5 The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats.
God is particular about the way that we worship. That does not mean that certain kinds of music are not allowed in worship, or that we need to dress a certain way, or talk a certain way. It does mean that for worship to be accepted there has to be a purity, a separateness involved. In setting up for the first Passover celebration the Hebrews are told to take an animal “without defect” as their meal. Their animal had to be perfect. They could go out to their flock and just grab anything and use it for worship. They couldn’t take the crippled or sickly and use them. They had to take the best. Those without defect would have been prime candidates for breading the next generation of animals. In an agrarian culture your breeding stock was important. If you were not careful, all your animals could end up weak and sickly. Weak and sickly animals were culled from the flock. You did not want them breeding with your healthy animals for fear you would weaken your flock as a whole. This is true about of worship today. We must be careful what we include in worship. Is what we are including going to enhance the purity of the whole experience, or is it going to dilute or perhaps pollute it? Sometimes we grab popular elements from our culture and bring them into our worship thinking it will help the experience. Instead, it ends up weakening the whole worship experience. I remember some preachers who used joke-telling as a substitute for preaching the Word. It seemed the point of coming to hear them speak was to get a good twenty minutes of laughter each week. Sometimes even the professional quality of music gets in our way during worship. It becomes spectator worship, if there is such a thing. The ‘audience’ watches the ‘band’ go through their ‘concert’. We must be careful that everything brought into worship is without defect. We know that this was a way to foreshadow the purity of Jesus, the perfect sacrifice for sins.