I'm Good
Amos 5:18-27
Wouldn’t it be great if justice came to our enemies and not to us?
Photo by Marko Lengyel on Unsplash
Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord! Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake. Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it? I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? You shall take up Sakkuth your king, and Kaiwan your star-god, your images, which you made for yourselves; therefore I will take you into exile beyond Damascus, says the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts. - Amos 5:18-27
What Amos is reprimanding the people about is their naivety. They think the judgment day they are hoping for will only affect their enemies, when all will be judged.
If we want to bring God’s regn down upon us in order to punish those who are evil in our eye, we may find that God’s judgment is tougher than we envision.
We may have flaws and faults too.
Heaven forbid! Right?
Jesus points this out when he talks about the splinter in the eye of the other and the log in our eye. We don’t see ourselves as bad. Our actions are justified.
It is like when we are punished in school for hitting the one who was bullying us. “But he started it,” we say, or “He hit me first.”
He, the other, is the guilty one, not me!
Amos goes on to say that God does not want festivals and sacrifices from us. He talks about idols, and we say that we don’t make false gods, thinking of statues and golden images, but what abut our idols?
Sometimes I think the mistake God made was to give us a day of rest in the week. We took that day to be the one day in the week that we needed to devote to God. One day. Do nothing but be in God’s presence.
But then that day became an hour in church, and then only once or twice a year. How much time each week, each day, do you devote to God?
We devote hours each day to the devices we carry in our hands, but we fail to bring our hands together in prayer.
So, go ahead and long for the day that God will come and judge the evil ones among us, believing that our minor sins are not so bad compared to their big sins.
Will we get a chance to plead our case before God? Maybe we should start taking stock of the good we do that we hope counters the bad.
Oh, and by bad, I mean the time we ignore God and focus on ourselves.
More to come...
Good symbolism . . . hands in prayer.
The comparison to childhood excuses of "but he hit me first" really nails it. We're so quick to calculate other people's moral debts while giving ourselves daily grace, but when you think about it, maybe that's exactly why the metaphor of justice rolling like water works so well instead of like, say, a carefully measured distribution.