“Your Majesty, Araunah gives all this to the king.” Araunah also said to him, “May the Lord your God accept you.” But the king replied to Araunah, “No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.” (2 Samuel 24:23-24a)
Hearing the devotion on Deuteronomy yesterday, I had to think of this passage from 2 Samuel. This phrase of David is one that has stuck with me over the years. “I will not sacrifice to the Lord offerings that cost me nothing.”
I feel like we’ve talked quite a bit in these devotionals and in sermons over the past year about humility and submission before God—that there is a counter-cultural act involved in being a Christian that asks us to commit ourselves in submission to someone higher than ourselves: namely Jesus Christ. Since the atom bomb and technological revolution, the assumption of our culture is that we are gods ourselves these days with the power to create and destroy and so have the right to judge the gods of the various religions and call them to account as beings that, if they do exist, are no more than our equals, if that.
The Christian faith asks for a different posture: to fall on our knees in submission to our God and King, a God worthy to judge us, not we Him. The paradox is that this posture of submission before God is the place of deepest freedom and fullest life. God also does not ask of us something He Himself did not do: after all, God in Christ first submitted himself to our cruelty, sin, and violent, death-dealing ways before putting these ways to death in his death, rising to a life that we now can receive when we submit to Him.
Submission to God is what we are called to. But it’s hard work. We need practices that help train us in the rhythms of submission and that give us very real and practical ways to do it in our daily lives. Sacrifice and offering are just those sorts of practices.
Offering is an offering not of something useless or that we’ve outlived our need for and are looking to get rid of anyway. No one makes a sacrifice when they put something on the buy-nothing group or out in the front yard, free for the taking. Offering is sacrifice: a giving away of something that has meaning, value, purpose, and real utility in our lives. It hurts a little bit. It’s an act of trust that the God to whom we offer something is able to fill up the hole left by the thing we’re entrusting to Him.
That brings us back to David’s exclamation: “I will not sacrifice to the Lord an offering that cost me nothing.” These are the last words of David recorded in the books of Samuel. Not insignificantly: this was the plot of land, purchased for the rightful price and offered in sacrifice to God, upon which the Temple would be built.
The Temple was not built on the land that David violently conquered when he killed the Jebusites and took their city, the city we now know as Jerusalem. No, the temple was built on the land that David peacefully purchased for the rightful price from Arunah, a still-living Jebusite, and offered in true sacrifice to the Lord.
So, what will you sacrificially offer in submission and trust to God?
お客様へのおすすめ
