Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Obedience is Better than Sacrifice

Obedience is Better Than Sacrifice - December 14, 2004


It came to my attention that I might have misrepresented a Bible verse in You Don't Have To Front To Kick It. The part where I quote a verse that my grandmother used to recite ALL the time:



Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways, acknowledge Him and He will direct your path.

That’s not something she just made up, that’s a verse found in Proverbs 3:5-6. It’s pretty much self-explanatory; she encouraged us to put our trust in the Lord even as children. For a hardheaded boy like me, this was EXACTLY what I needed to hear daily; because I had a problem with thinking I was always smart enough to ‘get over’. So much so that my father often called me ‘Slick’.


But besides that verse from Proverbs, my grandmother had another Biblical saying that I never really understood until I began to spiritually mature. I really wish everyone in the audience could have a chance to meet my grandmother because she’s a person that if you meet just one time in your life, you will never forget her. I leaned on her spirit a lot in my short story, ‘Flowers for Honey’ and I know she’s a large part of the blessings that God has bestowed on me in my life. For literally 3 months out of every year, she was not only my grandmother, but my mother, because my sister and I lived under her roof in Arkansas every summer, along with my cousin Peaches, who is really better defined as my sister, because that’s how close we are.



Whenever she left us at the house, there would always be explicit instructions of what to clean up, what to do, what NOT to do and so forth. And she was wild enough to come back and check up on us to make sure we followed through with her orders. If she told us not to watchTV, when she’d come home she’d put her hand to the side of the big Curtis Mathis console to see if it was warm. Of course, that was before the days of flat screen and plasmaTV, when they still had those big cathode ray tubes that heated up when in use. If there was a detail that was not met to her satisfaction, it didn’t matter what our excuse was, her reply was always,



“Obedience is better than sacrifice.”



Since I was often on the periphery of problems when it came to the housework (I did most of my dirt outside), I would often cock my head to the side like a confused puppy and wonder what the hell that meant. The only sacrifice I knew about was those sheep and stuff they killed in the Bible. We often got a live goat to slaughter and barbeque for Juneteenth, but what did that have to do with obedience??



It wasn’t until I really started studying the Word of God that I came to an enlightened understanding of what this phrase meant, as well as the part of the Bible that it is found in. When you read over in 1 Samuel 15t chapter, God instructed the 1st king of Israel, Saul, to destroy the Amalakites:



15:3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.



God wanted Saul to wipe out everything and leave nothing to spare. But Saul didn’t obey the Lord’s command like he was supposed to, instead he saved the best animals and spared the leader of the Amalekites, Agag’s life:



15:9 But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; but everything that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.





So the text describes how Saul offered up the best of the spoils as a sacrifice to God. Now, when I first read this passage, I was thinking that it was an honorable gesture for Saul to offer this sacrifice..considering how harder it is to build an altar and prepare an animal as compared to just killing everything. My immature spirit saw this as an act of unselfishness and sacrifice on Saul’s part. That’s why this passage is so important to the Christian faith..because God spoke through His prophet Samuel to let Saul and all who read the Word understand more about what God wants from us:



22 And Samuel said, Hath 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 hearken than the fat of rams.



Whoomp! There it is..obedience IS better than sacrifice ya’ll. Meditate on that for a while, because this is the background for our Bible School lesson for this week.