Everyone likes seeing hypocrites have their masks ripped off so that they are exposed for what they are and they get what they deserve. And religious hypocrites all the more! Except when it’s you. No one likes to have their own mask ripped off and to be told that their religion is shallow, self-serving and hypocritical. That’s not fun!

 

I don’t think there’s many better or more direct critiques of shallow, hypocritical and misguided religion that Amos 5:18-27. “Woe to you who long for the day of the LORD!" 'Why do you long for it? It’s not going to be the day you imagine…’, says God. He exposes the complacent sense of assurance and hope in the Israelites that the great day of reckoning will go well for them, just because of who they are. “It will be darkness, not light!” Why? Because God hates their empty, pompous religion. Their assemblies stink, their worship is like awful noise. Their religious rituals are empty because they are a thin veneer over hearts that have no regard for God’s law. God longs to see “justice roll on like a river” and “righteousness like a never-failing stream!” And instead he sees a people full of selfish ambitions and arrogant disregard for His instruction, trying to cover it all over with ‘going to church’.

 

I think Amos 5:18-27 is meant to have two complementary affects of us as we read and reflect on it. It’s meant to be a bit of a slap in the face (very much like Romans chapter 2), causing us to take a good look in the mirror and peel away any masks we see there. It’s meant to send a warning to any of us who are complacently covering over unrepentant hearts with shallow religion. But it’s also meant to cause us to rejoice all the more in the confident hope we have in Christ. Confidence of our justification before God through faith in Christ is not religious complacency. We rejoice in the hope of glory precisely because we’ve realised that no amount of religious effort, whether trying to be a good person or appeasing God with rituals, will ever be enough, and so we’ve thrown ourselves on the offer of mercy in Christ. We know that if it were just down to us, there would come a day when our masks would be ripped off and we would get what we deserve. But, thanks be to God, it’s not down to us and our ‘religion’ - it’s down to Christ and his righteousness. “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.” (Rom 5:1-2)