The Blood of Jesus Christ

Here are my comments from a discussion list on blood.

I’m not sure where you are going with this but I agree that blood has always been important to God. We live in a sanitized civilization where the impact (and connection) with blood is minimized… bloodless capital punishment, low profile abattoirs, bloodless surgeries, etc.

I’ve always thought about it like this… every crime (sin) against God carries the death penalty… sometimes immediate and sometimes delayed. In the Mosaic law some (not all) crimes could appease God with the substitution of animal blood. Animal blood, of course, isn’t the proper payment for human sin. It is limited in what it can achieve. The proper payment for crimes against God is human blood. The blood of the criminal.

Then God makes the blood of Christ available to us. It is like an overpayment for our sins and has such value that it can pay for the crimes of all of humanity past, present and future. It also has the ability to cleanse our consciouses.

Of course the question is why? At this point I like to fold in Ephesians 5, Christ wanting a pure, virginal bride (in regards to sin).

God wants a relationship with a pure people. He makes the down payment of the blood of Jesus Christ. That is the initiating point. With that head start, we strive to grow into the very stature of Jesus Christ by conquering sin (and the desire to sin) in our lives and become the pure bride and completely fitted soldier in God’s army.