AP

Numbers 29:12-13“On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work. Celebrate a festival to the LORD for seven days.  Present as an aroma pleasing to the LORD a food offering consisting of a burnt offering of thirteen young bulls, two rams and fourteen male lambs a year old, all without defect.”

Here, the LORD was insructing Moses about the annual celebration of the ‘Feast of Tabernacles’.

God, our Creator, has gifted us with the amazing gift of smell.  I think I had failed to fully appreciate the value and wonder of the amazing olfactory system that my gracious Creator had built into the design of my body, until it ‘broke down’ (it seems permanently) when I had a minor stroke in 2017.  Like many things we ‘take for granted’, we only realise their true value, benefit and blessing when we lose them. So my experience has taught me to be more thankful to God each day, and to ‘count my many blessings!’

How pleasing it is (used to be!) to be in the vicinity of a good chef’s kitchen or BBQ!  Like many aspects of creation that God has intentionally ‘built in’ to his Design, our olfactory system provides him with a meaningful way of explaining to us in a way we can appreciate through our physical senses, an important spiritual truth – in this case, the immense pleasure it gives HIM for us to offer our lives in complete devotion to him, holding nothing back.

The ‘pleasing aroma’ phrase, occuring so many times in connection with the Old Testament sacrifiucial system, is most commonly associated with the burnt offering, where the whole animal (or grain) is consumed by fire.  The symbolism is extremely powerful and easy for us to understand and appreciate.  It was sad when God’s people, Israel, \misunderstood the symbolism and focussed on the  sacrifice itself instead of what it meant for their daily living.

When King Saul failed to comply with the LORD’s unambiguous instruction to ‘totally destroy the Amalekites and all that belongs to them’ (1 Samuel 15:3), Samuel was instructed to tell him: “Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the LORD?  To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.”

Let us make sure we don’t make the same mistake., either by just ‘going through the actions’ of ‘devotion’ to the Lord who himself has already made the ultimate sacrifice FOR us, or by failing to offer our whole lives in genuine, unconditional devotion to him.  “All to Jesus I surrender, all to him I freely give; I will ever love and trust him, in his presence daily live.  I surrender, I surrender all; I surrender, I surrender all; all to you, my blessed Saviour, I surrender all.  All to Jesus I surrender, humbly at his feet I bow; worldly pleasures all forsaken, take me Jesus, take me now.  All to Jesus I surrender, Lord, I give myself to you; fill me with your love and power, let your blessings me renew” (J.W.van de Venter)

– Bruce Christian