Better Than Sacrifice

Many of us know this verse from sermons about obedience in everyday life: "Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams." An honest reader will object to using it so lightly, though, because four verses earlier we learn what obeying meant on this day.

"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 who quotes verse twenty-two is quoting a sentence spoken over a war meant to wipe out a people. A devotional that hurries past that fact is asking you not to read carefully.

So take what the Bible gives here, and do not fill in the rest. It gives Amalek a record that was centuries old. At the start of the chapter God says, "I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt." Moses had told that story in full: "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." It was an attack on the stragglers at the back of a line of freed slaves. A sentence was passed back then, and it stayed on the record ever since. That is a judge's account. It does not answer everything you will want answered, and pretending that it does would be dishonest.

Now watch what Saul did, because conscience had nothing to do with it. He spared the enemy king and the best of the animals. Then he met the prophet with a cheerful 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?"

Saul's defence was a religious one. The animals were kept "to sacrifice unto the LORD thy God." Notice that he calls Him Samuel's God, "thy God," rather than his own. Then comes our verse. After that, with the argument lost, Saul gives the real reason: "because I feared the people, and obeyed their voice."

Sacrifice and obedience were both God's own arrangements, set down in the same law, so this verse is no attack on worship. It ranks the two, on a day when a man offered sacrifice to cover up the obedience he had skipped and expected it to pass. Samuel's words still stand. God wants a heart that listens to Him more than anything you could bring to His altar, and that is good news, because He is still speaking to anyone who will hear.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 132 is Very Present Help (Psalm 46:1).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two