Lord, thank you for your beautiful sunny day. Thank you for a chance to come and worship, all of us here together, joining our voices and our hearts together with you. And Lord, we pray as we dig into your word that you will give us insight into what it says, that you'll help us to apply it, and I pray that your hand will be on me as I speak, that I may deliver your message faithfully. In Christ's name, amen.
Okay, so there's kind of a bit of a connection with some of the churchy words we've been doing recently. Last week Pastor Brad talked about priest, and before that we talked about covenant, and now we're going to talk about blood, and they all kind of fit together, as we'll see as we go through the message. Blood sometimes is a bit of a strange one, but the scripture talks about blood quite often. A lot of old hymns mention blood in them. "Nothing but the blood of Jesus," "Are you washed in the blood?" That kind of stuff. And sometimes it seems a little bit gross. Why is blood mentioned so much in the Bible? And so we'll look at this passage of Hebrews and then we'll see what we can learn about why there's so much blood mentioned.
Now, this is a bit of a longer passage here, but I think it's important to kind of see the whole thing together. So, Hebrews 9. This is actually just about the same passage we talked about with the new covenant, so you'll notice the word covenant shows up in here. So, from Hebrews 9:
"When everything had been arranged like this, the priests entered regularly into the outer room to carry on their ministry, but only the high priest entered the inner room, and that only once a year, and never without blood, which he offered for himself and for the sins of the people, and for the sins the people had committed in ignorance. The Holy Spirit was showing by this that the way into the Most Holy Place had not yet been disclosed as long as the first tabernacle was still functioning. This is an illustration for the present time, indicating that the gifts and sacrifices being offered were not able to clear the conscience of the worshiper. They're only a matter of food and drink and various ceremonial washings, external regulations applying until the time of the new order.
"But when Christ came as high priest of the good things that are now already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not made with human hands, that is to say, it's not a part of this creation. He didn't enter by means of the blood of goats and calves. He entered the Most Holy Place once and for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they're outwardly clean. 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?
"For this reason, Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, now that he's died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant. In the case of a will, it's necessary to prove the death of the one who made it, because a will is in force only when somebody has died. It never takes effect while the one who made it is living. This is why even the first covenant was not put into effect without blood. When Moses had proclaimed every command of the law to all the people, he took the blood of the calves together with water, scarlet wool and the 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."
This is the word of the Lord.
Okay, so every time I start to think about a passage that I'm going to preach on, or one of these churchy words, I start with a bunch of questions that I have about the passage, and I write those down. And quite often those beginning questions take me somewhere, but they don't really end up kind of being what the final sermon is about. But in this case, I think that the questions do kind of relate quite closely to the sermon. So I'm going to put them up here. I know some people like to take notes during the sermon. I'm not going to maybe leave these up long enough to write down, but I'll let you kind of rest on them and see if these are questions that you have also had about blood and the Bible.
So, first question: why did Jesus have to die? Can't God just forgive us? You see a lot of people who are not Christians have that question, whether they're sincere seekers, like it just seems weird. Why did Jesus have to die? Couldn't God just... he's powerful, right? Just forgive everybody. That's also a question that people who are really antagonistic toward Christianity often say too. "Well, that doesn't make any sense. Surely God, if he's powerful, can just forgive." So, why did Jesus have to die?
Why was he crucified? A few weeks ago we preached about Jesus calming the storm, and the disciples came to him and said, "Master, don't you care if we drown?" Why couldn't Jesus have drowned for our sins? I mean, it seems a little strange to us, but did it have to be crucifixion? Did it have to be blood? So, why was the shedding of blood necessary? What does blood have to do with forgiveness? We just saw in the very last line in that passage that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. Really? Why?
And what does this have to do with the Lord's Supper? When we talk about eating Jesus' body and drinking Jesus' blood, why are we drinking Jesus' blood? There's a lot, you know, that just seems a little strange. And for some people, I think, even the word blood is just kind of like, "Oh, that seems kind of gross." Some people don't really have a stomach, I think, for it. They see a cut or something and they're like, "I just can't look at that."
So, now, that's actually not the way I'm organizing the sermon, because of course there's four points here. A good sermon always has to have three. But each of these questions will hopefully be answered as we go through this.
So, part one, I thought we'd talk about just what is blood? Just in natural terms, what is blood? So, first of all, a question for the kids. Kids, adults, you can think the answer, but don't blurt it out loud. What color is blood? You know what color blood is? Well, yeah, you're half right. That's right, blood is red, but it's also sometimes another color. What color is blood if it's not red? It's blue. That's right. Because if blood gets exposed to air, to oxygen, it turns red, but blood that's inside your veins is blue, and sometimes you can see this. Sometimes there's a couple of veins really close to your wrist in there. You can see little blue lines there somewhere. That's blood that's inside, though, that isn't exposed to oxygen. But normally, of course, we think of blood as being red.
How much blood do you have in your body? You go to donate blood and they take those little bags and stuff, and you think, how much is there? Well, we have about 5 L of blood. So, picture that. I always think in terms of milk cartons and stuff, right? So you get like a 2 L and some 1 L. So, about 5 L of blood all together. When you donate blood, they usually take half a liter, so a tenth of the blood that you've got in you.
What's blood made up of? Well, blood is about 50/50. It's made up of plasma, and of course you can donate plasma as well. Plasma is kind of the main liquid, and it's kind of whitish, clear kind of stuff. About 50% of blood is plasma. The other 50% is made up of red blood cells, which is what makes blood look so red. If anybody's got a bio or medical background, I'm simplifying a few things here. You know, there's platelets and stuff with that as well, white blood cells. But for the most part, blood is about 50/50 plasma and red blood cells.
And how does blood work? Actually, let's go back to the composition for a sec. Red blood cells. So, blood is blue in your veins. When it hits oxygen, it turns red. So, what is the purpose of having blood in our bodies? What does blood do by circulating around? Well, it brings oxygen to all of our organs and muscles and to our brain and all that stuff, because every part of our body needs oxygen. But how do you get oxygen on the inside? So, blood takes that around. So, your little red blood cells have a metal inside them. You've actually got quite a few different metals inside you. But your red blood cells have a little bit of iron. We often talk about iron. Some people take iron supplements. And iron, when it gets exposed to oxygen, reacts really quickly.
And you know what happens if you've got some iron or something like that sitting outside, and it gets exposed to oxygen and it starts to rust? What color does it turn? Red. Rust is red, right? It's for the same reason that our soil here on P.E.I. is red, which also comes up a bit later in the sermon. There's rust in it. So, the reason your blood is red, slight simplification, the reason your blood is red is because it's rusty. You've got all these little bits of rust flakes kind of floating through your veins, or through your arteries, sorry. So, it gets exposed to the oxygen, it binds to the iron, turns into rust, and takes all the oxygen all through your body.
And because of this, because you need oxygen to live, blood is basically life. It's the thing that keeps you alive. Of course, if you lose too much blood, you're not going to live. But blood is the part that's kind of warming through you all the time and is bringing oxygen everywhere. It carries away waste as well. This isn't a bio lesson, but basically blood is what brings life to your body.
We think about blood sometimes in popular culture. We often think of blood as representing either a family connection, you know, like "blood is thicker than water," that kind of stuff, or sometimes your ancestry, and you talk about your blood or something. There's several countries, actually, where you can become a citizen of that country even if you weren't born there, if you can prove that you have a grandparent or something that was from that country. A lot of European countries do this, and it's actually called the blood rule. So we often think of your blood, like your Dutch heritage, your Dutch blood, your Scottish blood, that kind of stuff. Picture all these little blood cells wearing kilts going through your body, or wooden shoes or something. Anyway, so we think of blood as talking about your ancestry as well. So that's kind of blood outside of a scriptural context.
What about in the Bible, or in the Old Testament? So, I don't know how many of you have ever lived in Ontario, or maybe even in some big cities in Quebec, but they've got this thing in big cities in Ontario: big squirrels. I was surprised the first time I went to Ottawa and I saw this giant, like post-apocalyptic, nuclear-sized... is that a cat running through my front yard? And it turns out it's a squirrel. And compared to coming from P.E.I., where the squirrels are little things like chipmunks, it was massive. And there's squirrels everywhere.
Anyway, so one day in the early 90s, I was teaching at a school in Nepean, just outside Ottawa, and it was a 5-minute walk from my house, so I used to walk to school every morning. And one day, about mid-September, I saw this squirrel that had been hit by a bus, but not flattened, just kind of knocked over onto the grass. And there was a squirrel laying there. I kind of walked around him on the way to school. On the next day, the squirrel was still there. Scavengers hadn't found him, lawnmowers, whatever. And the scientist in me thought, "Well, this is kind of interesting." And the next week, he's still there.
And every day you could watch the squirrel. And some of you may be finding this a little gross, but it was kind of interesting. Every day, the squirrel got a little bit less like a squirrel and just kind of returned to the earth. It took about 6 weeks. At the end of 6 weeks, I was walking by and there was a little kind of discoloration on the grass with a bit of black fur there, and that was it. It was a really vivid image to me of what we see in Genesis, that we are formed out of the dust of the earth, and then when we die, we'll return back to the dust of the earth. This squirrel... I think this may be the only time in my life I've actually seen something decompose very slowly and naturally. Anyway, returning back to the earth.
What does that have to do with blood? Well, we always like to throw a Hebrew word or a Greek word into these churchy word series. So, the Hebrew word for today is adam. Adam, which means red. And there's a couple of words connected to blood that relate to this word adam. This is the root word, adam. And so from adam we get the word Adam, the name Adam, which means man. Man, human. Yeah, or actually more specifically, man. So adam means man. Now, oh, that's unfortunate. This is just the font that it was supposed to be. Anyway, it'll work.
So, we also get the word adamah, which means the earth. And so, you see in Genesis where it talks about man made from the earth. Adam means man, but adamah is earth. And adam, of course, also kind of implies red. And then dam is the word for blood. So we get the word for humans, we get the word for earth, and we get the word for blood, all kind of connecting with this word red. Which is further evidence, by the way, that the Garden of Eden must have been located on P.E.I., because the soil was red. Anyway, there you go.
So, if you take the sentence, "Man was made of earth and animated with blood," you get Adam made of adamah and animated with dam. And so with blood, you get this idea of blood being really tightly connected to life. You almost get this image... well, actually, I think it says this in Genesis, right? That Adam is sort of made and he's there, but he's not been animated with anything yet. The body is kind of there. It hasn't been hooked up to any electrodes. Well, God didn't use electrodes. The blood starts to flow and suddenly Adam is alive. So, in the Old Testament, this idea of blood associated with life, which is really kind of the same way we see things now, is a very powerful thing. In the Old Testament, blood is life.
So, what did the ancients think about blood? Well, you know, like we just said. And I feel like maybe I missed one thought in there. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Ah, never mind.
Okay, bicycle. Let's suppose I lent somebody my bicycle, and they were to use it for the weekend and bring it back Sunday evening. And they came to see me Sunday evening, and I noticed my bike's not on the back of their truck. And they say, "Yeah, I remember your bike." It's like, this isn't sounding good here. "I had it in town and I was just popping into a store. I was just going to be 2 minutes. I left it outside the store. I didn't chain it up. I was just in for 2 minutes. I came back out, the bike was gone. I'm really sorry, but your bike is gone." And I'm thinking, yeah, now it's probably on a cargo ship bound for another country somewhere. I'm not getting that back.
So I say, okay, well, that's a stinker, but yeah, I might have done the same thing, actually. I might have left it out there and not chained it up. And the person says, "Could you please forgive me?" Yeah, yeah, yeah, I forgive you. Well, that's good. I can forgive the person, but there's still a problem, right? The obvious problem is, now I don't have a bike. So, one of three things has got to happen. Either this guy offers to replace my bike, or I have to go buy a new bike, or I don't have a bike anymore. Either way, there's a loss there somewhere. Something is missing, something's broken, something that used to exist doesn't exist anymore. I can forgive him, but that doesn't make me a new bike.
So, what about sin? Well, sin is disobeying God's word. Lots of places in the Bible God tells us how he wants us to live, how we should conduct ourselves. And when we sin, we're breaking God's commandments. But sometimes I think that when you sin, it's kind of like a parent with a child or something. It's like, "Don't eat that. Don't eat that cookie. I told you not to eat the cookie." And the kid's like, okay. And they eat the cookie and they get caught. It's like, "Now you've got to be punished because you ate the cookie." "I'm sorry." But there's still 30 cookies in the jar, and it was just a cookie, and you still eat supper. So it's kind of just like you broke the rule, but you just broke the rule. We'll never really understand just how massive sin is, how important it is, how terrible it is.
So, look at this passage in 2 Samuel. So, this is David and Bathsheba, right? There's really a lot of stuff happening in this passage here. David sees Bathsheba. He decides to have an affair with her. She's a married woman. She gets pregnant. David basically kills the husband and then marries Bathsheba. A lot of layers of sinful activity in there, and he kind of justifies it. The prophet Nathan comes to see David, and in one of the ultimate confrontations of the Bible, and you really just need to be a fly on the wall for that one, he just blasts David with the fact that he has sinned. And just before this, Nathan kind of tricks him into it and says there was a guy who did this with a sheep, and David's like, "The guy who did that deserves to die." Nathan's like, "You're the man. You're the one who deserves to die."
David immediately says, "I've sinned against the Lord." He asks forgiveness. You think, okay, well, that's good. His first instinct, unlike, say, Saul or Solomon or so many other kings of Israel, his first instinct is, "Oh, no. Lord, please forgive me." God says, "Yes, I will forgive you, but there's consequences for sin. Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own." Wait. Is that word in there? I've often focused on the sword never departing from your house, kind of looking at what happens later in David's life. But "because you despised me"?
Imagine you're sinning and God comes and confronts you and says, "Why did you despise me by doing this?" I'm like, "Oh, God, no, no, no. I'm not despising you. I just had a weak moment, and I shouldn't have said that thing, shouldn't have done that thing. I wasn't trying to despise you." God says, "Yes, that's exactly what you did." And in a passage just before this it says, "because you've held the Lord in utter contempt." Sin is so much worse than we can get our heads around. It's not just breaking a rule. It's not just doing something bad that can be kind of fixed over.
So, in the 20th century, the 1900s, physicists really kind of understood that space and time are kind of the same thing. The universe is made up of this fabric of space-time, and you can have a heavy planet that causes a bend in it, or a black hole that makes a rip. So you could... yeah, that's all the physics. But I think there's a spiritual dimension to things that we don't often see. There's kind of this spiritual fabric that makes up the universe that God put in there right from the beginning. This is where God lives, and we kind of get glimpses of it. And when we sin, that makes a tear in the spiritual fabric of the universe. And forgiveness doesn't just heal that over. There's still a rip there. The bicycle is still missing.
Sin has profound consequences. There's stuff that we don't see out there, and God really takes that as "you have despised me." Sin needs to be paid for, but it needs to be paid for by something really powerful. What is it that can actually heal this rip in the spiritual fabric? What is it that can do that? So, how does sin get paid? Well, see, in Romans chapter 6, "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."
So, I'm getting a little heavy with this talk of sin and stuff. The good news, of course, is that we don't have to bear the burden of that sin. We don't have to bear the burden of that tear in the spiritual fabric. There's good news coming. But I think it's important to understand the bad news first, so we can see why the blood is important. Sin equals death. When the very first people, Adam and Eve, sinned in the Garden of Eden, that brought death to the entire universe. The Hebrew word there is translated cosmos. It wasn't just that the earth suddenly has thorns and briars and difficult things, but that the entire universe started to die. Stars started to die. Animals started to die. We started to die, just because of that one first sin. Sin is death. And so, how do we pay for it? Well, Paul in Romans gives us a glimpse of where that's coming. The eternal life comes through Jesus Christ and in his blood.
So, what did they do in the Old Testament? They used the blood of animals. There was a sacrifice every single day of either a bull or a ram, and that was done because life is the only thing that could hold death back. But it was just holding it back, right? So the death in this case, the death of an animal, is going to hold it back and try to heal it over. But really it's just kind of putting a band-aid on all those rips and tears in the spiritual fabric.
We see this right from the beginning, with Abel offering up some of his animals as a sacrifice. We see Noah coming off the ark, and the first thing he does is offer a sacrifice. We see Abraham almost offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice, and God at the last minute says, "No, wait. I see that you have faith, but look, there's a ram caught in the bushes over here. Offer that instead." Which is, by the way, a beautiful picture of Jesus as a substitute, taking punishment that he doesn't deserve. And then you get to Moses and the tabernacle, and this blood of animals offered every single day, because of course people, we keep sinning every single day.
And the thing about those animals, too, is the animals had to be perfect and spotless. No sacrificing that lame goat that was born there, or the cow with two heads, or any of that kind of stuff. "Oh, I've got to get rid of this thing. I'll sacrifice it." No, these have to be perfect, spotless animals, every single day, just to kind of hold back the tide of sin. So this is in the Old Testament. But that was never really the permanent solution. The permanent solution was waiting, with the blood of Jesus.
So, why does Jesus have to die? Why does it have to be through blood? Okay. So, on P.E.I. we used to have capital punishment, and capital punishment on P.E.I. was done by hanging. I think there were eight hangings done through the history of the Island. Some of them were famous ones. In 1815, a guy named Sancho Byers, actually a teenager named Sancho Byers, was hanged for stealing a loaf of bread. The governor would often commute the sentence and say, "Oh, we're not going to hang you for that." But this governor was kind of a bad guy, and this governor said, "Oh, no, he's going to hang." And the reason they hanged him is because he didn't eat the crust, which they took as proof that he wasn't really hungry. He just did it for badness. So he was hanged. I think the fact that he was black probably also played a part, the racism at the time and stuff.
The hangings used to be done publicly, right downtown at the corner of University Avenue and Euston Street, what I still think of as the Sea Treat. It probably hasn't been there for 50 years now. Anyway, or the Inn on the Hill. Later, the hangings were done in the park right behind the library, between the Dominion Building and the culinary. There's that nice park there. Right where the playground equipment is, there was a jail in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, and the hangings were there. George Dowie's hanging was a public hanging. People brought picnic baskets. They wore their Sunday clothes. They all brought their kids. And the hanging was botched. And after that people were like, "Ah, we shouldn't be doing this anymore." The last hangings were in 1941, at the 1911 jail, in the courtyard behind.
So hanging, I mean, it was a method of death, but it wasn't particularly gruesome, unless of course, in the case of George Dowie, it was. But what about crucifixion? Sometimes we get used to seeing crosses in the church. We talk so much about crucifixion that we lose a bit of a sense of what crucifixion was in the ancient world. My ancient history students are always surprised when they hear about other cultures using crucifixion. Sometimes they think Jesus was the only guy that ever got crucified. No, the Romans crucified a lot of people. In Carthage, every time they lost a war, they crucified their generals. Then the Romans got hold of crucifixion, and just like a lot of things, they raised it to a system, or to an art form. After the Spartacus revolt, a slave revolt about 80 years before the time of Jesus, they caught all the slaves and they crucified 6,000 guys, stretched along the road all the way from Rome to Capua.
The idea behind crucifixion was that this was supposed to be the most humiliating and painful way to die that the Romans had ever come across, and so they liked it. It usually took two or three days to die if you were crucified. You bled a lot. People would pass by you and laugh at you and throw garbage and stuff. And so you're in pain for several days. Compared to hanging, I mean, still not an awesome thing, but hanging was relatively quick. Crucifixion was long and slow. And it was a shame-filled thing. You couldn't be crucified if you were a Roman citizen, if you had rights. You could only be crucified if you were a slave, or a traitor, or a foreigner or something like that. It was reserved for the lowest of the low.
And while you're hanging there... usually they beat you pretty badly beforehand. We think about what we read about Jesus' crucifixion and the whipping and the scourging he went through beforehand, and how Jesus only lasted 6 hours on the cross, which everyone at the time in the New Testament is surprised by, that he was already dead and they didn't have to break his legs, because he'd been beaten so badly and his blood flowed so much.
The early church never would have used a cross like this as a symbol. A cross was a sign of shame, and it was probably about 300 years before you start seeing Christians actually use a cross and saying, yeah, we can kind of claim that now and say this is where our sins get paid for. Because before that, if an early Christian had walked in here and seen this cross: "What is that doing up there? That's horrible." It was seen as an embarrassing way for our Savior to have died. So we've kind of flipped that now, but originally, at the time, this was a humiliating, very bloody kind of way to die.
And so, what about Jesus' blood? So, Jesus at the Last Supper takes the cup and says, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you." And so, as we're drinking the wine, we think about Jesus' covenant and the blood. So, blood means life. Life is the only thing that can seal over the rifts and stuff that are caused by sin. Sin brings about death. The only cure for death is life. But if you want to somehow pay for all of the sins and all of the death brought into this, well, you need blood, and not just human blood. You need the blood of God. And so Jesus says, "This covenant is in my blood, which is poured out for you."
I used to think, up until very recently, when you look at the history of the Old Testament and Jesus fulfilling prophecies and stuff, that God put in this system of sacrifice in the tabernacle and the temple because that was what was necessary, and there was sacrifice of animals and stuff, and that kind of went along as its own thing. Much later, Jesus comes along, and God says, well, Jesus has to fulfill all these prophecies and fulfill all that stuff, so Jesus is going to have to die in this way because of what happened in the Old Testament. The Old Testament was kind of the driver. Jesus dies this way so that he can fulfill what happened in the Old Testament.
I realized I had that exactly backwards. The plan was there right from the beginning. Adam and Eve were in the garden. They sin. And right away God comes in and says, "What is this that you've done?" The woman is cursed, the man is cursed. He turns to the serpent and says, because you've done this and deceived these people, their seed is going to crush your head. If not before that, at the very least, right there in Genesis 3, God's got the plan. Sin has now entered into the world. There's only one cure for the sin that we're all going to commit, and that's got to be blood. But it's got to be the most powerful blood, the blood of God.
But there's a problem. God's a spirit. He doesn't have blood. God has to become a man and have a human body and have blood, which will then be shed to pay for all of that sin that's happened since the beginning of the world. And all of this stuff with the sacrificial system in the Old Testament was just done so that people could kind of get their heads around what was going to happen with Jesus.
Why does he have to die? He has to die because sin demands death. Why does he have to bleed so much? What's important about his blood? It's because blood represents that life. And everything that happened up to that point was just to kind of get us there, so that we say, "Oh, I think I understand that now. I kind of get that because of what we saw before." But the plan was always for Jesus. The plan was always for his death and his blood to pay for our sins. So the life force of God comes and pays for everything that we have done, that we ever will do. And so we can be thankful. In fact, we can thank Jesus for his blood. Because when you think about the blood of God himself, there is nothing stronger.
Let's pray. Oh Jesus, thank you that you were willing to come and leave your position at the Father's right hand and come and be one of us. And not just to be one of us, to live a perfect life without blemish, without sin, and yet still be killed in a shameful, horrible, painful way, and to shed your blood so that we could enjoy forgiveness and mercy. Jesus, thank you for your blood. Thank you for forgiveness. Thank you that we are one with you and that you walk with us every day. In Christ's name, amen.