judgment of God. Bothered with a holy bother and sent by the Holy Spirit, Amos became quite unpopular with Jeroboam and company with the message the Lord gave him. Yet he pleads for God’s mercy on the northern nation of Israel all the same. Then comes the plumb line and wall built true to plumb. God shifts to an object lesson for Amos. The Lord warns Amos, “I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.” (vs. 8) This time, Amos doesn’t plead with the Lord to spare so-small Jacob. The plumb line teaches the lesson it is meant to: Israel is not built up the way it needs to be. The plumb line is God’s standard, the wall true-to-plumb is what the society would be if they adhered to God’s law, but they have not done so, and so the Lord’s judgment is coming. He is justified when he judges, and Amos doesn’t plead for mercy as he cannot argue with the clear and obvious standard of God’s plumb line. Our lives are a lot like steel wire: we can straighten them out to a degree, but there will always be imperfections and crooked spots. We, like Israel in Amos’s day, are a crooked people, not true to plumb. God’s standard is holy perfection, and no one can live up to that! Once again we see in the prophets that things aren’t working the way they are, a Savior is needed, one who will make the crooked paths straight, who can take the bent wire of our lives and replace our unrighteousness with the perfect righteousness of the Lord’s perfect plumb line. What a gift of grace that would be, and is for us in Jesus Christ. So let us love God and love neighbor, not that we will ever be perfect on our own but neither is our labor in vain. Every faithful move towards loving God and loving neighbor truly does matter, and through the crooked crown of thorns on Jesus our wiry lives are made plumb. - Pastor Steven