REJECTED SACRIFICES
Isaiah 1:11. To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord.
Try to conceive what emotions would spring up in the breasts of the men to whom these words were first addressed—men who with most scrupulous care had fulfilled the requirements of a costly ceremonial worship, the respectable, the orthodox of their day. With what indignation they would rebuke the prophet, and how triumphantly they would remind him that all the sacrifices which they offered, and all the ceremonies they observed, were of divine appointment! And, doubtless, to their rebuke they would add a protestation that they had had a sincere delight in the services, which, they would not doubt, had come up as a sweet-smelling savour before the Lord. Both these allegations they might have made with truth, but the prophet would have dismissed them as irrelevant. What he denounced was not sacrifices, but certain sacrifices offered by particular individuals whose wickedness disqualified them for taking part in divine worship. “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices,” &c.
But why should the wickedness of the worshippers cause the rejection of the worship, seeing that it is of divine appointment? Because—
1. Sacrifices are in themselves worthless to God. He does not need, nor is He enriched by our offerings (Psalms 50:7-13).
2. Sacrifices were instituted merely to be expressions of and helps to human piety, and are worthless when there is no piety to be expressed or fostered by them. Outward worship is to religion just what a bank-note is to commerce; it is valuable only in so far as it is really representative of something beyond itself. The worship which does not really represent penitence, faith, and love in the worshipper is a falsehood, and is necessarily repulsive to the God of truth, and to the offerer of it is a deadly hurt. As the sunlight which develops life only hastens the putrefaction of the dead, so the very services which help to sanctify and ennoble the saintly may more completely disqualify the insincere for heaven.
3. Piety towards God is proved, not by costly sacrifices and stately ceremonies, even though pungent emotions are experienced by those who offer and take part in them, but by its pervasive influence on the character and the life. In family life love is proved by obedience; and to our Heavenly Father the protestations of reverence and love which are offered by men who live in disregard and defiance of His requirements are naturally and necessarily repulsive (1 Samuel 15:22-23). No elaborateness or costliness of ceremonial worship can atone for the absence of godliness in the lives of the worshippers; sacrifices are no equivalents for sanctification; and by the love of sin in the soul of the pretended worshipper even a divinely-appointed ritual is rendered abhorrent to God.
Judaism and its ritual are now things of the past, but men still need to be reminded of the facts now pointed out. The men of our day, after committing during the week all the sins denounced in the prophecies of Isaiah, assemble in the sanctuary on the Sunday, and, because they enjoy its services, they imagine that they are well-pleasing to God, and will bring down His blessing on themselves. To-day, as of old, men need to be told plainly that public worship may be an abomination to God, and that, instead of making those who join in it more sure of heaven, it may, by confirming them in their self-delusion, make their eternal damnation more certain.
There is another side to all this. While “the sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord,” “the prayer of the upright is His delight” (Psalms 147:11; Psalms 50:23). Concerning the “true worshippers,” who “worship the Father in spirit and in truth,” it is declared that “the Father seeketh such to worship Him.” How wonderful, how astonishing is that! That GOD, whom angels, archangels, and all the shining hosts of heaven adore, should not merely condescend to accept the worship of men upon earth, but that He should seek such worship! Think much of that surprising and comforting assurance. It used to seem to me almost too wonderful to be true, but I believe and understand it now. I am helped to understand it almost every day; for almost every day my little girl steals away from her nursemaid. I hear her climbing laboriously up the stairs; it is an immense journey for her little legs; and then presently she knocks at my door, and calls me by my name. I am often busy when she comes; she interrupts me when it is not pleasant to be interrupted; but, notwithstanding, I rejoice that there is so much love for me in her heart that she thinks it worth while to climb up so far, just to see me for a moment and then be sent down again. So the marvellous “seeketh” is explained by the word that comes before it! The “FATHER seeketh such to worship Him”! When His children come, and knock at His door, and call, “Abba, Father!” He listens with a joy that only a father can understand.
“His saints are precious in His sight;
He views His children with delight;
He sees their hope, He knows their fear,
And looks, and loves His image there.”
TRUE AND FALSE RELIGION
Isaiah 1:11; Isaiah 1:16-17. To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord. I am full of the burnt-offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats.… Wash you, make you clear; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.
What was the business of the ancient prophet? Not merely to predict events. His chief work was to make men realise vividly the presence of God. Religions, in order to their permanence, require system. But religious systems, with their creeds, forms, and ceremonies, have an inevitable tendency to coldness and deadness. The prophet was sent to counteract this tendency. It was his mission to restore to great words their great meanings, to cause moral principles to reassert themselves as the lords of conscience and of will—in a word, to prophesy on the dry bones of a decaying religion until there came upon them flesh and sinew, and there passed into them the breath of spiritual life. Such a mission was that of Isaiah. In his time religion was in a state of petrifaction, nay, rather of putrefaction. From this fact his prophetic message takes its keynote. It begins with an invective that reminds us of John the Baptist.
What was the condition of things that provoked his indignation? Not a lack of religious observances; there was a redundancy of them. That which caused a righteous anger to burn within him vehemently was their perversion of the sacrificial system in which they gloried, their dissociation of it from the moral law, to which God intended it to be only a supplement. It was given to teach men the hatefulness and the terrible consequences of sin, and the duty of consecration to God; but they separated it from the moral law, and allowed all its spiritual meaning to drop out of it. Instead of using it as a help to morality, they were making it the substitute for morality. Coming up red-handed from their murders, and reeking with their foul vices, they stood up before God, claiming His favour; for were they not sacrificing to Him, yea, in accordance with the regulations Himself had given? No wonder that a man with veracity in him and a love of righteousness should pour out upon such men and such offerings the whole wrath of his nature.
From this exposition take the following practical lessons—
1. All forms of religion have a tendency to lose their original purity and freshness. As a stream, clear at its fountain-head, but turbid before it reaches the sea; as our planet, which physicists say was flung off at first from the sun a glowing mass of light and heat, has been cooling down ever since; so is it with religions and churches. As a rule, their history has been one of gathering accretions and of diminishing purity and power in proportion to their distance from their fountain-head. So was it with Judaism. So has it been with Christianity. Contrast Christianity as we have it in St. Paul’s epistles, all aglow with fervour and love, and that of the time of Leo X., with its professed head and most of his court professed infidels, and the officials of the Church selling indulgences to sin for money! Luther lit the fire again; but Protestantism has had its illustrations of the same law. Witness the state of things in this country in the last century. In view of this fact let the Church pray for prophetic spirits who shall in each generation rekindle the dying fires; and, apart from the influence of specially-gifted men, let each Church betake itself continually to the Fountain-head of spiritual life.
2. False religiousness is worse than none at all. Isaiah says, not simply that such observances are of no avail with God, but that they are abominations to Him. We can see the reason. Such a religion as that which Isaiah denounced works harm to the individual and to the cause of godliness generally; to the individual, by inspiring him with a vain confidence; to the cause of godliness, by furnishing points for the shafts of ridicule, by which faith is killed in many hearts. It would be difficult to say who are the greatest promoters of infidelity—professed atheists or hypocritical religionists.
3. It is a perilous thing to overlook the connection between impression and practice in religion. In Isaiah 1:16-17, the prophet shows us what the true nexus between them is. “Your ceremonies and observances will do you no good unless you practise the morality, the judgment, mercy, and love to which they point.” Our power of receiving impressions is under a directly opposite law from our power of practice. The former steadily decreases by exercise, the latter as steadily increases. This is so in religion, as well as in other things. The impression produced upon the Jews by the sacrifices would decrease as they were repeated, unless by them they were led to practical righteousness, and their whole system would in time become utterly powerless as a moral incentive; just as, if a man is for a few mornings wilfully deaf to an alarum in his bedroom, it presently loses its power even to waken him. The same law will operate with us. The preaching of the gospel is intended to produce impression, and that again to lead to practice. If the latter does not follow at once, the chances are all against its ever following, because the impressions will become feebler with each repetition. A fact this for all hearers to ponder.
4. Religious observances and machinery of all kinds have their end in the development of character. This was so in Isaiah’s time. It is so now. If their religious observances were not leading them to “cease to do evil,” and to “learn to do well,” but were hindering them from doing so, it were better for them to give them up. So our creeds, organisations, ministers, &c., are of use only as related to character. They are the scaffolding, character is the building; they are the tools, that the work. If no building is going on, this parade of scaffolding is an imposture, and had better be swept away.—J. Brierley, B.A.