What About The Blood? Heb 9:12-22, Lev 17:11
A popular gospel tract written for Jews relates the testimony of one aged Israelite male given one spring evening many years ago during a meeting of fellow Hebrews.
“This is Passover week among you, my Jewish brethren, and as I sit here I was thinking how you will be observing it. You will have to put away all leaven from your houses you will eat the Matzoth (unleavened wafers) and the roasted Lamb. You will attend the synagogue and carry out the ritual and direction of the Talmud; but you forget, my brethren, that you have everything but that which Jehovah required first of all.” The gentlemen continued saying, “He did not say, ‘When I see the leaven put away, or when you eat the Matzoth or the Lamb or go to the synagogue,’ but His word was, ‘When I see the Blood I will pass over you.’ Ah, my brethren, you cannot substitute anything for this. You must have the blood, blood, blood!” As he reiterated this word with ever-increasing emphasis, his black eyes flashed warningly, and his Jewish hearers trembled before him. “Blood!” Every where the faithful Jew looks in the Law blood meets him, but let him seek where he may, he cannot find it in the Judaism of the present.
After a moment’s pause the old man went on to say: “I was born in Palestine, nearly seventy years ago. As a child I was taught to read the law, the Psalms, and the prophets. I attended the synagogue and learned what I was told, but as I grew older and studied the law more intently, I was struck by the place the blood had in all the ceremonies outlined there, and equally struck by its utter absence in the ritual in which I was brought up. Again and again I read Exodus 12 and Leviticus 16 and 17, and the latter chapters especially made me tremble, as I thought of the great day of atonement and the place the blood had there. Day and night one verse would ring in my ears: ‘It is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul.’ I knew I had broken the law. I needed atonement. Year after year, on that day, I beat my breast as I confessed my need of it; but it was to be made by blood, and there was no Blood!
I my distress I at last opened my heart to a learned and venerable rabbi. He told my that God was angry with His people, the temple was destroyed, and a Mohammedan mosque was reared up in its place. The only spot on this earth where we dare shed the blood of sacrifice, in accordance with Deuteronomy 12 and Leviticus 17, was desecrated and our nation scattered. That was why there was no blood. God had himself closed the way to carry out the solemn service of the great day of atonement. Now we must turn to the Talmud, and rest on its instructions, and trust in the mercy of God and the merits of the fathers.
I tried to be satisfied, but could not. Something seemed to say that the law was unaltered, even though our temple was destroyed. Nothing else but the blood could atone for the soul. We dare not shed blood for atonement elsewhere than in the place the Lord had chosen. Then we were left without atonement at all. The thought filled me with horror. In my distress I consulted many other rabbis. I had but one great question, ‘Where can I find the blood of atonement?’
I was over thirty years of age when I left Palestine and came to Constantinople, with my still unanswered question ever before my mind, and my soul exceedingly troubled about my sins.”
That gray-headed Orthodox Jew declared to these other men, “One night I was walking down one of the narrow streets of the city, when I saw a sign telling of a meeting for Jews. Curiosity led me to open the door and go in. Just as I took a seat I heard a man say: ‘The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.’ I listened breathlessly as the speaker told how God had declared that ‘Without shedding of blood is no remission,’ but that he had given his only begotten Son, the Lamb of God, to die, and all their iniquities. This was the Messiah of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah; this was the Sufferer of Psalm 22. Ah, my brethren, I had found the blood of atonement at last.”
As this precious elderly Messianic Jew declared his heartfelt concern for the souls of his kinsmen according to the flesh, I likewise plead with you this morning. For the faithful church member, for the one that was baptized in this very baptistery, for the one that was led to church by faithful parents, for the soul that has rarely darkened the door of a church, for the one that said a prayer at the urging of some genuine preacher, whatever your background may be, I’m saddened to have to tell you, but likewise confident according to this very book, that if you have never come into contact with the precious blood of Jesus Christ you are presently captive to the wrath of God and bound for an eternity in hell.
One preacher declared that if there’s one thing missing from modern Christianity it’s the blood. While I can enjoy plenty of different styles of Christian music I don’t hear much contemporary Christian music making much of the blood of Christ. You’ll not buy the latest contemporary Christian CD and hear lyrics declaring Redeemed by the blood of the lamb, or wonder working power in the blood, or what can wash away my sins, nothing but the blood of Jesus. The testimony of much of the professing Christians of my own generation declare the testimony, ‘When I was 15 years old, I gave my life to Christ,” as if they had done the Lord some sort of favor. The bullet proof testimony of a child of God has nothing to do with you or I taking our own fouled up lives and giving them to Jesus as if he needed our years of unregenerate baggage, the bullet proof testimony of a child of God claims that the Lord Jesus loved me so much that he washed me from my sin in his own blood.
To sinful man, blood itself is a frightful subject. Throughout the history of medicine great mystery has surrounded this crimson fluid coursing throughout our bodies.
The Bible itself is a bloody book.
If all this offends you, you best evaluate your brand of Christianity. You can get yourself a gender neutral translation of the Bible that takes the blood out and you can even change that black-back to look like a Cosmopolitan magazine, but you can’t change the subject that the Spirit of God has bore witness to for nearly 2000 years and that witness is bloody!
Not only is that book a bloody book, it’s a book about blood. The word itself appears over 400 times.
Those early physicians were onto something when they identified blood as the source of disease. The first thing the undertaker does when he prepares your corpse is drain your blood.
One soldier familiar with the carnage of warfare declared, that if you could bottle up the rotting blood from the grounds of warfare and let every young man and world leader get a whiff of 2-week old spilt blood, war would cease.
The best way to get sick quick is to get something toxic in your bloodstream.
It doesn’t take a medical doctor or a Bible scholar to observe that there’s something wrong with our blood.
You can trace our blood problems all the way back to Adam. When Adam beheld his bride he declared “This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh…” What about the blood? Adam was commanded regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that in the day that he ate there of he would surely die. When he took of the fruit he died spiritually, but 930 years later he also died physically. Now if the life of the flesh is in the blood and Adam died then something had to have happened to his blood supply. That’s why we refer to flesh as being sinful. Our flesh is sinful because the blood that supplies it is sinful. When Adam took of the fruit sin tainted his blood. That’s why the Bible says in Romans 5:12 “Wherefore by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” You know where you got your blood? You got it from your father. Blood is found in man’s seed. If you had an egg this morning when you cracked it open all you saw was egg white and the yoke. If it had been fertilized there would have been a little red dot in the center. Your flesh comes from your mother, that’s the egg. Your blood comes from your father. That’s the seed. When Adam sinned you were in his loins. That’s why Romans 5 declares that when Adam died you died, and when Adam was condemned you were condemned, and when he became a sinner, you became a sinner. The Jews have been promised a kingdom from the outset of scripture and the prophet of God Jacob declared that the scepter shall not depart from Judah. Out of the tribe of Judah would come the Messiah. And yet in the 22nd chapter of Jeremiah there was a king, of the tribe of Judah so wicked that the Lord changed his named. He was Jeconiah. The ‘Je’ means of God, just like ‘el.’ And then the Lord decreed that no man of Coniah’s seed would prosper on the throne of David. God had just made a promise that would apparently prevent him from fulfilling Jacob’s prophecy in Genesis 49.
But here was God’s provision for David’s throne and for your redemption. When the Lord formed Eve from Adam’s rib he made her so that she could carry a baby for nine whole months and she could provide that child with all the nutrients and vitamins the he would need to be healthy and yet never during the course of that healthy pregnancy would there ever be any interchange of Mother and child’s blood. That baby had it’s own source of blood. So when the fullness of time had come the Lord found a little virgin named Mary and the Holy Ghost came down and implanted her with the seed of God. That allowed the Lord Jesus to walk this earth in human flesh, being exposed to every struggle you and I are exposed to, and yet he could sinlessly offer himself the perfect sacrifice because he had in his veins the blood of God. That’s what Acts 20:28 says. The proof of this is in the resurrection. For while Jesus’ veins were empty when he was laid in the tomb, had sinful blood inhabited his body three days in the grave he would have begun to decompose. He did not.
And because of that the blood of Christ has provided us with propitiation, the satisfaction of God’s wrath; justification, made just as if we’d never sinned in the sight of God; redemption, bought back from the possession of the devil; made nigh, though we once were far off; made peace, with a holy God; cleansed our conscience from dead works, washed us from our sins, and continually cleanses us from all unrighteousness.
Let me ask you this: Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
The great missionary to Africa, David Livingstone, tried to explain God’s plan of salvation to the heathen in Africa hearing the Gospel for the first time. After hearing the story one man asked on behalf of the tribe, “Teacher, how could one man die for the whole human race?”
Livingston explained it like this. He dipped his hand into his pocket and brought out two coins, one a common British copper penny, the other a glittering golden sovereign. He explained that in the country from which he came, the little golden coin which was not so large as the penny and did not weigh as much was actually with 240 of the copper coins. The difference in the value was a result of the inherent, intrinsic difference in the metals. So he explained that God’s holy, perfect, well-beloved Son, was worth a whole world of guilty, lost, condemned sinners.