With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow before God most high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with myriad streams of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my crime,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
You have been told, O mortal, what is good,
and what the Lord requires of you:
Only to do justice and to love goodness,
and to walk humbly with your God.
(Micah 6:6-8)
Religiosity in the days of the prophet Micah (8th century BC) and for centuries before had a heavy emphasis on personal and public sins and atonement for them.
In the days of the Jerusalem temple, atonement rituals involved sacrifices, especially animal sacrifices. The worse the sin (and the greater the sinner’s resources), the greater the sacrifice.
Micah—and others—challenged this traditional religious custom and practice. You know what God really asks of you, he taught, it’s simple, three basic things:
– Do justice
– Love goodness
– Walk humbly with your God
Now-a-days, we have no temple for atonement sacrifices but we still have a somewhat similar atonement mentality.
But now as then, there’s no paying God back with sacrifices. If you regret what you have done, the answer to what you should and need to do is simple: exactly what Micah taught centuries ago.
What God asks of you is not to spend time and effort regretting and mourning your failures nor in being jealous of others. “Don’t cry over spilled milk!”
Just be just, be good, and be humble!
Look, no matter what you can come up with, you can’t change the past. What’s said is said, what’s done is done.
Don’t waste time regretting the past. We all have regrets about the past. None of us are perfect people, and none of us has a perfect past. Fact of life!
Also, don’t waste time and effort in trying to “pay back”. No matter what you may consider to be enough, it may never be enough for another.
The best you can do is to confess, to admit what you have done and, then, change for the future. It may never be enough for another, but it may be the best you can do.
We still have a sacrifice mentality. We may feel the need to atone for what we have done. Others may demand that we pay a price for what we have done.
Over the Christian centuries, many atonement practices have been popularized and some are still with us—e.g., special prayers, fasting, wearing painful devices, or vowing abstention from possessions, marriage, or free choices.
With the best of intentions, we may still be making inadequate or inappropriate decisions.
What God is asking of us, requiring of us, is relatively simple to state, pretty much what Micah taught long, long ago:
You have been told, O mortal, what is good,
and what the Lord requires of you:
Only to do justice and to love goodness,
and to walk humbly with your God.
We more or less pray this every day, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
2 October 2022