For over 4,000 years, from Adam to Jesus Christ, blood sacrifices were a vital part of the worship of the saints of the true and living God. Those sacrifices performed within the walls of the temple oft times included the sprinkling of the animals’ blood on the worshiper’s clothes. Why would the Lord require such a thing?
As strange as that may seem to us today, it was indeed a sacred part of their worship service in God’s Holy Temple. As with many of those ancient temple ordinances, they were a type and a shadow of a future event. The particular event that this ordinance pointed to would occur in a Garden known as Gethsemane where Jesus would “sprinkle,” and then finally cover his clothes with the blood of the great and last sacrificial lamb, even the Son of God himself. Those ancient ordinances that were demanded of all God’s chosen people were stopped at this final and infinite sacrifice.
Today, we are no longer asked to shed the blood of any animal in our worship. We are asked for something far more difficult to give. He now asks, in place of a blood sacrifice, that we “offer a sacrifice unto the Lord thy God in righteousness, even that of a broken heart and a contrite spirit.”
Is this not all we really have to give, anyway? Our money, our talents, our possessions, even the very air we breathe already belongs to him. Only in our willingness to do his will instead of our own, can we truly sacrifice anything. We marvel at Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son, yet forget that this may well have been a crowning test for Abraham after a lifetime of putting his all on the altar.
Would this test have ever come had he been unwilling to give of his time to read his scriptures or visit the sick? Had he always been too busy to answer the call of the Lord in the small things, can we assume he would ever have been given such a grand test?
So it is with us. What are we willing to lay on the altar? What are we not? It is the great test for all mankind. Joseph Smith taught that “a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has the power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.”
The greatest sacrifice we can make is replacing what we want, with “thy will, oh Lord, be done, not mine.” “Obedience, that which God will never take by force, He will accept when freely given. And he will then return to you freedom that you can hardly dream of; the freedom to feel and to know, the freedom to do, and the freedom to be, at least 1,000 fold more than we offer him. Strangely enough, the key to freedom is obedience.”
It has always been so, and will forever be so.
• Craig Lindquist is a Kapaa business owner and frequent contributor to The Garden Island.
