Micah 6:6-8 With which shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings… Taking the text as a revelation of the character of the Speaker Himself, we may say that God does in His own economy and sphere what He asks us to do in ours. What does this revelation do? 1. It does away with all ostentatious piety. Many of us would be glad to buy ourselves off from judgment. We may not put the question into words; it is not, therefore, less a question of the soul. What can I buy my liberty for? No amount of oil shall stand between me and release; no number of calves and rams shall for a moment deter me from paying the fine, if so be I can have the arrow drawn out of my heart, the poison withdrawn from my blood. But the Lord will not have all this. He does not want your gaiety but your simplicity; He does not want you to drive up to His door in chariot of gold and with steeds of fire, that he may receive your patronage; He sends word down to you by the first and humblest servant He lights upon, — Go and say all I want is that thou shalt do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God. This will take all the paint off our religion; this will deplete our decoration; this will leave us in ruins as to external appearance; but there are ruins that are true palaces. It will do away with all our ostentation of another kind than that which is merely physical, ornamental, or decorative; it will do away with all our intellectual contributions and displays of patronage in reference to the Cross. The Cross does not want your intellectual homage. 2. This revelation vindicates God from the charge of delighting in animal sacrifices. Does He love to see the smoking hecatomb? No; when He has required blood of the merely animal kind, it has always been symbolically, typically, or prefiguratively; it was a necessary part of the alphabet of spiritual lessons. He must begin His lessons where the scholar can begin. Everything the Lord did require of a physical and external kind was only in a temporary sense, the whole thought of God leading up to spirituality. "God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." 3. This revelation destroys the notion of piety by proxy. "My firstborn for my transgressions." We are always willing to make away with other people; we are exceedingly liberal with the lives of others. We philosophise and theorise with admirable serenity, as if we had abundance of leisure in which to contemplate the tragedy of mankind, and we say, If a thousand perish, and ten thousand be saved, the gain is on the side of salvation. No! That is false; that is a misuse of the principle of majorities. There ought to be no man lost. And no man will be lost but the son of perdition. If after the Lord has dealt with a man by His providence and by His Spirit, and by all the mystery of the Cross, there is found in that man nothing but devil, he must go to his own place, and to his own company. But the Lord will do the handling upon a scale we cannot comprehend, and if the Lord gives up any human soul we may well say sadly, Amen. (Joseph Parker, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Wherewith shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? |
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