I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.
Ver. 21. I hate, I despise your feast days] Wherewith ye think to stop my mouth and to make me your debtor; saying, as that Roman emperor, when his enemy came against him, Non sic Deos coluimus ut ille nos vinceret, We have not so served the gods that they should serve us no better than to give the enemy the better of us. The feast days and solemn assemblies you so much build upon are yours, and not mine; "I never commanded them" (viz. as you may use them), "neither came they ever into my mind," Jeremiah 32:35. So far am I, therefore, from accepting your sacrifices, as that I hate, I despise, I will not smell: an elegant asyndeton, importing God's utter distaste of what they did ("The sacrifice of the wicked is abomination: how much more, when he bringeth it with a wicked mind!" Pro 21:27), and assuring a sudden vengeance, as in that quick and smart passage, Go, preach, baptize, "he that believeth not shall be damned," Mark 16:16. Will-worship and outsideness in religion is very odious to the Almighty; and stinks worse in his nostrils than any ill vapour from the vilest dunghill doth in ours: or as those poisonous smells that ascended up once from the five cities of the plain, and brought down from him a counter poison of fire and brimstone. Rome also (that spiritual Sodom) shall be destroyed in like sort, with a terrible fire, Revelation 17:16; Revelation 18:8,9, for her detestable will-worships, superstitions, and idolatries, which no other nitre can possibly purge. Revelation 13:18, the whole "number of the beast," whatsoever is numbered to belong unto him, is but the "number of a man," human inventions and will wisdom; men will have it so; and this is the sum of all Popish religion. When the wit of man will be overpleasing God, with better devices than his own, will needs despite him with seeming honours; it turns to madness, and ends in mischief.