“And Jesus, passing away from there, saw a person sitting upon the tax office, being said ‘Matthew,’ and He says to him, ‘Follow me.’ And having stood up, he followed Him. And it happened with His reclining at the table in Matthew’s house, look, many tax collectors and malfunctioning people having come reclined at the table together with Jesus and His disciples. And having seen, the Pharisees were saying to His disciples, ‘Because of what does your teacher eat with the tax collectors and malfunctioning people?’ Yet having heard, He said, ‘the physically strong don’t have a use for a physician, but those having been harmed. Yet as you go, learn what this is, “I want mercy and not a sacrificial victim;” because I didn’t come to invite righted people but malfunctioning people.’”
Matthew 9:9-13
I’ve been wrestling with this topic for a couple of weeks now. It’s something that seems to strike at the heart of the Christianity I grew up with and was trained in just out of High School. In my last post on the subject, I discussed the reason Jesus died for us, and in that post I discussed that it was not so God could forgive our sins, that is, our malfunctioning behaviors, but rather so that we could be enabled to stop sinning and so our behaviors and responses could stop being influenced and informed by our inherited human malfunction. In short, God doesn’t need a blood sacrifice in order to forgive us, but we needed to be joined to Jesus Christ’s death on the cross so that His death would become our death and the natural consequence of that malfunction would be satisfied.
In this post, I want to talk about those passages in the Scriptures where God explicitly states that He doesn’t want sacrifices, but for people to be merciful, compassionate, and to do what He’s asked them to do. What a lot of Christians may not know is that He says this several times in the Psalms and in the writings of the Prophets.
The practice of animal sacrifice is an ancient one. From what I’ve been able to read on the subject, there have been animal sacrifices from the very beginnings of human civilization, and from even before this. When the first sacrifices are mentioned in the Book of Genesis in the Scriptures, the practice was already well established. What’s important to note here is that, prior to the Book of Exodus, God never asks for or requires a sacrificial offering. Many Bible Evangelicals will point to Genesis 3:21 as proof of God establishing the need for a blood sacrifice to forgive sins. But the text itself says nothing of the kind. It just says, literally, that God made tunics from leather for Adam and Eve to replace the leaf coverings they had sewn together. It never says God killed the animals to get the leather. It never says this needed to be done for Him to forgive them. The only thing the text really suggests is that God taught them the rudiments of leather working out of compassion for their new reality, and the delusion that their natural nakedness needed to be covered up. Leather happens to be a far more durable clothing material than leaves held together with grass or stalks. Another passage held up is Abel’s offering from his flock being accepted and Cain’s offering of vegetables he farmed being rejected in Genesis 4. While it is one potential interpretation to suggest that this supports God having established blood sacrifices, it is not the only interpretation. It can just as well be said this passage might be an amalgam or a metaphor for our malfunctioning human ancestors who embraced tilling the soil and farming, the rudiments of civilization, driving those other human species which existed once upon a time, all hunter gatherers, to extinction. It really all depends on how it is seen.
With this in mind, the first actual mentions of animal sacrifice in the Scriptures assume it as a well established practice with meaning, and one which God did not explicitly ask for. In every instance, the initiative is taken by human beings to build an altar and offer a sacrifice in order to honor Him in some way. The one exception here is actually Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, a human sacrifice no less (also practiced from extremely ancient times), which the text makes clear that God had no intentions of Abraham going through with it. This understanding of blood sacrifice as an established practice continues into the Mosaic law. If you notice in the text of the law, in a similar way that it treats things like slavery and polygamy, the Mosaic law doesn’t found or establish the practice of sacrifice in order to forgive sins, but it regulates it, establishing rules, rituals, and specific ways it had to be done from the building of an altar out in the bush to what the official place of sacrifice was to look like to the priesthood in charge of that sacrifice.
So, what am I driving at here? That animal sacrifice, much less human sacrifice, in order to forgive sins wasn’t God’s idea in the first place. It was an idea born out of our malfunctioning mind, that we could somehow transfer our guilt onto an innocent animal or person and then destroy it by destroying that creature, and had become integrated very early in human culture and society.
So what does God have to say about sacrifices? In the passage I translated at the beginning of this, Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 which says, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and a knowledge of God more than whole burnt offerings.” In Psalms 40:6-8 the psalmist writes, “Sacrifice and offering you didn’t desire, but ears you prepared for me; You didn’t require whole burnt offering and sin offering. Then I said, ‘Look, I am here! It is written about me in the head of the book. I delight to do your will, my God. Your law is within my heart.” In Psalm 50:7-23, God is explicit that sacrifices of animals don’t impress Him and that He could do without them. Instead, the worship He wants is gratitude and people doing what they promised. He really takes issue with folks quoting His laws and covenant and then hurting and harming others. In Psalm 51:14-17 David writes, in his great penitential psalm, addressing God says that “You don’t delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give one; burnt offerings don’t please You.” He continues by saying, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” This last part is significant because God very clearly talks about despising the animal sacrifices brought to Him by the people of Judah in Isaiah 1:11-20, animal sacrifices and rituals regulated by the very same Mosaic law which He instructed Moses to write. God tells them to stop bringing them altogether because He’s sick of them. He then tells them what He wants instead, “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from My sight. Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, reprove the ruthless, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Notice He says to stop bringing the sacrifices, but then says “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean.” How were they supposed to do that without animal sacrifices if animal sacrifices were absolutely necessary for forgiveness and absolution? In Jeremiah 7:21-26 God tells the people that He didn’t even command Israel regarding sacrifices or whole burnt offerings when He brought them out of Egypt. Instead, He commanded them that if they obeyed what He said, then He would be their God, and they would be His people. So there is an implication that even the sacrifices spoken of in the Torah were someone else’s idea, and not God’s. 1 Samuel 15:22-23 also sums up which God prefers when the prophet tells Saul that God prefers people listening to Him to offering animal sacrifices. Finally, there is also Ezekiel 18 where the entire point of the chapter is that if someone who has done a life of wrongdoing turns from that wrongdoing to do what is right, God would forgive him and he would live. Nowhere in this chapter are sacrifices mentioned as being necessary for God to forgive that person.
At this point, someone will bring up Hebrews 9:22 which literally says, “and nearly everything is cleansed with blood in line with the Torah and apart from the spilling of blood a release doesn’t happen.” The word I have translated “release” is what is frequently translated as either “remission” or “forgiveness.” What it actually means is a “letting go, a release,” and can also be translated “dismissal, divorce, quittance, exemption,” and so on. In context however, it is talking about the practice of the high priest who entered the Holy of Holies and sprinkled everything with blood, as well as the sealing of the Mosaic covenant with the people of Israel where everyone and everything was also sprinkled with blood. Under that covenant, there was no release or remission without blood being spilled and sprinkled. But this verse was only meant to be taken in the context with which it was written, it was not meant to be a general principle. Even as Paul writes in Romans 4 about Abraham being made or declared right because of his faith, because he trusted God. There was no animal sacrifice, there was no Torah at all, when this happened in the Book of Genesis, and that was Paul’s point.
The thrust of the New Testament arguments are that animal sacrifices, the blood of bulls and goats and sheep, could do nothing about our inherited malfunction. The best they could do was make us feel less guilty from a psychological perspective because something had been tangibly done to make up for it. In reality however, God never needed them to forgive us. He just needed us to realize our screw ups, turn around, and seek Him.
While Christ’s death on the cross can and frequently does fulfill the same role of a tangible act of propitiation from a psychological perspective, and does Scripturally take the place of all the animal sacrifices proscribed by the Torah for this reason, the actual purpose of it was to provide a solution for us to be able to act and respond apart from our malfunction by joining us to His death and resurrection so that His death and resurrection becomes our death and resurrection. This was God’s chief concern, that we be freed, or given the choice to be free, from the hereditary neurological malfunction incurred by the first Adam so that we no longer had to be enslaved to it, but could be joined or enslaved to the Spirit of Jesus Christ so that it would be Him responding and acting through us. Paul writes voluminously about this in his letter to the Romans and writes from this same position throughout all of his letters. God’s concern was to “right” us from our malfunction, not to be appeased like some vengeful tribal god demanding innocent blood for offenses like Molech, Ba’al, or even Zeus. To accuse Him of such motivations is to speak evil of Him and to put Him on the level of such lesser beings.
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