May 7 Daily Devotional

I do not rebuke you for your sacrifices or your burnt offerings, which are ever before me. God now declares, that he attached no value whatsoever to sacrifices in themselves considered. Not that he asserts this rite of the Jews to have been in vain and useless, for in that case it never would have been instituted by God; but there is this difference between religious exercises and others, that they can only meet the approbation of God when performed in their true spirit and meaning. Mere outward ceremonies being therefore possessed of no value, God repudiates the idea that he had ever insisted upon them as the main thing in religion, or designed that they should be viewed in any other light than as helps to spiritual worship. The prophet Micah says (6:7), “Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy?” “I desire mercy,” he says in another place (Hosea 6:6), “and not sacrifice.” Where a right use has been made of the institution, and they have been observed merely as ceremonies for the confirmation and increase of faith, then they are described as being essentially connected with true religion; but when offered without faith, or, what is still worse, under the impression of their meriting the favour of God for such as continue in their sins, they are reprobated as a mere profanation of divine worship.

I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens. God is absolutely independent of human offerings. He here points at the wide distinction between himself and man, the latter being dependent for a frail subsistence upon food and drink, while he is the self-existent One, and communicates life to all beside. While the world had a beginning, he himself was from eternity. From this it follows, that, as he subsisted when there was nothing without him which could contribute to his fullness, he must have in himself a glorious all-sufficiency.

Sacrifice unto God praise.* Faith, self-denial, a holy life, and patient endurance of the cross, are all sacrifices which please God. But as prayer is the offspring of faith, and uniformly accompanied with patience and mortification of sin, while praise, where it is genuine, indicates holiness of heart, we need not wonder that these two points of worship should be here employed to represent the whole.

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