Amos 5:21

I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take not delight in your solemn assemblies.

God's repudiation of their worship was based upon several things: (1) It was not really the worship of God at all, but the worship of the old pagan gods they had always adored, even in the wilderness; (2) the formal services which were patterned after the commandments laid down in the Mosaic Law had been conspicuously altered and perverted by such things as: (a) the omission of the sin-offering; and (b) the mingling of leavened bread with the burnt offerings; and (c) sacred images in the form of such things as the golden calves, adored at the shrines; (d) instruments of music such as had always marked pagan worship which they added to the worship, etc.; (3) all ethical and moral requirements of God having been forgotten and rejected in the practice of all kinds of immorality, drunkenness, and gluttonous feasting in the very worship itself; (4) the very shrines of Bethel, Gilgal, and Beersheba, where they worshipped, were illegal and contrary to the will of God, having been set up in their inception as supports for the throne of Jeroboam I. These are but a few of the outstanding features of an entire system of religion which was totally unacceptable to God.

I despise your feasts ..." As Hammershaimb noted: "The three great pilgrimage feasts (were): The Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Tabernacles."[48] These correspond to Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles. The prior existence of the Mosaic Law, as well as the radical drift away from it, on the part of Israel are in clear focus in this picture which emerges from Amos.

The words in this verse carry the thought expressed in the King James Version, that "I will not smell in your solemn assemblies," reminding Israel of that threat in the law (Leviticus 26:31). Although the outward forms of the worship in Israel carried many distinctive likenesses to the true Mosaic Law from which much of it had been originally derived and later perverted, there were also radical and presumptuous departures from it. "So secure were they that the only sacrifice which they did not offer was the sin or trespass offering."[49] "Amos stripped away all of Israel's false hopes."[50] Here it was their trust in an inadequate, incomplete, unauthorized, perverted, and innovated worship. In Amos 3, he took away their vain trust in the doctrine of election. In Amos 4, he took away their trust in tithes and offerings; and also in this chapter (Amos 5:18-20), he took away their trust in the future destruction of their enemies by God Himself.