Romans 12:9 → Amos 5:15

Paul's terse command — "Love must be sincere. Detest what is evil; cling to what is good" (Romans 12:9) — reproduces almost verbatim the prophetic summons of Amos 5:15, "Hate evil, love good," itself echoed in the Psalter's own moral instruction: "Turn away from evil and do good" (Psalm 37:27) and "You who love the LORD, hate evil" (Psalm 97:10). Amos issued his call in the context of Israel's hollow, evil-tolerant worship — sacrifices offered while justice was denied at the gate (Amos 5:21-24) — so the command to "hate evil, love good" was never abstract ethics but the concrete alternative to a worship that had learned to coexist with injustice. Paul places the same non-negotiable polarity at the head of his ethical instruction for the church: love that is anypokritos, "without hypocrisy" or a false face, cannot be neutral toward evil, because a love indifferent to what is good and evil is not the love Amos, the Psalter, or Paul commend but its counterfeit. This pattern of holding fast to good and abhorring evil belongs to the whole canon because it belongs to God's own unchanging character (Psalm 97:10's ground: "you who love the LORD"), so Paul is not innovating an ethic but is describing, once more, what it looks like for a redeemed community to share the moral character of the God it loves. Its terminus is not merely well-ordered behavior but Christlikeness: to hate what Christ hated on the cross and love what he loved there is to have one's own loves increasingly conformed to his, so that sincere love becomes the visible fruit of beholding him (2 Corinthians 3:18) rather than a rule imposed from outside.