MAIN HOMILETICS OF Proverbs 21:3
THE MORE ACCEPTABLE SACRIFICE
I. The sacrifices of the Mosaic law were acceptable to God as ceremonial signs. They were instituted by God, and therefore He expected them to be offered, and was displeased when His commands concerning them were disregarded. But they were but the means to an end, and if they did not lead to that end they were worthless in His sight. They were intended to awaken a sense of sin, and to be accompanied by observance of higher precepts and by obedience to more enduring laws. It availed nothing for a man to offer his bullock or his goat unless he laid his will upon the altar at the same time—no sin-offering could be acceptable to God unless the sin was put away, and no meat-offering could be regarded with favour if the heart of the offerer was without love to his neighbour and his life was marked by acts of injustice to him. It was of no avail to come before the Lord with “thousands of rams, or with ten thousand rivers of oil” unless the higher requirement was fulfilled—to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God (Micah 6:7-8).
II. The doing of justice and judgment is more acceptable to God because it is a moral reality. To love our neighbour as ourself is in itself good,—it is a moral attribute, an element of character, a part of the man himself. It is an expression of love to God and of obedience to His commands which can be made anywhere and at all times, for to do justice and judgment is the law of the moral universe, and belongs to heaven as much as to earth. It is to do what God has been doing from all eternity, for it is written that they “are the habitation of His throne” (Psalms 89:14). All other offerings without these are “vain oblations” and even “an abomination” (Isaiah 1:13) unto Him who owns “every beast of the forest and the cattle upon a thousand hills” (Psalms 50:10). To expect a holy and spiritual Being to accept anything less than a moral reality is to expect Him to be satisfied with less than would often content a fellow-creature.
OUTLINES AND SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS
Sacrifice; literally, slaughter. But with slender exceptions, the slaughter is a slaughter for sacrifice.… He did not love the slaughtering of His Son upon the cross. He did not love the slaughtering of beasts year by year continually. On the contrary, He does love righteousness, and, therefore, He does love, in the severities that men impugn, that very element of right which is the attribute that they would bring into the question. Doing righteousness Himself, He prefers the right-doing of His creatures to any form of sacrifice or possible service they can ever render.—Miller.
“Sacrifice” at best is only circumstantially good—rectitude is essentially so. Sacrifice, at best, is only the means and expression of good; rectitude is goodness itself. God accepts the moral without the ceremonial, but never the ceremonial without the moral. The universe can exist without of the ceremonial, but not without the moral.—David Thomas.
This maxim of the Proverbs was a bold saying then—it is a bold saying still; but it well unites the wisdom of Solomon with that of his father in the 51st Psalm, and with the inspiration the later prophets.—Stanley.