Today's reading describes a situation familiar to every believer. It is about people who, having received from God everything they have, have completely forgotten Him (vv. 1-2, 8). It seems to them that what they have received came to them by right, and that no one will ever be able to take it from them. This, one might think, is how the whole world lives. Few people think about whether what they have is deserved or undeserved, especially if it was, as people usually say in such cases, "earned by honest labor." To realize how dependent a person is on God in everyday life, one must have a deep and stable relationship with Him.

Perhaps this is exactly why God does not remind of His benefactions those who know little or nothing at all about Him. He does not need followers who follow Him from the same motives that make a debtor reckon with a lender, for such compelled relationships have nothing in common with love. But through the prophet He speaks of this directly to His own people, reproaching them for having forgotten everything God has done for them. God reminds them that Israel is surrounded by nations superior to it in every respect, and that if it has not yet been wiped from the face of the earth, this is only thanks to God's help, about which the people do not think at all.

Why, then, does God act differently in this case? It may be precisely because His people are in view. The history of the Jewish people is inseparable from the revelation they received: they were formed as a nation during the Exodus, and without God's direct intervention in history this people would simply not have existed. Under such circumstances, forgetting one's relationship with God is literally like death, and the Lord reminds the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of this through His prophet.

Here before us is not a desire to reproach for ingratitude or to remind them of past and present benefactions, but a reminder of the relationships without which the people will cease to exist, without which they will simply disappear from the face of the earth. And if God reproaches His people here for anything, it is not so much ingratitude as the fact that they forgot the relationships that once bound them to their God - the God who remembers everything, even when people would be glad to forget everything.

Amos's denunciations continue. Prophets are always very inconvenient: as soon as you have achieved something for yourself and relaxed, here comes the prophet, and nothing is right for him! Who gave him such a right? A heart burning with love for God and suffering over our separation from Him. Therefore God calls him to bring us the words of the Lord and, in a certain sense, speaks these words to us Himself through His prophet (see, for example, vv. 8 and 14). Do we thirst to hear them, do we seek them, do we agree to find them in what is unpleasant to us, in what rebukes us?

The prophet Amos denounces the people of Israel for their sins, whose essence is the absence of love, and warns of the coming catastrophe. But the goal of prophecy is not to frighten people so much that their hands fall helplessly, but to move them to change their lives. Prophecies are not so much predictions as pedagogy. Therefore the main thing here is not the coming horrors, but the call to an overturning of human ideas, which is the meaning of the word "repentance" (Amos 5:18-24), and to the restoration of relationship with God (Amos 5:4; 5:14-15).

And Amos continues. Prophets are always very inconvenient: as soon as you have achieved something for yourself and relaxed, there is the prophet, and nothing is right for him. Who gave him such a right? A heart burning with love for God and suffering from our separation from Him. Therefore God calls him to bring us the words of the Lord, and in a certain sense He Himself speaks these words to us through His prophet (see, for example, v. 8 and 14).