Mercy, Not Sacrifice (Part 2)

The second time that Christ quotes Hosea 6:6 (“I desire mercy, not sacrifice”) is found in Matthew 12:1-8 (a contextual discussion of this verse can be found in What Does God Want?, and also see Part 1 of this snack). Here we have the disciples picking grain from a field on the Sabbath. This prompts the Pharisees to point out to Jesus that they are breaking the Sabbath.

Matthew 12:3-7

He answered, “[David] entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread – which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. Or haven’t you read in the Law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple desecrate the day and yet are innocent? If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath.” 

Some people look at these circumstances and say that Christ was changing how the Sabbath was to be observed. While he did take issues with how the Pharisees observed the Sabbath, he was not changing how God originally commanded us to keep the Sabbath. The Pharisees had built a strict system of traditions in addition to God’s law in order to make sure that people wouldn’t be breaking the law. For example, the Pharisees had rules about how much you were allowed to carry on the Sabbath, thinking “if you can’t carry anything, then you can’t do any work that might involve carrying something.” Strict rules such as these were not given by God, and that’s why Jesus refers to them as “commandments of men” (Matthew 15:9) – and that’s exactly what Jesus took issue with here.

In His response, Jesus first cites the time when David and his men were fed with bread from the temple, found in 1 Samuel 21. The point that He is making with this reference is that God’s law of love can, in special circumstances, supersede the physical observances required by the law, such as if a person or animal falls into a hole on the Sabbath, you're allowed to pull them out (Luke 14:5). What David and his men did was worse than what the disciples were doing because God specifically made a law that only the priests could eat that bread, and yet David is not condemned for it. On the other hand, what the priests did in the temple was required by the law, and their Sabbath day duties easily violated the Pharisees so-called “law” (i.e. the “commandments of men”). Jesus then pulls out Hosea 6:6 to drive home the point that God’s law is not just about physical observances, but about love. God didn’t mind if we gather food to eat on the Sabbath (as long as we are doing it to feed ourselves and not for profit); therefore, the Pharisees “condemned the innocent.” Finally, Jesus asserts His authority, telling them “the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath.” Jesus owns the Sabbath – It’s His! Therefore, He knows what’s allowed and what’s not.

It should be clear then that Jesus was in no way trying to change the Sabbath (or any of God’s law, for that matter) in justifying what His disciples did. Instead, He rebuked the Pharisees for unrightfully making the Sabbath a burden with extraneous requirements rather than observing it with their hearts, and it’s all about the heart.

Mercy, Not Sacrifice (Part 1)

In my recent post What Does God Want?, I explained the contextual meaning of Hosea 6:6, a verse which Christ quoted in response to the Pharisees on two separate occasions. The first instance in which Jesus’ quotes Hosea 6:6 (which says “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,”) is found in Matthew 9:9-13. This story begins with Christ calling Matthew, who was a tax collector, to follow Him. The Pharisees wouldn’t have even touched a person like Matthew, and yet Jesus ate at Matthew’s house, along with other “tax collectors and ‘sinners.’” Considering their way of thinking, it’s no wonder that the Pharisees were taunting the disciples over this! When this got back around to Jesus, he said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

How was Christ using this verse? I believe that His meaning was two-fold. The primary purpose of His response was to justify the fact that He was eating with people who were generally regarded as unrighteous men. His claim is that He is there to help them as a doctor helps a sick person. Their sickness was their sin, which He desired them to repent of through His teaching and guidance. That’s always why He preached: so that people would repent and turn to God. When He quotes Hosea 6:6, He is mostly accentuating His love and compassion for these people (mercy), not simply following the letter of God’s law as the Pharisees did (sacrifice).

The secondary implication of His response was to point out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Note that He says “go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’ He was not complimenting the Pharisees here by distinguishing them as the “righteous” - it sounds more like a challenge! He was pointing out their pride for thinking that they were righteous. In reality, they were not doing what God wanted! God desired "mercy" from them through love and compassion towards these people that they were calling sinners, but they gave God only "sacrifice" through physical adherence to the law, disregarding unconditional love for others. After all, the commandment has always been "love your neighbor as yourself" - it has never been required that your neighbor be righteous by your own standards.

Christ: Our Guilt Offering

Isaiah 53 prophesies about the coming of Christ, and includes numerous aspects of His life and the suffering He would endure. The phrasing of verse 10 in the NIV caught my eye, where it says “Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer, and though the LORD makes His life a guilt offering, He will see His offspring and prolong His days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in His hand.” What does it mean that His life is a guilt offering? We know that Christ was sacrificed for our sins, but is there more significance to this concept?

The “guilt offering” was a particular kind of offering in Israel’s sacrificial system. The provisions for it are given in Leviticus 5:14-19. The guilt offering is similar to the sin offering, and in fact the Hebrew words for “guilt” and “sin” are very similar and sometimes interchangeable. The key difference in the two is that the guilt offering is given instead of the sin offering if there is the opportunity to make “restitution.” It says that anyone who sins “in regard to any of the LORD’s holy things” is to bring a ram for sacrifice, but he must also “make restitution for what he has failed to do in regard for the holy things, add a fifth of the value to that and give it all to the priest, who will make atonement for him… and he will be forgiven.”

Today, Jesus has taken His place as both our High Priest and the Guilt Offering for our sins; however, we are still required to make restitution to God in order to fulfill the law concerning the guilt offering. More plainly, I say again: Christ is the priest and blood sacrifice required to fulfill those aspects of the guilt offering law, but the responsibility of restitution still falls on us to fulfill!  In so far as we had before dedicated ourselves to living an ungodly life, we must also dedicate ourselves with the same fervor plus “a fifth,” so that we may be more zealous for God’s way of life than we ever were for the world’s way of life.

Jesus and the Snakes

Numbers 21:4-8 gives a seemingly odd episode from the Israelites' wanderings. The Israelites, as they often did, complained that God was just leading them around "to die in the desert," grumbling that they had no food or water. As an unusual form of punishment, God sends poisonous snakes that begin biting and killing them. After this goes on for a bit, the Israelites quickly ask Moses to pray to God to take the snakes away. Interestingly, God didn't take the snakes away; rather, He told Moses to make a "bronze snake" and put it up on a pole, and that if anyone is bitten by a snake, they could look at the bronze snake and live.

Flash forward several centuries. In John 3:1-15, Jesus is explaining to Nicodemus, a certain Pharisee who believed that Jesus had come from God, that men must be born again to enter God's Kingdom. Nicodemus asks, "How can this be?" to which Jesus tells him that since he has not understood earthly things, then neither does Jesus expect him to understand heavenly things. And then, he says something interesting in verses 14-15: "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life."

I am continually amazed by how intimately everything in the bible is connected. After some consideration, I came to the following conclusions as to the meaning of what Jesus is revealing here. Notice that in the Numbers account, God sent the snakes. Jesus prophesied that there would be many false teachers; and, given what we know about snakes in the bible, my best analysis is that these snakes are false teachers whose false instruction, their "bite," causes death. God is preparing a time of great distress to come on the earth, which will cause everyone to cry out to be saved as the Israelites did. God has lifted up Christ, so that all who will look to Him rather than to the false teachers will live, though they have been bitten by false doctrines. At that time, people will be given understanding that Nicodemus lacked, both of earthly and heavenly things.

What Happened at Massah?

Recall the story of Satan tempting Jesus in the desert. You can read it in Luke 4 for a refresher, and you will see that for each of Satan's temptations Jesus had an answer from the Law. The part that I want to focus on is this: when Satan told Jesus to throw himself down off the cliff and have the angels save him, Jesus said "It says: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" The scripture He quoted is from Deuteronomy 6:16, which reads "Do not test the Lord your God as you did at Massah." 

So what exactly happened at Massah? After being delivered from slavery out of Egypt, Israel had rejected the promised land by their lack of faith and were being led through the desert by God from one place to the next as a period of trial and testing. Eventually they stopped at a place where there was no water for them to drink, and they start arguing with Moses and complaining against God, telling him to give them water, to which Moses responds by saying "Why do you put the LORD to the test?" The word "Massah" means "testing," and I find it interesting that, while God was testing the Israelites to see whether they would follow His ways or not in their wilderness wandering, the Israelites, rather than obeying God, in turn tested God, challenging Him to see whether He would really provide for them - as if parting the Red Sea and raining down manna had not been enough!

Moses then asked God what to do, because he could see the people were getting out of control. Despite the fact that God wasn't happy with their attitude, He provided water for His people. As a result of this whole ordeal, Moses gave the place the names "Massah," which means "testing," and "Meribah," which means "quarreling," because Israel tested the God and argued by saying, 'Is the LORD among us or not?'" 

Going back to the temptation: Satan was asking Jesus to prove that God was with Him. How often do we question whether or not God is with us? Just as He patiently provided water for an unbelieving people then, even greater is the patience of God toward us, for surely we have all sometimes tested God ourselves in ignorance as we wander through our own wilderness! Thank God for His mercy! But we are called to a higher standard, because Jesus, in whose way we are called to walk, after 40 days of fasting demonstrated through His response that we should not seek to prove to ourselves or anyone else that God is with us, but to have faith in God to provide. The Israelites were ready to stop following God and go look for water themselves because they thought God might abandon them, whereas Jesus knew that God was with Him.

So also, by the holy scriptures we can know that God is with us! Isaiah prophesied of Christ in Isaiah 7:14 that He would be called "Immanuel," meaning "God with us." Jesus lived on earth and was "God with us" in the flesh, but also in the Great Commission, when Jesus appeared to the disciples after His resurrection, Jesus assured the disciples that "surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."  Jesus continues to be "God with us" today as we draw near the "end of the age," if we will repent of our sins, be baptized, and strive to live by God's word.

Rich Men, Camels, and Needles

In Mark 10:25, Jesus says that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." I've often heard people use this scripture out of context as though it were literal, and it always bugged me until I read it today, but now I know for sure that they're wrong. Let's review what has just happened leading up to this verse. If you don't remember the story of the Rich Young Man, you can read it in Mark 10:17-31, but I'll give a brief review. There was a rich young man who came to Jesus and asked Him how inherit eternal life. Jesus tells Him to keep the commandments and lists a few of them. The man claims that he has always kept the commandments, and Jesus responds that he lacks one thing: he must sell everything that he owns, give it to the poor, and follow Him. The man became sad and left because he was rich and wasn't willing to give it up for God - then Jesus gives the analogy with the camel.

If we read between the lines, his problem was not that he was rich - it's that he held his wealth in higher esteem than God's kingdom and would not let it go to follow Jesus. Additionally, if we keep reading, Jesus makes this even more clear. The disciples fervently discuss this among themselves, as they typically did when Jesus said something they didn't understand, and asked him "Who then can be saved?" Jesus replied "With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God."

There you go. He just told them that it is possible for a rich man to enter His Kingdom because with God all things are possible. Consider also some of the rich men in the Old Testament who will be in God's Kingdom - David, Job, and Abraham were all very rich. The key difference is that these men had the right heart, as is evident in each of their stories. They would have given up everything that they had without a second thought to follow God, and this is how we must also be.