The first in a series on sacrifice and Christianity preached in the North Peace, Summer 2023.

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Do you think I drink the blood of goats, or eat the flesh of bulls? -Ps
50:13

Over the next few weeks, we will be considering what we offer and give to
God. Another of way of phrasing that is to say that in the next few weeks we
will be reflecting on a Christian understanding of sacrifice, how that begins
in the Hebrew Scriptures, is fulfilled in Christ, and is experienced and lived
out by us now. Sacrifice is an idea very alien to us. We use the word in our
liturgies. And it carries ancient meaning, and with that meaning it carries
smells, it carries sounds, it carries tastes.

Even with the second generation in Genesis, both Cain and Abel find
themselves moved to make offerings to God, to make sacrifices. Cain offers
vegetables. Abel offers the blood of animals. God is pleased by Abel and not
pleased by Cain, which leads to Cain’s jealously and the first murder. In
cultures around the world, from incense in the far east, from cups of wine
poured out in the Aegean to the horrific sacrifices of the Aztecs there is
something innately human in our chase after the divine to want to offer something
to heaven and so connect with the eternal. As the world loses touch with
Christianity I will not be surprised if in a couple generations they start
again inventing their own sacrifices.

In Hosea (5:15-6:6) today we hear that in these weary lives of ours it is
the same God who leaves us vulnerable and bare and hurt and empty who we go to
for healing and restoration. It is he who tears us down. It is he who has hewn
us like stone or oak. It is he who has slain us. Hosea tells us that what God
wants from us is steadfast love. Steadfast love. Not the blood of animals. Not
cups of wine poured out. He wants us to offer us our love. He wants love that
is steady.

But what is our love like? How fickle a thing it is, that wanders from idol
to idol. Sometimes when we pray, we cannot get to the end of the prayer without
our minds wandering to what’s for dinner. We cannot get through a day without
rebelling against our God and seeking after our own selfish ways. This is the
kind of love we have to offer. A wandering love. An unsteady love indeed. And what’s
more he knows. We discussed a couple weeks ago how when Moses went up the
mountain to receive the Ten Commandments the people had already rebelled
against the hand who saved them from Egypt and set up for themselves a golden
calf as another God. Here in Hosea God compares our love to morning dew that
dries up, like a whisp of cloud that goes away early in the day. Our love is
not a love that endures.

He knows and all the same he demands. What does the Lord require of us?
Steadfast love. What do we not have? Steadfast love. But we know, because Jesus
told us on the Emmaus Road, that the prophets too hoped in the gospel now made
clear in his victory over death. Hosea points that after two days in the pit of
death, on the third he will lift us and raise us up. He is pointing to Jesus’s
death and resurrection. He is hoping to have what he cannot have outside of
Jesus’s bodily death and resurrection. For all of us who are united to Christ
are delivered by his death and we will be lifted up in his new life, our hope
is to die in him and live in him, as it was the hope of the prophets. For God
requires what we do not have, steadfast love and knowledge of God. For God
provides what we do not have, steadfast love and knowledge of God.

We will be reading through Romans for a long time this summer so you will
have the opportunity to follow Paul’s argument here in chapter 4. Paul here is
saying that it is not the law that made Abraham righteous, Abraham did not have
the law. He had the promise, and by faith in the promise he was counted
righteous. And Paul here says something radical. None of Abraham’s descendants
were ever accounted righteous because of the law. The law, the commandments of
God could not and did not make them holy, could not and did not set them apart
for God, could not and did not collect them in as his own prize possession. But
all those whom God received as his own, all those who were righteous before him
became so through faith in the promises of God.

They hoped against hope. Abraham was an old man. Sarah seemed barren. How
could God make a righteous nation of his descendants? They were dead. Even as
we are dead and have not the sacrifice to offer that our God demands. These
words Paul says are not offered for Abraham’s benefit, but for ours. Faith was reckoned
to him as righteousness. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who
raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.

We need to ask God to give us this faith. We must trust not in our dead
selves but in the living Lord to give life to this faith, to give steadfastness
to our wavering love, to give us knowledge of the promises he will be sure to
keep. May the God of grace give us what he needs to find in us, so that we may
offer our hearts, ourselves, our lives as a pleasing sacrifice to his glory.
Do you think I drink the blood of goats, or eat the flesh of bulls? -Ps
50:13