Saturday, August 25, 2012
Psalm 141:2 May my prayer be set before you like incense ...
THE ALTAR: HIS SACRIFICE ... OUR RELIANCE
Many churches today have no altar in the front. Outmoded tradition some say. Others say the very idea of a bloody sacrifice is primitive and part of the ancient past. We pray such ideas never infect our worship. At the same time let us never lose sight of why the altar's meaning is -- like the altar itself -- the focus of our worship.
The Old Testament worship center designed by God Himself included two altars. The largest and most important, the site of bloody animal sacrifices required by God, was the Altar of Burnt Offering. The other was smaller and stood immediately in front of the Holy of Holies great curtain: the Altar of Incense.
All of the animal sacrifices had to be brought in accordance with God's instructions in the Scriptures. The message was plain and clear and oft repeated: the only sacrifice acceptable to God was one that came at His directive and by His provision. Animal substitutes for guilty sinners were accepted by God only because they portrayed the actual true Sacrifice which God would one day provide.
When the time was right, God the Father sent His Son Jesus to offer Himself as the atoning sacrifice for our sins and for the sins of the whole world. The altars in our churches speak to us of this once-for-all Sacrifice of Christ our Lord and, in the most intimate and personal way, so does the Sacrament of the Altar.
The most common activity that takes place at the altar in our present-day churches is the very thing pictured by the ancient Altar of Incense: prayer. Here we do well to remember how the prayer-picture of rising incense was enabled to climb into the skies. Fire was necessary. And the burning coals that provided that fire could only come from one place: the Altar of Burnt Offering.
Only through faith in the sacrifice Jesus made for us on the cross do our prayers come before the throne of grace. Only in our Savior's sacrifice do we have the assurance that God will hear and answer our prayers.
Sing Jesus' dying love, sing of his rising power;
Sing how he intercedes above for those whose sins he bore.
(William Hammond, 1745, alt.)
