A Covenant With God by Sacrifice

Sometimes, when I'm reading my Bible, a single verse might jump out at me and offer a new understanding of a tenet of Scripture. I hope that you find that happening for you sometimes too. It can happen out of the blue, and sometimes, like today, it offers me a topic for an article. 

Today, my daily devotions brought me to read Psalm 50. Psalm 50 is entitled "God the Judge of the Righteous and the Wicked", and in it, Asaph, the author of this Psalm, compares the ways in which God will deal with those who are righteous and those who are unrighteous. As I was reading, verse five jumped out at me. It reads, "Gather My godly ones to Me, Those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice."

In my latest article, I made a mention about the importance of the Old Testament sacrificial system that God instituted in order to bridge the gap between Himself and His chosen people. That gap exists because of our fallen human nature, which, by necessity, separates us from God's holiness. As I stated in another recent article, sin cannot exist in God's presence because of His holiness. Any sinful creature would be immediately destroyed if it came into God's direct presence.

We get a picture of this in Exodus 33:18-23, when we read about Moses asking to see God when he is with God on Mount Sinai; "Then Moses said, “I pray You, show me Your glory!” 19 And He said, “I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.” 20 But He said, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!” 21 Then the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock; 22 and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen.”"

God granted Moses the desire of his heart to the extent that Moses was able to endure it, but God had to protect Moses from His own holiness while He did so. God used His own hand to shield Moses from the glory of His presence until such time as He had passed by. Then He removed His hand from Moses and allowed Moses to see only His back.

Even this was enough to have a physical effect on Moses. In chapter 34, we read that as Moses was coming down from the mountain, his face shone with the after effects of the glory of God. The people insisted that Moses wear a veil to hide his face from them because they were offset by what it looked like. This is a reflected afterglow of God's glory shining in the face of a created man, and this was still too much for the people to handle.

So, Leviticus tells us that God instituted a blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of the people so that God could be in their presence in the Tabernacle without them being destroyed. If there was still a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem today, the Jews would still be engaging in those sacrifices according to their beliefs. But God had the Romans destroy the Temple in 70 AD, and I believe that this was in order to signal to the Jews that the old covenant had been fulfilled and the sacrificial system had been brought to an end. The Jews refuse to acknowledge this, so they are still eager, to this very day, to rebuild the Temple and reinstate the sacrificial system.

But under the New Covenant, we as Believers are not under any obligation to offer a blood sacrifice to God, and this brings us back to Psalm 50:5 that jumped out at me.

This Psalm was likely written around the time of King David, hundreds of years before the Israelite Messiah would come and redeem His people. If this timeline is correct, the Tabernacle was still in use since it was actually David's son Solomon who would build the first Temple in Jerusalem, so the sacrifices were still ongoing. Given this, it is logical to conclude that the sacrifice mentioned in verse 5 is referring to the animal blood sacrifice. This is the way that was available for those who sought to be godly to appeal to God and to uphold the covenant with God.

But then, how does this verse apply to modern Believers. We hold that the Old Testament still stands today, though we are set free from the Law and it's rules for obtaining and maintaining cleanliness and separation from the world. How does God recognize us as His godly ones, and what sacrifice do we have to offer in order to maintain our covenant with Him?

I think that the Apostle Paul explains this to us in his letter to the church in Rome. Romans 12 starts off with the following instruction, "Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship." This is not a blood sacrifice; the blood of Jesus covers that aspect, but Paul is still calling on us to sacrifice to God. He is exhorting us to make our very lives a sacrifice to Him. It is a living and ongoing sacrifice, enacted on a daily basis as an act of love and worship to God. Paul goes on in chapter 12 to explain what that looks like, but that is not the focus of this article, so I won't delve into that further right now, though I urge you to read further for yourself.

There is a problem with a living sacrifice though. I am reminded of a quote attributed to Rick Warren, with whom I have numerous theological issues, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. Warren once stated that "The problem with a living sacrifice is that it can crawl off the altar.", much as he himself has done. Rick Warren has aligned himself with followers of Islam for some reason, which is contrary to everything that God demands of us. His theology has changed, and he has crawled off the altar due to these changes. He does not recognize this, but we can know a tree by it's fruit.

In the same way, even if we offer ourselves as living sacrifices to God and follow the directions of Paul which we read in Romans 12, it can be very easy to grow weary and slack off, or to change our minds or philosophy about what it means to serve God. This is what Warren was talking about when he said that a living sacrifice can crawl off the altar. This insinuates an intentional, yet potentially slow moving action. One can grow tired of continual sacrifice in one's life if that is what God has called us to.

This also reminds me of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac according to the command of God. There is some evidence that Isaac was at least a prepubescent boy at this time, so if he fought against Abraham at the altar, unwilling to submit to his fahter, Abraham, who was over 100 years old by this time, would have had quite a time of accomplishing his task. By this, we must assume that Isaac somehow accepted what his father was doing, trusting in God to provide the sacrifice in some way that Isaac did not understand, just as Abraham had said to him, which we read in Genesis 22:8.

Of course, from our current view, we recognize this as a type of foreshadowing of the sacrifice that God would offer to Himself in the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, to cover the sin debt of God's creation. And just as Isaac must have surrendered to Abraham and allowed himself to be put on the wood of the altar, Jesus also surrendered Himself to His Father's will and allowed Himself to be placed on the wood of the cross as a sacrifice. This was not done of His own will. We read of His prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane before His arrest. He says, "“My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.”" (v.39b); and again, "“My Father, if this cannot pass away unless I drink it, Your will be done.” (v.42b); and we read that He went and prayed the same again a third time.

These were not some quick one sentence prayers; Jesus was praying for some extended period of time. The disciples who were with him had time to fall asleep several times as they waited on Him, and the physical toll on Jesus' body was such that the Bible tells us that He sweat drops of blood (Luke 22:44). This is not hyperbole; hematridosis is an actual medical condition wherein the body secretes blood from the pores of the skin, like sweat. This extremely rare condition comes about when someone is under extreme fear or stress. This tells us that, though Jesus was willing to obey God in what He was called to do, He did not want to go through what He was facing. Jesus truly was a living sacrifice, and He showed us what it means to carry through with our commitment to God, regardless of the outcome.

Not many in the western world are called to sacrifice our very lives in obedience to God, though there have been some instances where people have been killed because of their statement of faith in God and their unwillingness to relent. I think of the Columbine school shooting in particular, but there have been others as well. Unfortunately, there are hundreds, and even thousands of our brothers and sisters in Christ around the world who have and who still are forfeiting their lives because of their faith in God. Nigeria is a current hotspot of anti-Christian persecution at the hands of Islamic terrorists. Those Nigerian Believers know what it means to climb up on that altar as a living sacrifice and to refuse to crawl off of it. What an amazing modern example for the rest of us to witness.

I will admit that I am not very good at remembering to hold these brothers and sisters up in prayer to God, but I want to encourage you to pray for them whenever they cross your mind. We can pray that the persecution stops, but that is unlikely without extreme pressure placed upon the Nigerian government to crack down on these Islamic terrorists. Rather, we can pray for supernatural protection for the Nigerian Believers, and even moreso, that when they are inevitably faced with death for their beliefs, that they will refuse to climb down off of that altar, and that they will follow the example of their Saviour, submitting to God's will unto death, even when their human desire is to live. 

It has been pointed out that Islam is the only religion in the world that calls for the beheading of those who refuse to submit to it; this leads me to believe that those who die at the hands of Islamists, who die for Christ, are setting the example for those whom are mentioned in Revelation 20:4, who are beheaded for their belief, and they will be the first to come to life and they will reign with Christ for the Millennium.

In the west, I believe that there will come a time when Believers will be called to the same kind of sacrifice that the Nigerians are now facing. Our faith has not yet been tested in the same ways that their faith has been, but that future is coming; the Bible tells us so. Jesus speculated while He was still on earth, after having told a parable of the persistent widow petitioning the unrighteous judge; "However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?" It is up to us Believers to hold onto the faith for Him to find. The Bible tells us that there will be a falling away, an apostasy from the true faith, so many will turn away from God, but strive to make sure that, should you find yourself living in that time of Christian persecution, you will not fall away.

At that future time for us, just as is now happening regarding the Nigerian saints and others around the world, God will be saying, "Gather My godly ones to Me, Those who have made a covenant with Me by [a living] sacrifice".