Loving the good
Life and justice go hand-in-hand for one cannot fully have one without the presence of the other. This is the focus of the prophetic challenge to ancient Jewish society in the 5th chapter of Amos. “Seek the Lord and live,” Amos cries out to the people of God who have simultaneously pledged allegiance to God while perverting God’s justice through acts of greed, lust for power, and complete disregard for the poor. For Amos, such behavior not only destroys God’s justice, but also seeds the destruction of life itself.
Throughout the course of Christian history, the stern indictment of this prophetic warning from Amos has echoed against the injustices of the church. It is no secret that the Church has frequently failed to live up to its calling in Jesus Christ. Much of the failure throughout history has been seen in the disconnect between remaining faithful to the fundamental principles of Scripture amid the secular distractions of the world around the church.
Economic desires, cultural expectations, political priorities, fear of the unknown, nationalistic preferences, and personal priorities of any given time within Christian history have motivated Christians to abandon Scripture in favor of convenience, power, control, and comfort. Consequently, in the name of Jesus and by the authority of the Church, lives have been destroyed, cultures have been maligned, poverty has been expanded, equality has been denied, racism has been promoted, hatred has been embraced, and wars have been fought out of a misguided belief that somehow the perversion of scriptural principals glorify God.
At the heart of this sin—a sin that is older than the Bible itself—is the sin of covetous desire. Amos 5:7 and 5:10-13 serve as examples of this narcissistic sin of unrighteous desire. Seeking personal gain at the expense of the poor, hating those who dare to speak God’s truth, lust for financial gain at all cost, dishonesty, and disregarding those who are in need, all represent how the sin of greed, lust, and covetousness can cause the Christian to overlook God’s priorities without realizing the inherent dangers.
The warning Amos gives also goes beyond the sin of distractive desire and its destructive consequence. For Amos, the worst aspect of this sin comes as the one living in the demonic desire to have and control uses Biblical justification, religious authority, and even the name of God to validate and rationalize the sin. When the church engages in sin—any sin—while finding some means of lifting some obscure passage of scripture, some archaic religious tradition, or some politically convenient rationale to make the sin seem righteous, this is perhaps one of the greatest sin of all. To put it in terms of the 10 Commandments, it is taking the Lord’s name in vain. To put it in terms of Christ’s stern warning in Matthew 12:31, a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
It is for this reason that Amos calls out to love that which is Good and to turn against that which is evil. By “good,” however, Amos does not mean that which an individual necessarily finds personally pleasing, satisfying, or pleasurable. Rather, Amos is looking to call for genuinely Spirit-filled righteousness—living in accordance with what God demands even when it may contradict what culture, politics, and personal convenience demand. In fact, there will be times when doing the right thing necessarily means doing the unpopular thing, the counter-cultural thing, or the politically incorrect thing. The measure of righteousness comes down to how it protects equality, upholds the poor and needy, and seeks genuine truth. This is the call of the Righteous.