7:1 Sovereign Yahweh showed Amos a mass of locusts swarming in the springtime after the first harvest and before the second. The Lord was forming this swarm of locusts. The very first crops harvested in the spring went to feed the king's household and animals (cf. 1 Kings 18:5). The crops that the people harvested later in the spring fed their animals and themselves. If anything happened to prevent that second harvesting, the people would have little to eat until the next harvest in the fall. The summer months were very dry and the Israelites had nothing to harvest during that season of the year.
Locusts swarming indicated that they were about to sweep through an area and destroy all the crops. There was no way to prevent this in Amos' day. Locust invasions were a perennial threat, and they were a method of discipline that God had said He might use if His people proved unfaithful to His covenant with them (Deut. 28:38, 42; cf. Joel 1:1-7; Amos 4:9).
7:2 Amos witnessed the locusts strip the land of its vegetation. Then he prayed and asked the sovereign Lord to pardon Jacob (Israel) for its covenant unfaithfulness. Jacob was only a small nation and could not survive such a devastating judgment if the Lord allowed it to happen as he had seen it in his vision.
Amos' view of Israel as small and weak stands in contrast to that of Israel's leaders who believed it was strong and invincible (cf. 6:1-3, 8, 13; 9:10). Israel occupied a large territory under Jeroboam II, second only to what Solomon controlled, but it was still small in relation to the larger empires of the ancient Near East. Amos may have meant that Israel was small in the sense of helpless. God had promised to take care of Jacob when that patriarch encountered Yahweh at Bethel, now a center of apostate worship in Israel (cf. Gen. 28:10-22). Perhaps that is why Amos appealed to God with the name of Jacob (cf. 3:13; 6:8; 7:5; 8:7; 9:8).
7:3 In response to Amos' prayer, the Lord relented and said He would not bring a completely devastating judgment on Israel, at least then. He would be merciful and patient and would grant Israel more grace (cf. Exod. 32:14).
The fervent prayers of righteous individuals, like Amos, can alter the events of history (cf. James 5:16-18). Some things that God intends to do are not firmly determined by Him; He is open to changing His mind about these things. However, He has decreed other things and no amount of praying will change His mind about those things (cf. Acts 1:11; Rev. 22:20). It is, therefore, important that we understand, from Scripture, what aspects of His will are fixed and which are negotiable.65
