Jun
29
The Dangers of Religion
Filed Under Christian Living, Worship
We are embarking on a new min-series in our study of Amos on Sunday evenings. We’re particularly considering how true religion can quickly erode into false worship. We had so many great things going on last Sunday that I knew I’d be pressed for time in introducing the sermon series. So I include below a summary of Amos 5:1-5 with a look specifically at verses 4-5.
Death by Religion
Religion can kill you. No really, it can. In saying that, I realize that I have to do some denoting of what I mean by the term religion. The shorter OED defines religion this way,
Belief in or sensing of some superhuman controlling power or powers, entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship, or in a system defining a code of living, especially as a means to achieve spiritual or material improvement.
We might summarize this into a working definition of that which a given person or culture defines as their connection to the divine. The Muslim would see the Koran as prescribing a religion or a set of duties and beliefs that connect a person to Allah. The Buddhist would follow the Tripitarka for instruction on how to attain Nirvana. A Hindu would follow the Bhagavad Gita in order to arrive at one’s atman being in unity with Brahman. The Green Bay Packers fan is going to participate in certain pre-game rituals in order to commune with other Packer fans and entice a win on the field. All of these practices could fall under the general description of religion.
The problem is that not every religion brings life. In fact, only one religion brings life, the rest result in death. Through the revelation of the Bible, the Triune God has always laid claim to the only life producing religion (Deut 30:6, John 10:10, John 17:3). But we need not be too quick to assume that all that is called Biblical-religion is truly life-producing religion.
We see an example of this distinction in Amos 5:4-5 where the profit Amos, pronounces the word of God,
For thus says the LORD to the house of Israel: “Seek me and live; but do not seek Bethel, and do not enter into Gilgal or cross over to Beersheba; for Gilgal shall surely go into exile, and Bethel shall come to nothing.”
God, here, is making a distinction between life giving religion and religions of death. He defines life giving religion as seeking himself. Biblically speaking, the only connection to the divine that brings life is the pursuit of the Yahweh of the Bible. Jesus brings this into clearer focus by proclaiming himself to be the life and the only way to union with God. This is all basic Christian doctrine.
What I want to highlight however is the focus that Amos places on false religion. It isn’t what you think. To contrast life giving religion, Amos does not say, “Don’t seek Baal.” He does not say, “Don’t go to asherah poles.” He does not say, “Don’t participate in cultic fertility rituals.” These would all be true and right commands, but that is not where the focus is placed. Amos commands the people to not go to Bethel, Gilgal, and Beersheba. These are not locations of foreign pagan rituals. They are geographic locations in which God had lavished past blessings upon his people.
Bethel is most notably mentioned in Genesis 28 and Genesis 35. In Genesis 28, Jacob, for lack of a pillow, goes to sleep on a stone. He is then given, in a dream, a divine revelation of a ladder upon which angels were descending and ascending. Jacob wakes up and declares the place to be the house of God (literally in Hebrew, bet-el) and promptly builds an altar. Later in Genesis 35, upon his return from the Laban incident and in prelude to meeting his brother, Jacob again camps at Bethel. It is at this point Jacob spends the evening duking it out with God. As both dawn and Jacob’s hip break, God pronounces his blessing on Jacob in the form of a new name, Israel. Bethel stood as the geographical representation of God’s promise to give his people a name or an identity in himself.
Beersheba too takes on historical meaning in the book of Genesis. In Genesis 21, Abraham enters into a peace agreement with Abimelech. The motivation for this agreement was Abimelech’s recognition that God was with Abraham (Genesis 12:22). After all, who would want to fight against God? Genesis 26 finds Isaac in Beersheba. It is at this point that this common theme continues, with God’s promise, “I will be with you and will bless you.” In Genesis 46, Jacob/Israel is in Beersheba, where God says to him, “I myself will go down with you to Egypt.” Beersheba stood as the geographical representation of God’s promise to be with his people.
Gilgal is the last shrine mentioned in Amos 5:5. Joshua 4-5 describes Gilgal as the staging area of Joshua’s campaign into the promised land. It was one of the first cities to be defeated. It was at Gilgal that the new generation of Israel renewed their covenant with God submitting themselves to circumcision. The very etymology of Gilgal is rooted in the concept of circumcision. Gilgal resurfaces in 1 Samuel 11 as the location for the coronation of king of Saul. Gilgal stood as the the geographic representation of God’s promises to give is people the blessings of the covenant especially as they were realized in the kingdom.
However, in order to understand Amos 5:5, one more tidbit of Israelite history must be noted. After Solomon’s reign, the kingdom of Israel was split between North and South. The Northern Kingdom was ruled by Jeroboam. Jeroboam, though apostate in religion, was a brilliant politician. He realized that the center of Israelite worship was at Jerusalem in the Southern Kingdom. He rightly reasoned that his kingdom would be undermined if his people continued to worship Yahweh at Jerusalem. To remedy this problem, Jeroboam reorganized the worship of his kingdom around these locations of past divine blessing. It was not a turn to flagrant paganism, rather it was a turn toward man innovated syncretism. He still wanted his people to worship Yahweh in name, he just wanted them to do it in a different way, a way that served his ends.
Now we are ready to understand Amos 5:5. God is not just concerned that his people worship him in name but he is also concerned that his people worship him in the way that he prescribes in his word. God is jealous about his worship. He is so jealous about his worship that he has prescribed a single way to worship that brings life. All other ways bring death. One way seeks the true God, all the other ways seek the ends of men and death. The Israelites had taken locations that were designed to point them to the one true God and had made these locations ends in and of themselves.
A good illustration of this is that of car collectors. I don’t understand collecting cars. To spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a vehicle only to store it in your garage and not drive it makes no sense to me. Cars were meant to be driven. They are intended to take me somewhere. They are the means and not the end. To the car collector, the car is the end and not a means. The car becomes a pseudo-shrine that imports the history of the car without its intended function.
This is what the Israelites had done with their history and with the Bible. They had assumed that the religious activity of shrine pilgrimages gave them a right to claim the promises that each shrine represented. They assumed that their own acts of devotion entitled them to God’s blessing. They had forgotten and forsaken the gospel.
The gospel was evident at each of those places. You cannot miss God’s gracious condescension to sinners in giving his people an identity. You cannot miss God’s gracious condescension to sinners in promising his presence with them. You cannot miss God’s gracious condescension to sinners in providing for them the benefits of the covenant.
But more than this, these three location pointed to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, to fulfill the stipulations of the covenant of grace. In John 1:51, Jesus calls himself the fulfillment of Jacob’s ladder, seen at Bethel. Matthew 1:23 interprets the promise of Beersheba, the promise of God’s presence as prophesied in Isaiah 7:14 as being fulfilled in Jesus who is Immanuel, God with us. When we consider Gilgal and the promise of the blessing of the covenant, we hear Paul, in Ephesians 1:18, praying that believers would know that their divine inheritance comes from union to Jesus Christ.
By worshiping tradition, Israel had short circuited the gospel. By worshiping tradition, Israel had ceased to seek the Lord and life.
This continues to be a check to my own heart. My denomination loves history and has a great deal of respect for the saints that have gone before us. We reverence (worship?) names like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Owen, Edwards, Manton, Brooks, Bunyan, Warfield, Thornwell, Dabney, and others. However, the enticement to false religion remains the same. It is death to my soul to think that by reading Calvin’s Institutes I am necessarily communing with the living God. By declaring my assent to the Westminster Confession of Faith, I am not by necessity pursuing the true God truly. It is only as these men and their works point me to my sin, my Christ, and biblical worship that they are of any use to me or my soul. These men and their works should never supplant the Holy Spirit illumined Bible as the primary component of my soul’s diet. I can never forget that my standing before God is through the merit of Jesus Christ and not through the merit of my Reformed Presbyterianism.
So, I ask you whether your religion is one of abundant life or abundant death? The answer to that question turns on this thing we call the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, as revealed in all of Scripture. Gospel repentance drives you to your knees in humility. Gospel grace raises your face from the dust heap to the manifest joy of worshiping Jesus Christ. Gospel living sends you out into the world to order your life based on the service to the King of kings.
Seek the Lord and live! 
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