Loyalty Rather Than Sacrifice

For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice,
And in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.Every generation of man includes people who simply miss the point about God. Thanks be to Him for His patience.Throughout the Bible, the Lord God reminds us that commands and ordinances are not what the flesh will try to make them out to be. In fact, they are the exact opposite. It’s very true that they exist and apply to mankind, but man’s flesh perverts them every chance it gets. “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). Commands are often best understood as simply the expression of God’s will for mankind.While the flesh perceives God’s law as confining, God sees it as the pathway to freedom. The pressure the fleshly person feels while trying to uphold the law is completely unwarranted. It’s also the purest example of futility in life.During the prophet Hosea’s time, the fleshly Jews assumed that performing sacrificial acts were what pleased the Lord. However, since their hearts weren’t right, their motivation being fleshly (e.g., works for grace), the Lord was dissatisfied altogether. As Hosea wrote above, the Lord was looking for loyalty from His subjects.Works will never produce good loyalty; however, loyalty will always produce good works. Men who have this wrong, like those Hosea was addressing in the Old Testament, are as Jesus described the Pharisees in the New Testament, “You judge according to the flesh” (John 8:15). Contemporary Christianity is hardly any different. There are apparently millions of people alive today who believe that sacrificial performance, without any real loyalty to the Lord, is pleasing to Him. This is false religion.I have a pastor friend that preaches in Ghana, Africa every day, fighting tooth and nail against this very perversion. Whole sects of so-called “Christianity” are convinced that a person must add works to the true Gospel of Jesus Christ in order to be saved. These delusional folks will fiercely contend with my friend, proclaiming that he is the one who is unsaved. Why? Simply put, they are loyal to their flesh, not the Lord. As such, through that lens, they perceive my godly friend as ungodly. Everything is flipped upside down. Hence Paul’s retort, “Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh” (2 Corinthians 5:16).“[The Lord delights] in loyalty rather than sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6a). In other words, while God’s law is chalk full of commands to sacrifice, performances are merely a show of loyalty, never the establishment of it. An impure heart will never be purified through sacrifice, only by the grace of God. Human flesh cannot understand such a thing.When the Pharisees saw this, they said to His disciples, “Why is your Teacher eating with the tax collectors and sinners?” But when Jesus heard this, He said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I DESIRE COMPASSION, AND NOT SACRIFICE,’ for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”Again, “[The Lord delights] in loyalty rather than sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6a). Since the flesh flips things upside down, we might say that this tenet of God is reversed to say, “The Lord delights in sacrifice rather than loyalty” (unholy doctrine). Arguably our greatest depiction of this ungodliness in the Bible is with the Pharisees.At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.” But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent?”

“But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I DESIRE COMPASSION, AND NOT A SACRIFICE,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”The foul thing about ungodliness is that it justifies itself and condemns the things of God, including His children. It hails false religion - where loyalty is to the flesh, not the Lord - as worthy of praise, and all who practice it, while it persecutes those who refuse to abide in it. False religion crucified Jesus, who said, “Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20).Loyalty is a big word. It behooves each of us to understand where our loyalties lie. Are we truly loyal to the Lord God, or are we loyal to the flesh? Why do we sacrifice, if/when we do? What is our motivation for doing so? These are the questions that God already knows the answers to because He sees the heart, “for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7b). The question is whether or not we are being honest with ourselves.Let us stop saying, “Oh, look there at that religion…or over there at that one…how wretched they are!” Rather, let us take a long, hard look in the mirror, through the lens of the Word of God. What might we discover about ourselves? Will we run away, or face the facts? ”For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was” (James 1:23-24).In my book Religion By Any Other Name, I wrote a whole chapter on the fact that religion doesn’t need a name to be evil. In fact, the nameless ones are often the most insidious of all. We must turn over every stone in our souls, especially when we pray, in order to bring to light the truth about our loyalties. What good is any sacrifice if we are serving the wrong master?The difference between true and false religion is an issue of loyalty, not sacrifice.

Love in Christ,

Ed Collins