God-centered resources from the ministry of John Piper

This is a guest post from a friend of ours who is a missionary doctor working with Muslims. It is a part of his guest series, "Day-to-day Observations from Asia."

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I was studying Psalm 43 with a friend in Urdu the other day. We came to where it says in English, "I will go to the altar of God."

As I read along in Urdu, I did not know the word for "altar," so I asked my friend what it was. He didn't know how to translate the word into English, but he gave the following English description: "It is God's bloody place, where the throats of the animals are slit for sacrifice."

Of course. It's an altar.

Sometimes I think of an altar as the carpeted stairs and dais at the front of the church meetinghouse. But it's not. It is a bloody place—a place of sacrifice and death.

I need to remember that.