Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Do you think that the Israelites, who lived under the old ceremonial laws, ever wondered why they repeatedly offered sacrifices? After all they had their main festivals like Passover, First Fruits, Weeks, Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, the Festival of Tabernacles, all of these involved the high priest making some form of offering on behalf of the people. But these weren’t the only times that offerings were made to God; and when I’m talking about Old Testament offerings, I’m not talking about passing a basket around the worshipers like we do today. Most of the time making an offering to God in the Old Testament Jewish faith meant the blood of an animal must be spilt. On top of all the festival sacrifices there were other offerings that people would bring to the temple daily. There were fellowship offerings, guilt offerings, and on top of those special offerings that people might bring to the temple any day there was the daily offering. Every day of the week people could be seen bringing doves, pigeons, sheep, goats, and bulls. If you closed your eyes you would have thought you were at a slaughterhouse and not a temple. The bleating of all the animals, the smell of burning meat, the sight of all the blood was to be a reminder to the people that sin needs to be paid for. Sin needed to be paid for with blood.
All of those Old Testament offerings never could cover over sins, they were never meant to. Those sacrifices were meant to teach that a true substitutionary sacrifice would be needed to actually take the place before God’s judgment of every last person who had ever lived and ever would live. No bull, no sheep, no goat, no dove could ever take on the wages of sin for even one trespass. Many lost sight of what these offerings were meant to focus their eyes on. They would stop looking for the coming Messiah – the Christ – the true Lamb of God, and they would place their hope in the blood of beasts, and in their action of bringing these animals to be sacrificed. Day in and day out animal after animal would be slaughtered in the hope that one day after doing the same thing over and over there would be a different result. Hoping that one day they would have done enough to pay for their sins that piled up even more quickly than the pile of bones left over from the burnt offerings.
Does this sound like how you practice your Christian faith? Do come to church hoping that this time you’ll hear just the right thing to make you a better Christian, to make you able to avoid all sin? Are you hoping that maybe if I just put a little more in the plate, then it’ll be enough, then my guilt over those words that I said out of anger will be paid for? Yet when you leave you still feel the shame, still feel the guilt. Do you come back again and again thinking that this is the time I will have done enough? Or do we simply turn going to church as our obligatory burnt offering, something done just to satisfy God’s demands so he treats me favorably? Is Christianity just a rebranding of what Judaism had become, where we do things thinking that because we do them God will love us? Doing the same thing over and over hoping for a different result, that this time my having done this will remove my guilt is a form of Christianized insanity!
If that is what we have turned Christianity into we would be insane. Christianity is not some form of life coaching, where eventually you can expect to make yourself perfect. Our faith points us to Jesus, the true high priest that the Old Testament sacrificial system was intended to point Israel to. The amount of offerings that a high priest had to deal with undoubtably made it so that he was separate from the people he served, unable to understand the everyday temptations because of the sheer volume of work he had, which brought an entire separate set of temptations. Jesus, as our great high priest, lived among those he came to serve. After Jesus’ baptism he went into the wilderness to square off with the Devil and we see Jesus’ stomach tempted after 40 days of fasting, we see Satan use a temptation of pride in asking Jesus to jump; Jesus was also tempted to avoid his own eventual suffering and death when Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. The writer to the Hebrews reminds us in chapter 4 verse 15 that, “we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.”
This Jesus, who knows every last one of our struggles, is our High Priest and he is why we gather week in and week out together for worship. We are not here expecting to walk out of church being able to live perfectly like he did, but we leave week after week having heard about how our High Priest was also the perfect lamb of sacrifice. He did what the blood of beasts never did, his blood poured out once for all paid the required price for every angry outburst, everyone of our missteps, all of our sins! True Christianity is NOT insanity because we don’t come again and again (and twice a week during Lent) expecting different results. We come expecting the same results – expecting to be reassured that our sins have been completely paid for, this then gives us the ability to go out in the world and thank God, our perfect Priest and Sacrifice Jesus, for all he has done. “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” – Hebrews 4:16.
