Much in Prayer
by S. M. Hutchens
One of the most common themes in the oracles of the Old Testament prophets is God’s utter disgust with religious exercises as substitutes for doing what the worshipers know to be right. The Prophet Amos speaks the word of God to Israel, saying,
I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amos 5:21–24)
Could this possibly be said more unmistakably and forcefully? God hates Religion, however formally correct, fervent, costly, and serious, apart from doing what is just and right. The exercises of worship, on one hand, and the pleasing of God by doing the good which he commands, on the other, are quite separable, so that a man might storm the heavens with mighty words and pray until he bleeds, but as long as he will not do what he knows the Lord requires of him by way of justice and righteousness, he will be ignored. Translate it this way similarly to offend modern ears:
I hate, I despise, all your church services and liturgies. Even though you celebrate any quantity of Masses or preach mighty, heart-moving, biblical sermons, you’re wasting your time and nauseating me. I can’t stand listening to your organs, guitars, choirs, your soloists and worship teams or whatever noises you have managed to devise in my name and putatively for my glory. I’ve made it plain to you in many ways what I require. Instead, you put on a show. You do not like these simple, uncomplicated requirements of mine and think you can evade them as though my God-ness obliged me to appreciate the rigamarole. It doesn’t. Do what you know you’re supposed to if you want me to pay any attention to your prayers or be with you in church.
Not Confined to Liberals
I was inspired to repair to Amos after viewing yet another graphic testimony to the enduring truth of his prophecy: an image of a cluster of clergy-persons rapt in prayer, as though seeking blessing and guidance for their cooperative rebellion from the Christian faith, still falsely identifying themselves as Christian pastors in their teaching the lie of the “radical inclusivity” of Jesus, as though they thought God would want to help them when he had already made it plain in Scripture that they were disobeying him and that what they needed to do for a divine audience was repent.
I know the type, and it is by no means confined to liberals. They tell people they have been “much in prayerful study” or the like, instead of simply finding ways of doing what they already know to be right. They fool fewer people than they think they might with this sort of thing, but they do discredit the churches that tolerate them and accept their pastoral guidance, even though their “prayerful study” usually results in a bulwark of reasons to do what they will and what their disobedient congregations in fact prefer.
Martin Luther King Jr. (from the Birmingham jail in particular) provided the most powerful example in recent memory of this situation in his accusation against professing Christians who, while mighty with religious noise and all the sounds of righteousness—churches that were “much in prayer”—were unjust to black people, for whom the Christian faith does not demand equality of political and social rights, but something infinitely greater: that black Christians be loved by other Christians and treated like brothers. (The movement for civil rights has always been in conflict with Christianity because it involves politics, which requires divisions that set man against man, whereas the Christian faith regards all believers as a fraternal unity from the beginning, and has the authority to command politics, not from the illusory platform of a radically inclusive Jesus—a Jesus that does not exist—but according to the sovereign commands of the Judge of all men.)
Acceptable Divine Worship
There is no word here against divine worship in its various expressions—the opposite, in fact: this is something in which the Lord may “take delight”—but only against the utter vanity of the work of every liturgist, architect, musician, and worshiper, when the supposed worship does not issue from the greater thing: the disposition and actions that must precede it if is to be accepted by God. For the prophet Micah likewise says:
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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