Daily Lesson for Sunday 4th of May 2025
Sometimes contrasting two ideas can be very instructive. Much can be learned about the nature of sacrifice in the biblical perspective from when God actually rejected the sacrifices of His people.
Compare Isaiah 1:2-15 with Isaiah 56:6-7 and Psalms 51:17. What important lessons about sacrifice are taught here?
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This tragic episode in Israel’s history was not the first time that God rejected a sacrifice; something similar happened near the beginning of salvation history, when Abel’s sacrifice was approved and acknowledged by God, and Cain’s was not. That early episode gives us another opportunity to contrast acceptable and unacceptable sacrifices. (See Genesis 4:3-7 and Hebrews 11:4.)
In Isaiah’s time, Israel was going through the motions, mentally checking off religious boxes in a minimal attempt to appease God, all while living as they pleased. Their sacrifices were anchored in self, just as Cain’s were, and not in an attitude of surrender and submission to God.
It is the same spirit that animates the kingdoms of this world: the spirit of self-sufficiency. Cain would live as he pleased and render mere ritual to God on his own terms. One can only assume that he viewed God as an inconvenience, a roadblock to setting his own course, but he feared God just enough to go through the motions.
Abel, however, offered the sacrifice God had requested, the sacrifice that exhibited the promise God had made of a coming Messiah (Genesis 3:15): a lamb, pointing forward to the saving act of Christ at Calvary.
“Abel grasped the great principles of redemption. He saw himself a sinner, and he saw sin and its penalty, death, standing between his soul and communion with God. He brought the slain victim, the sacrificed life, thus acknowledging the claims of the law that had been transgressed. Through the shed blood he looked to the future sacrifice, Christ dying on the cross of Calvary; and trusting in the atonement that was there to be made, he had the witness that he was righteous, and his offering accepted.”—Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 72.
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How crucial that we protect ourselves from simply going through the motions! How can each one of us experience what it means to depend totally upon the death of Jesus as our only hope of salvation? |
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