These pieces of pottery are over 3,000 years old. Millions of them were found blanketing the hillsides surrounding Shiloh, leading to the discovery of the location of the Tabernacle. Several times a year, Israelites would travel here for feasts and festivals. After their sacrificial meals were eaten in view of the Tabernacle, the containing vessels were considered holy and had to be destroyed. In obedience, the Israelites shattered them right where they stood before returning home.
Millennia later, there’s new meaning to be found in the broken pieces of other people’s sacrifices. Beyond serving as a wayfinder for unearthing history, they remind us of what true sacrifice looks like: It can’t be taken back. Too often, we try to put the pieces of past sacrifices back together. We pursue futile attempts to regain what we feel we lost or was misused, as if we still have claim to it. If that’s true, was it really a sacrifice at all?
In the same way this scattered, broken pottery surrounded the place where God’s presence dwelt among His people, our own living sacrifices point others towards God’s presence today. Brokenness surrounds holiness. And it requires complete surrender. A willingness to release our own desire for control to God’s perfect plan and sovereignty. A resolve to return time after time with a new sacrifice, regardless of how God chooses to work with it.