NOTES for Amo 6:1-14
Today’s reading describes a situation familiar to every believer. It concerns people who, having received everything they have from God, have completely forgotten Him (vv. 1–2, 8). They think that they received what they possess by right and that no one will ever be able to take it away from them. It might seem that the whole world lives this way. Few people reflect on whether what they have is deserved or undeserved, especially if, as people usually say in such cases, it was “earned by honest labor.” To understand how dependent a person is on God in daily life, one must have a deep and stable relationship with Him.
Perhaps this is precisely why God does not remind those who know little or nothing about Him of His acts of kindness. He does not need followers who follow Him for the same reasons that compel a debtor to reckon with a creditor, for such compulsory relationships have nothing in common with love. But through the prophet He speaks directly to His own people about these acts, reproaching them for forgetting everything God has done for them. God says plainly that Israel is surrounded by peoples who surpass it in every respect, and if it has not yet been wiped from the face of the earth, it is only because of God’s help, to which the people give no thought at all.
Why does God act differently in this case? Perhaps precisely because He is speaking of His people. 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, the Jewish people simply would not exist. In such circumstances, forgetting their relationship with God is literally like death, and through His prophet God reminds the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of this.
What we have here is not a desire to reproach them for ingratitude or to remind them of favors done in the past and still being done today. It is a reminder of those 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 their forgetting the relationship that once bound them to their God. To the God who remembers everything, even when people would gladly forget it all.