When you review the education system we currently have in the West and around the world, you find that there are three choices available to college students after they’ve finished elementary and high school. The first option is a private university.

Those who attend private universities are considered to be the smartest and these are mostly individuals who consider themselves the world’s gift to mankind. These are the elite, the illumined ones who know what is best for the peasants of the world.

The second, just below these private universities are public universities, not as expensive as private but still require students to have a certain level of educational achievement. Lastly, we have colleges, some technical and other vocational. These don’t cost as much as the first two.

In his book, The Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto gives us a preview of the Prussian system of education and how similar it is to the Western system. To make it easier for the reader, I have underlined these three types of schools:

The familiar three-tier system of education emerged in the Napoleonic era, one private tier, two government ones. At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiensschulen, where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command.

The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require.

From 5 to 7.5 percent of all students attended these “real schools,” learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to manage materials, men, and situations—to be problem solvers. This group would also staff the various policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain.

Finally, at the bottom of the pile, a group between 92 and 94 percent of the population attended “people’s schools” where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths of history.

The Prussians wanted a completely controlled society that could be used to bring both material and military prosperity to the country. An astounding statement came from George Fischer, NEA union past president, speaking at the 1970 NEA convention.  He said that they had been working for 113 years to reach the point where they could control who practiced which profession.

A model Professional Practices Act has been developed, and work has begun to secure passage of the Act in each state where such legislation is needed. With these new laws, we will finally realize our 113-year-old dream of controlling who enters, who stays, and who leaves the profession. Once this is done, we can also control the teacher training institutions which would require another whole speech to describe—but don’t worry, we’ll get there too.

This was the same goal that Prussia had during the 1800s. This form of education was brought to the West, most notably in America during the 1800 and early 1900s by American citizens who went to Germany to attend their universities. According to John Gatto:

Throughout nineteenth-century Prussia, its new form of education seemed to make that warlike nation prosper materially and militarily. While German science, philosophy, and military success seduced the whole world, thousands of prominent young Americans made the pilgrimage to Germany to study in its network of research universities, places where teaching and learning were always subordinate to investigations done on behalf of business and the state.

Returning home with the coveted German Ph.D., those so degreed became university presidents and department heads, took over private industrial research bureaus, government offices, and the administrative professions. The men they subsequently hired for responsibility were those who found it morally agreeable to offer obeisance to the Prussian outlook, too; in this leveraged fashion the gradual takeover of American mental life managed itself.

These students who were educated according to the Prussian worldview had to bring their socialist Nazi indoctrination home to the United States. From there, it spread to the universities, government and businesses to eliminate individualism and liberty.

The School Factories

The Western education system, according to some analysts still adheres to the industrial-age factory model of education of creating subjects and factory workers. John Taylor Gatto in his book, Weapons of Mass Instruction adds another interesting and chilling narrative to this system of public schooling.

The function of teaching, he writes, “is to render the common population manageable so that young people could be conditioned to rely upon experts and remain divided from natural alliances. They must at all costs be discouraged from developing self-reliance and independence.”

It’s another argument voiced by David Brooks of the New York Times in 2012: “The American education model….was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model designed to create “docile subjects and factory workers.”

Alvin Toffler is another writer who condemned the “school factories” in his book, Future Shock:

Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed…..A world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock.

The solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world. This system did not emerge instantly…..Yet the whole idea of assembling masses of students (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) was a stroke of industrial genius.

The whole administrative hierarchy of education….The very organization of knowledge into permanent disciplines was grounded on industrial assumptions. Children marched from place to place and sat in assigned stations. Bells rang to announce changes of time.

The most criticized features of education today – the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of seating, grouping, grading and marking, the authoritarian role of the teacher – are precisely those that made mass public education so effective an instrument of adaptation for its place and time.

Hundreds of students in one massive classroom with one teacher…Students were grouped (30 or so together) not by age but by reading proficiency, with more advanced students “monitors” assigned to tutor and train the others.

In 1820 another English journalist William Cobbett had condemned the dangerous idea inspired by the French Revolution that sons of working men and common labourers should be exposed to bookish education courtesy of the national government.

He argued that “some people must remain to labour; all men cannot attain to eminence in the world; and, therefore that which laudable in individuals is, to say the least foolish upon a national scale.

Surprisingly, another liberal English philosopher and political economist, John Stuart Mill also had serious reservations about public education offered free of charge by the state.

He argued that a state-operated school system inevitably becomes “a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another…in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.”

John Mill was convinced that universal and compulsory education undertaken by the state would inevitably lead not only to a despotism over the mind, but ultimately to a cultural totalitarianism that mandated conformity of conduct as well as conformity of thought.

He did not want the education of the masses to be concentrated in the hands of the state. He insisted that people be taught to think for themselves and not to parrot the opinions of their intellectual superiors.

He said, “How do you teach people to think independently? Certainly not by telling them what to think…. It requires the wider scope of experiential opportunity provided by the rough-and-tumble interactions with the real world school of hard knocks.

Like many progressives of his time, Mill concluded that if the government would make up its mind to require a good education for every child, it might save itself the trouble of providing one:

A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly the same: as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government.

Another Greek scholar and theologian J. Gresham Machen had also much to say about the public school system. In his book, Christianity and Liberalism Machen wrote:

A public school system, in itself, is indeed of enormous benefit to the race. But it is of benefit only if it is kept healthy at every moment by the absolutely free possibility of the competition of private schools.

A public-school system, if it means providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficial achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument of tyranny which has yet been devised.

Freedom of thought in the Middle Ages was combatted by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective. Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the ultimate control of experts appointed by the State, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.

Such a tyranny, supported as it is by a perverse technique used as the instrument in destroying human souls, is certainly far more dangerous than the crude tyrannies of the past, which despite their weapons of fire and sword, permitted thought at least to be free.

Although Machen’s book was written in 1924, his warnings of the dangers of the public school system are as relevant today as they were the day he first issued them. Machen died in 1937 and did not live to observe the rapid changes in the Western educational system.

He did not live to see all of Hitler’s laws. In that same year, one of Hitler’s first legislative acts on taking office was to establish the Reich Ministry of Education and give it the control of all schools, including the private schools.

Every person in the teaching profession, from kindergarten through the universities, was compelled to join the National Socialist Teacher’s League, which, by law, was held “responsible for the execution of the ideological and political coordination of all teachers in the accordance with National Socialist doctrine.”

Nobody was to have the right to teach children from a different point of view than the state.

Prior to 1933 the German public schools had been under the jurisdiction of the local authorities and the universities under that of the individual states. Now all were brought under iron rule of the Reich Minister of Education.

He declared that public education was compulsory and that children could not be educated at home. There would be no right to teach from a distinctively religious point of view, especially as he said on May 1, 1937:

The Youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled. This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.

It is important to remember that the law was on Hitler’s side. He told the parents, “Your child belongs to us already…who are you? You will pass on. Your descendants now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

Hitler believed that parents had the responsibility of raising the child’s body, but the Reich would educate the child’s soul. Private or denominational schools were closed in Germany due to increased taxes and excessive regulations. In the end, educational options for parents were squeezed out.

Waking Up Americans

This is the rationale behind the Common core education system. This system has now drifted away from its founding narratives of biblical education and individual freedoms, and has been replaced by the narratives of economic utility and the “factory of model of education.” And it is the same communist indoctrination according to one Chinese immigrant mother, Lily Tang Williams that she experienced in China.

On the Freedom Works website Williams, wrote a piece waking up Americans because she believes this country is “the Shining City on the Hill” and this is what drew her to America.

Common Core, in my eyes, is the same as the Communist core I once saw in China. I grew up under Mao’s regime and we had the Communist-dominated education — nationalized testing, nationalized curriculum, and nationalized indoctrination. I came to this country for freedom and I cannot believe this is happening all over again in this country. I don’t know what happened to America, the Shining City on the Hill for freedom.

She also warned against Americans comparing their children and their “education” to those being indoctrinated in China.

I am telling you, Chinese children are not trained to be independent thinkers. They are trained to be massive skilled workers for corporations. And they have no idea what happened in Tienanmen Square in 1989 where government ordered soldiers to shoot its own 1,000 students.

She exposed the encroachment of the federal government and corporations in the area of education by pointing out that the Chinese indoctrination education system is to make slaves of men, and cheap workers who lack the ability to think critically.

Federal government holds the stick. International corporations hold the money….Individual liberty. That’s what I came to this country for. Do you just want our kids to be test machines? Workers – cheap workers for corporations? America is great.

Don’t compare yourselves to China. That’s why lots of Chinese are trying to come here — to try to be free. And they all tell you ‘Do not go after the Chinese Communist education. I was brainwashed so bad it took me ten years in this country to get out of it.

Her conclusion is very chilling:

From the NSA keeping records on us in massive databases to Common Core nationalization of exams and curriculum; what is happening now is very unlike the America I came to find. The worst, I fear, is that Common-Core could be used by the government and corporations to do data collection and data mining on our children. What else could come to take away more of our rights and privacy?

Our freedom is very precious and we must fight to keep it. Without freedom, you are just a slave, no matter how much money you have.”Trust me to say this because I have lived under tyranny before and will never want to live in it again. I took a long journey from tyranny to liberty. I don’t want to go back into tyranny.

Since the early 1900s Western Christians have been sending their children to mandatory state schools. From there, they were told to pay any price for their children to get a college degree, and that is why you can see the transformation of society which has had devastating consequences for many Christian families, the Body of Christ, and ultimately, the nations.

Unlike former times, in which only a few professions required further training in order to find work, today everyone will have to be exposed to the government’s education to find a job. And that’s not education and neither is it “educational choice.” It’s secular communist indoctrination.

 

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. —Samuel Adams

Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature. —Benjamin Franklin

The policy of American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits. —Thomas Jefferson

Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths. —Bishop Fulton Sheen

Those of us who are constitutional conservatives and believe the words of the Holy Bible and America’s founders, who sought freedom and liberty for mankind, fear a dystopian society that imposes a harmful, oppressive, and miserable existence upon its citizens.

The communists now in control of our federal government believe they are creating a “utopian” society promoted by Marx and Engels, but their utopia ultimately ends in starvation and death.  We’ve watched for multiple decades as decay has set in at the very core of our liberty-loving nation and America has been torn from her freedom-loving roots.

Freedom-loving Americans have become the pariahs who must be terminated for the good of the Marxist utopian society. Socialism makes you a slave to the government and that’s what has happened to our brainwashed public.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, 70, told a Federalist Society virtual convention last November that he thought the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic serves as a “sort of constitutional stress test.” He argued that America has “never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive, and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020” and raised concerns over their impact on individuals’ civil liberties. Link

The real virus infecting America is not Covid-19.  The Marxist-Leninist takeover of the Democrat Party is complete and the majority of the Republican Party is following the same path.  The real danger is communism; it’s here and it’s going to cost us unless we stand together and fight.

Covid-19 was used for many reasons against America by both China and Democratic Socialists, but the continued efforts by both parties to control the citizenry showed their true totalitarian natures. Lockdowns, masks and vaccines are far more dangerous to our health than Coronavirus and interestingly enough, we’ve had no seasonal flu this year.

Mask Mandates

According to Anthony Fauci,who is now the chief medical advisor under Biden, we’re supposed to wear two masks to keep from catching the new variants of the Covid-19 virus, a paper mask and a cloth mask over it.(Remember that back in March of 2020, he said there was no reason to be walking around with a mask.)  Maybe three or four would be even better, to totally cut off our oxygen intake.

CNBC touts that their experts suggest wearing three!  Did we ever wear a mask for the seasonal flu virus in the past?  Never! (Wait, I’m wrong…excuse me, many wore masks during the 1918-1919 Spanish flu epidemic that killed 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.)

Why did anyone think wearing a warm, moist rag a millimetre away from his or her mouth, for hours at a time, creating the ideal conditions for bacteria to multiply, would be a good thing? Link

In a previous article regarding Dr. Anthony Fauci, I stated that he had co-authored a paper about the 1918-1919 Spanish flu and said that many had died of bacterial pneumonia.  This is true.  However, I had also stated that he claimed masks were the cause.  A devoted reader corrected me.

Fauci did not claim that bacterial pneumonia was caused by masks but it’s interesting that wearing masks has caused numerous problems, including impetigo(usually caused by a staph infection), dental problems, yeast infections, acne etc. Link Today, doctors are warning that bacterial pneumonia is on the rise…and yes, it’s from wearing masks.  Maybe Fauci and his friends forgot to mention this fact, or didn’t discover it.

Despite the knowledge that this evil Covid-19 virus was made in a bioweapon lab in Wuhan, China, it is still a virus and no more people have died in 2020 than have died in years past in America.  Johns Hopkins reported that the yearly death rate remains normal despite Covid-19. 

Deaths from heart disease, respiratory disease, influenza, pneumonia and other causes have far lower stats for 2020, where Covid-19 deaths are higher.  Yet the average of yearly deaths remains the same.  Why?  Because everyone is being categorized as dying from Covid-19 rather than their underlying comorbidity. The study was immediately withdrawn and trashed.

US Intelligence tells us that the Chinese government is collecting American’s DNA.  Link 60 Minutes has learned that the Chinese company, BGI Group, the largest biotech firm in the world, offered to build Covid labs in at least six states, and U.S. intelligence officials issued warnings not to share health data with BGI. The story was on Sunday, 31 January 21 on 60 minutes.

Beijing Genomics Institute, is a Chinese genome sequencing company, headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. It was formed in 1999 to participate in the Human Genome Project as a genetics research center.

100 More Days

President Biden, elected via Dominion machines with Smartmatic software connected to the internet and sent to multiple foreign countries in order to intercept data of America’s 2020 election, has decided all federal people throughout the country should be masked until May 1^st, 2021.  And he wants all 50 states to follow through with mask mandates.

I see toddlers and young children with masks on their faces, put there by parents who believe the propaganda spewed by mainstream media.  It makes me heartsick.  And people alone in their cars with masks on their faces!  The entire country wore masks everywhere for months, yet we had another surge of the virus. Our citizens are fools.  We have become a nation of controlled lemmings who are abandoning freedom!

One Los Angeles health official went so far as to say that not wearing a mask is domestic terrorism!   In another article, a couple was escorted off a plane because their two-year-old son refused to wear a mask!  Never reported are those who are dying from mask wearing.  If you’re outside, get the danged thing off your face!

The unelected tyrants in local health departments are issuing these decrees without any studies whatsoever.  I wonder how many of them own stock in the mask making companies.

We are not the citizens who won back-to-back World Wars!  America’s propagandists in the mainstream media have stampeded the public into fear and panic over the virus in order to generate support for their totalitarian agenda.  Few Americans have seen through it…and that is most alarming.

Statistics

According to the CDC, along with studies by people in the age groups of 0 to 19 have a 99.997% chance of survival if they contract COVID-19, the age group of 20 to 49 a 99.98% chance, 50 to 69 years old 99.5% and 70 years old and above a 94.6% chance.

The case fatality rate of Covid-19 is 0.1 to 0.3 percent which is the same exact case fatality rate as the regular seasonal flu.  They shut down the entire world economy for a lie!  The WHO came out with a 3.4 case fatality rate and Fauci came along and cut it to 1.0 rate, which is 10 times higher than seasonal influenza. The middle class was purposely destroyed, and they still have foolish Americans in masks.

Last September One America News reported that medical researchers from UCLA and Stanford University found that the chances of dying from Covid are much lower than previously thought.  Even the likelihood of contracting the virus, going to the hospital or even death from Covid-19 is an extremely rare event.  An average person in an average county has a one in 3,836 chance of becoming infected and that’s without wearing masks or doing any social distancing.  Odds of being hospitalized are vanishingly small even for people in the at-risk category.

If you’re between the ages of 50-64 years old, the chances of getting the virus and needing hospitalization are one in 852,000.  And for that same person who is at risk, the chance of dying from Coronavirus is one in 19.1 million.  All these stats are from last May 2020 when deaths were 16 times higher than when this was reported.  The risk from dying in an automobile crash is one in 114.  Yet, we were sold lockdown insanity.

One America News also reported that researchers in Australia say Ivermectin can cure Covid in 48 hours.  Ivermectin is typically used for parasitic infections, yet a peer review study conducted last April stated Ivermectin could kill the virus with one dose.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xklE0jTgaw]

One of my neighbors is elderly.  She contracted Covid-19 and her smell and taste was gone, and she had sinus problems.  Her physician gave her Azithromycin and she recovered.  She is 82, her husband is 88 and he has a comorbidity.  He insisted on sleeping with her should she have a problem in the night, and he watched over her even though she wanted him to sleep in another bedroom.  She was fine, and he never contracted Covid. 

Lockdowns

Small businesses have been wiped out, and millions of middle-class Americans have been decimated.  Yet, the big box stores allowed to stay open have flourished while small businesses faced total destruction.  Far more damage has been done to middle America by the lockdowns than by the fraudulently dangerous Covid-19 flu.

Cases of Covid-19 rose despite the lockdowns.  Of course, they did…the locked down folks needed to be exposed to get herd immunity, but the totalitarian dictators knew that every time the lockdown was lifted, Covid-19 would spread again, and they could force another lockdown.  Over the course of the past year, class inequalities have grown wider and have become more entrenched. And yet, at each turn, left-wing lockdown lovers have demanded ever-more severe restrictions on people’s lives.

Had America left the entire country open; Professor Isaac Ben-Israel claims that within 40 to 70 days the virus would have passed through all of those who were not sheltered for comorbidities, and it would have been over.  Unfortunately, the communist controllers in this country wanted the Trump economy destroyed along with small businesses so that they would rely on government handouts, and the middle class who loves freedom would be decimated.

Well done by the Marxists in control.  How many have committed suicide because their life’s work was ruined by the shutdowns and then by the communist BLM and Antifa riots.  And nothing was done to stop them!  Nothing!

How easily we have snowballed into a full-fledged Marxist/fascist nation, with political dictators releasing criminals from prison and imprisoning those who refuse lockdown orders.

Truth in Medicine

America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) have been at the forefront of telling us the truth.  They knew that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Azithromycin (Z-Pak) and common zinc cured early-onset Covid-19.  Dr. Simone Gold, who is also an attorney, said, “Follow the science always meant ‘follow,’ but never the ‘science.’”  A new study out of New Jersey actually validates what the frontline docs have told us.

Dr. Gold tweeted, “On Inauguration Day, 6+ months after AFLDS said it, The WHO announced a single PCR test is not reliable. “Coincidentally” the number of “cases” will now plummet.”

How many times have we heard that the tests are unreliable?  WHO confirms the PCR test has a problem, one day after Biden inaugurated.

Elon Musk had four tests in one day by the very same way, same machine, left nostril positive twice, and right nostril negative twice.  Sounds like we’ve been had!

PCR assays are not designed to be used as diagnostic tools, as they can’t distinguish between inactive viruses and “live” or reproductive ones.Besides that, previously, the WHO had recommended 45 “amplification” cycles of the test to determine whether someone was positive for Covid or not.

The thing is, the more cycles that a test goes through, the more likely that a false positive will come up — anything over 30 cycles actually magnifies the samples so much that even insignificant sequences of viral DNA end up being magnified to the point that the test reads positive even if your viral load is extremely low or the virus is inactive and poses no threat to you or anyone else.

In one Colorado county, they’ve admitted nearly half of the deaths from Covid were false.  All deaths were designated as Covid, but were false.  The CDC now claims that 94% of all coronavirus deaths were supplementary, meaning, the person had co-morbidities. Less than 10,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 alone.  The CDC apparently changed Covid criteria that inflated fatalities ten-fold, and actually broke federal law.

Conclusion

There are no guardrails on the left or the right to protect the Republic from communism.  Other than a handful of constitutionalists, both parties have joined the socialist agenda. President Trump, as much as he did for America in four years, and as much as he loved her and her citizens, he lacked discernment in hiring good people and continually chose from the swamp.

Matt Bracken writes in the American Partisan, “The American Left has no self-correction mechanism. (Examples of contemporary Leftist insanity: transsexuals welcomed into the military, biological boys ordered onto girls’ sports teams and in girls locker rooms, etc.) This Leftist insanity is anything but unprecedented. From the French Revolution, to the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Revolution and through all the horrors of 20th Century Communism, the Left has proven that when it is unchecked, it will drive at full speed straight off the cliff of civilized norms of behavior into totalitarian systems of guillotines, Gulags, forced starvations, and killing fields.”

Matt is right…we are there.

Copyright © 2020- News with Views-All rights reserved.

 

The name Amos means “burden” or “burden bearer.” Amos was a shepherd and fig grower from Judah, which was the southern kingdom, but he prophesied to the northern kingdom of Israel. He confronted the false religious leaders of his day and was not intimidated by priest or king. When we look at the conditions in Israel during Amos’s time, we realize that we are no different in today’s society.

Israel was at the height of its political power with a prosperous economy, but the nation was spiritually corrupt. People worshiped idols, especially at Bethel, which was supposed to be the nation’s religious center. At Bethel and Samaria the worshipers had sex with male and female prostitutes, believing that this would persuade God to bless their crops.

The wealthy elite of Israel had become prosperous, greedy, and unjust. There was slavery as a result of over taxation and land confiscation. There was cruelty and indifference toward the poor and oppressed. The standard of living was high, but the gap between the rich and the poor was wide. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The rich had two homes, one for the summer months and the other for all other times, but many people didn’t even have one. With all the comfort and luxury came self-sufficiency, pride, corruption, debauchery, and war.

The people rejected real faith in God by acting religiously. They had become interested in the gods of other nations, including the gods of the East and the West that arrived with traveling merchants. So God sent Amos to denounce this social and religious corruption. Amos first challenged the sins of the surrounding nations. The entire first chapter details God’s judgment on Israel’s neighbors. Maybe the Israelites must have cheered Amos, saying, “Preach it brother” until he directed his words of judgment to them. He received this prophetic message through visions two years before the earthquake. The Lord gave Amos the reasons for judgment:

Hear this word that the Lord hath spoken against you, O children of Israel, against the whole family which I brought up from the land of Egypt, saying, You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities….

Hear ye, and testify in the house of Jacob, saith the Lord God, the God of hosts, That in the day that I shall visit the transgressions of Israel upon him I will also visit the altars of Beth-el: And the horns of the altar shall be cut off, and fall to the ground. And I will smite the winter house with the summer house; and the houses of ivory shall perish, and the great houses shall have an end, saith the Lord (Amos 3:1–2, 13–15 KJV).

God’s people failed to realize that He held them to a higher standard than all other nations. God intended to guide them Himself, making them a nation of leaders who could become a model for the entire world. His heavy judgment fell on them because He held His people accountable to lead the world to Himself.

The events in this book of Amos fit the same biblical patterns demonstrated in Old Testament history. Again and again, as Israel prepared to cross the river Jordan and enter the Promised Land, Moses charged them to remember and learn from those who had gone before them. They were called to go back and examine their history.

Amos then spoke harsh words to God’s people by warning them to finally prepare to meet their God. This was a pronouncement of wrath on those who refused to return and worship the God who had faithfully protected and provided for them:

And also I withheld the rain from you when there were yet three months to the harvest. I caused it to rain upon one city and caused it not to rain upon another city; one piece of ground was rained upon, and the piece upon which it did not rain withered……I have overthrown some among you as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were as a brand plucked out of the burning; yet you did not return to Me, says the Lord. Therefore thus will I do to you, O Israel; and because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God, O Israel! For behold, He Who forms the mountains and creates the wind and declares to man what is his thought, Who makes the morning darkness and treads on the heights of the earth—the Lord, the God of hosts, is His name! (Amos 4:7, 11-13 AMP)

Amos lamented the destruction of the house of Israel as if it had already happened. The Israelites believed that their wealth could sustain and secure them in times of trouble, but Amos told them their destruction was sure. There was only one remedy to all of this—to repent, seek the Lord, and live:

For thus says the Lord to the house of Israel: Seek Me [inquire for and of Me and require Me as you require food] and you shall live! [II Chron. 15:2; Jer. 29:13.] But seek not [the golden calf at] Bethel nor enter into [idolatrous] Gilgal, and pass not over to [the idols of] Beersheba; for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity and exile, and Bethel [house of God] shall become Beth-aven [house of vanity, emptiness, falsity, and futility] and come to nothing. Seek the Lord [inquire for and of Him and require Him] and you shall live, lest He rush down like fire upon the house of Joseph [representing the ten tribes] and devour it, and there be none to quench it in Bethel [the center of their idol hopes] (Amos 5:4–6 AMP).

Amos continued to condemn the leaders who fail to provide justice for their people. He called for repentance to those who turn justice into bitterness. Just like it is today in most of the nations, leaders have abused power, they have abandoned morality and twisted justice, making it a bitter pill for the oppressed, hating and despising people, and judge those who told the truth. They taxed the poor for unselfish gain. They were corrupt, oppressed citizens, took bribes, and deprived people of justice in courts.

Surprisingly, however, the people were calling for the day of the Lord, thinking it might bring an end to their troubles. But the Lord said: “Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord! Why would you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness and not light; it is as if a man fled from a lion and a bear met him, or went into the house and leaned with his hand against the wall and a serpent bit him” (Amos 5:18–19 AMP).

Warning of Judgment

God gave Amos messages of the coming judgment in two ways: he had dreams while he was sleeping and visions while he was awake. He saw God preparing to send a vast swarm of locusts, and he saw God preparing to punish His people with a great fire. Amos must have felt overwhelmed after he was shown visions of Israel’s impending judgment. His immediate response was to pray that God would spare His people.

The only thing he could do was beg God to forgive and relent. He prayed for his people with compassion and honesty. He knew Israel would not survive a judgment because of its size. So he interceded and God withdrew His judgment. Amos stepped in-between the people and God, and stood in the gap before the Lord for the land, that He would not destroy it. The Lord relented from this plan of destruction (see Ezekiel 22:30).

And when [the locusts] had finished eating the plants of the land, then I said, O Lord God, forgive, I pray You. How can Jacob stand? For he is so small! The Lord relented and revoked this sentence: It shall not take place, said the Lord [and He was eased and comforted concerning it]. Thus the Lord God showed me, and behold, the Lord God called for punishment with fire, and it devoured the great deep and would have eaten up the land. Then said I, O Lord God, cease, I pray You! How can Jacob stand? He is so little! The Lord relented and revoked this sentence: This also shall not be, said the Lord [and He was eased and comforted concerning it]. (Amos 7:2–6 AMP)

But in this same chapter, Amos had a vision of the Lord standing alongside a wall with a plumb line in his hand. God was showing him that He was measuring Israel against His standards, not their own, and that judgment must soon follow (see Amos 7:8, 17).

Again, in chapter 8 the Lord showed him a basket of ripe and therefore soon-to-perish summer fruit. Then the Lord told Amos, “Like this fruit, Israel is ripe for punishment!” (see Amos 8:1–2). God said He would even take away the opportunity to hear His Word and that this judgment would stand above all others:

Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but [a famine] for hearing the words of the Lord. And [the people] shall wander from sea to sea and from the north even to the east; they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord [inquiring for and requiring it as one requires food], but shall not find it (Amos 8:11–12 AMP).

When the Word of the Lord becomes rare and God withdraws His words from a people, they experience the worst of all famines. Helmut Thielicke, a German theologian and pastor, preached a series of sermons based on the Lord’s Prayer in Stuttgart during the Allied bombing of World War II. Thielicke’s sermons were filled with compassion as he identified with his congregation’s fears, struggles, and questions about God. Like Amos, he became a burden bearer.

Thielicke realized that at times like these we must speak prophetically. We cannot merely say what the people want to hear. Preaching in a bombed out church, he interpreted his country’s experience as evidence of divine judgment. “For God’s judgment does not consist in His destroying the offenders with a thunderbolt from heaven.” Instead, he explained, it consists in God allowing us to pursue our chosen road to the end. Thielicke saw this as a mark of divine love, explaining that God’s wrath is easier to bear than His silence.

God is so merciful that He never judges without first sending a prophet to explain to His people what might happen if they don’t turn from their ways and repent. Through the prophet Amos, God told the people that they could still humble themselves and return to Him and receive mercy.

In chapter 9 Amos spoke words of hope to the people if they would humble themselves, repent, and turn from their wicked ways. He spoke of a better future:

In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, and close up the breaches thereof; and I will raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old: that they may possess the remnant of Edom, and of all the heathen, which are called by My name, saith the Lord that doeth this…. And I will bring again the captivity of My people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God. (Amos 9:11–12, 14–15 KJV)

Image Description

The lion, bear and snake in the lower right corner illustrate Amos 5:19: “[The Day of the Lord] will be as though a man fled from a lion only to meet a bear, as though he entered his house and rested his hand on the wall only to have a snake bite him.”

The two women ignoring the beggar are the “cows of Bashan… you women who oppress the poor and crush the needy” (Amos 4:1).

At the top are several large houses. Amos is critical of the size and number of the houses of the wealthy: “‘I will tear down the winter house along with the summer house; the houses adorned with ivory will be destroyed and the mansions will be demolished,’ declares the LORD” (Amos 3:15).

Image Courtesy of Earth and All Stars