Amos 5:14

"Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live; and so Jehovah, the God of hosts, will be with you, as ye say."

The very fact that Amos here definitely quotes from what his hearers were in the habit of saying surely supports what was just said regarding his having done so sarcastically in the preceding verse. Amos here strikes at the fundamental cause of all of Israel's transgressions and sorrows: they loved the wrong things. That, of course, is exactly the way it still is with the world. As McFadden said:

"The root of the social problem, as some one has said, is not defective social arrangement, but sin; and no fundamental improvement can be effected by a change in the environment, but only by a change in the men."[33]

Much of the present-day preoccupation of churches with such things as "better housing," "improved standards of living," etc., has resulted from the failure to behold this truth. No matter what social planners and environmentalists may say, there is no escaping the fact that all of man's problems originated in Eden; and there was nothing at all wrong with that environment. The entry of sin was the destructive factor that drowned the whole world in woe.

Regarding the probable reason for Israel's confidence that the Lord was with them, Hammershaimb explained it thus: "It arose from the people's conviction of the unfailing good fortune which they thought they had evidence of in the external successes of Jeroboam II."[34] It is also a fact that the whole nation had blindly trusted in their boasted fleshly descent from the patriarch Abraham, claiming to be "the seed of Abraham," despite their spiritual rejection of the obedient faith which marked the life of Abraham.