L. R. Tarsitano—Saint Andrew’s Church, Savannah

The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity—October 10, 2004

True Worship and True Morality

“The LORD hath sworn by the excellency of Jacob, Surely I will never forget any of their works” (Amos 8:7).

Today’s lesson from the Prophet Amos begins with a divine indictment—a list of charges of immorality and disobedience that God has laid against Israel. “Israel” here is not, however, “the whole people of Israel, descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” It is, instead, the so-called “Northern Kingdom” that broke away under King Jeroboam from the far larger Kingdom of David, after David’s son Solomon died. From this time forward, David and Solomon’s descendants were left with only the “Southern Kingdom,” called “Judah” for the one tribe that remained loyal to David’s line. It is from “Judah” that we get the name for the same region in our Lord’s day, “Judea”; and it is from “Judea” that we get the noun “Jew” and the adjective “Jewish.”

It is important, before we consider in particular the crimes for which God indicts the Northern Kingdom of Israel, to remember a significant fact. Jerusalem and the Temple of God were both located in Judah. Thus, if King Jeroboam and his Northern Kingdom were going to continue to practice the religion of the Old Testament, there was no way that they could avoid being forever beholden to their despised neighbor to the south—to the Kingdom of Judah, from which they had seceded and against which they had rebelled.

If, for example, King Jeroboam and the citizens of the Northern Kingdom of Israel wanted to offer sacrifice in the biblical way, then they had to bring their sacrifices to Judah, Jerusalem, and God’s Temple. If Jeroboam and his subjects wanted to keep the Passover or the other holy days of God, it would have had to have been under the direction of the priests at God’s Temple in Jerusalem, in the capital city of Judah. There was no way around the fact that God had established his Temple and his religion in Jerusalem, so Jeroboam faced a choice. He could have absolute independence or he could have God’s religion, but he couldn’t have both.

He chose independence. We read in the First Book of Kings: “And Jeroboam said in his heart, Now shall the kingdom return to the house of David: If this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the LORD at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto their lord, even unto Rehoboam king of Judah, and they shall kill me... Whereupon the king took counsel, and made two calves of gold, and said unto them, It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem: behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And he set the one in Bethel, and the other put he in Dan. And this thing became a sin: for the people went to worship before the one, even unto Dan. And he made an house of high places, and made priests of the lowest of the people, which were not of the sons of Levi. And Jeroboam ordained a feast in the eighth month, on the fifteenth day of the month, like unto the feast that is in Judah, and he offered upon the altar. So did he in Bethel, sacrificing unto the calves that he had made: and he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places which he had made” (1 Kings 12:26-32).

In this way, Jeroboam built convenient temples of his own, called “high places” here, and he equipped them with priests and holy days of his own invention. He established idolatry, the worship of golden calves, as the official religion of his kingdom, with idols placed at Dan and Bethel. He tried to make his religion look like the religion of God, but it was not God’s religion. Every prayer that he and his people said was a sin, piled upon a sin, in a never-ending cycle of blasphemy and idolatry.

It is impossible, in the end, to separate the true and proper worship of God from true and proper morality. “Right worship” and “right morality” are both necessary elements of a true religion. And while it is certainly true that a person or a people can have a true form of worship and still be immoral hypocrites, the true worship of God always contains within it the divine power and possibility of moral reform. False worship, on the other hand, not only leads to a false morality; it has nothing within it that is capable of leading people by God’s grace back to a moral life.

False worship feeds immorality, and that’s exactly what happened in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Although Jeroboam’s invented religion might have appeared to a casual bystander to be similar to the Old Testament worship of God, it led immediately to ever more serious works of evil and cruelty. Consider, then, God’s indictment of Jeroboam’s kingdom.

The Old Testament has built into it certain obligatory mercies and kindnesses to the weak and to the poor. When certain biblical holy days came, the debts of the poor were to be forgiven. Furthermore, for the protection of the poor, God had commanded fixed and dependable weights and measures, so that the little money that the poor actually possessed would be given full value when they went to buy food to feed their families. In Jeroboam’s kingdom, however, under his false religion, none of these divine commandments was being kept. The poor were not only exploited, kept in debt, and defrauded. They were also being bought and sold as slaves for as little as a pair of shoes or a bite of food.

Seeing these evils, God instructs his Prophet Amos to declare: “The LORD hath sworn by the excellency of Jacob, Surely I will never forget any of their works.” God has taken an oath never to forgive these sins unless they are repented, which they cannot be according to a false religion, and he has sworn never to reward the false worship that leads to immorality as if any sort of religion of man’s own choosing is sufficient to worship or to please him. God’s oath, moreover, is of the highest and strongest sort. He has sworn by himself, “the excellency of Jacob,” the true God who called Jacob and his descendants to eternal life as his Chosen People in preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ.

Nor are we merely guessing at the meaning of God’s oath or guessing about his rejection and condemnation of any religion but his own. God makes himself entirely clear through Amos: “They that swear by the sin of Samaria [another name for the Northern Kingdom], and say, Thy god, O Dan, liveth; and, The manner of Beersheba liveth; even they shall fall, and never rise up again” (Amos 8:14). The “sin of Samaria” is Jeroboam’s made up religion. The “god of Dan” is one of Jeroboam’s golden calves, which is not alive, but only a dead idol. The “manner of Beersheba” is the religion and immorality attached to idolatry and to the worship of golden calves.

God makes here a declaration of condemnation, for he says that those who follow the false religion of Jeroboam and the Northern Kingdom “shall fall, and never rise again.” They will die, and they will not receive the eternal life that God has promised to the faithful—to those who abide in his true worship and true morality. The false religion of Jeroboam can be repented and abandoned for the mercy of God, for the sake of God’s true promises to the repentant sinner; but God extends no such mercy to those who have rebelled against him and who remain in their rebellion against him for the sake of their false religion.

The difference between true and false worship is the difference between life and death. The choice between the true worship of himself that God has established and the inevitable moral degradation that must follow false worship is terribly real, whether we are speaking of Jeroboam’s time, 2800 years ago, or contemplating our own situation today.

Since the 1960s, a great many households within the Christian Church have replaced the form of worship that their ancestors had received from God in his providential governance of his Church with new inventions of their own. These new forms of worship may seem, as Jeroboam’s invented religion did, rather like the old religion, but they have in practice turned out to be the worship of men, the idolatry of men’s ideas and politics, and slavery to the fads of intellectuals. And what has happened?

Church after church is racked with scandals of immorality, including the abuse of children—a sin we always find connected with false religion and paganism in the Bible. New priesthoods and ministries have been invented, and they have divided the Church in ways that we are only now discovering, as we only begin to remember that female priesthood and inverted sexuality were always signs of false religion and rebellion against God in the Holy Scriptures. People claiming to be “Christians” join the clamor to remove the Ten Commandments from public view.

But enough. We know the symptoms. What we need to be clear about this morning is the disease that causes them. And that disease is the disease of Jeroboam and the Northern Kingdom, condemned by God this morning. That disease is the abandonment of the true worship that God has provided for us to offer praise to the glory of his Name for inventions and self-expressions of our own. And once we are disobedient in worship, we have given up the God-given means of our moral reclamation when we go astray.

When Mattathias, the father of the Macabees was dying, he called his sons to his side and said this: “Now therefore, my sons, be ye zealous for the law, and give your lives for the covenant of your fathers” (1 Mac. 2:50). He and his sons were fighting an occupying power that would have abolished the religion of God, called here “the law,” along with the worship and morality of the life-giving covenant with God. Today, it is not foreign occupation, but an internal rebellion against God that threatens the worship and morality of the Church. We can do no better than to follow the same advice and to give our lives and to devote our living to maintaining the historic and blessed worship of Almighty God which we have received as our inheritance, so that we may have true morality in God’s Name as well, and receive the promise of life offered to all who cling to the excellency of Jacob, to the One True God who lives, saves, and guides us to his kingdom and to his throne. When we worship as we should, we stand with Jesus Christ before that throne, both in this world and in the next.