Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 259 · September 16
A Famine of Hearing
“Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD:”
A basket of summer fruit sits on a table. The fruit is ripe and at its very best, but one more warm day will turn it. God shows Amos this basket and asks him what he sees. When Amos answers, God makes a play on words, because in Hebrew the word for summer fruit, qayits, sounds almost the same as the word for end, qets: "The end is come upon my people of Israel; I will not again pass by them any more."
It matters who heard this. Israel was a rich country with a full calendar of religious days, and Amos quotes the people muttering their way through them: "When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit?" The ephah was the measure for grain and the shekel was the weight for money, so they shrank the one and padded the other. They kept the holy days, and they resented every hour those days kept them from trading.
Then comes today's verse: "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD." The verb is send. This famine is God's own act, and He announces it ahead of time. The next line shows what it is like from the inside: "they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, and shall not find it." Everyone in that famine is searching hard.
The usual lesson drawn from this verse is that we own Bibles and neglect them. That is worth saying, yet it is a different problem from the one Amos describes. In the famine he sees, nobody is neglecting anything. The people are desperate to hear, and there is nothing to hear. Israel had known a time like it once before, described in one plain line: "the word of the LORD was precious in those days; there was no open vision." Our trouble is usually appetite. Their trouble was supply, and God had taken it away on purpose.
Go back to the basket. It was full when God held it up, and full is the last stage before fruit spoils. What is on your table this morning is a Bible you can open, in your own language, with nobody stopping you. The God who once held back His word has put it into your hands now, and He still speaks through it to anyone who opens it and listens.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 259 is Everlasting Arms (Deuteronomy 33:27).