Licentious Idolatry in the Prophets

um the the underlying cause of this i'm not saying that this is necessarily amos's argument but what what do all of these features have in common what do all these practices of exploiting the the selling the righteous exploiting the poor and abusing girls sexually have in common idolatry and that might be why laying down beside every altar on garments um that are are um gained uh taken in pledge uh possibly just garments that are taken from the poor in a way of being uh repossessed or something yeah these people have debts or whatnot they can't they can't cover uh what they owe which in many of these cases the reason they owe in the first place is probably unrighteous so it's yeah these even their clothes are repossessed and and uh so the the fact that the those in power possess these garments in the first place is and then use them uh they've taken everything from from those that they could and uh and then they use this unrighteous wealth or these unrighteous objects or the the these these objects that were gained unrighteously they used them for even more unrighteous purposes yes and and and the la the idea there of laying down beside every altar is shorthand for the absolute hypocrisy of outward religion of of giving a public face of being deeply religious and devoted yet privately um having a heart turned away from the lord and publicly oppressing the righteous and the poor and women and worshipping laying down beside every altar on garments that are gained by merciless and selfish means so what is it it's just religious hypocrisy and perhaps that's the deepest unifying feature of all of these perhaps that's why it's saved as the fourth and climactic expression here because those problems that are social and personal those those horizontal abuses are rooted in what a perversion of the vertical relation to god and and so this fourfold description of sin shows that the hearts of those in israel had fundamentally abandoned true religion their hearts were darkened their practices were cruel their worship was a facade designed to promote their own reputations and line their pockets this is really a kind of preview of precisely what jesus rebuked the pharisees for doing right i think camden oh sure and so it's an exposure of hearts that are not simply breaking the law of god if you if you just read collective national sin you think oh they're breaking god's law yes that's true but they're doing it in order to advance themselves in the promotion of a purely external religion that if you look at just underneath it it's full of dead men's bones and everything unclean to pull lines from what jesus said about the pharisees you

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Length: 3min 51sec (231 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021