SUNDAY SERVICE
6th Sunday after Trinity — Sunday 12 July 2015
Amos 7:7-15
Ephesians 1:3-14
Mark 6:14-29
Our readings are united by church and government suppressing God’s word of truth, which alone can save us.
Amos confronts the corrupt government of his day with a message entrusted to him by God. The Lord holds up a discriminating plumb line to the ruling elite, and they are found wanting. Jeroboam had constructed man-made centres of man-made religion, “the king’s sanctuary” or “the temple of the kingdom”. They went up in response to his word and worshipped as he commanded them. This was a state church, which merely reflected the will and whims of the king.
Amaziah, priest of the state-sponsored temple at Bethel, conspired against Amos and sought to have him disciplined. As Luther indicates here, this is typical: “Thus the ungodly with their own traditions always mock the preaching of the godly.” Ironically, Amaziah seeks to banish Amos from the land, just as Amos has prophesied the exile of Israel. Yet Amos refuses to bow to pressure from the government and the state church, which follows along obsequiously in its pocket.
As many who follow the call of vocation have discovered, God’s true word is inescapable and must be preached, even if it means leaving the comfort zones and income levels of previous employment (Amos 7:14-15). JC Ryle spoke of a similar situation in his book Christian Lead
ers of the Seventeenth Century, which I have been editing for forthcoming publication. “Wretched, indeed, is that country where low, sneaking informers are encouraged,” he writes, “where the terrors of the law are directed more against holiness, and Scriptural religion, and freedom of thought, than against vice and immorality; and where the seat of justice is used for the advancement of political purposes, or the gratification of petty ecclesiastical spite!”
He was speaking of another century, but it is not so different from the days of Amos, or our generation.
It was not so different with King Herod either, when he met with God’s true messengers. He imprisoned John the baptiser for challenging his unnatural twisting of sexual and marital ethics. Inwardly he suspected he ought to listen, but his sinful nature kicked against the word and rendered him indecisively perplexed. His lusts caused him to make a rash promise, which forced him to make a definitive choice. And just as Stephen Fry said recently about God: “The moment you banish him, your life becomes simpler.” When Herod subsequently rejects the Word incarnate also, it brings harmony to his relationship with Pilate. But in eternity, there is no peace for those who respond to the word of God this way.
This Sunday the lectionary begins a series of consecutive readings in Ephesians, which will continue until 23 August. The reading for today is a single majestic sentence encompassing eternal predestination, redemption in Christ, and the consumption of all things in God’s strategic plan for the universe. It urges us to praise God that we have every spiritual blessing in Christ and are part of God’s cosmic strategy through believing the word of truth. This is the message we are called to proclaim (to the state, and to the world), and which God will bless as we do so.
This is in stark contrast to the earth-bound gospel of a worldly religion that listens only to those who bless the particular perversities of the age.
As Calvin once remarked, exposing our tendency to ask God to bless our personal agendas and disordered ambitions, ”How can any one have the effrontery to expect that God will aid him in accomplishing desires at variance with his word? What God with his own lips pronounces cursed, never can be prosecuted with his blessing,” (Institutes 3.7.9).
Dr Lee Gatiss is author of The Forgotten Cross (Evangelical Press) and Director of Church Society (www.churchsociety.org).