 |  |
offering that I could render. Then, being taught of Thee, I said, Lo, I come, presenting
myself before Thee, not with a dead and formal service, but with myself as a living
sacrifice."
The tenth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews establishes two great truths regarding
the doctrine of sacrifice.
(1) That the sacrifices offered under the law, together with its promises, were "shadows"
of good things to come: and
(2) That these "shadows" find their substance and fulfillment, not in the repentance of
the sinner, but in "the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. 10: 10).
Yet once more, Psa. 50: 8 has been similarly misconstrued:
"I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices or thy burnt offerings, to have been
continually before Me."
In these words God was not repudiating the Mosaic system but, as Perowne
comments:
"The reason for this act of judgment is given first negatively. It is not because the
people neglected the externals of the law, or had forgotten to offer the sacrifices
appointed by the law. They had brought them; but they had brought them as if the act
were everything, and as if the meaning of the act, and the spirit in which it was done,
were nothing. But God demands no service for its own sake (the cattle upon a thousand
hills were His), but as an expression of an obedient will. A thankful heart is more than all
burnt offerings."
It is in the light of such passages that we must read:
"To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me? . . . . . I am full of the
burnt offerings of rams . . . . . Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination
unto Me" (Isa. 1: 11-13).
These words were spoken to a people who could be likened to Sodom and Gomorrha,
whose prayers were rejected because the hands that were spread out to God were "full of
blood". Such were enjoined to wash and make themselves clean; to put away the evil of
their doings; to cease to do evil; to learn to do well. If the sacrificial system had been
devised to make "the mere ceremonial act an easy means of blotting out the moral
offence, iniquity would have been established by the law. The moral sense of the nation
would have been enfeebled" (Patrick Fairbairn, D.D.).
Similarly, we must read another such passage in Jeremiah:
"I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them
out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices" (Jer. 7: 22).
A superficial reading of such a passage creates a contradiction; it sets the Prophets
over against the Law. But, while it is true that when the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt
nothing was indeed said of burnt offering and sacrifice, the system was introduced later