Imagine for a moment a person of high office has asked you to meet them, to come before them. Maybe the Premier, or Prime Minister, or other such office. How would you prepare? What would you bring? How would you feel about the meeting? Are you wondering – why me?
And once you’ve thought about that, consider this. The creator of all, The Lord God, Jehovah, calls you to come before Him, what do you bring?
Samuel 13 records an event where King Saul didn’t wait for Samuel to arrive to bring an offering to God. Samuel was running late; Saul’s people were scattering and Saul took it on himself to make the offering. He had what seemed to be a good reason.
11 Samuel said, “What have you done?” And Saul said, “When I saw that the people were scattering from me, and that you did not come within the days appointed, and that the Philistines had mustered at Michmash, 12 I said, ‘Now the Philistines will come down against me at Gilgal, and I have not sought the favor of the Lord.’ So I forced myself, and offered the burnt offering.” 1 Sam 13:11,12 ESV
It seemed like a good idea, after all, Saul was king, God’s selected leader for the nation of Israel, surely, he was qualified to give the offering. But the response is not what we might expect.
13 And Samuel said to Saul, “You have done foolishly. You have not kept the command of the Lord your God, with which he commanded you. For then the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever. 14 But now your kingdom shall not continue. The Lord has sought out a man after his own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be prince over his people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.” 1 Sam 13:13,14 ESV
The issue is not that Saul gave the offering, but rather that he was told to wait for Samuel to come. In response for Saul’s disobedience, the kingdom would be removed from him.
A bit later, as recorded in 1 Sam 15, Saul relents to the people and does not destroy all the spoils when defeating the Amalekites as directed by Samuel. When Samuel shows up, he hears the animals and asks for an accounting. Saul says the people took the best to sacrifice to the Lord your God.
22 And Samuel said,
“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,
as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
and to listen than the fat of rams.
1 Sam 15:22 ESV
God does not delight in our sacrifices; he delights in us obeying his voice. Samuel says it is better to obey and to listen. Also note, when Saul excuses the keeping of the animals, which incidentally are not sacrificed, he refers to God as the Lord YOUR God. There is a strong implication that the Lord is not being seen as God by Saul, and that he has gone the way of the nations around him, where the king was seen as deity, and could make the rules himself. In addition to the eventual loss of his kingdom, Saul led his people into constant warfare with the nations around them, especially the Philistines. His acts of disobedience led to a generation of war.
Back to the opening question. The creator of all, the Lord God, calls you to come before Him, what do you bring? Micah 6 has summarized it.
6 “With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
8 He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:6-8 ESV
With what shall you come before the Lord? Micah was a contemporary of Isaiah. Where Isaiah prophesied to the royal court in Jerusalem, Micah prophesied to the common people of Judah, to the rural, farming communities. Their messages were the same. Even though the nation was experiencing relative peace and prosperity, their sin before God was mounting up, most hidden behind a veil of religious activities. They were a religious people, ticking all the boxes. They worshipped at the temple; they made all the required sacrifices; they knew and did all the rituals. They had the right worship songs and the comfortable buildings, had outreaches into the poorer areas of their cities, it was a perfect model. They were very religious, but their hearts were far from God.
They were sick and didn’t know it.
Micah’s central theme touches time and again on the line of “to hear”. Hear oh Israel, the lord our God is one lord. There are no commandments greater than these. It is a message to the everyman. It is a message picked up by Jesus, raised by the expert in the law, and given to us today – to love the Lord our God, to love our fellow man, to do justly.
Micah poses a question in response to the trends of his time – do we come before God with the perfect offering in our eyes? Rivers of oil, the best photo op or opinion and offering of our wealth. Will God be pleased with giving of even our firstborn, of the best of the fruit of our labour?
Can you hear the arrogance? We basically ask - what would it take to buy off God? As if God could be bribed? (could He? Umm. no). Could we ever offer God any material thing He wants or needs?
And Micah doesn’t answer directly, he asks, why do we ask? God has told us what we are to bring. What we are to do. The problem is, we don’t want to do that, it is either inconvenient, or too costly in our own personal economy, or we think we’re all good.
But we ask if God is cool with the offerings because we want to avoid what it is God wants. We have a need to appease God because we know we have fallen short of His glory, that we all have sinned and we want a way to make it up. The problem is, we try to make it up from within our own paradigm. I think, if I could get away with bringing something, then God would be happy and I’d be happy. But we know what it is God asks, what He requires:
God requires that: “we do justly” before Him, before our brethren, before all people: regardless of their religious, racial, or economic standing in life. I spoke about justice a couple of weeks ago so I won’t go into a deep detail again. We are called to do justice, not thwart it, to live a life following the Spirit. We can’t do this on our own. Left to our devices we will find ways to subjugate others while exalting ourselves. This was Saul’s sin – he saw himself equal with God’s appointed judge of Israel. In his pride, Saul ended up losing the kingdom. This is our sin too, without the Holy Spirit, we are wont to rush headlong into destruction, seeking our own desires of the flesh and fighting to hold onto our ways.
God also requires that “we love kindness” that we show mercy, compassion and goodwill unto all men. We are witnessing a time in the world unlike any other we have seen. How many times over the past three months have you heard the words “unprecedented”, and yet even with the chaos of pandemic, our tendency is to question, to ridicule those who won’t wear a mask, or maybe those who do wear a mask, depending on which camp we fall into. God calls us to love kindness, to bear one another, to avoid division and controversy, both of which are works of the flesh, and to work in the fruit of the Spirit.
We are to love mercy, because of the mercy God has shown us. we can only truly show the mercy of God if we have experienced His mercy ourselves.
The Lord your God, the God of Samuel, is the same God today, he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and is the God of here and now. He is the God who in Micah’s time required his people to love kindness. He requires it of us today.
And God calls us to walk humbly with Him. Not to race ahead, not to lag behind, not to point out all the amazing work we have done, not to seek the platitudes of man, or the applause of our friends, but to walk. humbly. Matt 23:12 and Luke 14:11 say “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
But what is humble? Humble is not grovelling, or having a low self esteem. Godly humility is being at ease and comfortable with who you are in the Lord. It is recognizing that you cannot succeed in your own strength and need God’s help. Godly humility means you don’t have a need for vengeance, you can be a peacemaker and walk, and bring justice because it is not your agenda you carry. While we should avoid self-pride, humility does not mean we should pretend we are unaware of the gifts God has given us. The key is to remember that they are from God.
Humility is not thinking less of ourselves; it is thinking of ourselves less. It is the realization that our worth is not in self pride.
And God asks that we walk humbly – with Him. Not against Him, but with Him. Stop and think about that for a moment. God, the creator, the perfect, all knowing, all present. The one who spoke all that is into existence, the eternal – He wants you to walk with Him.
That is the picture from the Garden of Eden. The Lord God walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. When the work was done, evening falling and, in the Jewish culture, it was the bridge of the end of one day and the start of the next. Dusk, sunset. The toil of the day was over, and the Lord would walk with them. I can imagine they’d have so much to tell God, how the day went, the discoveries they had, and the delight. What a way to wrap up and start a day. Then there came the day when they hid from God. God still wanted them to walk with him in humility, but they had taken a step of pride, exalting themselves, wanting to be like God.
We might want to think we’d not fall into that sin, of reaching out and eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, but ask yourself – are you walking with God in humility?
If you’re honest, the answer will depend on who you are relying on. If you are relying on self, then the answer is no – it might look like humility to others, or even to you, but if you are exalting yourself, it isn’t humility.
It is the walk, in relationship, the humble walk, with God that goes hand in hand with doing justice and loving kindness. This was what God required of Israel. It is required of us today - loving and obedient hearts.
It is in Christ alone that our hope is found the song says. We cannot do it on our own, all our plans and apparent good works are like "filthy rags" in God’s sight. It is Christ's death that paid the penalty for our sin, and the only way we, that you, that I, can "do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God" is if we have come to Christ and accepted that gift of salvation.
So, back to that initial question - The creator of all, The Lord God, Jehovah, calls you to come before Him, what are you bringing?
Blessings.