Albert Barnes Commentary Amos 7

And behold He formed - (that is, He was forming.) The very least things, then, are as much in His infinite Mind as what we count the greatest. He has not simply made “laws of nature,” as people speak, to do His work, and continue the generations of the world. He Himself was still framing them, giving them being, as our Lord says, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work (John 5:17). The same power of God is seen in creating the locust as the universe. The creature could as little do the one as the other. But further, God was “framing” them for a special end, not of nature, but of His moral government, in the correction of man. He was “framing” the locust, that it might, at His appointed time, lay waste just those tracts which He had appointed to them.

God, in this vision, opens our eyes and lets us see Himself framing the punishment for the deserts of the sinners, so that when hail, mildew, blight, caterpillars, or some other previously unknown disease (which, because we do not know it, we call by the name of the crop it annihilates) wastes our crops, we may think not of secondary causes but of our Judge. Lapide says: “Fire and hail, snow and vapors, stormy wind, fulfill His word (Psalms 148:8), in striking sinners as He wills. To be indignant with these would be like a dog that bit the stone with which it was hit, instead of the man who threw it.” Gregory, in his work on Job (Book 32, Chapter 4), says: “He who denies that he was stricken for his own fault, what does he do but accuse the justice of Him who smites?”

Grasshoppers - that is, locusts. The name may very possibly be derived from their “creeping” simultaneously, in vast multitudes, from the ground. This characteristic is especially observable in these creatures: when the warmth of spring hatches the eggs, they creep forth at once in myriads. This original meaning of their name must, however, have been obliterated by use (as mostly happens), since the word is also used by Nahum in reference to a flying locust.

The king’s mowings - must have been some royal provision or tax to meet state expenses. A similar custom still lingers here and there among us: the “first mowth” (or “first vesture”), meaning that with which the fields are first covered, belongs to one person, while the pasturage afterward (or “after-grass”) belongs to others. The hay harvest probably took place some time before the grain harvest, and the “latter grass” or “after-grass” (לקשׁ leqesh) probably began to spring up at the time of the “latter rain” (מלקושׁ malqôsh). Had the grass been mown after this rain, it would not, under the burning sun of their rainless summer, have sprung up at all. At this time, then, on which the hope of the year depended, in the beginning of the shooting up of the latter grass, Amos saw in a vision God forming locusts, and the green herb of the land (the word includes all, that which is for the service of man as well as for beasts) destroyed. A striking emblem of a state recovering after it had been mown down, and anew overrun by a numerous enemy!

Yet this need be only a passing desolation. Would they remain, or would they carry their ravages elsewhere? Amos intercedes with God, in words from that first intercession of Moses, forgive now (Numbers 14:19). By whom, he adds, shall Jacob arise? Literally, “Who shall Jacob arise?” That is, who is Jacob that he should arise, being so weakened and half-destroyed? Plainly, the destruction is more than one invasion of locusts in one year. The locusts are a symbol (as in Joel), just as the following visions are symbols.

The Lord repented for this - God is said to "repent"—that is, to have strong compassion for, or concerning, the evil which He has either inflicted (Deuteronomy 32:36; 1 Chronicles 21:15), or has said that He would inflict (Exodus 32:12; Joel 2:13; Jonah 3:10; Jeremiah 18:8), and which, upon repentance or prayer, He suspends or checks. Here, Amos does not intercede until after the judgment had been, in part, inflicted. He prayed, when in vision the locust had made an end of eating the grass of the land, and when the fire had eaten up a part. Nor, until Israel had suffered what these visions foretold, was he considered small, either in his own or in human sight, or in relation to his general condition.

The this then, of which God repented and said, it shall not be, is that further undefined evil, which His first infliction threatened. Evil and decay do not die out, but destroy. Oppression does not weary itself out, but increases. Visitations of God are tokens of His displeasure, and, in the order of His justice, rest on the sinner. Pul and Tiglath-pileser, when they came with their armies on Israel, were instruments of God’s chastening. According to the ways of God’s justice, or of man’s ambition, the evil now begun would have continued, but that God, at the prayer of the prophet, said, Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further (Job 38:11).

God called to contend by fire - that is, He “called” His people to maintain their cause with Him “by fire,” as He says, “I will plead” in judgment “with him” (Gog) “with” (that is,” by”) pestilence and blood (Ezekiel 38:22); and, by fire and by His sword will the Lord plead with all flesh (Isaiah 66:16); and, The Lord standeth up to plead and standeth to judge the people (Isaiah 3:13).

Man, by rebellion, challenges God’s Omnipotence. He will have none of Him; he will find his own happiness for himself, apart from God and in defiance of Him and His laws. He plumes himself on his success and accounts his strength or wealth or prosperity the test of the wisdom of his policy. God, sooner or later, accepts the challenge. He brings things to the issue which man had chosen.

He enters into judgment (Isaiah 3:14, and other similar passages) with him. If man escapes with impunity, then he had chosen well, in rejecting God and choosing his own ways. If not, what folly and misery was his short-sighted choice; short-lived in its gain; its loss, eternal! Fire stands as the symbol and summary of God’s most terrible judgments. It spares nothing, leaves nothing, not even the outward form of what it destroys.

Here it is plainly a symbol, since it destroys the sea also, which shall be destroyed only by the fire of the Day of Judgment, when the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up (2 Peter 3:10). The sea is called the great deep only in the most solemn language, as in the history of the creation or the flood, the Psalms, and poetical books. Here it is used in order to mark the extent of the desolation represented in the vision.

And did eat up a part - Rather literally, The portion, that is, probably the definite portion foreappointed by God to captivity and desolation. This is probably what our English Version meant by a part.

For although God calls Himself the Portion of Israel (Deuteronomy 32:9; Jeremiah 10:16; Zechariah 2:12), and of those who are His (Psalms 16:5; Psalms 73:26, and other similar passages; Jeremiah 10:16), and reciprocally He calls the people the Lord’s portion (Jeremiah 12:10), and the land, the portion of God’s people (Micah 2:4); yet the land is nowhere called absolutely the portion, nor was the country of the ten tribes specially the portion, given by God.

Rather God exhibits in vision to the prophet the ocean burned up and the portion of Israel upon which His judgments were first to fall. To this Amos points, as the portion.

God knew the portion which Tiglath-Pileser would destroy, and when he came and had carried captive the east and north of Israel, the pious in Israel would recognize the second, more desolating scourge, foretold by Amos. They would own that it was at the prayer of the prophet that it was stayed and went no further, and would await what remained.

Just as our Lord repeated the same words in the Garden, so Amos interceded with God with words, all but one the same, and with the same plea: that if God did not help, Israel was indeed helpless. Yet a second time God spared Israel.

From a human perspective, what was so strange and unexpected as the fact that the Assyrian and his army, having utterly destroyed the kingdom of Damascus, carried away its people, and devoured like fire more than half of Israel, then rolled back like an ebb tide, swept away to ravage other countries, and spared the capital? And who, looking at the mere outward appearance of things, would have thought that this tide of fire was rolled back, not by anything in that day, but by the prophet’s prayer some 47 years before?

People would undoubtedly look for motives of human policy that led Tiglath-Pileser to accept tribute from Pekah while he killed Rezin, and that led him, while he carried off all the Syrians of Damascus, to leave half of Israel to be removed by his successor.

Humanly speaking, it was a mistake. He merely checked his enemy, leaving him to make an alliance with Egypt, his rival, who contested with him the possession of the countries that lay between them.

If we knew the details of Assyrian policy, we might know what induced him to turn aside in his conquest. There were, and always are, human motives. These, however, do not interfere with the foundational purpose in the mind of God, who directs and controls them.

Even in human mechanisms, the wheels, interlacing and acting on one another, merely transmit to each other the motion and impulse that they have received from the central force.

The earth’s rotation on its own axis does not interfere with its revolution around the center of our solar system; rather, this rotation is a condition for it. Amidst the alternations of night and day, this rotation brings each portion of the earth within the influence of the sun, around which the earth revolves.

Similarly, the affairs of human kingdoms have their own subordinate centers of human policy. Yet, it is precisely through these that they revolve all the more surely within the circuit of God’s appointment.

In the history of His former people, God gives us a glimpse into a hidden order of things: the secret spring and power of His wisdom, which sets in motion the intricate and complex machinery that alone we see. And in observing only this machinery, people often lose awareness of the unseen agency behind it.

While humans strive with one another, prayer, prompted by God, moves God, the Ruler of all.

Stood upon - (Rather over a wall made by a plumbline; literally, a wall of a plumbline, that is, as ours has it, made straight, perpendicular, by it. The wall had been made by a lead or plumbline; by it, that is, according to it, it should be destroyed.

God had made it upright; He had given to it an undeviating rule of right; He had watched over it, to keep it as He made it. Now He stood over it, fixed in His purpose, to destroy it. He marked its inequalities. Yet this too in judgment.

He destroys it by that same rule of right with which He had built it. By that law, that right, those providential leadings, that grace, which we have received, by the same we are judged.