Forming Faith Blog

Moral or Immoral Wealth? (Amos 1 & 5)

Posted on October 28 2025 by Gregory Rawn

God, through Amos, condemns injustice where the wealthy prosper at the expense of those without. God commands us to make justice flow like a mighty flood.

A waterfall in the forest. God condemns the injustice of wealth and calls for justice to flow like mighty waters.
Since the Creation

It is now ten weeks since the creation of the cosmos or, at least, since the beginning of the Narrative Lectionary year. We have moved from the inherent goodness of creation through Abraham and Jacob, the exodus and wilderness, and the times of Samuel, David, and Solomon. Last week, we heard a still, small voice alongside a fearful prophet, Elijah. We will now spend the next six weeks in the literary prophets before jumping into the Gospel of John.

A Shepherd from Tekoa

As an introduction to his prophetic words, Amos made sure to point out that he was a shepherd of Tekoa. Tekoa was on the edge of arable land near Bethlehem and Jerusalem. This was a hard place to farm and shepherd. So, Amos is not from the upper echelons of society but from the class of those struggling to get by.

Eighth-century Socioeconomics

The Book of Amos was written in the mid-eighth century BCE. This was a time of economic expansion (better explained here). There was an increase in foreign trade and the need for agricultural goods. This, however, did not mean that each farmer with their ancestral land grew crops and sold them equally. Don’t be ridiculous. The land of struggling farmers was incorporated into larger estates, and those farmers were often forced to become tenant farmers.

And this is economics. If you want to increase your profits (and your ability to buy all these cool foreign goods), you need to either increase your production or reduce your expenses (or both).

The larger landowners didn’t pay the tenant farmers; they just demanded a portion of their yield (i.e., sharecropping). They couldn’t increase the land’s yield, so to increase (their) production, they simply needed to increase the farmers’ rent. If the farmers couldn’t pay, the landowner might get slaves out of the deal. What if the peasants couldn’t grow enough for both the landowner and their own survival, or if the goods they needed became more expensive? Too bad for them. If judges tried to oppose landowners, they just needed to compensate the judges for their cooperation.

Power Over, Richer Than

If you have wealth, you have power, the ability to do things others cannot. Then you can use that wealth and power to gain more wealth and power. The moral problem doesn’t specifically come from someone having money or power. The problems come from how you gained your wealth and what you do with it once you have it.

Morality of Wealth

Is it moral to be wealthy? That’s a loaded question, right? Let’s start with the basis of biblical morality. It can be subject to many interpretations, but Jesus and many others boiled it down to a dual commandment: love God, love your neighbor. So, at its most basic, an action that honors God and helps your neighbor is good, and an action that disrespects God and harms your neighbor is bad. It is also clear in Scripture that you cannot love God and mistreat those made in the image of God.

So, did Amos’ audience gain their wealth through actions that honored God and helped their neighbors? Amos gives a clear “no.” But there is a second—unrelated—aspect: were they using their wealth to honor God and help their neighbor? Also, “no.”

Is It Moral?

With this measure, wealth can only be “moral” if it is gained while honoring God and helping our neighbor, and used to honor God and help our neighbor.

So, all I need to do is earn wealth through hard work and refraining from cheating, and give some of it to my church, right? No. God sets a high bar. We might not be able to reach that level, but we need to work toward it. Our work must not only avoid harming our workers, our community, and God’s world, but it should also benefit them to the best of our abilities. And that will definitely cut into our profits.

If we do these things and can still become wealthy, then we must use our wealth to honor God and help others. How much do we need to give away? Well, God’s ideal world is one of shalom—where all people have everything they need to thrive (not just survive). So, until poverty and suffering (the opposites of shalom) disappear, you keep on giving.

That’s bad news for the wealthy (and those who desire to become wealthy). In a world filled with poverty and need, it is not okay to be wealthy.

What about Us?

We get to a big, sticky problem when we start looking at ourselves. I must ask myself: “Am I wealthy?” By most metrics, I am not. But I certainly have more than two sets of clothing (Luke 3:10-11). Perhaps it’s best not to try to determine the dividing line between wealthy and not wealthy. On an individual level, God calls us to act in ways that honor God and help others. And we can steward our resources to alleviate suffering wherever we can.

But injustice is more than individual actions. Entire systems can and do cause poverty and suffering; others ignore the suffering that could be alleviated. Both contribute to the injustice in the world, and we need to fight both to work toward letting “justice roll down like waters.”

What Are We to Do?

As we are teaching or preaching this text, it’s important to break this down. Since justice is about loving our neighbor in the long term, we need to think of it that way. Here are some questions to challenge our participants and ourselves:

  1. What would a world governed only by love of God and our neighbor look like? Write a list, draw pictures, or discuss this in large or small groups.
  2. Where do we see suffering around us? You can use a bulls-eye diagram to help participants think about this in terms of those closest to us (innermost ring) to those across the world (outermost ring).
  3. Choose one problem. What is causing this suffering? (That might be a long and complicated list.)
  4. What can we do to help solve this problem in the long term? (An important first step is to learn about the situation. Then you can research what others are doing to work for justice in this area and decide what small steps you all can take to make a difference. “Acts of Justice with Youth” by Chris Wilterdink is a helpful read when looking at acts of justice.)

You might need to adapt these steps to the appropriate developmental levels, but this can be done with younger, older, and intergenerational groups.

Shalom,

Gregory Rawn (Publisher and Owner)

This post is revised and updated from the original written for November 14, 2021.

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