My wife and I are reading through the Psalms in our evening reading and occasionally a nugget of the Psalms jumps out of the page. Don’t you love it when, after years of reading the “Old Book” passages become alive, reinforcing old teachings or simply warming your heart.

This is the book of Psalms, and it is rich.

I pray I can communicate a portion of the blessing we receive from this wonderful book.

Psalm 51

18 Do good to Zion in your good pleasure; build up the walls of Jerusalem;
19 then will you delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings; then bulls will be offered on your altar.

David is closing his prayer of contrition with these final verses, and expanding his prayers beyond his own life.

His first desire is that God will do good to Zion. This is God’s heart for His people and David is expressing his own heart in connection with God. He is seeking the prosperity of Jerusalem, and this must mean the spiritual prosperity of Jerusalem, for he immediately refers to God delighting in right sacrifices.

After this entire psalm, if there is one thing that stands out, it is that the sacrifices God prescribed in the Old Testament were not only to be physically performed, but that the practice of sacrifice had a much greater meaning than a simple offering of an animal.

The greatest message of sacrifice is of the Lord Jesus Himself, and of His full and complete provision of our salvation through his sacrifice on the cross. This is the focus of the Word and we (at least I) need to be remined of it daily.

Yet David speaks to the believer also in this psalm, describing the sacrificial system in the believers life, not only of physical sacrifice, but of the sacrifice of our will to God’s will, of the acceptance of a verdict of death in our own lives.

As he closes he speaks of “then bulls will be offered..” Bulls and goats, sheep and doves were being offered in sacrifice even as he wrote this psalm, yet David speaks of the sacrifices of a humble and contrite (broken) spirit in the believer, that is to accompany acts of worship and remembrance. When the believer humbles himself, accepts the truth of his rebellion and obstinacy, openly confesses his dark heart, and seeks renewal and restoration after a period of sin, this is when the sacrifices become pleasing in the sight of the Lord.

May God open our eyes to our own condition before Him so that we may gladly offer up sacrifices to Him in spirit and in truth!

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