Speaking Well of God
Presentation 5.The God of Sacrifice and Blood

[Edited transcript. This article preserves aspects of a spoken delivery]

Good evening everyone.  I have to say I have appreciated so many things since I’ve been here.  Thank you Luis, for your singing.  Thank you, again, church and Pastor for the invitation to be here.  Thank you to my faithful translator who also took us out to see Christ the Redeemer statue on Corcovado today.  And thanks to everybody who’s been speaking to me in languages that I can understand.  It’s come to my notice as I’ve been speaking that quite a few of you understand what I’m saying without the help of my translator, so maybe we with just a few more English lessons we could do it all in English!  One of the added advantages of doing it this way is to produce the DVDs.  So I also want to thank the team of videographers here who are producing that DVD in order that that these messages don’t simply go out into the air and disappear, but will be useful for, I hope, for other people as they watch and listen.

Now I have to tell you that our subject for today, “The God of Sacrifice and Blood,” is going to be something of a heavy subject.  But I want to tackle this subject because so many people have spoken to me about it.  They say, “The God of the New Testament—that’s fine, I can appreciate Jesus and the God of the New Testament.  But the God of the Old Testament with all the blood and the sacrifices—what do we do with Him?”

I’ve even had people say, “I just don’t like Him at all. I only like the Jesus of the New Testament.”

Today I want to rescue the God of the Old Testament.  Just read what it says and I think you’ll find that the God of the Old Testament can speak in ways that are very surprising.
God of Sacrifice?

Okay, first a little bit of background.  Some images from where I have been. Like Tikal in Guatemala. There you will see stone altars, every few meters in the jungle of Guatemala and they are thousands and thousands of these stone altars.  And these are all altars of human sacrifice.  There’s a terrible scene in the middle of a beautiful jungle.

Then you go to the Inca capital in Peru called Machu Picchu.  You learn about what they did in terms of human sacrifice. It’s appalling. 

And then go to Mexico to Monte Alban where you see the altar of sacrifice just outside the town of Oaxaca. When I saw this I wondered what kind of god would demand a sacrifice like this.  Human sacrifice has been practiced all over the world.  In fact, the whole general idea of sacrificing to God is very common in religions throughout the world. 

I was in China where Atheism is the state religion, but hidden away in some woods I came across a little shine with offerings to the gods. 

In Indonesia I was staying in a Muslim village. They don’t believe in “pagan shrines,” but near the base of the volcano that was beside the village, there was a little shrine with gifts of food and drink.  I asked my guide, “What is this?”

“Oh, they are superstitious people,” he said.  “They think they need to give sacrifices to keep the volcano god happy.”

So, what about our God that we believe in, the Judeo-Christian God?  If you go back into the Old Testament you’ll find descriptions that God gave of the sacrifices that He says that you are to bring.  It could seem that God is a very demanding kind of person, that He wants these sacrifices. 

Meaningless sacrifices

Let’s go and look at the words of Isaiah, chapter 1. Let’s begin in verse 11. 

“The multitude of your sacrifices, what are they to me, says the Lord.  I have more than enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fatted animals, I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.”

And you can imagine the people there scratching their heads saying, “Just a moment, this is what you asked for.  Why are you saying you don’t want it anymore?  Did you change your mind?  Can’t you decide whether you want us to bring sacrifices or not?”

Let’s read a little more, verse 12: “When you come to appear before me, who has asked this of you?  Stop this trampling of my courts.”  Verse 13, “Stop bringing meaningless offerings.”

Pointless, meaningless offerings.  You can read on—I wish we had time to read everything here.  Verse 15:

“When you spread out your hands out in prayer I will hide my eyes from you.  Even if you offer many prayers I will not listen.  Your hands are full of blood, wash and make yourselves clean, take your evil deeds out of my sight, stop doing wrong, learn to do right.” 

He’s saying, “I’m sick and tired of these offerings, don’t bring any more!  Do you think I want to blood of bulls and lambs and goats?  What kind of God do you think I am?”

And the people say, “That’s what you said.” 

And God says, “You haven’t got the point at all, have you?  Stop doing wrong, learn to do right.”

Then He goes on to explain what that means—to look for justice, and help the fatherless and the widows and so on.  Then that verse that we’ve already used, verse 18, “Come now, let us reason together.” 

What is God really saying there? 

“I want you to think about what you’re doing.  I don’t want rituals, I don’t want sacrifices, I don’t want blood; I want a relationship with you.”

You might then ask, “So why did you ask for it in the first place?”

And I believe God would say, “Well you were supposed to learn something from that.  You just keep on repeating it and you’re not learning anything.”

Offensive sacrifices

Let’s turn right over to the very last chapter of the same gospel prophet Isaiah, and look at Isaiah 66:2.  And this is in the middle of the verse, “This is the one I esteem, he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.  That’s what I want; this is what I’m looking for.”

And then he says these very strong words.  These are very strong words he is about to say. 
Verse 3, “But he whoever sacrifices a bull is like one who kills a man.  And whoever offers a lamb is like one who breaks a dog’s neck.  And whoever makes a grain offering is like one who presents pig’s blood.”

This is very offensive to anybody from a Jewish background; the whole idea of pig’s blood is the most offensive thing you could think of to present to God.  I apologize for mentioning this because I do understand the offense that these words can cause, but this is what the prophet is saying.  Let’s ask, why is the prophet saying this?  Because of what they are doing. Let’s read on, at the end of verse 3: “They have chosen their own ways and their souls delight in their abominations.”

The problem is the way that they are bringing these sacrifices.  So God says, “I’m disgusted, I don’t want that, in fact, it’s just like pigs and dogs to me.”

Blood?

So God is looking for more than sacrifice and blood.  There’s a lot in the Bible about blood.  I could talk a lot about it; I’m just going to skip over quite a bit of the material here.  You remember, for example, the blood on the posts in the time of the Passover.  And all the way through the Old Testament you have reference to blood and sacrifice.  And so when it came to the time of Jesus, this is been continuing for a very long time.  And this was happening in the temple daily, and it was multiplied.  Have you any idea of the amount, the vast amount of sacrifices that was carried out in the temple? 

In the year AD 64 there was a Roman governor in Judea by the name of Cestus.  He went and counted the lambs—how many lambs have been sacrificed in the temple in one year.  Want to know the number, how many?  256,500. A quarter of a million lambs every year.  Because so many were being killed, blood was flowing through that temple like a river.  When Jesus came in and saw that, saw all the buying and the trading and all the rest of it, He saw not only the business transactions, but that God, through even the sacrificial system, was totally misrepresented.  He, as you remember, cleaned out the temple, because He said, “You’ve made my Father’s house a den of thieves.”

No blood, no forgiveness?

Let’s go over into the New Testament now, and into the part that most talks about the Old Testament system of sacrifice.  Hebrews 9:22.

“In fact the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” 

All of the preceding chapter, and even before, is talking about this whole aspect of blood.  It suggests that the law is saying you need to have the blood before you have forgiveness.  But this is the legal system, the law-based system.  But the point that is being made here in Hebrews is that it doesn’t work, because if you read in verse 4 of the next chapter, chapter 10, “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.”  So everything that they were doing didn’t really work in practical terms.  Immediately after that comes the quotation from Psalm 40, right after that statement, “When Christ came into the world sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me.”

Exactly. Without even really trying to, Jesus is undercutting the whole system by saying, “You weren’t even pleased with all those burnt offerings and sin offerings.”

Jesus Himself says, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.”  Mercy, not sacrifice. Where is he taking that quotation from?  He’s getting that from Hosea verse 6.  If you go and read it in its totality it says, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.”

And I could give you a lot more.  Psalm 50: “I have no need of a bull from your stall, or goats from your pens.  Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?”

No, these ideas, God says, “are foreign to me.”  In fact, this is the basis of paganism—the god drinking the blood.  Again in Jeremiah chapter 6, He says, “I don’t care about the incense; your burnt offerings aren’t acceptable.  Your sacrifices don’t please me.”

And you can imagine the people saying, “But we even went and got the very best incense from Sheba, the land of Sheba.”

Bargaining with God

It’s almost like we’re saying we’re giving the best to God in our business transaction with Him, so He should give us the best forgiveness in return.  Let me ask you, can we bargain with God like that? 

I remember visiting a church member in hospital.  Right next to her was another lady who had had a very severe stroke. She indicated that she wanted me to come over and talk with her.  She was quite hard to understand because of the stroke that she’d had.  But what she was asking was, “Do you think if I gave all my money to God, would He heal me from the situation I’m in?”

This is the same idea, isn’t it?  Sacrifice.  And I said, “That’s not what God is looking for.”

But she said, “Are you sure?  If I gave every single thing, then God surely would help me, wouldn’t He?”

Have you ever tried to do those bargains with God?  Like the money I was saving up to get a new car, maybe if I gave that to the church then I would get what I really wanted.  You remember the indulgences that were sold in the Middle Ages? You put the money in the box and you got what you wanted.  In fact, the gentleman who was going around with this indulgence selling program had an ad slogan—a jingle if you like.  He was perhaps the first mass marketer, I don’t know.  But his line was, and it sounds better in the German, but as soon as the coin in the box clinks, the soul from Purgatory springs.  The “clinks” and the “springs” went rhymed together well in the German.  So again, you sacrifice and get what you want. It’s almost like some kind of vending machine, you put the money in; you get the product out.  Is this our God? 

What does God really want?

There are any other illustrations of sacrifice, but we need to come to the end.  What does God really want then, is the question. 

Let’s go straight to Micah, the prophet Micah, because you can look at Hosea, you can look at Amos, you can look at Isaiah again, all the way through, they’re all saying the same thing, “God doesn’t want this.” 

But Micah 6 tells us in verse 6, “But what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God.  Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?  Would the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil, shall I offer my first born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

Is that what God wants?  Micah even suggests human sacrifice.  You know what God said about human sacrifice—because even the children of Israel ended up doing that sometimes.  God is saying, “No, no, no!” 

Micah concludes: “He showed you, O man what is good, what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Here we could launch into a whole new sermon about what it means to act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God!  However I want to give you some time to react, to respond, to ask questions in just a moment. 

Pastor in court

But I want to end with a picture from a legal court room situation.  I was in court.  Now suddenly everybody’s paying attention, listening carefully!

“What was the Pastor doing in court?” you’re asking yourselves.

Don’t get too excited.  It was just a parking ticket.  And I didn’t think it was correct.  So I wanted to go in to talk to the magistrates and say, “I don’t believe that this parking ticket is right.”

But it was a very interesting introduction to the legal system of justice.  I went into the courtroom. It’s very formal, it’s meant to intimidate you.  The first thing they say to you is, “Raise your right hand, and put your other hand on the Bible and swear to tell the truth.”

I said, “I can’t do that.”

They said, “Why not?”

“Because I’m a Pastor, I’m a minister of the Gospel., I explained

“Well, you should be able to do this with the Bible even more than most people,” they said.

“But the Bible, and these are the words of Jesus, say you’re not supposed to do that,” I told them.

And they said, “Oh really, where does it say that in the Bible?”

So I started explaining. I picked up the Bible there in the court—the one they’d given me to swear by, and started reading. 

After I’d read about not swearing, the magistrates said, “Well, this is interesting.  Here we have a Christian minister who believes in the Bible, that doesn’t want to use the Bible to swear to tell the truth.”

I went on, “Well, with your permission, I can explain some more.”

So we did Bible study together.  What was supposed to be a five or ten minute hearing turns into a long discussion. I think we were there for maybe an hour.  The traffic police officer is sitting there thinking, “What is going on?”

Anyway, at the end of our Bible study, they said, “Well, we’d better get to the point.  But you have to say something. What can you swear to do?”

“Well, I don’t want to swear,” I answered

“Well, could you promise to tell the truth?” they asked.

I replied, “Of course, because more than anything else, I believe the Bible says we’re supposed to tell the truth.  What I say will be the truth, I guarantee it.”

“Well, that’ll be good enough,” they agreed. “You promise to tell the truth?” Then they asked, “So what really happened?”

I explained what happened. Then they responded, “Okay now, just a moment Dr. Gallagher, we’re going to go and retire and consider our verdict.” 

They went out and about 30 seconds later they came back.  The head magistrate told me, “We don’t find any case to answer.  You are free to go, there is no charge, there is no penalty.”  And he said, “Thank you also, Pastor, for the Bible study!”

Legal or relational?

This experience really helped me to understand that the legal process is important in a human way for ordering society, but more important is the relational aspect that developed there.  If we are relating to God because we think we are in legal trouble with Him, then we’ll try and deal with it in a legal way.  But if it’s a relational issue, then we relate to it and deal with it in a completely different way. 

You know, I could take my marriage certificate, and wave it in my wife’s face and say, “It says here that you’re supposed to do this, this is the legal requirement.”

I can imagine what she might say, and it wouldn’t be very helpful.  Because once you start making legal demands in a relationship, you’ve got trouble.  When it comes to God, when it comes to sacrifice, when it comes to blood as payment, I believe we miss the point if we make it into some kind of legal transaction.  Only as we understand the blood as the symbol of life, as the way in which God wins us back to a relationship with Him, only then can we truly be at one with God.  I pray this evening that we may truly be one with God.  Let us not be preoccupied about our legal standing before Him, but let us be concerned to relate to Him as our Father, the one who truly does love us.  May we all be there together with God as His family is my prayer for Jesus sake.  Let us pray.

Lord God, we’ve thought much about what you’ve said in the Old Testament and what you meant by it.  In those sacrifices we were supposed to learn something about you and something about what sin truly does.  That sin kills us.  And that only you can heal the damage that is done.  May you come to us and not simply deal with legal issues, but heal us, to remake us in your image, and bring us home to you once more.  This, with all the forgiveness and healing that we need, we ask in Jesus name, Amen.

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