Alive: Grow in Your Relationship With Jesusنموونە

My childhood church sang a song I found deeply unsettling because it asked the question, “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?” Every time we sang it, I’d make a gagging sound only loud enough for those sitting beside me to hear. I had no desire to be washed in anything other than warm, clean bath water. I didn’t even want to see this Blood we talked about so often, much less be washed in it.

However, no amount of queasiness changes the fact that blood is central to our faith and was central to God’s Work of Redemption from the beginning. Blood is the source of life for every living thing, and as we’ll see today, Jesus’s Blood is the Source of Spiritual Life for all who believe in Him. Hebrews 9:22 says, “According to the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”

Before the birth of Jesus, God had a Covenant (known as the Old Covenant or Mosaic Law) with His people that was made up of more than six hundred laws, including the Ten Commandments. Yesterday we considered how everyone sins, and because of sin, it was impossible for anyone to obey all those rules at once. So, as payment for sins, God specified that people had to take a spotless animal to the temple for the priest to slaughter and burn on the altar of the Lord. The offering’s blood would count as payment for their sin, and then their relationship with God would be restored. This was an exhausting, smelly, temporary, and repetitive way to deal with sin. But it wouldn’t always be that way.

Jeremiah was a prophet who spoke to people on God’s behalf about six hundred years before Jesus came. Jeremiah and the people around him lived under the Old Covenant, the Law of Moses. You can read about it in Exodus (2). Yet, he looked forward to a day when God would make a New Covenant with His people.

The Old Covenant was a never-ending cycle of failure and forgiveness because perfect obedience to God’s Laws was impossible for sinful humans. Our rebellion against God’s Ways set us in opposition to Him and separated us from Him. Thankfully, it didn’t keep God from loving us and providing a New Way for us to be reconciled to Him. The New Covenant Jeremiah described looked forward to the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus. Because Jesus is the Son of God, one Person of the Holy Trinity, He was able to be the Perfect, Sinless Human we could never be.

Hebrews is a beautiful book that compares the Old Covenant to the New Covenant (the relationship God has with His people through Jesus). It helps the reader understand how Jesus fulfilled every element of the Old Covenant, setting up something Gloriously Better.

Hebrews 9 presents Jesus as the Great High Priest, who has ended the need for a temple priest to advocate to God on our behalf. Instead, Jesus is the Greatest and Highest Priest of all, bridging the divide between God and us. Through His one-time Death on the Cross, Jesus gave the Ultimate and Final Payment God required to restore humanity’s relationship with Him. His Sacrifice was applied to us, and through His Blood, we now have direct access to God. No more priests, no more blood, no more six hundred laws. Just a relationship with Jesus.

The temple sacrifices would never be enough. There was always a need for more because there was always more sin in people’s lives that needed forgiving. Yet, Jesus, the Sinless Sacrifice, died “once for all time” (Hebrews 10:10). He never sinned, but He took our place, dying the death we deserved.

Only God could reconcile us to Himself because we were stuck in our sin. Jesus bore the weight of it, experiencing death. Then, He rose again Victorious over sin and death, ensuring there will be a day when both are no more. Jesus crossed the divide between God and man so that we would be reconciled to God. This happens when we put our trust in Christ. We die to sin and live unto Him!

If you are a follower of Jesus, then you are a child of God and a New Creation "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17)! Come to find out, I do want to be “washed in the blood of the Lamb” after all.

(2). F. B. Huey Jr., Jeremiah, Lamentations, vol. 16, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1993), 24.