Amo 8 | EE | STEP | Then the LORD God showed to me a basket of summer fruit.

Amos 8

Fruit that is ready to eat

1 Then the LORD God showed to me a basket of summer fruit. 2 He asked me, ‘Amos, what do you see?’ I answered him, ‘I see a basket of summer fruit.’ Then the LORD said to me, ‘The time is ready. I will now send troubles to my people.

3 On that day, people will not sing in the temple. Instead they will cry loudly, because there will be dead bodies everywhere. Be quiet, because I have spoken. I am the great LORD.’

Trouble will come

4 So listen to me, you people that are not fair to poor people. You try to kill them. 5 You say to yourselves, ‘We want this special party to finish. We are having a party because the moon is new (it is still very narrow). But we do not want to have a party. We want to sell food again. We want our day for rest to finish. We do not want to rest. We want to continue to sell food.’ But you rob other people. You lie. You say, ‘This is the right amount of food.’ But it is not the right amount. You say, ‘This is good food.’ But it is not good. It has dirt in it. And it has other bits in it that are not good. And you make the price too high. 6 Sometimes a poor person cannot pay money back to another person, because he does not have enough money. It is a small amount of money. It is the amount of money that a person pays for shoes. But you buy that poor person for that small amount of money. So then he will be a slave for you. And you sell the bad bits of food plants. It is wrong that you do those things. 7 The LORD has strongly promised this: ‘I will never forget the wrong things that they have done. 8 The whole country will start to move because they did wrong things. It will shake (move quickly up and down). It will go up and it will go down, like the Nile river. Everyone will be afraid and everyone will cry.’

9 The LORD God says, ‘At that time, I will make the sun go down at noon. I will make light become dark. 10 Your parties and happy songs will finish. Instead, you will be very sad and you will cry. You will cut your hair. And you will wear special clothes. Those clothes will show that you are very sad. It will be as if your only son died. It will all be very sad.

11 I, the LORD God, speak true words. At that time, I will cause you to be very hungry. It will not be because you have no food and water. You will be hungry to hear a message from me, the LORD. 12 You will go all over your country, because you will want to hear a message from me, the LORD. But you will not hear one.

13 At that time, your beautiful young women and young men will feel that they need to drink. So they will become very weak and tired. 14 People did not want me to help them. They made idols (things to worship) in Samaria and Dan and Beersheba. And then they said, “They will help us.” These people will fall down and they will never get up again.’