Micah 6:6

"Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousand rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

This is one of the most popular passages in the whole Bible, and, it should be added, one of the most misunderstood and abused. Contrary to what is frequently alleged, the passage does not say:

"The true worship of God is the service of man. The Old Testament has no greater word than this.[11] This passage is one of the greatest in the Bible on the futility of ritualistic worship."[12]

There are many such comments regarding these verses, but they miss the point completely. This passage does not condemn God's own religion revealed to the Hebrews which was a ritualistic worship; and the true worship of God is the service of man, only if it is related also to the service of God through obedience to God's commandments. It is definitely untrue that "service to man is worshipping God."

"It would be a gross misinterpretation of this verse, a violent wrenching the text out of its context, to construe this as a mere pronouncement that the whole point of religion is a virtuous life, without the need of atonement or of faith in God's revealed word."[13]

To take the view which some have advocated would be to degenerate holy religion into mere humanism, which in the last analysis is pure atheism and the ultimate seed-bed of every evil ever known to mankind. Scoggin also stressed this:

"Sacrifices of whatever kind have no meaning when unaccompanied by ethical behavior. Sacrifice in itself is not wrong but unaccompanied by ethical living, it is simply irrelevant."[14]

We should go beyond Scoggin's remark that "sacrifice is not wrong." Indeed, it is commanded; and Christians are commanded to present themselves "a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God" (Romans 12:1); and such a ritual as the Lord's Supper is made to be a synecdoche of the entire Christian religion by none other than Jesus Christ himself (John 6:53ff). Without sacrifice, of the kind that God has required in his revealed will, there can be no such thing as salvation. True, the sacrifices that Christians must offer are "spiritual" (1 Peter 2:5); but they are nevertheless sacrifices.

In Micah 6:6-8, therefore, God was not abolishing the institution of sacrifice, despite the conclusion to that effect which some have mistakenly made.

The thing that was wrong with Israel's sacrifices was the fact of their supposing that as long as they offered them it did not make any difference to God what they did.

In fact, this verse must not be viewed as the honest response of people intent on doing God's will. Far from it. They were attempting to justify their wickedness on the basis of their having proliferated and multiplied the very sacrifices God had commanded, and in addition had also added a lot of sacrifices God had never commanded, such as human sacrifice! The scholars who see these verses (Micah 6:6,7) as the plea of a truly religious people trying to do God's will, simply need to look at the passage again.