Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 132 · May 12
Better Than Sacrifice
“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.”
The line turns up in sermons about serving rather than only singing, and it will not stay in that room. Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. Read four verses up and see what obedience meant here.
And the LORD sent thee on a journey, and said, Go and utterly destroy the sinners the Amalekites, and fight against them until they be consumed. That is the command Saul is condemned for keeping badly. Anyone quoting verse twenty-two quotes a sentence spoken over a war of extermination, and any devotional sliding past it is asking you not to read.
Take what the chapter gives and do not fill in the rest. It gives Amalek a file four hundred years old. Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt; How he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God. A raid on the stragglers of a column of freed slaves, and a sentence passed then and carried on the books since. That is a judicial account, and it does not answer everything you will want answered. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Now watch what Saul did, because it was no conscientious objection. He kept the best of the livestock and the enemy king, then met the prophet with a greeting: Blessed be thou of the LORD: I have performed the commandment of the LORD. Samuel's reply is one of the great lines in the book. What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears?
The defence comes back religious. The animals were kept to sacrifice unto the LORD thy God, and the pronoun in thy God is worth a moment. Then the verse. Then, the argument lost, Saul gives the true reason: because I feared the people, and obeyed their voice.
Sacrifice and obedience were both God's own arrangements, set in the same law, so this is no verse against liturgy. It ranks them, on a day when a man produced the second to cover the absence of the first and expected it to pass. It usually does, with people.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 132 is Very Present Help (Psalm 46:1).