David, the man “after God’s own heart,” was familiar with God’s idea of sacrifice as prescribed in the Law of Moses. He came to understand, however, the deeper issues of concern to God. In his meditations towards God, he recorded in Psalm 51:16-17 the following profound truth:
For You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it;
You do not delight in burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken (shabar) spirit,
A broken and a contrite (dawkaw) heart —
These, O God, You will not despise.
Looking at the Hebrew words used here brings some interesting concepts into the light. The word shabar means more than to break or be broken; but destroy in pieces, crush, rupture; bring to a (new) birth. The word dawkaw means to collapse, crumble, beat to pieces; humble.
Getting to the real heart of the matter: love and sacrifice
So David understood that beyond any type of ritual exercise or sacrifice, God purposes to deal with the human heart. In His love, Father God brings us to crush the idols in our heart; the vain images of little real worth. He grasped hold of how we can better serve our soul by sacrificing our pride and sinful desires and yielding to God’s Holy Spirit.
David grasped hold of a key concept: through the process, something precious is birthed within. Our ideas, ideals, values, desires, hopes, dreams, mental images and aspirations come into alignment with God. They may shake and crumble, but it is out of God’s love for us to bring us to a healthy spiritual alignment by conforming to His image and nature that He created within us.
We were all wired to do so. It brings us to cultivate a deeper and richer trusting faith in our Creator, Father God. It makes us more whole.
It’s amazing, therefore, to see how at the same time God purposes to break us He seeks to build us up by birthing new values and desires. It’s how His grace and truth work together. It’s how the Potter fashions renewed, refreshed and strengthened vessels that will honor Him—for our benefit and His glory!
Consider the sacrifices as symbols of relational bridges
I’ve often wondered why God made animal sacrifices such a central part of the Old Testament law. There had to be a reason why God used the phrase most holy over thirty times in the context of prescribing the sacrifices.
So what was the purpose of five types of sacrifices? What picture did they attempt to illustrate, and what greater issues did they point to? How is this relevant to us?
Consider the five types of sacrifices as relational bridges. They served as types and shadows, or outward observances of inner realities. As symbols, they pointed to a greater reality with more significance and purpose.
Seeing them from this perspective can help us connect spiritual realities about our relationship with God and relationships with one another. In total, the five offerings served as visual aids to help us appreciate and value crucial dynamics of God’s covenant as they relate to life. Can you see the big picture?
Burnt offering: value wholeness and submission of the will
Grain offering: appreciate God’s provision
Peace offering: value reconciling relationships; with God and one another
Sin offering: see cause and effect as it relates to moral corruption
Trespass offering: understand compensatory restitution and value redemption
To even think of killing and sacrificing an animal to make restitution for sin or what you did wrong, or sacrifice your provision or something of value to you brings you to humility and gratefulness. It also brings you to the place of faith—trusting that God will meet your greater needs and bring a form of redemption.
That was God’s purpose in a nutshell. Even more, they reveal one’s need for a better way of making restitution and being redeemed. They also prepare one’s heart for ultimate redemption—Messiah’s redemption.
This is exactly what the writer of Hebrews revealed had come to pass!
Under the old system, the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a young cow could cleanse people’s bodies from ceremonial impurity. Just think how much more the blood of Christ will purify our consciences from sinful deeds so that we can worship the living God. For by the power of the eternal Spirit, Christ offered himself to God as a perfect sacrifice for our sins (Hebrews 9:13-14).
Sacrifice is about demonstrating the values of the heart
So the sacrifices were types of engagements with God—activities or exercises you might say—that kept the fear of the Lord before people. The Bible emphasized them to be visual aids.
They serve as continuous reminders to reveal the benefits and values of being whole and live free; cleansed from sin—in one’s mind, heart and conscience—and refreshed and energized to be who God created you to be and do what God ordained you to do.
Responding to God’s amazing grace in real and relevant ways
We have a hard time seeing how God truly wants us to experience a higher, richer way of life. Understanding the greater reality of sacrifice brings you to a higher kind of life.
It connects you to God’s dominion and reality in real and practical ways. It enables greater dynamic access than the internet! It fosters and empowers a living dynamic access to God’s rich and everlasting saving grace.
This was the thrust of the message Paul proclaimed in Romans 5:1-5, depicting a kind of faith that brings real access and connectivity to God’s love and grace; a kind of access that brings hope, freedom and peace.
There is also a special message God communicated through the writer of Psalm 50 in speaking to “those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice.” God offers a kind of daily salvation energized by the power of His Holy Spirit that keeps you in His grace through trusting faith.
Sacrifice reveals our priorities
God’s concept of sacrifice, therefore, is about the reality of what it means to “seek first the kingdom of God” so that “all these things”—the things you need most in life, the really precious things—will be yours (Matthew 6:33). How?
God’s kind of sacrifice demonstrates how you value the things of God—the things of real substance and importance—more than the things you think you want and desire. It places God’s values above your own ideas and ideals, hopes and dreams and images and aspirations.
This kind of sacrifice expresses true worship in spirit and in truth (John 4:23). How?
The kind of sacrifice God speaks of exalts God by putting God’s priorities—His values, ways and means above your own. It brings you to realize that the things God values and ways He prescribes to deal with life’s challenges bring real peace and joy to the soul and express real love between people.
How? It shifts your center of being—your focus and footing—off self and onto God, bringing real balance. David experienced much conflict in his life, but he also experienced such grace in real and tangible ways. He described this state of being to which God brought him in several special ways.
One state he called a broad place (Psalm 18:19; 31:8); a wide open place, a place of safety, inner strength, freedom and joy. Another was an even place (Psalm 26:12); a place giving you a sense of straightness, harmony and alignment. He found these places because he frequently inhabited the holy place (Psalm 24:3); the place of intimacy with God, where immersed in God’s holy and jealous love, God’s fire burns away the prideful imaginations and vain desires of humanity’s corrupted, polluted and sinful heart.
Yes, sacrificing your human pride and desire for worthless things brings you into God’s presence in a way the human mind finds hard to understand, but heart can sense. It brings an inner peace and strength—the strength of the Holy Spirit—that brings real confidence and hope because it comes from God!
It also brings forth the wisdom and counsel of God to help you navigate through life’s challenges. Moreover, it brings back to you things of greater substance and real value. God calls this real redemption and restoration.
Obedience and sacrifice is how God knows you
Those who have found such grace from God’s throne have come to know the joys of listening to and obeying the voice of God; and coming to the understanding of what God means when He speaks of “those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice” (Psalm 50:5). What does this mean? Obedience and sacrifice is how God knows your heart. Really? How?
Look to Abraham, the father of faith. Abraham was called by God to venture out from the familiar surroundings of his homeland and go through years of some serious trials—exercises to cultivate trusting faith in God. His final test was unequivocally obeying God’s voice and being willing to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. God stopped him, though, as he stretched forth the knife.
He heard the voice of the Angel of the Lord saying, “now I know that you fear God” (Genesis 22:12). By his unrelenting obedience, even to the point of sacrificing what was most valuable to him, God knew him. God knew his heart was wholly devoted, unequivocally surrendered first and foremost to God.
God revealed through Abraham these simple key truths; that by obedience and sacrifice we reveal our true heart towards God. Obeying God shows that we honor and exalt God above anything else. Sacrifice is how we demonstrate our devotion to God. It’s how we demonstrate the righteousness of faith, or our right-standing before God to walk with God.
Before manifesting His power in Abraham’s life in a very real and personal way, God had posed a challenge to Abraham: “walk before Me and be blameless” (Genesis 17:1). Abraham learned what it took to walk before—or in the presence of—a holy God. Not religion; but hearing and responding in faith to the voice of the supreme Shepherd. He didn’t ask for a lamb for sacrifice. He was looking at Abraham’s heart.
This is exactly the twofold key that the Lord had affirmed through Samuel; the crucial value of “obeying the voice of the Lord” and “to obey is better than sacrifice” (Samuel 15:22). For centuries thousands have heard the voice of the Shepherd calling His sheep—to experience this reality and be part of His fold, His vineyard, and abide in Him (John 15).
Yes, it was out of this supernatural love, that by the power of the Holy Spirit, grace and truth met together to birth God’s greatest miracle. As John revealed, “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).
Experiencing miraculous life in Him
Jesus revealed the truth; that the drive behind our thoughts, behaviors and actions lies in the heart. We all need God’s grace and the cleansing of the blood of Messiah Jesus and power of the Holy Spirit to be deemed holy and clean before God.
That is what Jesus taught and made a reality. He didn’t do away with the spirit or power of God’s law, but reveal its greater purpose and manifest its reality.
He came amongst the unholy and unclean to make us holy. Jesus came to bring us into God’s own holiness. He came to manifest the reality of God and give us a new refreshed, cleansed and holy heart.
He came as Son of Man and Son of God to relate with mankind and take on the power of evil at its very core—within us—to transform us and make us holy. In Him, we are made holy as we are transformed in His image and identity. Truly, as we are created in the image of God, we have the capacity to come into alignment and harmony with God according to His standards and ways—which work from the inside-out—by living in Him.
This was the gist of what Paul taught. It is what he meant in his pivotal message of encouragement to believers recorded in Romans 12:1-2. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”
Paul taught what it meant to live and be clean before God. “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are” (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).
Peter, too, encouraged believers to embrace the reality of being a cleansed vessel, fir for God’s greater purposes. He connected centuries of God reaching out to humanity through the scriptures. “Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; as obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your ignorance; as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, “Be holy, for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:13-16).
Crossing the bridge to God’s reality
The prophet, Jeremiah, spoke of, and the writer of Hebrews affirmed the reality of “the law written on our hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33 and Hebrews 10:16). It brings us to reconciling our desires, values, motivations, attitudes, inclinations and intentions with those God desires to bring out in us.
Why is this important? The heart is the first battleground over which God and Satan fight continually. Just as love and affections issue from the heart, so does anger, bitterness, jealousy and resentment. Faithfulness, loyalty, commitment and allegiances are also fashioned in the heart.
We can clearly see, therefore, that from within the heart issues qualities and characteristics beyond what is merely “good” because within the heart reflect the qualities that express how you are created in the image of God. Seeing this truth and pursuing it with all your heart will make you whole, and make all the difference in your life.