Amos: The Mad Farmer of Tekoa

What are the Hebrew prophets up to? What’s their agenda? The prophets call us to integrity—to wholeness of being. Religious people tend to build walls to separate the sacred and secular, but the prophets will not tolerate this bifurcation of being. The prophets use their poems like battering rams to break down the walls we build to separate the sacred from the secular. The poet-prophets thunder, "There is no secular! It’s all sacred!"

The Hebrew prophets simply will not tolerate the separation of worship and justice. Worship is how we relate to God and justice is how we relate to our neighbor. False religion says as long as we believe right and worship right, we can get away with treating our neighbor wrong, that our sins will be hidden by our worship. But the prophets vehemently disagree with this! All of them. This is a consistent theme throughout the Hebrew prophets.