Main news for 28 March 2019

What God wants to say, by saying through the mouth of His prophet about the knowledge of God and mercy, which are more important for Him than sacrifices? Indeed, the practice of sacrifice existing in the yahvism in the days of Hosea was doubtless approved and blessed by them, but God is not a man to change according to the sins or errors of people. But in what was the sense of the yahvist sacrifice? On its basis were the practice and experience of communion with God, which sense was even known by the heathen. It [ the sense] consisted of the fact that sacrifice became a meeting of man with God (or with the gods and the spirits, if it is about paganism) on the same table. So God gave to man the possibility of communicating with Him and the consecration in the most natural and organic form for man.

But in order that the sacrifice really becomes a form of communion with God, was required the conversion of man to God, the observation of the commandments given by God and for this mercy to the neighbor, without which man couldn’t count on the forgiveness of sins, especially these serious and consciously committed sins, as, for example, the apostasy, so, unfortunately, frequent in the life of the Jewish people in the time of Hosea. And meanwhile it is in particular then that some began to see sacrifices, as a means to pay off from God, compensating with the luxury the sacrifices and the magnificence of feasts for these violations of the Torah, which became already obvious for each.

The prophet on behalf of God tells his fellow countrymen and the coreligionists considering themselves as believers only because they participated in pompous religious rites, that without this spiritual basis, on which are built the living relationships of man with God, no sacrifice will give them anything. So, it is better not to have illusions, by hoping on God's benevolence in exchange of pompous cult. He { the Lord} will not be there.