Amos 7:9

"And the high places of Isaac shall be desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste; and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword."

"The high places of Isaac ..." "Isaac" is here a title of Israel, as the parallel in the next line shows. It is not the religious conduct of the patriarch Isaac that is under indictment here, but that of the Northern Kingdom. The amazing notion current among many scholars to the effect that there was nothing wrong with those shrines which the rebellious people had built upon the very sites of the old pagan shrines that Once were there before Israel came into the land could not possibly be correct. Some of the patriarchs indeed had been associated with some of those places, through events that marked their lives; and, no doubt, the paganized priesthood of Jeroboam's Israel had, from such premises, alleged the legitimacy of their shrines; it was, nevertheless, a deception. Harper's opinion that, "Down to the days of Josiah, the nation worshipped Yahweh regularly and legitimately upon the so-called high places,"[23] cannot be allowed, the sole reason for the shrine of Bethel, for example, having been Jeroboam's repudiation of God's true religion and the institution of another, as a political device to establish his throne. "Even the priesthood which Jeroboam I appointed was absolutely illegitimate (1 Kings 12:31f)."[24] This latter fact was one of the gross sins of Israel that would be exposed by God's plumb-line, of which Thorogood gives this excellent definition:

"First, He was using the Law which he had given to the Israelites long before, as the standard of their faith and conduct. Secondly, He was using the prophets, such as Amos ... Their preaching was a standard by which the Israelites could judge their own lives."[25]

One false idea which is almost invariably associated with these vigorous condemnations is expressed as follows, "Amos also taught that the most elaborate worship, if insincere, is but an insult to God." This is true enough, except for the implication that, if the worship of the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom at the pagan shrines of Dan, Bethel and other high places had been "sincere" it would have been acceptable to God; and this is not the case at all. As Christ himself declared, "In vain do ye worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men" (Matthew 15:9). This applies pointedly to the very thing that characterized the worship in the Northern Kingdom; it was founded on practically nothing that God commanded, but was built altogether upon traditional, pagan and opportunistic practices.

"The sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste ..." This refers to the, "idol-temples at Dan and Bethel (1 Kings 12:29), at Gilgal (Amos 4:4), and perhaps in other places."[26] It was not merely the social indifference and oppression of the poor, and not merely a matter of their insincerity, but their whole rotten system of gross paganism, garnished and embellished with a few trappings from God's true religion, that was marked for destruction here. Furthermore, not merely the overthrow of false religion would occur, but also the overthrow of the evil dynasty that had initiated it, and the whole people of that evil generation which had received and reveled in the false religion.

"And I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword ..." As Keil pointed out, this is a reference to the dynasty of Jeroboam I, "but not to be restricted to the overthrow of his dynasty, but an announcement of the destruction of the Israelitish monarchy."[27] Three things should be noted, no special king is mentioned here, but a dynasty, such being the meaning of "the house of Jeroboam"; secondly, this is something which God promised to do, not Amos; and in the third place, the name, or identity of any ruler to be killed by the sword was definitely not mentioned.