Albert Barnes Commentary Amos 4:7

"And I also have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest; and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered." — Amos 4:7 (ASV)

And I, I too have withheld the rain - Jerome, living in Palestine, says that “this rain, when “three months still remained until harvest,” was the “latter rain,” extremely necessary for the fields of Palestine and the thirsty ground, to prevent it from drying up through lack of moisture when the blade is swelling into the crop and forming the wheat.

The time intended is the spring, at the end of April, from which time, for the wheat harvest, three months remain: May, June, and July.”

“God withheld the rain so that they would endure not only a lack of bread, but also burning thirst and a scarcity of drink. For in these places where we now live, all the water, except for small fountains, is from cisterns; and if the wrath of God should withhold the rain, there is a greater danger of thirst than of hunger, as Scripture relates was endured for three years and six months in the days of the prophet Elijah.

And to prevent them from thinking that this had happened to their cities and people by a law of nature, or the influence of the stars, or the variety of the seasons, He says that He rained upon one city and its fields, and from another withheld the rain.”

This was a second visitation of God. First, a general famine, “in all their cities;” secondly, a discriminating visitation. “Nature” possesses no discrimination or power over her supplies. Seeming waste is one of the mysteries of God in nature, “to cause it to rain on the earth” where “no man” is; on “the wilderness wherein” there, “is no man” (Job 38:26).

Ordinarily too, God “maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). But God does not enslave Himself (as people would have it) to His own laws. Amos appeals to them that God had dealt with them not according to His ordinary laws; that not only had God given to one city the rain which He had withheld from another, but He had also made the same difference regarding smaller “pieces” of ground, the inherited “portions” of individuals. Some such variations have been observed in Palestine now.

But this would have been no indication of God’s Providence if the consciences of people had not responded to the prophet’s appeal and recognized that the rain had been given or withheld according to the penitence or impenitence, the deeper or more mitigated idolatry, or the greater or lesser sinfulness of the people. We have, then, in these few words a law of God’s dealing with Israel. God, in His word, reveals to us the meaning of His daily variations in the workings of nature; yet, even in such instances that people can scarcely escape, they hardly think of God the Creator, rather than of nature, His creation.