Jeremiah (1-31) 7:21 Commentary and Bible Study

Then you get another line of reasoning. ‘Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Put your burnt offerings unto your sacrifices, and eat flesh.’ Now to understand this, you just have to bear in mind that there was a difference between the burnt offering and the peace offering. The burnt offerings had to be wholly consumed upon the alter, entirely consumed. But for the peace offerings only the fat parts were burnt, and the meat was preserved off the altar. A portion was divided to the priests, and the rest was for the person offering the sacrifice and his family to have a meal of dedication to God, and thanksgiving for his forgiveness. So there was a distinction between the offerings. The one was burned up entirely, and the other divided between the priests and the offeror. And what God effectively says to Jeremiah here is, when you make your burnt offerings, preserve all meat and consume it all yourselves. Why? Because there is no profit to you in making such offerings to me; I will not accept them. The only profit you are going to get from them is the meat. You are not going to get any profit in the form of a blessing from God. What God is saying here is, your offerings are so worthless and so vain, so unacceptable and so empty, that, so far as I am concerned, you can do it entirely your own way. You can eat the lot yourselves. You can take all meat and all the benefit, because the offerings don't count for anything. Your worship is useless. The next verse goes on to say why it's useless. ‘For I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices: ²³ But this thing commanded I them,’ – the moral commandments came first – ‘saying, Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be my people: and walk ye in all the ways that I have commanded you, that it may be well unto you.’ The commandments came first. They were everything. The sacrifices, the ceremonial, the worship came afterwards, and were worth nothing without the obedience that came first. The commandments are what counts, the moral commandments. The sacrifices were secondary. They were teaching aids; they taught you that sin could be forgiven through the shedding of blood, through a sacrifice. That would come with Messiah, ultimately. The ceremonies of sacrifice: they were symbols of forgiveness. When they brought a sacrifice, the man who made the offering – according to Leviticus – skinned the beast himself. Later on the priests took over, because the offerings were so numerous. But at first the one making the offering skinned the beast himself. What if he were a Jerusalemite, a towny? He wasn't used to that, a not very nice thing, in fact, a gross thing to do, for him. And how it brought home to him that this forgiveness of sin was a grisly business, and there had to be suffering and a punishment, but there was forgiveness with God! But you see, if you made the offerings on the same level as the moral law – it is just a matter of keeping the ceremonies – you missed the whole point. When you try to keep the moral law, you are humbled. By the law is the knowledge of sin. You say, ‘I have failed’, and then you look with new eyes at the symbols which say, there is forgiveness with God. A great sacrifice is coming for sin. But you people of Juda and Jerusalem, Jeremiah says, have got it wrong, because you actually put the symbols first. You come into this temple to make your offerings, and you forget the primary matter is the moral law and the commandments. So Jeremiah is putting that across to them: that they have got it completely wrong in that reasoning.