The River of Righteousness and the Cesspool of Self-Worship Text: Amos 5:21-24
Introduction: The Stench of Acceptable Sins
We live in an age that is drowning in religiosity and starved of righteousness. Our culture is awash in spirituality, self-help gurus, and a thousand different paths to "becoming your best self." And the evangelical church, tragically, has often been more influenced by this therapeutic slop than it has been by the bracing, sharp-edged Word of God. We have become experts at crafting worship experiences that are emotionally engaging, musically excellent, and aesthetically pleasing. We have our smoke machines, our professionally designed sermon graphics, and our seven-point applications for a better marriage. But what God is looking for is not a better production. He is looking for righteousness. And what He often finds is a beautifully decorated tomb, full of dead men's bones.
The prophet Amos was sent by God to a nation that was in a similar state of affairs. The northern kingdom of Israel was enjoying a time of great economic prosperity and military security. And they were religious. Oh, they were very religious. They flocked to the worship centers at Bethel and Gilgal. They kept the feast days, they offered their sacrifices, they sang their songs. By all external metrics, they were a thriving, God-fearing people. But underneath this pious veneer, the entire structure was rotten to the core. Their prosperity was built on the backs of the poor. Their courts were corrupt. Their business dealings were dishonest. They had mastered the art of segregating their Sunday mornings from their Monday mornings. Their worship was a noisy, elaborate, and expensive lie.
And so, God sends a shepherd from Tekoa, a man who knows the smell of sheep and the bite of the wind, to deliver a message that is as subtle as a sledgehammer. God is not impressed. In fact, He is disgusted. This passage in Amos 5 is one of the most searing indictments of hypocritical worship in all of Scripture. It is God's declaration that He will not be trifled with. He will not be bribed with fat calves and well-rehearsed choirs while His law is trampled in the streets. He is not interested in the tumult of our songs if they are not the overflow of a life lived in justice. This is a word we desperately need to hear today, because the temptation to substitute the forms of worship for the fruit of righteousness is a perennial weed in the garden of the human heart.
The Text
"I hate, I reject your feasts,
Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer up to Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
And I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings.
Remove from Me the tumult of your songs;
I will not even listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."
(Amos 5:21-24 LSB)
Divine Disgust (v. 21-22)
We begin with God's absolute repudiation of their religious observances.
"I hate, I reject your feasts, Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer up to Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them; And I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings." (Amos 5:21-22)
The language here is shockingly strong. God does not say He is merely disappointed or that their worship could be improved. He says, "I hate." He despises it. The very things He Himself had commanded in the law of Moses, the feasts, the assemblies, the offerings, have become a stench in His nostrils. Why? Because the people had divorced the ritual from the relationship. They had severed the liturgy from life. They thought they could appease God with the blood of bulls while their hands were full of the blood of injustice.
This is a direct assault on the consumeristic mindset in worship. They were treating God like a vending machine. They put in their sacrifices and expected blessings to come out. They thought their religious activity was transactional. But God is not a cosmic merchant to be bartered with. He is a holy Father to be obeyed. The offerings He commanded were meant to be outward expressions of an inward reality of repentance and faith. For Israel, they had become a substitute for it. They were using the means of grace as a cover-up for their lives of disgrace.
Notice the progression. He rejects their feasts and assemblies, the corporate gatherings. He will not accept their burnt offerings, which were for atonement. He will not even look at their peace offerings, which were for fellowship and communion. God is saying, "We have no fellowship. Your attempts at atonement are an insult because you have no intention of repenting. Your gatherings are a conspiracy of hypocrites." This is a terrifying thought. It is possible to be meticulously, orthodoxly, and passionately engaged in religious activity and have God utterly reject it. It is possible to be busy for God and be an enemy of God.
The Cacophony of Hypocrisy (v. 23)
Next, God turns His attention from the rituals of sacrifice to the rituals of song.
"Remove from Me the tumult of your songs; I will not even listen to the melody of your harps." (Amos 5:23 LSB)
The problem was not the quality of the music. We can assume they had skilled musicians and passionate singers. The problem was the source of the music. The songs were not rising from hearts overflowing with gratitude for God's law and grace. They were rising from hearts that were calloused, greedy, and unjust. God calls it "tumult," or noise. It was a chaotic, meaningless racket to Him. It was the sound of spiritual static.
This is a sober warning for the modern church, which places an enormous emphasis on the musical portion of worship. Music is a good gift from God, intended to be a vehicle for theological and doxological truth. But when it is detached from obedient living, it becomes a performance for men, not worship for God. It becomes an emotional anesthetic, designed to make us feel good about ourselves without having to deal with the hard realities of our sin. God is not looking for a good concert. He is looking for a broken and contrite heart, which then expresses its restored joy in song.
When you sing "Holy, Holy, Holy" on Sunday, but then cheat on your expense report or gossip about your neighbor on Monday, your song is just noise. When you lift your hands in praise but will not lift a hand to help the widow or the orphan in your community, your melody is a mockery. God is telling Israel to just stop. "Take it away from Me." The silence of repentance would be more pleasing to Him than the Hallelujah Chorus sung by a choir of rebels.
The River of Righteousness (v. 24)
After tearing down their entire edifice of false worship, God tells them what He actually wants. This is the positive requirement, the divine alternative.
"But let justice roll down like waters And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." (Amos 5:24 LSB)
This is one of the great declarations of Scripture. God is not against form and liturgy. He is against empty form and hypocritical liturgy. What He desires is for the reality of His character to flow through His people and into every corner of the culture. He wants justice and righteousness.
Let's be very clear about what these words mean, because our modern world has hijacked them. "Justice" (mishpat) in the Bible is not the secular social justice of our day, which is rooted in envy, resentment, and Marxist categories of oppressor and oppressed. Biblical justice is about conforming to God's standard. It means giving people their due according to God's law. It means impartial courts, honest weights and measures, protection for the vulnerable, and punishment for the wicked. It is about rendering to God what is God's and to our neighbor what is our neighbor's.
"Righteousness" (tsedaqah) is a broader concept. It refers to a right standing with God that results in right living in the world. It is ethical and moral uprightness, a life that aligns with the character of God. The two terms are intertwined. Righteousness is the character of a man who is right with God; justice is that righteousness in action in society. Righteousness is the foundation; justice is the structure built upon it.
And God wants these things to "roll down like waters" and flow like a mighty stream. This is not a picture of a stagnant pond or a seasonal trickle. It is a picture of a powerful, constant, life-giving river. It is dynamic, relentless, and cleansing. This is what true worship produces. It doesn't terminate in the sanctuary; it flows out of the sanctuary. True worship realigns our hearts with God's character, and we leave the assembly to enact that character in our homes, our businesses, and our communities. The songs we sing on Sunday should be the soundtrack for the justice and righteousness we live out Monday through Saturday.
Conclusion: The Fountain of True Justice
So where does this leave us? This passage is a devastating critique of any religion that is all leaves and no fruit. It is a warning against the kind of faith that is a mile wide and an inch deep. But it is not a call to abandon worship, liturgy, and song. It is a call to fill them with integrity. It is a call to connect the vertical reality of our love for God with the horizontal reality of our love for our neighbor.
But there is a deeper problem, isn't there? The standard God sets here, a constantly flowing river of perfect justice and righteousness, is a standard that none of us can meet. Our streams of righteousness are, at best, polluted and intermittent. Our hearts are not naturally fountains of justice; they are factories of idolatry and self-interest. If this passage simply leaves us with the command to "do more justice," we will either become proud Pharisees or despairing sinners.
The only solution is to be connected to the true source of the ever-flowing stream. The only man who ever lived a life of perfect, uninterrupted justice and righteousness was the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the embodiment of mishpat and tsedaqah. And on the cross, He took upon Himself the ultimate injustice. The perfectly righteous One was treated as the ultimate sinner, so that we, the unrighteous, might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21).
When we come to God through Christ, He does not just forgive our unrighteousness; He gives us His righteousness. The Holy Spirit is poured into our hearts, and He begins the work of carving out a new riverbed. He begins to produce the fruit of righteousness in us. The justice and righteousness that God demands from us are the very things He provides for us and produces in us through the gospel.
Therefore, true worship is not us trying to impress God with our pathetic little trickles of good works. True worship is coming to the fountain of Christ, drinking deeply of His grace, and then allowing His life to flow through us. Our songs are no longer the noise of hypocrisy, but the grateful response to His mercy. Our offerings are not bribes, but joyful sacrifices of thanksgiving. And our lives become the channel through which His justice and righteousness begin to flow into a dry and thirsty world. He does not want our dead rituals. He wants our lives, offered back to Him as living sacrifices, so that His life might pour through us like a mighty, unstoppable river.