6/30/2022 0 Comments The Blood controversyThis post is about the controversy of the blood of Christ. First of all, I affirm that Jesus had to die in no other way than the way He did in order to fulfill the words of the prophets: horrible, bloody death on the cross to save His people from their sins. So what is the issue here? As far as I understand it (I honestly don’t know all the claims about the blood; maybe someone can enlighten me), this issue is that some say that there is some special property in the literal, actual blood of Christ that saves us. I believe this to be a misunderstanding of how the NT writers use the word (I believe the word blood is used as a metonym to symbolize the atoning death of Christ in its entirety), and affords some confusion about how we think about the bodily fluid of Jesus.
When we say we are saved by the blood of Christ, what do we mean exactly? Are we saved by the actual bodily fluid that ran in the veins of Jesus’ body, and is Jesus presently somehow using His red blood cells and His blood plasma in the work of salvation? Are we right to call the blood of Jesus as the “blood of God” as some have called it? In order to understand the symbolic meaning of blood, we must start with the Hebrews’ usage of the word. In Genesis 9:6, God says that “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed…” God is not talking about cutting someone with a papercut; God is talking about murder and capital punishment for murderers. In Leviticus 17:11,14, God sees the blood as symbolically representing the life of the animal. In Acts 18, when Paul was fed up with the Corinthian Jews, he says, “Your blood be on your own heads! I am clean.” He means that symbolically that the Jews who reject their Messiah have nobody else to blame for their own certain death. More significantly, in Matthew 27:25, the Jewish crowd incited by their leaders cry out, “His blood shall be on us and on our children!” They are not talking about the literal blood, but they are willing to be responsible for Jesus’ death. So how we understand the literal bodily fluid of Christ, as it really is, is that it is the blood of a Man, not of God. God is Spirit, and does not have flesh and blood. But Jesus being fully God, and paradoxically fully Man, possesses the blood of a Man. Period. Now… When Paul speaks about the gospel and how God has made peace with sinners through “the blood of His cross” in Colossians 1:20 (you will notice that the wooden beam of the cross is wood and does not possess blood), or when Peter says that we were not purchased with perishable things like silver and gold, but with “precious blood of Christ” in 1 Peter 1:19, they are not talking about the literal blood, but what the blood symbolizes: the death of Christ. Thus, Paul rightly says that we were reconciled to God “through the death of His Son” (Romans 5:10). This proper understanding of the “blood” of Christ is necessary to appreciate the substitutionary work that He accomplished on behalf of sinners to save them from the penalty of their sins by dying in their place. Of course, we have not even begun to talk about the mystery of the three hours of darkness on the cross when God descends upon His Son to “crush Him” (Isaiah 53:10) and extinguish the infinite wrath of God against all the sinners who would ever believe in Him. But there should be no mystical idea about the actual bodily fluid of the Man Jesus as having some special property. It is a real blood of a real Man. It is the entire death of Christ that the NT writers say is the atonement for sins when they refer to the blood of Christ.
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CategoriesAll Discourse Doctrines Gospel Humour NT Commentaries OT Commentaries Tactical Life Date
August 2023
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