Psalm 50:7-15 Commentary

The Lectionary has carved out the exact middle section of Psalm 50 for this Ordinary Time Sunday in Year A.  It would have us skip the first half-dozen verses that summon Israel to gather before God and then the final verses that are all about a scolding of the wicked.  Instead we focus on God’s address to his people in verses 7-15.

God begins by saying he is going to testify against his people but in what follows that does not really happen.  This does not sound like an indictment per se.  It is more a case of God’s testifying to some things not so much against the people as in front of them, though if God says what he does about sacrifices because some of the people have come to misunderstand such rituals, then perhaps it is a corrective form of testifying after all—a de facto indictment of their misperceptions.  And probably that is the case too because why else would God say what he does unless he is correcting and clarifying something where the thinking of the people is concerned?

Mostly God makes it clear that important though the sacrificial system in Israel was—goodness knows a whole lot of biblical real estate is devoted to the ins and outs and regulations governing sacrifices in places like Leviticus—that system did not exist to meet any divine needs.  When we consider key doctrines in the Theology of God (which is Theology proper), one teaching is on Divine Aseity.  Among other things Aseity Doctrine asserts that God is sovereign and complete within God’s Self.  God was not caused by any external force and God does not need anything in order to be God and to continue being God through all eternity.  Even God’s act of creating the cosmos was not in response to some external need or pressure to create but was instead an act of sheer grace and pleasure.  God is by definition self-sufficient in every particular.  No one could ever add to or subtract from God.  God does not need a blessed thing.

And pretty much that is at the heart of these verses in Psalm 50.  God does not need sacrifices to meet some need.  God neither eats nor drinks and it is not the case that absent people’s offering up their sacrifices, God would somehow feel unsatisfied or like something was missing from the divine Life.

To our modern eyes and ears perhaps this seems pretty obvious.  But in the Ancient Near East there were plenty of religious practices that were premised on the idea that the gods got hungry and so you had to feed them.  Or the gods were perpetually on the razor-thin edge of unleashing wrath and so they had to be appeased, sometimes even with human or child sacrifices (horrifyingly enough).  In other words, sacrifices, ritual acts of sex at the altars of Baal or Asherah were all necessary to meet some divine needs and/or to head off disaster or a season of bad crops or some other ugly form of punishment at the hands of some very capricious gods and goddesses.  In short, lots of false gods came off as being pretty needy.

But nothing of the sort is true of Israel’s God.  The sacrifices made to God do not add anything to God or to God’s existence.  Everything involved in sacrifices belonged to God in the first place and if God is favorably inclined to love his people and to be gracious toward them, it is not because God’s affections can be bought nor can God be bribed.  Yet in the final verses of this section in verses 14-15 the people are told yet again to make their thanksgiving sacrifices, to fulfill the vows they had made to God and God would in turn be faithful in attending to the people as he promised.  Psalm 50 is not aimed to make people think sacrifices are optional after all since God does not need them.  No, no: keep sacrificing according to the Law.

But if God does not need sacrifices, why were they so important to do?  If in Israel they were not to be premised on the idea that God needed to be fed or appeased or to give something God was currently lacking, then what role did sacrifices play?  Perhaps the answer is not that God needed the sacrifices so much as the people did.  The people needed to remember that sin and evil are serious.  All the things that vandalize and rupture God’s desired shalom for this creation are grave matters that cannot be dismissed lightly.  There is a cost to restoring the things sin disrupts.  There needs to be a kind of holy seriousness in the hearts of people where understanding the right ways to live before a holy God is concerned.

Sacrifices did not meet unmet needs in the heart of God but they did address what was needed in the human heart.  What was needed was a sober reminder that paying for sin was costly.  When blood had to be shed, when an animal or a bird had to give up its life as a symbol of a putting to death of sinful deeds and sinful hearts, then the gravity of the moral universe came into proper focus.

In the longest run, of course, all of this crystalized in the death of the final sacrificial Lamb of God, Jesus Christ.  Because as the author to the Hebrews will write about quite extensively in the New Testament, all along the blood of birds and animals—costly though it was and serious and sobering a business as the whole sacrificial system had been—those sacrifices would never get the whole creation across the salvific finish line.  Those sacrifices made by humans were in the end stand-ins for the humans themselves who were the guilty ones and so finally the Son of God himself made an incarnate human being took all that human guilt, shame, sin, iniquity, and evil upon himself and allowed the sheer weight of it to crush him in his final sacrifice on the cross.

Psalm 50 makes it clear that God did not need the sacrifices of his people to meet any needs in the divine existence.  True.  But in the end God himself needed to make a sacrifice within God to set the cosmos back on course, to right every wrong ever done, to atone for all the evil that had accrued in human history.  What remains for us today as we live on this side of Easter is to become what the New Testament calls ”living sacrifices” of thanksgiving to God.  Again, not because God needs that but we do.  We need to know, and every day live in ways that make it clear we know, how great a salvation we have received by grace alone through faith alone in our living Lord Jesus Christ.

Illustration Idea

Sometimes today we find the idea of sacrifice noble and attractive and at other times not so much.  In baseball we have “sacrifice” fly balls when a player willingly hits the ball deep into the outfield knowing it will be caught and he will be out but he does it so his teammates already on base can advance forward or even come home to score a run.  The player sacrifices the chance to get another hit added to his batting average for the good of the team.  And of course another place you hear of the concept of sacrifice being cast into a positive light is military personnel who sacrifice their lives on the altar of freedom.

But in a lot of other arenas, people don’t like to be told to sacrifice something.  President Jimmy Carter has written that when as President he began to suggest that life had limits and that sometimes we all needed to give up some things for the greater good, that message did not sell.  When the USA boycotted the Olympics in Moscow to protest Soviet policies, the message that American athletes needed to sacrifice winning medals for a greater good did not go over well.  Americans prefer the idea of limitless opportunity and ambition, to go for the gusto and seize the brass ring and achieve and earn for themselves first of all.  If anything, we hear about people “sacrificing” family time in order to keep climbing the ladder of success.  But that kind of sacrifice does not have the ring of nobility to it.  That is a sacrifice that ends up being self-serving after all.

So maybe we find the sacrifice of truly valuable things to be noble when others do it but not so much when we ourselves are called to do so.

Sacrifice does indeed turn out to have a lot to do with the bent of any given human heart.