Romans 12:1 I beseech you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God… The words are very familiar, or they certainly would strike us powerfully. None of us ever saw a sacrifice; but the readers of this Epistle knew the sight well; and whether they as Gentiles thought it a mere ceremony, or, if they argued about it, as the Scriptures almost compelled an Israelite to argue, they must have been startled at Paul's words. "Does he mean us," they may have said, "to treat our bodies as either sinful and to be got rid of, or as things so sacred, that to offer them in self-devotion will have power to make peace for us with God?" A little reflection would show them that neither of these interpretations could be the right one. St. Paul held the body in high honour; but, on the other hand, there was no thought in his heart, when he spoke of the body as a sacrifice, of anything meritorious. We shall best grasp the apostle's meaning if we consider — I. THE TERMS USED. St. Paul had never yet visited Rome, and could not say as he said to the Thessalonians, "Remember ye not that when I was with you I told you of these things?" And therefore he has gone with great fulness into the whole system of grace and redemption, and now he turns to the practical inference. 1. He appeals to his readers "by the mercies of God." They for whom God has done all these great things had, by their very nature, no claim whatever to the love of God; and therefore mercy, "kindness to the undeserving," is the right word for God's dealings with them; and if mercy is to be indeed a blessing, it must lead to something in the heart and life, responsive and corresponding to it. 2. "Your bodies." St. Paul gave no encouragement to that sort of religion which dreams and cultivates beautiful ideas and rapturous feelings, and there stops. If he had written "minds" he might have given the notion of an intellectual attainment; if "souls" he might have opened the door to a languid and useless existence, such as hermits and mystics delight in; but when he says "bodies" he strikes at the root of all such errors. The word he uses is not "carcase," but "living body"; which includes all the powers of intercourse and exertion. 3. "Present" applies to the worshipper who places his victim by the altar and to the priest who officially makes the presentation, in either of which senses the word would be suitable here. In the one sense the Christian is the priest of his own sacrifice. Scripture speaks of us as offering up "spiritual sacrifices," as being ourselves "a royal priesthood." In the other sense the Christian places his offering by the altar that Christ may offer it up to God, and so make it acceptable. There is no conflict between the two; for, if the Christian is God's priest, he is so in virtue of the one process and the one sacrifice, and the moment he would officiate independently he becomes a priest of Baal. 4. "Sacrifice" was of two kinds.-1Leviticus 16, with its commentary in Hebrews 9; Hebrews 10, is the great study of "the sin-offering." There we find how absolutely this is restricted to the work done on Calvary. It would be blasphemous to apply the term to a human being as meaning atonement. When we even speak of atoning for a sinful past we are going perilously near to the edge of this precipice. (2) But though the sin-offering is absolutely Christ's, it is not quite thus with "the burnt-offering," the essence of which is the penetrating, transfiguring fire, the emblem of the sanctifying work of the Holy Ghost. The "sacrifice" here is the life indwelt, kindled, inspired, transformed by the fire of the Holy Spirit. II. THE CLAUSE AS A WHOLE. 1. It prepares us for a somewhat painful life. "Sacrifice" implies death. "Look, then, upon yourselves as men who have already died with Christ, and who are now being burnt upon God's altar." The figure sets before us the life of a Christian as a life through which a fire is passing, that it may come out from it in a new form, the sinful having become pure, the earthly heavenly, and the whole man "meet for the inheritance of the saints in light." A process like this must be painful if the holy flame is really alight, if the baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire is really at work in us, consuming our base passions, etc. 2. The painful life is also a glorious life. There is something in the word to which all but hearts of earth and stone are responsive. What will not a friend sacrifice for his friend? Will he not go through fire and water may he but prove his love? "Present your bodies a living sacrifice." Wherefore? and for what? To show that you feel what God has done for you in Jesus. If Christian ambition were just a refurbishing and regilding of this poor tarnished thing which sin and the fall has made us, I can well imagine noble hearts saying, "I will none of it. I despise your decencies and decorum." But men cannot speak in this way of the sacrifice of the body, of the flame kindled at the cross-altar, and kindling the creature and the sinner into the sufferer and into a doer and into a darer. Man would give worlds to live that life if he could. He cries in his shame and bitterness, "Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his." One reason why there are not more Christians is because so few have entered into the thought of the inward fire which alone can make the outward surface aught but a delusion or a hypocrisy. (Dean Vaughan.) Parallel Verses KJV: I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. |
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