(…continued) From beginning to end, and all the while in between, life is filled with sacrifices for others and for ourselves. In school, if you want to make the team or make the honor roll, you will have to make sacrifices to work harder. If you want to get ahead on the job, you will have to make some sacrifices. If you want to lose weight or get in shape, you have to make sacrifices. And then there are those ultimate sacrifices, and, if you enjoy the prosperity and freedom that we have living in this nation, you have to have a deep gratitude for the many lives that have been sacrificed over the years to win and protect that freedom.
So why should we be surprised that the Bible is so full of talk of sacrifice? Our lives with each other are filled with sacrifices for each other. Should it surprise us that our lives before God should also have an element of sacrifice? And who are we to define what that relationship should look like or consist of? The blood sacrifices of the Old Testament do sound strange to us, but even back then, all of those animal sacrifices were only a symbol of something far greater going on. In the New Testament the animal sacrifices were abandoned, but that ‘something greater’ was still there, and was taken care of in another way.
That ‘something greater’ that is behind all this is that things are not right between us and God. Our sinful disobedience has darkened and saddened the good world that God created, and God demands that things be made right again. And righting a wrong, or healing a wound, or restoring a broken relationship, always takes a sacrifice. Someone must be willing to apologize, someone must be willing to make amends, and someone must be willing to forgive. The burden should be on us because we are the ones who have broken the relationship, but the story of the Bible is that God has taken the burden upon himself, most perfectly and completely by coming to earth in person in Jesus of Nazareth. His death on the cross was the sacrifice that paid the price that healed the relationship with God. Our little minds will never comprehend exactly how this all works, but we can understand what it means to make a sacrifice, and that is what Jesus did for us.
It is a strange story in Genesis 22 where God tells Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac. What kind of God is this that would demand such a sacrifice? Why would God tell somebody to sacrifice the child whose life, God Himself said, was to be the hope of the world? None of those questions are answered in the story. But the story does not end with the sacrifice of Isaac, the boy, the son. Rather, the story ends with God providing the sacrifice. God has an angel stop Abraham as the knife is ready to descend into Isaac’s body, and then the angel shows Abraham a ram caught in a thicket. God provides the sacrifice, there for Abraham, and later on the cross for the sins of the whole world.
Our daily sacrifices are made for each other, but only Christ’s sacrifice on the cross restores our relationship with God. Even the great thinker and writer C. S. Lewis could not comprehend it all, but he pointed out that what the Bible says is that we are not asked to fully understand it, but simply to believe it. Just believe in that Jesus and the sacrifice he made for you, accept it, and receive it as the free gift that it is, and it is yours, and it will save you, now and forever.
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Isaiah 53:4-6 — Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
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Have mercy on me, Lord;
heal me, for I have sinned against you. –Psalm 41:4
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