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Hebrews 9- ‘The Purpose of Blood’
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Why is so much of the Christian religion focused on the seemingly barbaric subject of ‘blood sacrifice’? More specifically, why do we focus so much on Jesus’ blood…particularly when, according to science, Jesus died on the cross from suffocation? In terms of quantity, very little of Jesus’ blood was shed? Surely, there’s something more going on here than meets the eye!
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Hebrews: ‘The Journey of Becoming’
Sermon 7- ‘The Purpose of Blood’
Passages: Hebrews 9: 11-28
Matthew 27:19-26
Why is so much of the Christian religion focused on the seemingly barbaric subject of ‘blood sacrifice’? More specifically, why do we focus so much on Jesus’ blood…particularly when, according to science, Jesus died on the cross from suffocation? In terms of quantity, very little of Jesus’ blood was shed? Surely, there’s something more going on here than meets the eye!
Let’s begin with prayer.
It’s obvious to anyone who reads the Bible that the blood of Jesus is very important! Indeed, all throughout the Bible, there’s blood everywhere!!! But why is it so important?
Many evangelicals, trying to make sense of this heavy emphasis on Jesus’ blood, go back to the OT story of the Passover. They believe that Christ’s blood ‘wards off’ God’s wrath in the same way that the blood of the Passover ‘warded off’ the angel of death. In other words, they think that Jesus’ blood was offered to God as a ransom or payment to escape God’s condemnation. God is somehow propitiated/appeased with the blood of Christ.
Commentator Alec Motyer argues that “the blood effected a change in God.” (Motyer 49) Holding to a ‘penal substitutionary model’ of sacrifice, his contention is that the blood of those sacrifices was necessary to turn away God’s wrath and literally change God’s attitude toward Israel’s sins.
But, is that an accurate understanding of what happened when the sacrificial lambs were sacrificed and their blood was painted on the lintel and doorposts of the Israelite homes? I doubt it! In the first place, how can anything done by human beings affect a change in God? But more importantly, was it God or was it Israel who needed to be changed? Christoph Schwobel, in refuting the logic of theologians like Motyer, states emphatically: “The first, and perhaps most serious, problematical development occurs where God is no longer understood as the author of reconciliation but as the recipient of reconciliation, the one who must be reconciled.” (Schwobel 28)
The point is that, in the context of the Exodus, it was clearly Israel’s predicament that propelled God to act, and not the other way around. In His unmerited love, He raised up Moses as a deliverer for His people in a determined effort to rescue His people from slavery. God needed no persuasion from blood sacrifices to act on behalf of His people. To the contrary, the Passover and subsequent Exodus were part of His long-ranging plans to bring Israel to Himself and to transform them into a ‘new humanity’. God was, indeed, changing Israel!
Moreover, the spilling of the Passover blood was only a preliminary event to a far bigger event in Israel’s history…an event to which the author of the Letter to the Hebrews alludes in chapter 9, 19-22…an event which took place when God gathered His people at the foot of Mount Sinai. Let’s look more closely at that passage-- Hebrews 9, verses 19-22.
“When Moses had proclaimed every commandment of the law to all the people, he took the blood of calves, together with water, scarlet wool and branches of hyssop, and sprinkled the scroll and all the people. He said, "This is the blood of the covenant, which God has commanded you to keep." In the same way, he sprinkled with the blood both the tabernacle and everything used in its ceremonies. In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness (Gk= remission).”
As the people of Israel were gathered at the foot of Mt. Sinai, God was present to them in a powerfully new way. He had taken them out of Egypt, out of the land of bondage, in order that they might be made into a new people…a Kingdom of Priests who would radiate His love and grace to the rest of the world.
And yet, in many respects, it was Moses who, quite literally, was the first High Priest in Israel. He was “the image of the invisible God” as he stood before the people. He was God’s representative…His chosen servant. It was Moses who would mediate the presence of God to the Israelites. For this reason, it was Moses who pronounced the words of the Covenant over the people. It was Moses who took the blood of the covenant and sprinkled it over all the people and everything that was potentially tainted by human sin. In Moses’ hands, this very ordinary blood of calves mixed with water, scarlet wool and hyssop, had some sort of cleansing power.
Before I go any further with that idea, however, it’s essential that we remember what we learned last week about Biblical covenants. Essentially, all covenants in the Bible were covenants of life, flowing down from God to the created order. Hence, whenever death seemed to take hold and begin to reverse the movement of life, what could God do? The answer, it seems, was to renew His covenant of life with blood! Why? “The life is in the blood”, says the Scriptures. In other words, whenever death seemed to be closing in, blood (in the hands of God’s chosen mediator) had the power to reverse that movement.
Now, this wasn’t a bit of hocus-pocus, either! The logic behind the curative powers of the blood was quite profound. After all, where does all life come from? The Bible says that all life comes from God; that God’s life is the source of all life. If that’s the case, then, the life blood of an animal logically bears something of God’s life within it! That is, there is a connection with God in that animal’s blood. Hence, if God (or one of His representatives) sprinkles it on defiled people and objects (things that were suffering under the decay of death), in a sense, this was God’s way of restoring ‘life’ to those things.
OT scholar, Gordon Wenham, is convinced of this idea: He writes that, in the OT, “Sin and uncleanness lead a person from the realm of life into the realm of death. The blood of sacrifice stops this process, indeed it reverses it. It gives life to those doomed to die.”
But remember, only certain human beings (those who stood in God’s place) were given the right and privilege to wield the life-giving power of blood. In the story of the Passover, it was the heads of the families who stood in God’s place, sacrificing the lamb and sprinkling it blood on the doorposts. But later on, this task of mediator was formalized when Aaron’s family was organized as an official order of priests in Israel. They, like Moses, were God’s chosen representatives towards the people, standing in God’s place, blessed with this special proximity to, and intimacy with, God.
Now, one of the key tasks performed by the priests was to be Israel’s health inspectors. Whenever any sort of disease was found in Israel, it was the job of the priests to inspect and to prescribe a remedy. If a person was unclean, that person had to go outside the camp in the hope that the sacrifices of blood made by the priests on their behalf would gradually cause their health to return. It was as if God, through the priests, was at work reversing the effects of the fall in the world.
Chief among these priests was the one who was designated annually to be Israel’s High Priest. Once a year, this specially chosen priest was allowed to minister in the Holy of Holies. But the reason why he was allowed to do so was because, for the short time of his task, he was being divinized! Dressed in garments of unimaginable glory and splendor and bearing of the names of the twelve tribes of Israel on his chest, he was literally ‘standing in’ for God. For a brief moment, he was nothing less than the incarnation of God.
And here was his one and only task: He was to carry blood into the Holy of Holies…the inner sanctum of the Tabernacle. Then, gradually, he was to move from the Holy of Holies outwards, sprinkling that blood over everything that was man-made. Remember, this man was standing in God’s place. And so, it was as if God Himself was purifying these things, moving from the centre of His ‘dwelling place’ (the ark) outwards, culminating all His efforts with the sprinkling of blood over the waiting crowd. As one scholar observes, “… sacrifice has a crucial role in maintaining order and restoring the equilibrium when that order is disturbed.” The final act of this ‘divine’ High Priest came as he prayerfully placed the sins of the people on a scapegoat and sent it away into the wilderness. Through all these gestures, it was God who was actively creating a ‘new humanity’ out of the old one...through the cleansing, life-giving power of blood
It is crucial to get this pattern of OT sacrifice clear in our thinking because it formed such a fundamental plank in Christ’s mission as He came “to give His life as a ransom for many”. Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross must be understood in the same light that we see the Old Testament sacrifices, as the Divine sacrifice coming from God towards humankind. As John the Baptist said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”. He is also the divine “High Priest in the order of Melchizedek” who, according to the Book of Hebrews, stands in the place of God, in the Holy of Holies, purifying all of creation with His own blood and, thereby establishing a ‘new humanity’ out of the old, one that is permanently purified through His one sacrifice.
It’s no wonder why His ‘divine sacrifice’ put an end to the need for any further sacrificial action from God towards mankind! In Christ, a “New Covenant’ had been established in His blood, and no longer was a man needed as the High Priest to ‘stand in’ for God. God, Himself, had finally come! Nor was it any longer necessary for that High Priest to offer the blood of bulls and goats to ‘cover’ human sin and rectify its corruption in the world. As St. Paul says in Romans 3, “God presented Him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in His blood.”(Rom 3:25) In Christ, God Himself had finally come with His own blood, to deal with sin once and for all.
The critical point here is that it was God’s blood, the source of all life, that has become the means by which the sins of the entire world were finally taken away and a ‘new humanity’ created out of the rubble of the old. Hence, St. John can write; “He himself is the sacrifice that atones for our sins- and not only our sins but the sins of the world.” (1 John 2:2) The picture given in the Revelation of St. John is that of the ascended Jesus as a slaughtered lamb standing at the heavenly throne of God receiving praise from “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth.”(Rev. 5:6-14) St. Paul also speaks of how it was through this divine sacrifice that “He made peace with everything in heaven and earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.” (Col. 1:20) It’s a picture of the universal and cosmic dimensions of Christ’s divine sacrifice that must never be diminished. As Jonathan Wilson says, “The sacrifice of Christ is a cosmic event that is restoring the entire creation to shalom.”
Now, with all this in your mind, listen as I read some verses from the NT abou Jesus’ blood.
1. (JN 6:53) Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
2. (Eph 2:13) But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.
3. (1 John 1:7) But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.
4. (1 Peter 1:18-19) For you know that it was not with perishable things…that you were redeemed… but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.
5. (Rev 6:-10) “You were slaughtered and your blood has ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. And you have caused them to be a Kingdom of priests for our God. And they will reign forever and ever.”
Do you see it now? Only the life-blood of God has the power to wash away the sins of the world and create a ‘new humanity’ in His divine image! It’s no wonder, then, why the blood of Jesus takes such a central place in the Scriptures.
Let me go back, now, to those ‘bloody’ verses from Hebrews. I think they will make a lot more sense to you.
• Heb 9:14 How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!
• HEB 10:19-22 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus…let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith…
• HEB 12:22-24 But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem… You have come to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
• Heb 13:12 And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood.
• HEB 13:20-21 May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus…equip you with everything good for doing his will…
As the song says:
“What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. What can make me pure within? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. Oh, precious is the flow that makes me white as snow; no other fount I know. Nothing but the blood of Jesus!”
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