Spending Time with Amos & Micah

I am a human being and I have many faults.  One of these is that I don’t spend enough time reading and thinking about the Old Testament.  I have been preaching for a number of years now and I think I have preached on the Old Testament twice, once for a family service basing the whole thing on ‘Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ and once on a passage from Joshua which was forced on me by college.  I usually preach from the New Testament and nearly always from the gospels.  I have been guilty of putting to one side a good portion of God’s inspired word and even considering it fairly irrelevant, replaced by the New Testament!  How wrong I have been.

For the past week or so I have been immersed in the books of Amos and Micah for an essay I am writing for college and I have been incredibly blessed by studying these prophetic writings in so much detail.  Two verses that particularly stood out, because of their familiarity are; ‘let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:24) and ‘what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’ (Mic 6:8).  The latter especially really speaks to me in a deep and spiritual way.

In particular I have been looking at understandings of social justice in the two books and have identified the following social justice issues:

• ·        Trading in human beings / slavery of the poor and destitute
• ·        General oppression of the poor and weak
• ·        Perversion of the justice system with the extensive use of bribery
• ·        The sexual abuse of women
• ·        Unjustified taxation targeting the poor rather than the rich
• ·        The abuse of economic arrangements including the use of false weights and measures.

Many of these have a deep resonance with our society today.  Slavery is still an issue in our modern world, even within our own country in the form of foreign girls and women forced to work in the sex trade and in a recent case in the newspapers where Gypsy men were kidnapped and forced to work against their will under threat of violence.  The poor and weak are still oppressed in our society, the rich are still growing richer and the poor are becoming poorer.  Taxation in this country is still unfairly heaped upon the poor who pay a greater share of their income than the rich and well-off.  Our justice system may be free of bribery; but many people cannot afford to pursue justice through the courts with the increasing restrictions on legal aid, denying them the justice they have a right to.  The sexual abuse of women is still common through prostitution.  Finally, whilst false weights and measures are probably not common the economic reality is that our economy benefits the wealthy and big corporations to the detriment of everybody else; farmers having the price paid for their produce squeezed until it barely covers the cost of production being one very isolated example.

The Old Testament is not, as I thought, largely irrelevant.  As much as the New Testament it is the living word of God and can speak to our present situations through the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit as much as the New Testament.  Of course we interpret the Old Testament in light of the New Testament but that does not mean that it does not have much to teach us.

I am glad to have spent the last week or so in the company of Amos and Micah and the God inspired prophecies they gave; they have taught me much; much more than I would have thought possible.

I will be preaching from the Old Testament much more from now on!