Bite 13: Sentence Diagramming Amos 3:3-4:5

Deciding the Passage

It seems to me that the person who broke the text into chapter and verse wasn’t sure where the breaks should be either. I haven’t had a clean break that corresponds to chapter breaks yet. Wanting a clean break, I was going to go along with ending my passage at the beginning of Amos 4. But then clearly God wasn’t done saying “hear this” and Amos wasn’t done saying “declares the LORD.”

I decided to end the passage at Amos 4:5 because after that, God started speaking of himself instead of describing what his people had been doing. Or what was going to happen to them.

Do you see that? In Amos 4:6 there is a slight change of direction. God recounts what he has done to bring his people back to himself. But they would have none of it.

Consequently, our passage this time is long. I have the link to my sentence diagram right here:

I had difficulty figuring out how to fit it printed on a page. I’m hopeful anyone with computer savvy (I do not!) will be able to print it fine.

And if you’d like to try sentence diagramming on your own, kudos you! I will be sharing my thought process here and if you’d like to come back and print it anyway later, you know where it is. Let’s chat a little about how I diagrammed this passage.

Amos 3:3-3:6

Rhetorical questions. See them? I lined the premises up on the left with the qualifications underneath. Proper terms for these parts? I don’t know. But I see the two types of phrases and I want to distinguish them from each other. Does the one thing happen? Not without the other thing happening first. Although, I know my objective here isn’t interpreting the text but observing. Remember that sentence diagramming is kind of identifying the nuts and bolts of the text.

So the first few verses lay themselves out nicely. Amos 3:7, I placed the for the Lord GOD does nothing under the previous LORD and diagrammed that verse similarly.

Yahweh

Which draws my attention to the fact that my Logos sentence diagramming tool not only doesn’t put the distracting punctuation in, it doesn’t include the all caps which indicates the sacred name of Yahweh. If you print that observation worksheet out I gave you up above, none of the Lords or Gods are in all caps like they are in the ESV. Which, as you know, indicates the use of the tetragrammaton YHWH.

Amos 3:8-10

It gets fuzzy for the rest of the passage for me. To start, there seems to be a series of how God voices.

1. The lion has roared, Amos 3:8
2. The Lord GOD has spoken, Amos 3:8
3. Proclaim, Amos 3:9
4. Say, Amos 3:9

These voicings of God are aligned toward the left margin and what was voiced are positioned underneath. Once again, the conjunctions (the ands) are lined up on the far left margin both so that they are out of the way and not lost.

Then in Amos 3:10, the declares the LORD repetitions begin. Actually, there are both declares the LORD and thus says the LORD. Various permutations of names for God, but all describing his speech. And what he says covers the rest of the 5 W’s and an H of reporting.

Organization

When I see repeated phrases like declares the LORD, I like them to be lined up. Usually on the left margin. However, in this instance, the stuff God says is both in front of the declares the LORD and behind it. Losing the content of the speech is not my goal just so I can have my sentence diagram lined up nicely. So I opted to have the variations of thus says the LORD lined up a tab or two over. I still know where they are, and the front end of his statements are lined up on the left margin while the back end of his statements are tabbed over under the identification that God is talking.

Like I said, it gets fuzzy for me, where pieces should line up. But the point I have to remember is that this is an exercise to be familiar with the text. To recognize for myself who is saying what. When you produce your own sentence diagrams wherever you are studying, it is for you to see the flow and also who is saying what.

My hope for you is that you will not consider time in the Word as only a neat and clean 20 minutes with your cup of coffee, curled up in your favorite chair in front of the fire. It IS that. But I hope that it’s not ONLY that. It can be so much more. My hope is for our current generation of students to push their sleeves up and withstand the temptations of all music choices, social media, and shopping that is on every computing device and get into the meat of the Word.

Hm. I seem to have gotten emotional there.

Amos 3:10-12

For a couple of verses, God states the condition of his people and what the result will be. I lined up the what of their condition (they do not know how to do right and that they store up bad stuff in their strongholds). Between those phrases, Amos identifies God as the speaker.

• Declares the LORD, Amos 3:10
• Therefore thus says the Lord GOD, Amos 3:11
• Thus says the LORD, Amos 3:12

Those are the consistent parts of the section and you know I like to line up consistent parts. So even though they aren’t lined up on the left margin, I’ve tabbed over and lined them up over there.

Mingled amongst the thus says comments are what he said. I tabbed over so that what God says is lined up under that God says. He says that an adversary will surround and then the analogy of the shepherd under that corresponding adversary.

Amos 3:13-15

In these verses, God converses with Amos directly. God commands Amos to hear and testify. Telling Amos what to say, some what and where is answered for us. There are a few phrases all starting with the personal pronoun I which I lined up. Well, the first one actually starts with that on the day, but what God says of himself, I lined up.

See, I and I will are different but since they seem to be related, I went ahead and lined them up. Not included in this screenshot, I also lined up the declares the Lord GOD phrases from Amos 3:13 and Amos 3:15. The ands are in reality lined up all the way over at the far left margin.

Amos 4:1-5

Continuing from Amos 3:13, again Amos calls his audience to hear. This time Amos isn’t mild in his identification. Last time he used the moniker house of Jacob. This time he begins with you cows of Bashan. And it gets more intense with each phrase. That section I started with you, dropped a line to have cows directly underneath, and then the 4 who‘s are lined up under that. Because they are all identifying the same target audience.

Once the offenders are clearly identified, then Amos says that GOD has sworn some things. The first item in this series is again reminding them that a day is coming. What happens and how it happens I line up under the fact the the day is coming.

In Amos 4:4, I simply don’t know yet what is happening. It kind of sounds like God has a bit of a divine snarky tone to his comments, but without more study, I don’t know for sure. I lined up the imperatives I see along the left margin. The ones that seemed right to align.

• Come
• Trangress
• Multiply
• Bring
• Offer
• Proclaim

I’m not sure how those all interrelate (I said I found this passage a little fuzzy from the beginning!), so I did the best I could. Study is required. I need to understand better what is in the OT law in order to understand how the house of Jacob has transgressed.

However, I did continue to line up all the declares the Lord GOD phrases through to the end.

Reflection

While I haven’t studied this passage yet, I can read English (fairly) well. Amos is reprimanding the children of God. Who God loves. Because they have been going against the will of God.

Sound like anyone you know?

Have you heard that Jeremy and I recently added complexity to our already increasingly complex lives? Explanations will come later, but the complexity is this little fuzzball:

If you’ve ever had a puppy begin to live in your home, you know that you’ve just invited in a wild animal which has no respect for boundaries. Particularly in the area of bodily eliminations…

Laws of Mama Dog

We’ve had Gidget for almost a week and she is one smart pup. For example, we’ve begun training about sitting at a particular door of our house in order to ask to be let in. She might go out any other door, but when she wants to come in, she already runs to the “right” door, sits, and waits to be let in. After less than a week of training. She has us at least partially fooled that she wants to be an obedient pup.

Well, she was loose in the house the other day with not tight enough environmental boundaries. She moved into the position to poop. I happened to see her right away doing this, so I darted over to her, saying “no, no, no, let’s potty outside!” She saw me coming and pinched it off so she could run away. Three steps into running, she decided to turn around and run towards me.

She was in the process of violating the law of mama dog’s house and for a fraction of a second she thought running away was the right course. Then she thought better of it and she ran towards me.

I wasn’t mad. There are reasons why the law of mama dog is in place. I simply want her to agree with my rules and follow them. Because it’s good for everyone in the pack.

Laws of the Lord GOD

What if the children of Israel had turned from their positions of sin and run toward God? If they had theoretical poo dangling from their theoretical bums, what would God have done? What has he said he would do as regarding the Hebrews?

Consider Leviticus 26 in the midst of the giving of the Mosaic Law. I suggest the whole chapter so that we see the context.

What about in 1 Samuel 12:19-25 when the Israelites were foolishly asking for a king so they could be like the surrounding nations? Samuel tells them they are being evil and yet, don’t turn from following the LORD. Even while they request what is wrong (a king), Samuel tells them that God will not forsake them, the people God has made for himself.

The Psalms and Proverbs also have a number of I-was-going-the-wrong-way-but-then-God situations. I could go on and on clear through the rest of the Bible.

Who is God? He is the one who calls us out of darkness into his light. We aren’t in light where we are all clean, pretty, and upright. Nope. Poo hanging from our fluffy fur, folks. That’s when God calls us. And just like Gidget, when we turn back to the Father in the midst of our filth, he picks us up and helps us out.

This is how I was thinking while I was working on sentence diagramming this passage. People are people, doing what they do. And God is God, doing who he is.

Wrap Up

I’m not joking around when I say that I don’t know how exactly the diagramming of this passage should go. Paul reminds and that gives me courage to also remind. Be encouraged to keep pressing into the text even if it seems difficult. Or disheartening. Or however it might seem. Our Bible Study Bite is that our God has revealed himself from heaven and that means that we have the ability to understand him as he’s revealed himself.

That means there is profit in continuing to learn and grow in our efforts to know God through his Word. There is also profit in learning what the Israelites were up to that violated the law and incurred God’s wrath. I know I’m not Jewish so I’m not under that specific law, but as we’ve discussed before, knowing the laws that are in place give us information about the character and nature of the law-giver. And knowing how the people broke that law helps us also understand what all people are like, including ourselves.

Thanks for studying with me today! If you’ve found anything helpful here, please like and subscribe. And if you know of other students of the Word, would you please share so we can all study and encourage each other with what we’re learning?