Word of Salvation – February 2014

 

Numbers 28 – SACRIFICES, SACRIFICES…!

By Rev. John Westendorp

(Sermon 28 in a series on Numbers)

Scripture reading: Numbers 28.

Singing: Book of Worship 122 / 160 / 470 / 398

 

Introd: Sometimes as you read a novel a certain chapter builds up to an exciting climax.

It takes you to a point where something really important is about to happen.

You are now sitting on the edge of your seat in anticipation.
But as you begin the next chapter the writer takes you back to some previous scene.
Or the writer digresses to give you an update on some other character in the story.

I always find those moments disappointing… it’s a let-down.
The author has psyched you up to expect an important part of the plot to be revealed.
Only to let you down by taking you to some other point in the story.
That tactic on the part of the novelist keeps you in suspense for a few more chapters.

Something similar happens here in Numbers 28.
In the previous chapters we have Israel on the very borders of the Promised Land.
There was a brief diversion as the daughters of Zelophehad asked about their inheritance.
But then it got down to the heart of the story. It’s all happening.

Moses is told that his life is over and that he must prepare himself to die.
Joshua is appointed as the leader to take over from Moses.
Before the whole assembly he is commissioned to lead Israel into Canaan.

As we conclude that chapter and go to the next we expect Moses to die.
We expect to see Joshua taking over and leading Israel into Canaan.
An appropriate opening to the next chapter of the Bible would be: Let the war begin…!

But the surprising twist is that we get nothing like that.
Instead we get Israel’s religious calendar… two chapters of regulations about worship.
Numbers 28 & 29! They are not exactly the most exciting chapters of the Bible.

However, a thoughtful reader knows that a novelist has good reasons for keeping you in suspense.

So too we’ll see that the Lord has good reasons for giving us first this, Israel’s religious calendar.

A] THE CENTRALITY OF WORSHIP.

1. The chapter begins by spelling out the daily sacrifices that Israel was to make to the Lord.

There is a morning sacrifice and an evening sacrifice.
In both instances a year-old lamb is to be offered as a burnt offering.
That is to be accompanied by some fine flour… some olive oil… and some wine.
In Israel that’s how every day begins… and that’s how every day ends.
Two sacrifices every Monday… two more every Tuesday… then two on Wednesday.
Every day of the week… year in year out… that same little ritual… morning and evening.

Why? What’s the point of it?

Some time ago I came across an article on Islam in a newspaper.
It pointed out that the Muslim faith is not just a religion but that it’s a way of life.
The Muslim is called to prayer five times a day and his whole life revolves around that.
This writer of this article seemed to imply that other religions are just religions.
But in contrast Islam is more than a religion… it’s a lifestyle.

Well here in Numbers 28 God is making clear to Israel that their faith is not just a religion either.
Biblical faith too is a way of life… the day begins with worship and it ends with worship.
It begins with God and ends with God. Worship defines each and every day.

Or we could look at it another way.
God gives us His gifts and blessings every day… and in return Israel was to give daily too.
Whichever way we look at it these daily sacrifices are foundational to the life of God’s people.
They are saying in a very clear way that daily life is to be lived with God.

Today we’ve lost something of that concept.
There was a time when most Christian families still had morning and evening prayers.
The day would begin and end… with prayer arising like the smoke of a burnt offering to God.
That makes me wonder how it goes in your home and in your life.
Do you race off to work in the morning without even giving the Lord a passing nod?
And at night crash into bed and fall asleep without thanking Him for the day’s blessings?
Biblical faith is a lifestyle where the day begins with God and ends with God.

But Numbers 28 goes further. On the Sabbath day the requirements for worship are doubled.
Twice as many lambs… twice as much flour and twice as much oil and wine.
So God not only claims our days… He also claims our weeks.
And here He asks His people to make a special effort on the Sabbath day.
In a very telling way He sets aside one day out of seven as being special to Him.

Then on top of that there are special additional sacrifices every month.
On the first day of the month… each new moon.
Because God not only claims our days and weeks as His, but also our months.
More than that! Five annual feast days are mentioned with more additional offerings.
Because all of life is His… our days… our weeks… our months… our years.

And in all of this the focus is on fellowship with God.
Because the various elements of these sacrifices symbolise a balanced meal:
There is meat… but there is also flour and oil… and even a drink offering of wine.
So God is saying in a very vivid way that all of life is to be lived in fellowship with Him.

2. Okay! But why does God record these things right here at this point in Israel’s history.

This is not just the strategy of a novelist who wants to keep you in suspense for a few more chapters.

I believe God does this because we human beings need reminding.
None of this stuff here in Numbers 28 is new. God had told them all this back in Leviticus.
The problem is that we human beings often suffer from egg-timer disease.
(Egg-timer disease is when we only remember something for 3 minutes.)
So the Bible often repeats things for us because we forget so soon.

Furthermore, keep in mind that Israel has been wandering in the wilderness for forty years.
This is now a whole new generation.
And every new generation needs to be reminded that all of life is religion.
That our days and weeks and months and years are to be lived in fellowship with God.

More importantly these instructions are given because this new generation is about to go into Canaan.
And in Canaan they are going to be confronted everywhere with idolatry.
An idolatry that was as pervasive as it was perverse.
Fertility gods and household gods… and tin-pot idols by the dozen.
Some of them so perverse that they actually demanded child sacrifice.

Well, what’s the best antidote for false religion? It’s true religion.
Many banks appoint special people as experts in detecting forged banknotes.
When they train these folk they don’t show them dozens of varieties of forgeries.
No! They make them concentrate on every detail of the genuine banknotes.
So intensely that these people will instantly detect even the best forgery.

So too the best remedy against the idols of our time is true God-ordained worship.
That’s why for us as Christians our worship is so important.
Sunday by Sunday we come here and we focus on the real thing.
So that as we go out into the week we recognise the false gods of our age.

Here Israel’s whole life, its days, weeks, months and years are made to focus on God.
But it is so that as they enter Canaan it will protect them from the fake religions of Canaan.

3. One of the mistakes we could make at this point is to keep it all very general.

Some years ago I was counselling a young man who felt churchgoing wasn’t all that important.

Repeatedly he would say to me: “But all of life is religion… and I worship God in everything I do.”
Numbers 28 certainly supports that view of life.
The days… the weeks… the months… the years… all of time is lived in fellowship with God.
All of life has to do with the worship of our Creator.

But we shouldn’t overlook that this chapter includes very specific and appointed times.
The times are at sunrise and at twilight.
And the special weekly offerings are not just on any old day of the week.
They are to be carried out on the Sabbath Day.
And the monthly sacrifices are to be on the first day of the month.
And the annual special offerings are to be on the appointed feast days.

IOW this is not only saying that for Israel all of life centres on God.
It is also saying that this worship of God is to be expressed in specific ways at specific times.
The times are set out by the Lord… and the elements of each offering are given in detail.

IOW it is God who decides how He is to be worshipped and when He is to be worshipped.
We Reformies call that the ‘regulative principle’ for worship.
So while we worship God in all of life we especially worship Him on the Lord’s Day.
And like the morning and evening sacrifices we have a morning and evening worship service.

Here in Numbers 28 God sets aside the Sabbath day as the climax of Israel’s worship.
A double quantity of everything is to be brought to the Lord to mark this special occasion.

So… yes… this chapter teaches that all of life is lived in fellowship with God and centres on worship.

But we cannot use this chapter to oppose certain set times to worship God for His goodness and love.

4. One other thing that this chapter make abundantly clear is that worship is about God.

Today’s evangelical church needs to sit up and take notice of that.
In too many places today a very subtle shift from God to man is taking place.
In many pulpits today preaching is all about our needs being met.
And many songs sing more about my worship of God than about His love for me.

Let me show you one way in which the stress in this chapter falls fully on God.
Notice verse 2. Our NIV doesn’t quite do justice to the original text.
In the Hebrew the first person singular pronouns (me and my) are used four times.
It reads like this: Present my offering, my food for my offerings by fire of a soothing aroma to me.

Worship is not truly worship if the focus is on us.
The essence of worship is nothing less than us attributing worth to God. It’s about Him!
It is bringing tribute to the Sovereign Lord of the universe… especially because of His grace.
God had brought these folk out of Egypt from their slavery… by His grace.
God would graciously bring them into Canaan… and for that grace they worship.
Surely that grace of God should be why our worship today focuses fully on Him.
We have experienced that in Jesus God is gracious to us. So let’s worship Him for it.

B] PERVASIVENESS OF SACRIFICE.

1. This morning I particularly want to explore a little further with you the nature of these offerings.

While the worship of Numbers 28 is very much directed at God it does relate to human need.

But not in the way that many modern preachers would bring that out.
The health, wealth and prosperity preachers focus on our material and physical needs.
Too many sermons today will be geared towards you being a better husband or wife.
Or how you can succeed in life and not let troubles get you down. Okay they are good things.

But these sacrifices highlight quite a different need that we human beings have.
Notice that these daily offerings are spoken of burnt offerings.
That means that those lambs, offered morning and evening, were totally consumed.
Okay… the skin was kept by the priest but the rest was totally burnt up in the fire on the altar.

Keep in mind that this daily sacrificial lamb was a substitute for the people.
So what God was saying was: This is what you deserve, my people!
Because of your sins against me you deserve nothing less than total destruction.
But I will now accept this lamb in your place… as your substitute.

We call that ‘making atonement’… it’s about reconciling God and man again.

Today we often have the idea that we sort things out with God simply by repentance, by saying sorry.

These sacrifices show that there is a cost involved in making atonement… costly animals.

The point is that someone has to pay.
Imagine someone smashes into your car at a city intersection.
The other driver gets out and profusely apologises… he keeps saying: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
That’s very nice… but his being sorry is not going to fix the damage to your car.
So you tell him that you forgive him and that you won’t hold it against him.
But your forgiveness of him… that doesn’t fix the damage to your car either.
The point is that someone has to pay to fix things up.

So too someone has to pay to fix up our broken relationship with God.
So over and over in the OT there was always the shedding of blood.
That was God’s way of making payment for what we had broken.
That’s why the book of Hebrews says: Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

2. But there is a second reason why burnt offering were brought.

Sacrifices were also brought in thankfulness to God for His goodness and love.

Again that makes the idea of sacrifice being totally burnt up on the altar meaningful.
That lamb was totally consumed indicating the idea of total commitment to God.
The one who brought the sacrifice wanted to show his total devotion to the Lord God.

Paul pick up on this idea in Romans 12 verse 1.
He says that because of Jesus we ought to offer our bodies as living sacrifices to God.
He adds that this is the spiritual worship that we owe to our God.
So just as Israel also brought these daily sacrifices in thankfulness to the Lord.
So too the daily sacrifice of thanks that we bring to the Lord is ourselves offered up to Him.

This linking of our grateful devotion to God to an act of sacrifice is a very sobering thing.
It highlights that even the thank offerings of Israel were bathed in blood.
An animal needed to die in order for that gratitude to God to be expressed.
That reminds us that our thanksgiving too needs purification by sacrifice.
God cannot even accept your gifts of gratitude and devotion unless they are purged by sacrifice.

3. But that also shows us this morning the weakness of the whole OT sacrificial system.

Can you imagine how many animals were slaughtered on the altar every year?

I did some calculations this past week and added up the figures.
I worked out what this all amounted to over a period of just one year.
If I got it right then each year there were 115 bulls offered. That’s a good sized cattle farm.
There were 39 rams and 32 goats. A staggering 1098 lambs.
You end us with almost a ton of flour and almost 1000 bottles each of oil and wine.
Do you see why I said that atonement costs something?

Actually the figures that I’ve given you are really just the tip of the iceberg.
Because what we have in Numbers 28 & 29 is just the regular sacrifices.
On top of that come all the personal offerings for individual sins from thousands of Israelites.

Imagine that. Every time you committed some bad sin you needed to bring a sacrifice.
Or whenever you wanted to make some special act of devotion to God you brought a sacrifice.
Thousands upon thousands of sacrifices. As the song says: Blood on blood outpoured!

Over and over Israel’s sacrificial system was saying: it is never enough!
You’ll never be finished with it in this life.
You think you’re done and then you find you have to bring yet one offering more.

But that was precisely God’s design.
All this made Israel long for the day when the perfect sacrifice for sin would be made.
The prophet Isaiah predicted that suffering Servant of the Lord would be that offering.
    Like a lamb he was led to the slaughter… and the Lord has laid on him the iniquities of us all.
And so when Jesus begins His public ministry John the Baptist points Him out.
    See the Lamb of God who take away the sin of the world.

What a blessing that the perfect sacrifice has been made.
[And we celebrate that today/next week in bread and wine at the Lord’s table].
Someone has indeed paid the cost to fix up what was broken.
All those thousands and thousands of O.T. sacrifices point us to Jesus.
He has restored us into fellowship with God so that for us all of life is religion.
He even purifies our acts of devotion as we offer ourselves as living sacrifices.

4. Here in Numbers 28 we need to realise that these offerings were not brought by individuals.

These daily… weekly… monthly and annual sacrifices were brought by the priests in the tabernacle.

But can you imagine what that meant for the people of Israel?
Keep in mind that the whole nation was camped around the tabernacle.
It meant that every morning and evening they would watch the smoke rise up into the sky.
And it would be a vivid reminder to them of their guilt.
Yes… we are people who fail to live up to God’s high and holy standard.

But there is also the other side to it.
It would also be a reminder to them of their glorious forgiveness with God.
Any Israelite who got up in the morning tormented with guilt only had to look.
Over by the tabernacle the smoke of the sacrifice ascended to heaven.
The sacrificial lamb had just died in his place. Atonement had been made.

How much more wonderful for us today. We look in faith to Jesus the perfect Lamb of God.
We now know: it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to remove sin.
So Numbers 28 is not just a sidetrack about Israel’s religious calendar.
No! This chapter points me to the Lamb of God who died for me on Calvary.
What a glorious truth: He has taken upon Himself all my sin. Praise be to His name. Amen.