Three Things You Always Thought God Wanted… but He Didn’t (Part 4): Blood Sacrifice
- Keith Stanglin
- Jun 23
- 8 min read
Keith D. Stanglin
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 Samuel 15:22
In this series of posts, I’ve suggested two institutions that, from a certain perspective, it seems God wanted for Israel, but he in fact didn’t want them. The king and the temple were ideas introduced by the people not only apart from but also contrary to the wishes of God. Yet God accommodated these human requests, regulated them, and ultimately allowed them to become obsolete, fulfilling their design in Jesus Christ and in his mystical body, the church.
Another biblical institution fits these same criteria—blood sacrifice. My confidence that God did not want sacrifice may not be as great as it is with regard to kingship and temple. First, in contrast to king and temple, blood sacrifice does not so clearly originate in Scripture as a human idea; the origin of sacrifice in Israel is not documented in Scripture. It’s just there and assumed already in Genesis 4:3-5, without explanation. But it was apparently not there from the very beginning, and its absence in Eden may be suggestive. Also, the fact that Cain and Abel are practitioners of sacrifice doesn’t imply that God commanded it. In this text, sacrifice per se is ambiguous. The act could be either pleasing or not pleasing. It’s not about fruit or flesh, both of which could be acceptable. There’s something else going on here.
Second, unlike king and temple, whose negative assessments come immediately alongside the introduction of the human idea, the explicit negative assessment of sacrifice comes much later in the biblical canon. That is, as soon as the notions of king and temple were introduced in Israel, God was not a fan. Not evidently so with sacrifice.
But the negative assessments do come. The books of Samuel, which record God’s negative assessment of king and temple, also register God’s comparative disapproval of sacrifice; obedience is better than sacrifice (1 Sam. 15:22). A similar tone is struck in Psalm 51: “You will not delight in sacrifice…; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering,” is followed by a note of divine delight in sacrifice, once things are made right in Jerusalem (Ps. 51:16-19). At the very least, these texts are marginalizing the importance of sacrifice, but they stop short of rejection.
There is more, however. In Jeremiah 7, famous for its scathing denunciation of the temple and the people’s idolatrous devotion to it, there is the following condemnation of blood sacrifice:
21 Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices, and eat the flesh. 22 For in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. 23 But this command I gave them: ‘Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people. And walk in all the way that I command you, that it may be well with you.’ 24 But they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels and the stubbornness of their evil hearts, and went backward and not forward.” Jeremiah 7:21-24 (ESV)
Again, at the very least, the message is the same as that of 1 Samuel 15:22: God
prefers obedience over sacrifice. But the language here is stronger. God did not command sacrifices, yet the people walked in their own counsels—that is, they practiced sacrifice anyway. The NIV, apparently uncomfortable with the force of verse 22, adds the word “just” (which is to say, “only”): “…I did not just give them commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices…” (Jer. 7:22, NIV). Such a strategy of supplying “just” or “only” is fairly common, but it implies the opposite of what the text actually says, changing it from God did not command it to God did command it. If that is a legitimate tactic, it would have to be employed in an awful lot of other passages, too, that seem to reject sacrifice:
In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. Psalm 40:6
I will not accept a bull from your house or goats from your folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills…. “The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me; to one who orders his way rightly I will show the salvation of God!” Psalm 50:9–10, 23
“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?” says the Lord; "I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats…. Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations—I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them.” Isaiah 1:11, 13–14
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. Hosea 6:6
I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them…. Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings during the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? Amos 5:21–22, 25 (The implied answer to that last question is, No!)
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? 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? Micah 6:6–7 (As above, the implied answers are, No!)
To be sure, most of these prophetic denunciations of blood sacrifice are given in the context of worshipers who are committing injustice. For them, sacrifice has replaced godly living. So, at the least, we can say that God prefers godly living to sacrifice, and the sacrifice, to be acceptable, must flow from righteousness. But the language seems stronger. These prophets are contrasting godly living (the truly acceptable and sufficient sacrifice) with blood sacrifice and other superfluous festivals. It is the godly living that makes the otherwise unnecessary sacrifices—something humans wanted and God accommodates on his terms—tolerable to God. Admittedly, as with king and temple, the language points more to obsolescence than to outright prohibition.
That these negative assessments of blood sacrifice come canonically after God’s regulation of sacrifice—for example, divine regulation in Leviticus comes before divine denunciation in Jeremiah—does not mean that the negative assessment is an afterthought or directed only at abuse. After all, canonically speaking, the positive institution and regulation of kingship in Deuteronomy 17 comes well before its negative assessment in 1 Samuel 8; that does not change God’s fundamental censure of kingship.
So what’s the deal with blood sacrifice? Like kingship, it is something that the nations practiced long before and outside of God’s special covenant with Israel. It likely began as human sacrifice and eventually was replaced by animals. Like the temple, sacrifice is something that humans wanted to do for the gods. What is it for? Religiously speaking, the meaning of sacrifice is not simple but complex. Put as simply as possible, it is to serve and feed the gods, as many ancient stories make abundantly clear. As such, a sacrifice may appease the god’s anger or thank the god for a blessing. It is usually part of a quid pro quo exchange, “do ut des,” I (the worshiper) give so that you (the god) may give…the field or womb an abundant harvest, the ships favorable winds, the city protection, and the like. And the more dear the sacrifice, the more is expected from the god.
How or why did it start? The ultimate origins of blood sacrifice are shrouded in prehistory, but various theories have been offered. Put as simply as possible, it seems to be a ritual representation of something deeper. Some anthropologists think it is a representation of hunting prey for food. Others trace the origin to a scapegoat mechanism, in which the community turns violently against one on whom the blame is placed for whatever harm plagues the community, physically or otherwise. Sacrifice is a way for people to feel better about their relationship with the divine, to reconcile the worshipers with life and death, to maintain communal and cosmic order, by offering something tangible and precious.
For Israel’s God, from the beginning, this kind of sacrifice is simply unnecessary. God never needed to eat flesh, and it all belongs to him anyway (Ps. 50:9-13). He was and is eternally sufficient apart from creation, utterly transcendent and independent. God need not be persuaded by some human gift to communicate the good. He is goodness itself. What he relishes is for his creature, made in his image, to reflect the divine likeness and goodness, the end for which God created man. Thus, righteousness is the only sacrifice God ever wanted from humans.
Yet, as with kingship and temple, God accommodated humans who wanted to offer a blood sacrifice. They wanted a physical way to express gratitude. Perhaps they, like the nations, sought to put God in their debt for a blessing. And, perhaps especially, they wanted a way to assuage their conscience, to effect atonement, when they did not live up to what they were created to be. So God regulated it—burnt offerings, peace offerings, Passover, Day of Atonement, and so on.
But God allowed blood sacrifice so that he could reverse its logic and undo it. When God “cut a covenant with Abram” (Gen. 15:18), Abram divided the sacrificial animals in half, and the form of God in a fire pot and torch passed between the animals. God is the covenant maker, the covenant keeper, and the one who will suffer in the event of human breach of the covenant. Genesis 22, an etiology of the cessation of human sacrifice in favor of animal sacrifice, also foreshadows the kind of sacrifice God is willing to make on behalf of his covenant people.
The sacrifices served their purpose, pointing to and finding their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), the Passover lamb (1 Cor. 5:7), the Day of Atonement goat (Hebrews 9), a sacrifice slaughtered from the foundation of the world (Rev. 5:6; 13:8). Christ embodied what God intended all along—divine atonement for his people. Theologians have offered many atonement theories, from Christus victor, to satisfaction, moral exemplar, penal substitution, governmental, and more. Whatever Christ’s death means, and however it atones for human sin, at bottom it means that God in Christ gives himself to be wronged in this covenant relationship with us—to be wronged and, instead of seeking retribution or recompense, simply to forgive, to let it all go, for the sake of infinite love.
The display of the sinless God-man on the cross, the shedding of innocent blood and divine life, is meant to put an end to all blood sacrifice. It is meant to show the uselessness of violent sacrifice and, in the empty tomb, the vindication of righteousness, always the true and only sacrifice God desired.
Sacrifice is fulfilled not only in Christ, but also in Christ’s body. Indeed, God does desire sacrifice, evident in the life of the church. First of all, the Eucharist, or Lord’s Supper, is a participation in the body and blood of the Lord, presented as a clear alternative to the sacrificial meals at pagan temples and even the sacrifices and meals offered by Israel (1 Cor. 10:14-21). Finally, the Spirit-filled members of Christ are to offer “your bodies as a living, holy, God-pleasing sacrifice, your thoughtful (logike) worship” (Rom. 12:1). Logike worship is the alternative to blood sacrifice. It is thoughtful, logical, spiritual, intellectual worship, not flesh and blood. But, actually, it is flesh and blood, involving “your bodies.” It is what the prophets said all along, and God wanted all along—a “sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God” (Heb. 13:15-16).
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