The Kingdom of God. John Bright
And to the peace offerings of your fat animals I’ll pay no attention.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I’m not listening.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.
(5:21-24)
Thus it was at a time when society desperately needed criticism, yet when established religion could not deliver that criticism, nor even criticize itself, that the protest had to come from outside the organized church. And that, plainly, was a horrible state of affairs.
The intent of Amos’ message, then, is plain—as plain as a blow in the face. Nor is there need to argue that it is a relevant message in all ages; it is desperately relevant. It tells us what we need to hear: that a society that cares more for gain than for honor, for its living standard than for God, is sick to the death; that a church which has no rebuke for society, which demands lavish support before righteous behavior, is no true church but a sham of a church. Amos tells us that no amount of religious activity and loyalty to church can make a man’s conduct in business and society of no concern to God, nor can a correct creed play substitute for plain obedience to the divine Will in all aspects of life. He tells us that a church which makes a dichotomy between faith and ethics, to the point of making small insistence upon the latter, is under the judgment of God along with the society of which it has become a part.
2. Relevant indeed! But one might well ask what this has got to do with the hope of the Kingdom of God? Amos’ message is one of almost unrelieved doom. True, he called for repentance (5:4, 14-15), and to the repentant he held out hope. But it is plain that he did not expect repentance: the doom is both sure and soon. Israel is a tottering, jerry-built wall out of line with the plumb line of God (7:7-9)—tear it down! Israel will be left “the crumbs of a lion’s meal”31—two legs and a piece of an ear (3:12). So real was the coming ruin to Amos that he set up a wailing over the doomed nation as if for the dead:
She has fallen, never again to rise,
has virgin Israel;
Hurled headlong upon her land,
there is none to pick her up.
(5:2)
One might well ask what such black doom has to do with our topic.
But we shall badly mistake Amos and the other eighth century men if we do not understand their preaching as a powerful reactivation of the covenant faith. It is rooted and grounded in that sense of the intimate relationship between God and people which was the heart of all Israelite believing. It addresses the people as nothing other than the people of Yahweh, the subjects of his rule and partners of his covenant, and reminds them what that relationship means.
Now it is not to be supposed that Israel really needed to be reminded of her election. On the contrary, it was a fixed idea with her; she believed it all too well. Her whole tradition asserted with unanimous voice that God had chosen her out of all the families of the nations to be his people, and she cherished that belief with all her heart. Yahweh was her God, and she his people; Yahweh had therefore blessed her and would continue to do so. As Yahweh’s own people she might face the future without fear and even look forward with confidence to the Day of Yahweh (5:18), when he would intervene in history to judge his foes and establish his rule upon earth. Why should Israel not be confident? Is not the establishment of God’s rule the establishment of his people? And the Israelite state is the people of God.
In short, the whole notion of covenant and election had been made a mechanical thing, the deeply moral note inherent in it blurred and obscured. It had been forgotten that the covenant was a bilateral obligation, requiring of its people the worship of Yahweh alone and the strictest obedience to his righteous law in all human relationships. Or if the obligation was remembered at all, it was imagined that lavish sacrifice and loyal support of the shrines discharged it. The bond between God and people was thus made into a static, pagan thing based on blood and cult—a total perversion of the covenant idea. And religion was accorded an altogether pagan function: to coerce the favor of God by the sedulous manipulation of the ritual so that protection and material benefit might be secured for individual and nation.
Amos totally rejected this mechanized notion of the covenant. But this did not involve either Amos or any of the other prophets in a rejection of the belief that Israel was a chosen people. On the contrary, they affirmed it again and again. Indeed it seemed to Amos that the whole national past had been no less than a history of God’s grace—a grace repaid by the grossest ingratitude (2:9-12). But to be chosen, said Amos, is not to be pampered; it is to shoulder double responsibility. To sin against the light of grace is felony compounded, nay capital crime. All nations, Israel included, stand equally before the bar of God’s justice (chs. 1–2). There are no pet nations, elite races: “Are you not just like Ethiopia’s sons to me, sons of Israel? . . . Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt—and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Arameans from Kir?” (9:7.) Election is for responsibility. With what logic, and yet a logic so hard for favored people to grasp, Amos reasons (3:2)! He moves from plain premise to unheard-of conclusion. This is the premise: “Only you have I known (i.e., chosen) of all the families of the earth.” And this is the inexorable conclusions: “Wherefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities”!
But in saying this Amos is only harking back from a perverted notion of the covenant to the true one. The people of God is a community knit to one another by its bond with the covenant God. It is a brotherhood, for within it all human relationships are regulated by the righteous law of that God; and all stand equally under that law. The covenant is not mechanical and in the nature of things; it is a bilateral, moral agreement and can be voided. Mistreatment of the brother voids it, for he who crowds his brother spits on the law of God and, in that fact, does not keep covenant with him. In short, Israel is the people of God, but only as she keeps his law and exhibits his righteousness. Because Israel has not done so, but has egregiously violated the covenant brotherhood, Israel is no true people of God!
It is in the light of this theology that we must understand Amos’ ethical preaching. It is important that we note this, for it is too often missed. We take the ethical attack without the idea pattern upon which it was marshaled, and that attack becomes a noisy, angry thing—and Amos something he was not at all. He was no revolutionary summoning the downtrodden masses to the barricades. He was no humanitarian, moved by the plight of the poor, who advanced a program of social reform designed to cure the national malady. He was—let us not mistake it—no teacher of a new ethic which would ultimately, so the handbooks used to tell us, tame the rough-and-ready morality of the people and lift them to the heights of ethical monotheism. Amos was no innovator, but a man of the ancient ways. His ethical protest was drawn from a well five hundred years deep. His were the ethics of the Decalogue; of Nathan, who called David a murderer to his face (II Sam. 12:1-15); of rugged Elijah coming down to Jezreel to meet his enemy Ahab and curse him for his crime against Naboth (I Kings 21). Yet for all his roots in the past, Amos was no Nazirite, no Rechabite, who thought to cure the ills of society by a flight to a past that never was. Amos was plainly and simply a man of the covenant who denounced all greed, immorality, and social iniquity as a sin against the covenant God. He advanced no cure for the schism of society save a restoration of the covenant brotherhood which had created Israelite society in the first place:
Seek good and not evil, that you may live;
And so Yahweh God of Hosts may be with you, as you say he is.
(5:14)
3. Just here is the tremendous contribution of Amos to the notion of the Kingdom of God apparent. With Amos the rejection of that blasphemous identification of the people and the Kingdom of God with the Israelite state had become total. Resistance to that identification, as has been said, was not new. It went back to the ancient feeling that the monarchy was not God’s order and, even if looked upon as a tolerable and necessary order, was to be brought into line with God’s order. It was this feeling that was behind purge after purge, revolution