When the Borders Get Too Small

Amos 1:15

Ammon's king and leaders

will be dragged away.

I, the Lord, have spoken!

Thought for the day – When the Borders Get Too Small

Amos 1:15 is a verse you could walk straight past. In the CEV it reads, “Ammon’s king and leaders will be dragged away.” It’s the tail end of a prophecy against a nation most of us couldn’t find on a map, so it’s easy to skim. biblehub

But look at what comes just before it. In Gilead, Ammon’s soldiers cut open pregnant women to grab a bit more land. The most vulnerable people imaginable were treated as collateral damage for a bigger border. And God, through Amos, says: I saw that, and it won’t go unanswered. Then he signs his name to it.

Notice who gets named. Not just the king, but the leaders too. The very people who were supposed to protect Ammon were the ones who built its cruelty, and nobody gets to hide behind their position.

Isn’t that uncomfortable? Because it’s so easy to read Amos as a book about other people. John Wesley didn’t. In 1791, in the last letter he ever wrote, he urged William Wilberforce to keep going in the fight against the slave trade and not grow weary. Wesley understood that holiness is never just private. It’s social. It shows up in how we treat people who can’t push back.

So here’s my question for today. Where have I been quietly enlarging my own borders, my time, my comfort, my reputation, at someone else’s expense? And who is God asking me to stand beside instead?

This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

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