A reader asks:
I . . . came across the daily readings. They seem to contradict themselves. . . . Hosea 6:1-6: The last couple versus are, “what am I to do with you, Ephraim? What am I to do with you, Judah? For your love is like morning mist, like the dew the quickly disappears. This is why I have hacked them to pieces by means of the prophets, why I have killed them with words from my mouth, why my sentence will blaze forth like the dawn- for faithful love is what pleases me, not sacrifice; knowledge of God, not burnt offerings“.
This is what the last couple versus of the psalm says, “against you, you alone, I have sinned, I have done what you see to be wrong, that you may show your saving justice when you pass sentence, and your victory may appear when you give judgement. In your graciousness do good to Zion, rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Then you will delight in upright sacrifices,-burnt offerings and whole oblations — and young bulls will be offered on your alter“. I understand the psalms are the prayers from the days of the old testament but were those prayers given to them by God through means of the author; David, I think, being one. The talk about sacrifices and burnt offerings seem to contradict.
Great question! The root of this questions is: does God want burnt offerings? Did he ever? Why?
We know that God is primarily concerned with the heart, and not external trappings. He would much prefer “a contrite heart” to burn’t offerings. The scriptures are clear on this in many places (here is a handy list of may of the places in scripture that speak of God’s desire not for sacrifices but for the heart being upright, etc.)
Obedience is the primary point, because obedience requires humility, it is humility which allows us to work with grace.
Now a sign of obedience for a Jew was to follow the Mosaic law, and often times they got caught up in following the letter to the point that they forgot about the spirit of the law – the whole purpose of the thing to begin with.
God does not NEED sacrifices of animals, but these were permitted and even accepted as righteous offerings for a variety of reasons: it was giving of one’s goods and resources (which required trusting God) in a ritual of praise which kept life and death and blood and covenant all before the mind of men. So long as these sacrifices were done in that spirit, they were good things, if unnecessary.
But they were never the whole point. The whole point was reconciliation. From the unblemished lamb of Passover to the scapegoat of atonement (see Leviticus 16), all of these hinted and looked forward to the one sacrifice that would matter: Christ.
Now the Old Testament was written over the course of many centuries by one divine author and many human authors in collaboration, and various books and readings point towards various truths that may have been more relevant at one point of Israel’s history than at another. Hosea, you’ll remember, was the prophet who was told to marry a prostitute (even more unfortunately, she was named “Gomer”) to live out in his own life the relationship of God to wayward Israel—at that point, they were so wayward that any sacrifice would have been but a prideful act, and not an act of worship.
Much like the Pharisee in the gospel today(Luke 18:9ff):
Jesus addressed this parable to those who were convinced of their own righteousness
and despised everyone else.“Two people went up to the temple area to pray; one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector. The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity — greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.’
“But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, ‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner.’
“I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” (SOURCE)
See, he who exalts himself, missing his own faults, and the whole point of worship. The thanked God that he was righteous and didn’t need salvation, unlike the sinners and even the lowly tax-collector, But it was the tax collector who actually worshiped.