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And who is so foolish as to suppose that the things offered to God are
needed by Him for some uses of His own? Divine Scripture in many
places explodes this idea. Not to be wearisome, suffice it to quote
this brief saying from a psalm: "I have said to the Lord, Thou art
my God: for Thou needest not my goodness." We must believe,
then, that God has no need, not only of cattle, or any other earthly
and material thing, but even of man's righteousness, and that
whatever right worship is paid to God profits not Him, but man. For
no man would say he did a benefit to a fountain by drinking, or to the
light by seeing. And the fact that the ancient church offered animal
sacrifices, which the people of God now-a-days read of without
imitating, proves nothing else than this, that those sacrifices
signified the things which we do for the purpose of drawing near to
God, and inducing our neighbor to do the same. A sacrifice,
therefore, is the visible sacrament or sacred sign of an invisible
sacrifice. Hence that penitent in the psalm, or it may be the
Psalmist himself, entreating God to be merciful to his sins, says,
"If Thou desiredst sacrifice, I would give it: Thou delightest
not in whole burnt-offerings. The sacrifice of God is a broken
heart: a heart contrite and humble God will not despise." Observe
how, in the very words in which he is expressing God's refusal of
sacrifice, he shows that God requires sacrifice.
He does not desire the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast, but He
desires the sacrifice of a contrite heart. Thus, that sacrifice which
he says God does not wish, is the symbol of the sacrifice which God
does wish. God does not wish sacrifices in the sense in which foolish
people think He wishes them, viz., to gratify His own pleasure.
For if He had not wished that the sacrifices He requires, as,
e.g., a heart Contrite and humbled by penitent sorrow, should be
symbolized by those sacrifices which He was thought to desire because
pleasant to Himself, the old law would never have enjoined their
presentation; and they were destined to be merged when the fit
opportunity arrived, in order that men might not suppose that the
sacrifices themselves, rather than the things symbolized by them, were
pleasing to God or acceptable in us. Hence, in another passage from
another psalm, he says, "If I were hungry, I would not tell
thee; for the world is mine and the fullness thereof. Will I eat the
flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?" as if He should say,
Supposing such things were necessary to me, I would never ask thee
for what I have in my own hand. Then he goes on to mention what these
signify: "Offer unto God the sacrifice of praise, and pay thy vows
unto the Most High. And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will
deliver thee, and thou shall glorify me." So in another prophet:
"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the
High God? Shall I come before Him with burnt-offerings, with
calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of
rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my
first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of
my soul?
Hath He showed thee, 0 man, what is good; and what doth the Lord
require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God?" In the words of this prophet, these two
things are distinguished and set forth with sufficient explicitness,
that God does not require these sacrifices for their own sakes, and
that He does require the sacrifices which they symbolize. In the
epistle entitled "To the Hebrews" it is said, "To do good and to
communicate, forget not: for with such sacrifices God is well
pleased." And. so, when it is written," I desire mercy rather
than sacrifice," nothing else is meant than that one sacrifice is
preferred to another; for that which in common speech is called
sacrifice is only the symbol of the true sacrifice. Now mercy is the
true sacrifice, and therefore it is said, as I have just quoted,
"with such sacrifices God is well pleased."
All the divine ordinances, therefore, which we read concerning the
sacrifices in the service of the tabernacle or the temple, we are to
refer to the love of God and our neighbor. For "on these two
commandments," as it is written, "hang all the law and the
prophets."
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