Article November 27, 1971 Issue

Inspiration and Scholarship Can Work Together

CORA MASON

Amos was an ordinary person. He was not a prophet or the son of a prophet, but a small farmer, a tender of sheep and sycamore figs, who lived on the edge of the Judean wilderness south of Bethlehem. What happened to him is told quite simply: "The Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel."^{Amos 7:15;} So Amos the farmer stood up before the priests, the merchants, and the rich city dwellers of the Northern Kingdom, castigating them all in the name of the Lord for their neglect of His justice.

About twenty years later Isaiah, the aristocrat of Jerusalem, has a parallel experience: "I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. And he said, Go."^{Isa. 6:8, 9;}

A century later the message comes to Jeremiah in the last decades of the kingdom of Judah, as the clouds gather over Jerusalem; and then to Ezekiel, who is to work among the exiles in Babylon. More than six centuries later Saul the Pharisee has his vision of the Christ on the Damascus road. "And I fell unto the ground" (his friend Luke reports his words) "and heard a voice .... And I said, What shall I do, Lord?"^{Acts 22:7, 10;}

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