THE BLOOD OF CHRIST.

1.        The shadow of things to come:                                 

                                                                             

Leviticus 17:10-11  “And whatsoever man [there be] of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.  For the life of the flesh [is] in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement (a covering) for your souls: for it [is] the blood [that] maketh atonement (a covering) for the soul.”             

For an explanation of the word atonement, take very careful note of pages four, five and six.  It shows that the blood of sacrifices was to cover the sins of the people, not to take away those sins.  That was to be the mission of Christ Jesus our Lord.

                                                                            

The above scripture refers to the physical blood of animals.  The explanation for the prohibition is then given.  Blood was to be offered as atonement - a covering for sin.  An animal was sacrificed and it was animal blood which was used in these offerings.  The life that is in animal blood is animal life, but we see elsewhere that the life of man is in his soul.

                                                                            

Genesis 2:7 “And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”                                                             

1 Corinthians 15:45 “And so it is written, the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam [was made] a quickening spirit.”                       

The life of the animal is in its blood and when that blood no longer flows in the animals veins the animal ceases to exist. 

Man does not cease to exist when blood no longer flows in his veins, for his life is in his soul.  All men do die physically and some from loss of blood but his soul is everlasting and will live on for eternity.

The animal gave its all when it died on the sacrificial alter.  Christ gave his all when he died to God the Father during those three hours of darkness when he was “...made sin for us...”   After propitiation, redemption, reconciliation was completed his all was restored to him; then and only then did he give up his physical life for the purpose of resurrection.

                                                                              

The animals life given on the alter was a portrayal of propitiatory or satisfactory death for sin; the fulfilment of which was in the death of Christ on the cross.

                                                                               

Five Levitical Offerings:

                                                                          

 1.   The burnt offering: Lev 1 is propitiation representing the work of Christ on the cross and so animal blood was used.                                                         

                                

 2.   The food offering: Lev 2 is propitiation with emphasis on the person of Christ on the cross so no animal blood was used, comparable to the bread of the communion.            

                                                                             

 3.   Peace offering: Lev 3. This is reconciliation based on the work of Christ on the cross so animal blood was used.                                                                

               

 4.   Sin offering: Lev 4 is confession of sin, with regard to the unknown sins and is the "cleansing of all unrighteousness" of 1John 1:9.  The blood of an animal was used in this offering because of its relationship and dependence on the work of Christ on the cross.           

 5.   Trespass offering: Lev 5 is confession of sin with emphasis on the sins you name.  Again animal blood was used due to its relationship and dependence on the work of Christ on the cross.                                                                      

    

Animal blood is a representative analogy, a teaching aid.  It is descriptive of an innocent life being offered as a substitute and is analogous to the life of Jesus Christ being given as a sacrifice for the sins of all mankind on the alter of the cross of Calvary.  "...He who knew no sin was made sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him..."                                                                  

                                                                               

Hebrews 8:5 “Who serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things, as Moses was admonished of God when he was about to make the tabernacle: for, See, saith he, [that] thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount.”                    

     

Hebrews 10:1  “For the law having a shadow of good things to come, [and] not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually, make the comers thereunto perfect.”       

John the Baptist made the analogy in his identification of Jesus when he said “...behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world...” the one reality that would fulfil all that the tens of thousands of shadow sacrifices could not do.                                   

                                                                       

  Note... From John’s viewpoint, Christ was the Lamb of God that "takes away" not covers the sins of the world.

      

2.        Separation from God is spiritual death:

Man is born spiritually dead and eventually dies physically.  Adam was told not to eat of the fruit of the tree of good and evil for on the day he ate of it he would surely die (dying you will die) (Gen 2:16-17).   He ate of the fruit yet died some nine hundred years later.  On the day he ate of the fruit he was banished from God’s presence.   Spiritual death is separation from God and if not rectified in time results in an eternal separation, which is damnation and Hell.  Jesus Christ had both spiritual and physical life from the moment of birth.   On the cross He died to God the Father when He became sin for us; "... My God my God why have you forsaken me..."                         

                                                      

The word, forsaken (Gk. engkataleipo), means to abandon or to desert and is a separation.  Christ was separated from the Father whilst on the cross when He was bearing the sins of the world.  He became sin for us and the Father judged those sins by separating himself from the sin bearer.  The lives of animals were taken on the sacrificial alter for a temporary covering of the sins of those making the sacrifice and were mere figurative shadows of the perfect which was to come.  Christ Jesus literally bore our sins in His own body and was judged by God whilst on the cross.  Leviticus 16:8-22 gives a graphic picture of death and separation, which the saviour of men must face to fulfil the salvation of mankind.  Romans 5:6-11 demonstrates the fulfilment of the Levitical offerings.

Matthew 27:45-46.  Jesus died to the Father at the ninth hour at the end of three hours of darkness.   Luke 23: 44-46. He cried out again committing His spirit into God’s keeping, which shows a restoration of fellowship and an end to judgement, and in John 19:30 he cried out again that all was accomplished, for the word "finished", gk. teleo means to bring to an end, to perform, execute, complete, fulfil or to pay a due.  Jesus, while still alive physically, completed the task of redemption, reconciliation and propitiation, then He gave up His spirit into the Father’s hands and died physically. 

Bleeding to death causes the victim to faint from loss of blood before death occurs.  Jesus deliberately thrust his head forward and gave up His spirit.  Every account in the gospels depicts an immediate cessation of life once all was finished.                                                 

                                                                            

John 19:30-34 “When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.  Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jews did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down.  The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other.  But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.”                        

Jesus did not bleed to death.  The spear that was thrust into His side or chest cavity (the Greek word for side is pleura from where we get the word pleurisy); caused a gush of blood clots and serum, the blood and water of John 19:34. If Jesus had bled to death He would have fainted for He was as we are; also there would have been very little blood to flow from the spear wound; yet immediately there was that flow of blood and water.  In this passage John was testifying to the Gnostics of his day, to the perfect humanity of Jesus Christ by describing the reality of natural death.          

                                                                           

The physical death of the Lord Jesus was to allow the resurrection to the heavenly and eternal body of incorruption and immortality.              

                                                                            

3.        Jesus was human, our kinsman:                                        

Jesus was our kinsman redeemer and as such was, in His physical make-up, as human as you or I, and this does not allow any mystical or supernatural application to His blood.  It was human blood, serum with red and white corpuscles, made from the dust of the earth and not designed to cleanse even one sinful material human being let alone tens of millions.  It is emotional nonsense to credit the blood that flowed in the veins of our Lord Jesus Christ with that capacity.  On the other hand His separation from the Father whilst on the cross, did redeem us from sin and satisfied or propitiated the Father who because of His satisfaction, reconciled mankind to Himself.  It is by grace we are saved through the agency of faith in Jesus Christ and even that faith is God’s gift to us so that there is nothing in man by which man can boast.                           

4.        The blood and the death of Christ are one and the same:               

       

The blood of Christ is said to accomplish redemption, reconciliation and propitiation.  Redemption and reconciliation are also accomplished by the death of Jesus Christ.  The blood of Christ and the death of Christ are synonymous or exact terms.                                                     

      

 Redemption:                                                           

Hebrews 9:12  “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption [for us].”                                          

             

 Hebrews 9:15  “And for this cause he is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions [that were] under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.”                         

Reconciliation:                                                         

Colossians 1:20 “And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, [I say], whether [they be] things in earth, or things in heaven.”

Romans 5:10 “For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.”                                                       

Propitiation:                                                           

Romans 3:25 “Whom God hath set forth [to be] a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;” 

1 John 4:10 “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son [to be] the propitiation for our sins.”                   

To summarise:
1. The life that is in the blood is referring to animal life.  Man’s life is in his soul.                             

2. Jesus the man from Nazareth was the fulfilment of all the Old Testament shadow analogies.                                            

3. Spiritual death is separation from God; eternal death is eternal separation from God.  Jesus the man was forsaken or abandoned by the Father when He was made sin for us.  He suffered both spiritual and physical death on the cross.                           

4. Jesus, as our kinsman redeemer had to be truly human therefore His blood was truly human.                                                 

5. Jesus had to be truly human to hang on that cross and to made sin for us, for divinity cannot be restricted to one point in time nor can divinity be made sin.                                                

6. A perfect priest must be on equal terms with both parties in a dispute, in this case, with both God and man.                        

7. It was the spiritual death of Jesus that accomplished our salvation and the term "blood of Christ" is an analogy to His spiritual death. 

8. The "blood of Christ" and "the death of Christ" are synonymous terms as proven in the following scripture.       

                                                                             

Hebrews 9:14-17  “How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?   And for this cause he is the mediator of the New Testament that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they, which are called, might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.  For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator.  For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth.”                           

CONCLUSION:

If the term "the lamb of God" referring to our Lord Jesus Christ, is a spiritualising reference to the Passover lamb, why is the term "the blood of Christ" taken literally?  Jesus Christ was a human being not a lamb and his blood being human blood had no supernatural or mystical substance capable of cleansing sin.  It is a distortion to spiritualise one and not the other.  It is obvious that the physical lamb was depicting a spiritual reality in Christ’s death on the cross, yet the physical blood of Christ’s humanity is believed to hold supernatural power.

Jesus Christ was true humanity.  He was as human as you and I.  He suffered hunger, thirst, and temptation and needed angelic protection lest he strike his foot against a stone and be physically hurt thereby.  Even though he was God, he was also true humanity and to be our 'kinsman' redeemer and our great high priest needed to be so.  As God he could not bear the sins of men for God can have nothing to with sin and sin cannot touch him, but as man Christ could and did bear the sins of the world.  As God Christ could not be restricted to any one point in time, yet as man Christ could and did hang upon the cross to bear those sins.

If there were anything supernatural about the humanity of Christ, anything other than basic earth bound humanity he could not be either our redeemer or our high priest and we would be without salvation thereby.  The blood that flowed in Christ’s body was as human as ours, with no physical efficacy in cleansing the soul from sin.  The term ‘the blood of Christ’ does however have spiritual significance of tremendous proportions.

Shedding of blood in context of the Passover lamb pictured the life of an innocent being taken in place of the life of the guilty.  The guilty were deserving of death yet a substitute paid the price, the price being death.  With the price being paid, the guilty were then freed from judgement and they continued to live.

The reality to the ritual of the Passover is the fact that all men are spiritually dead.  All are partakers of the Adamic nature because of their generic relationship to Adam and all being born imperfect, have no relationship with the perfect God of glory, and are spiritually dead.  We are dead to God, separate from him because of our imperfections, our sin.  We were separated from God because of sin; we needed a substitute to be separated from God on our behalf that we might, because of that substitute, live by means of his relationship with God and ours with him.

The reality to the physical death of that Passover lamb is found in the spiritual death that Jesus Christ suffered during his time on the cross.  His cry "...My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me...", came at the time of his bearing the sins of mankind and his subsequent separation from God the Father, which was spiritual death, and it, was at that moment he suffered death for all men.  It was at that moment he paid the penalty for sin and God the Father proved the perfection of Christ’s sacrifice by raising him from the dead, for "...Christ was raised ‘because’ of our justification...". 

Our justification was a completed act before Christ was raised from the dead and so a propitiated God accepted resurrected humanity into his presence in the person of Jesus of Nazareth; giving us that assured hope of our own future resurrection.

Jesus Christ did not die either spiritually or physically by the loss of his blood.  For after he had died physically the spear of the Roman soldier let loose a gush of blood from Christ chest, which blood would have not been there in sufficient quantities if He had died from its loss.

The physical death of Jesus Christ was necessary for his humanity to be raised in a form which could live forever; the immortal and incorruptible resurrection body. 

                   

So be it.