Temple Duties
present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship Romans 12:1
Spiritual Service – Most of us have never witnessed an animal sacrifice, but we can imagine one. The blade slices across the throat of the animal, producing a geyser of blood. The animal attempts to escape, but it’s already too late. Life pours on the ground. The animal falters, then falls. Its eyes glaze. It gulps for oxygen. The ground is sticky red. So are the hands of the priest. If you thought that the sacrificial system was a nice, clean, sanctified event, read Leviticus again. Sacrifice was blood and gore as a visible reminder that sin is hideous and its payment excruciating.
When Paul uses this metaphor to speak about our duty, he says something that would have shocked his world. They were all too familiar with the butchery of a sacrifice. They could well imagine putting their own bodies on the altar. They could feel the knife at the throat. But Paul says we are to be a living sacrifice. We are Isaac, stretched out on the altar, ready to die, but miraculously spared, remembering every day for the rest of our lives that we came just that close to sacrifice.
Do you have the picture firmly in mind? Now you will discover something very Hebrew about this imagery. Paul says that offering ourselves as living and holy sacrifices is our “spiritual duty”. The Greek is logiken latreian. But the Hebrew equivalent is not “work” or “service”. Instead, it is a technical term in Temple language. In other words, Paul is calling on believers to perform a specific religious ritual, equivalent to what every first century Hebrew would know immediately as the proper act of submission before the living God. He is beseeching us to make a death vow of total fidelity to Jesus. Nothing in the religious practice of the Hebrew was more sacred than a vow taken in the Temple. Nothing bound me closer to the God of the Patriarchs. This, says Paul, is what being a follower of Jesus is all about.
Baptism is a similar rite. It is a sacred religious event fraught with deep significance in the life of a believer. But baptism is just the beginning of the Christian’s life with God. That life is supposed to go on under the banner of a sacred vow, a Temple vow, never to be broken. From this moment on, I am alive only at the will of the Father. I am sacrificed with the Son, dead in the tomb, raised by the Father’s compassion for the Father’s purposes. My only reason for breathing is because it pleased God to allow it. Now I have a vow to fulfill.
Every moment that we “live” outside our vow, we disgrace the God who rescued us from the sacrifice by spilling His own blood in our place.
