9 December 2009
Psalm 38; Amos 8:1-14; Rev. 1:17-2:7; Matt. 23:1-12

Amos continues to call for justice in the land. The accusation against them is that they are driven entirely by commercial interests, desiring not to worship God but instead only to do business and, if that weren’t enough, desiring to do so dishonestly. The great punishment of God in all this is that there will be a famine in the land of hearing the word of God. Along with the other judgments this one will cut them off from hope. When they need to hear from God, He will be silent.

Jesus is doing away with the organization chart. They are accustomed to a second hand relationship with God, mediated through priests and scribes, professional religious people. The sacrificial system actually required all this. Sacrifices must be done at the temple and the only ones authorized to offer them were the priests. The law needed to be interpreted in order to be applied, so you needed someone to interpret it, thus the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. The problem was the motives of the leaders were as wrong as the people of Amos’ day. Jesus’ sacrifice would open the way to a more direct relationship with God, no priests offered that sacrifice, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit means that the law is written on our hearts, we don’t need another to interpret. It isn’t that there is no need for anyone to preach or interpret the Word, we can always learn from one another, but it does mean that we can seek the Lord on our own and receive wisdom and knowledge.

The letter to the church at Ephesus is similar in some ways to much of the prophetic books of the Bible but remarkably dissimilar in one important way. The similarity is the accusation of abandoning the love they had at first. They have made secondary things primary things and in the process lost the one primary thing. The dissimilarity comes in the encouragement they receive in this brief letter. We are always tempted to make secondary things primary but we must constantly resist that temptation and keep the love of God primary. Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 6 was to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and everything else will be added remains true. We allow other things to take precedence, sometimes good things, but the love of God must always be primary.

Do not forsake me, O LORD!
O my God, be not far from me!
Make haste to help me,
O Lord, my salvation!