Hosea 8:13 · World English Bible
As for the sacrifices of my offerings, they sacrifice meat and eat it; But Yahweh doesn’t accept them. Now he will remember their iniquity, and punish their sins. They will return to Egypt.
An offering can be the very means of avoiding the thing it pretends to accomplish. The people go through the motions of surrender and then eat the meat themselves, so nothing has been given up and nothing inside them has changed.
From the Clinical Psychology reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
An offering can be the very means of avoiding the thing it pretends to accomplish. The people go through the motions of surrender and then eat the meat themselves, so nothing has been given up and nothing inside them has changed. A gesture aimed at heaven that leaves the man exactly as he was buys off a conscience that wanted reform instead. The devotion is a performance.
That is why the offering is refused. What was owed was the correction of conduct, and a ceremony was handed over in its place. So the old wrongs stand, remembered and unpaid, and the road runs backward. To return to Egypt is to slide into the bondage a person thought he had escaped, because he treated the way out as a ritual rather than a change. Skip the inner work and dress the skipping in incense, and you end up enslaved again.
Clinical Psychology lens
Where are you performing the change you have not made?
When real virtue fades, ceremony arrives to stand in for it. The louder the ritual grows, the less there is underneath.
Do not announce your philosophy. Live it. The sheep does not show the shepherd how much grass it ate, it produces wool.
If a man has no humaneness in him, what has he to do with ritual, what has he to do with music? The form without the substance is noise.
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Clinical Psychology