Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and pay your vows to the Most High.We have a common-sense understanding of what it means to sacrifice. We know that it means to give something up, to self-abnegate. Usually it connotes self-denial for the sake of another—in this case, the Most High.
Psalm 50: 14
Sacrifice, then, always involves giving. The one who offers a sacrifice gives up something that would otherwise belong to him and dedicates and devotes it to God—to His honour, His praise, His Name, His worship. As all Christians know, giving to God is in one sense a ridiculous idea. How can you give anything to Him who already owns and possesses all things? It is precisely this point that the Lord drives home to His people in this fiftieth psalm.
He says that whilst He does not reprove Israel for its sacrifices, He yet needs to testify against us (verse 7). For our fathers had fallen into the error of thinking that offering a sacrifice was like a commercial exchange. It is as if we were taking something that ultimately and originally belonged to us and we were giving something to God, so that we lose and He gains. The subtle sub-text always lurking nearby is that our sacrifices buy something in return from God in a crass commercial exchange. By sacrifice, the demons whisper, we are paying a price for something and now God owes us. He is in our debt.
He reproves our fathers by reminding them and us that every beast of the forest, every farm animal on the hills, every bird, yea everything that moves belongs to the Lord. They are His (verses 9--13). He commanded them out of nothing. He alone is the only true and original owner of all things. Therefore, when we sacrifice our self-denial is relative only. For whatever we are giving up—whether it be time, money, possessions, energy, talents, voice—never really belonged to us at all in an absolute sense. We are only, ever, and always mere stewards of what belongs to God.
Therefore proper and only true motivation behind all sacrifice is thanksgiving. It is giving to God which is simply a vehicle or means of expressing and conveying our thanks to Him for all that He has been and is to us. It, therefore, can be in no sense a bargain, a sale and purchase agreement. This was the offensive sin of our fathers—and we would do well to put any trace of their wrongdoing far from us.
The paying of vows is central to true faith and worship. It is an ordinary part of Christian living, devotion, and service to make vows to God, and pay them with great thankfulness for all His goodness. These are the sacrifices which are acceptable to God. The way it works is aptly demonstrated in the life of our father, Jacob. God had met with him and promised that He would love Jacob, care for him, and bring him back safely to his father's house—despite the fact that he was at that time a fugitive, fearing for his life, possessing only the shirt on his back. He took a vow—if God would do all this, then he would take a tenth of everything that God gave him, and would give it back to Him. (Genesis 28: 22). And so he did, for the rest of his life.
So central is this dynamic to the life of faith that the Lord summons to Himself those He calls His godly ones who have made a covenant with Him by means of sacrifice. (Psalm 50: 5). Once again, sacrifice is not a “buying” of God's favour. Even as God had set His love upon Jacob and made promises to him, so Jacob had responded by a sacrifice which expressed his thankfulness to God for His love and promises. The expression of our thanks by way of sacrifice or giving is our way of responding, of entering His covenant, of taking it to ourselves, of showing that we believe God and are thankful for His mercies. The sacrifices of thanksgiving make the covenant with the Lord insofar as they are our believing response.
As the darkness of Unbelief deepens upon our world it results in the starlight of Belief, of the Gospel of grace, shining ever more brightly. One of the brightest stars in the Gospel firmament is the light of thankfulness in the hearts and upon the countenances of God's people. It shows in their merriment, their joy, their exuberant sacrifices, their cheerful generosity.
In a world made increasingly ugly by a rising tide of victims' claims, by spurious demands for payments, and by pseudo-entitlements; where “you owe me” is the klaxon screech signalling each new day; where the West's minaret call to its house of prayer is the brazen assertion of society's debt to me; where the mosques of the West hum to the querulous demand that all debts be paid; on this darkening plain the light of perpetual thankfulness adorning the countenance of the Lord's people appears more and more beautiful. It is one of the Kingdom's brightest stars.
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