{"id":6639,"date":"2015-06-22T00:05:04","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T07:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/?p=6639"},"modified":"2015-06-21T17:54:20","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T00:54:20","slug":"sold-for-sandals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2015\/06\/22\/sold-for-sandals\/","title":{"rendered":"Sold for Sandals"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cBecause of the three great sins of Israel
\n\u2014make that four\u2014I\u2019m not putting up with them any longer.
\nThey buy and sell upstanding people.
\nPeople for them are only things\u2014ways of making money.
\nThey\u2019d sell a poor man for a pair of shoes.
\nThey\u2019d sell their own grandmother!
\nThey grind the penniless into the dirt,
\nshove the luckless into the ditch.
\nEveryone and his brother sleeps with the \u2018sacred whore\u2019\u2014
\na sacrilege against my Holy Name.
\nStuff they\u2019ve extorted from the poor
\nis piled up at the shrine of their god,
\nWhile they sit around drinking wine
\nthey\u2019ve conned from their victims.
\n\u201cIn contrast, I was always on your side.
\nI destroyed the Amorites who confronted you,
\nAmorites with the stature of great cedars,
\ntough as thick oaks.
\nI destroyed them from the top branches down.
\nI destroyed them from the roots up.
\nAnd yes, I\u2019m the One who delivered you from Egypt,
\nled you safely through the wilderness for forty years
\nAnd then handed you the country of the Amorites
\nlike a piece of cake on a platter.
\nI raised up some of your young men to be prophets,
\nset aside your best youth for training in holiness.
\nIsn\u2019t this so, Israel?\u201d (Amos 2:6-11)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ingratitude can be startling. Hebrew poetry is created by rhyming ideas rather than sounds\u2014that is, by writing parallel lines that use synonyms. Numbers, however, lack synonyms and so the convention for poets when they chose to use numbers, was to give two sequential numbers\u2014as here, three, then four. The poet intended all along to list four things, of course. So what four sins was Israel guilty of? <\/p>\n

Judges took bribes to punish a people for crimes they were innocent of. They oppressed the poor and suffering. They profaned the name of God when both a man and his father used the same prostitute. And finally, they got drunk in the temple from the wine they had taken unjustly.<\/p>\n

God took this bad behavior as ingratitude. Look at what he had done for them in rescuing them from Egypt and giving them a country. Rather than being thankful, they treated each other the way the Egyptians who had enslaved them had.<\/p>\n

The consequence, of course, would be God\u2019s discipline. He intended to help them learn to be thankful, to help them learn to be loving to one another and to God. Likewise, God punishes us in order to make us better people more like him. God punishes us to keep us from hurting the people we should be loving.<\/p>\n

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\u201cBecause of the three great sins of Israel \u2014make that four\u2014I\u2019m not putting up with them any longer. They buy and sell upstanding people. People for them are only things\u2014ways of making money. They\u2019d sell a poor man for a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[18,17,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6639"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6639"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6640,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6639\/revisions\/6640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}