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

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his faithful ones. Ps. 116:15

We are reflecting together on what matter of sacrifice is pleasing to God.
Last week we heard how God desires rams or bulls but steadfast love. Last week
we heard how God knowing we have not steadfast love offers of himself that love
to himself for us. Last week we heard how Abraham was made righteous by his
offering uf faith, and it is by the offering of faith that we too may be
gathered among the precious ones of God. Today we will continue our inquiry, of
what sacrifice pleases God.

We happen today in Romans upon the doctrine of the substitutionary
atonement. Jesus who was righteous died for us who were unrighteous. Paul
points out how this does not make earthly sense, how the economy of heaven
differs from the economy of earth. Rarely will anyone die for a righteous
person, though someone might. But God loves us such that he died for us while
we were enemies. JI Packer puts it this way: The traitor is forgiven, brought
in for supper, and given the family name.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the
ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person–though perhaps
for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love
for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. (Romans 5:6-8)

God tells us when teaching Israel to sacrifice in the temple that the life
of a beast in its blood. For this reason when God places man back on the earth
after the flood he forbids them to drink blood. Jesus is the lamb without spot
or blemish, offered up to God, to suffer in our place under the just wrath of
God. In this way none may say God is not just. God does not wave away the demands of
holiness. He demanded justice and received it in full. And so we enter into the
courts of thanksgiving by a payment not our own, adopted into a family not our
own, because of a sacrifice we owed and could not and did not pay. Jesus truly
suffered and was crucified, truly died and was buried, to purchase for God a
people reconciled to the Father. Jesus was a sacrifice not only for original
sin but for all the particular sins of men. He made there of himself, offered
only once, a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice oblation and satisfaction
for the sins of the whole world.

When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were
harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Mttw 9:36

This is what’s so bizarre about our relationship with God. It makes no
earthly sense. Its like that scene from the movie Ant Man where the little girl
receiving a grotesque doll as a birthday present says “he’s so ugly, I
LOVE him.” We are so ugly and God loves us. We see here how this Jesus who
suffers for his people looks out upon the crowd and has compassion for them,
longing for them, in their helplessness. He sees us as sheep without a
shepherd. So he sends forth the apostles to proclaim the coming of the kingdom
of heaven. He sends them forth to teach us to look in the right way. He sends
them forth to gather lost sheep to the one shepherd.

So much of modern Christianity is individualistic. We value private
revelations and private experiences. We talk about what God has done for me,
about a personal relationship with Jesus, we sing “Into the Garden
Alone” – with that line: “and the love we share as we tarry there no other has ever known.”
I don’t know that this is how God sees us or loves us. Jesus sees the crowd and
has compassion upon the crowd and is gathering them up into a new kind of
community, a community delivered by his blood, a kingdom under his protection
as King. Jesus’s death is the perfect and sufficient sacrifice to make us right
with God. What Jesus desires out of this offering is the same thing he desired
when he delivered Israel from slavery, a treasured possession, a people, a holy
nation. Hear the words God offers at Sinai to Israel.

You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’
wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep
my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples.
Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and
a holy nation. (Exodus 19:4-6)

God longs for a people set apart for himself. He saves us from this
perishing world into a people. If Anglicanism is going to survive at all it is
going to have to come to terms with the fact that it has lost the culture out
there and that it needs to become its own Christian culture here in earth. We
need to develop a sense of how to orient our lives seriously and deliberately
such that are we living together as a diaspora community whose home is the
holiness of God. We need to teach our children the ways of the country we long
for, the language and the sights and the smells and the songs need to permeate
their imaginations and their longings and their minds. That takes time, and it
takes life together, it is a work of generations, but we need to stop sitting
on our hands.

See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be
wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Mttw 10:16

Jesus with these words sent out the apostles to begin gathering and forming
what would become the church. These men witnessed to this Christ unto their
deaths. They lived and died as martyrs. How can we hope to be following in
their footsteps? How can we hope to die for Christ when we will not even live
for him? May God so orient our lives that we grow as a people offered to him,
that we may be accepted as a people for whom he offered his life and his death
and a new life beyond death.

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his faithful ones. Ps.
116:15