AP

Psalm 66:13-15  I will come into your house with burnt offerings; I will perform my vows to you, that which my lips uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble.  I will offer to you burnt offerings of fattened animals, with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams; I will make an offering of bulls and goats. Selah

During my time doing National Service, our Platoon Sergeant, a World War II veteran, enjoyed saying, “Smoko time!  If you don’t smoke, just go through the motion”, the constant repetition of which became quite a ‘Dad joke’ to us.  I really feel for the unnamed Psalmist as I read the words in today’s verses.  The spirit in which they are expressed, and the state of the heart from which they flow, clearly differentiate him from the general run of the worshippers who regularly ‘went through the motions’ of keeping the requirements of the Mosaic Law in a purely mechanical ritual, but whose heart was not in it.

Sadly, these were the vast majority of whom God spoke through Isaiah: ”What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.  When you come to appear before me, who has required of you this trampling of my courts?  Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me” (Isaiah 1:1-13), and to whom Micah wrote: “With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high?  Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?  Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?  Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?  He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness/mercy [chesed], and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8)

No, this Psalmist was not like one of them.  He truly meant and felt what he said.  He knew what Asaph meant when he wrote, “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and perform [not just say] your vows to the Most High” (Psalm 50:14).  But I also feel for this Psalmist because he obviously experienced the ‘weakness of the flesh’, he knew what it was to ‘fail’ repeatedly in this ritual of making promises to his God!  How blessed we are, this side of the cross, to be able to experience the very thing his efforts were pointing to: the Perfect Sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb of God, who would die for him!  “Not all the blood of beasts on Jewish altars slain could give the guilty conscience peace or wash away the stain.  But Christ, the heav’nly Lamb, takes all our sins away; a sacrifice of nobler name and richer blood than they.” (Isaac Watts)

– Bruce Christian