Have you ever been flipping through the pages of the Bible when a phrase jumped out at you? It happens quite often to me, whether as part of my daily study or when I’m looking for inspiration for one of these devotional writings. I happened to be paging through the minor prophets (we call them “minor” because of the length of their writings, not their importance), and I stopped, coming back to these words in Hosea: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
In some ways these words can seem foreign to us, because we already know that God desires mercy of us more than any sacrifice that we might ever be able to offer. Even if we still lived in a time when the practice of sacrifice was part of how we worshipped the Lord, however, the word “mercy” here is one that we would need to hold in our hearts. In Hebrew, the word is hesed, which can be translated as “mercy,” “favor,” “kindness,” or my preference, “lovingkindness.” It speaks to the relationship that our Creator desires to have with us.
For the Israelite people, the temple sacrificial system could easily devolve into a transactional relationship, where the people offered up their sacrifices to the Lord, and God returned forgiveness, guidance, and holiness to them. Unfortunately, that idea of worship forgets that at the heart of the relationship was the truth that God set aside the Israelite people as a chosen and beloved people who were made holy not through their actions but through God’s desire. The Lord’s desire is that we might live grounded in the idea of hesed rather than in transactional experiences of supposed holiness, where we see our lives as being righteous simply because we pray or read the Bible without seeking a deeper and growing relationship with our Creator.