Blood of Christ

All throughout the Old Testament for the many centuries that it covers, animals were sacrificed day in and day out.

Their purpose was to portray the need for a savior, the need for the penalty of sin to be paid, the dramatic and exorbitant price demanded by sin, and the process by which that price could be paid thus resolving mans dilemma of being separated from God forever.

With each sacrifice, an animal, typically a bull, was strapped to an alter of sorts, and its throat cut. The blood of the animal spilled out and the animal died.

More details of each sacrifice have been covered in our studies of the first seven chapters of Leviticus. But suffice to say, the need for a perfect bull, without blemish, the death, required, and the resultant examination, burning, and eating of the bull, portrayed many of the aspects of the work of Christ on the Cross in obtaining the work of salvation for us.

If the spilling of blood was all that was necessary for resolving mans problem and for paying the price for sin and death, then the very first sacrifice performed by Adam and Eve would have been sufficient. However, that is not the case.

Sacrifices resulted in the death of millions of animals over the centuries, and not one of them, nor the collective result of them all, was sufficient to save mankind.

In the New Testament, the phrase Blood of Christ is used often in portraying His work of salvation, on the Cross. Unfortunately too many folks seem to think that it was the blood spilling out of His body that was the solution to mans sins, but such is not the case.

The blood phrase is used in several passages in the New Testament to describe the redemptive work of Christ, Eph. 1:7, Col. 1:14, 1 Pet. 1:18-19.

Justification or justice is also described in these passages, describing the reasons why God cannot vindicate man from sin until the sin problem was solved, thus allowing God to then impute His own righteousness and eternal life to mankind, Rom. 5:9.

The blood also teaches the principle of sanctification and propitiation, which frees God to place man into union with Christ, Heb. 13:12.

One of the best starting points in the study of the Blood of Christ is Rom. 3:23.

Rom 3:23-25

23 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;

24 Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:

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;

From the time of Adam, to the end of the Millennium, man has and will be, separated from God were it not for the work of salvation, which Christ performed.

From Adam to the time of the Cross, God looked down through that tunnel of time and saw the Cross and thus passed over all of the history of human sinning, knowing that the Cross would resolve the problem. Thus the Passover Feast was established in order to describe and teach the principles of salvation to those folks, as well the future salvation work of the Messiah.

The text of Rom. 3:25 presents the concept that God had set forth the plan for propitiation (the work of satisfying Gods demands) future tense, as the plan which would resolve mans crisis.

Heb. 10:1, explains that the animal sacrifices could not, nor can ever, satisfy the work of salvation, because the animal sacrifices was only a shadow, a portrayal of the work of the Cross.

Heb 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.

And finally the actual work of the cross. In Isa 53:9, the death of the savior is portrayed in the plural. There will be two deaths. The first will be His spiritual death and the second will be His physical death.

In Col. 1:22, the word for death, thanatos refers to a single death, a spiritual death, which is the death which Christ suffered in obtaining our salvation. It does not ever refer to physical death.

The Lord was on the Cross from 9 am until after 3 o clock pm. From nine in the morning until noon He hung on the Cross and then at noon, the skies went dark, into a supernatural darkness, in which nothing could be seen.

Jesus was still alive during that time. He cried out, My God, my God , signifying the time of judgment had arrived. He screamed out these words for three hours until 3 o clock. Then the time of judgment was over. Jesus was still alive.

The skies cleared up and Jesus stated, tetelestai, or it is finished. The work of salvation was then completed, and Jesus was still alive at this point. Then and only then did He exhale for the last time and died physically.

During the Old Testament sacrifices, the animals were tied to an alter, not hung on a cross. Christ was not tied to an alter, but was hung on a cross. The physical death of the animal, portrayed the spiritual death of Christ, not His physical death.

Once the work of salvation was completed, then the work of the first advent was over. Jesus then died physically, Matt. 27:50, Mk. 15:37, which both state that Jesus sent His own breath away. He Himself exhaled and died from His own command. Man has no room to boast that man caused His death, or that man had any part in the work of salvation. The word for exhale, ekpeneo means a controlled and coordinated exhale. Jesus Himself brought on His physical death through the act of His own volition.

He brought Himself into the world and He took Himself out of it. Thus Christ has total control over everything that occurs in life and in death, Psa. 31:5.

The physical death of Christ set the stage for His resurrection. And while physical death is the result of spiritual death (physical death is not the penalty of sin), then once the penalty for sin has been paid, then resurrection is now available.

Once sin has been paid for, then that is not the end of the story. Life has to resume in order for man to live in heaven with God. Thus resurrection is an essential part of Christian doctrine.

After the physical death of Christ, then His soul went into the underworld (Hades), Psa. 16:10, Lk. 23:43, Acts 2:27, Eph. 4:9. His human spirit went to heaven in the presence of the Father, Lk. 23:46, Psa. 31:5. His body went into the grave, Lk. 23:53. This was in fact the result of His physical death.

Note one more thing. After He died physically, the spear stab to his body, Jn. 19:34, resulted in the shedding of blood. He did not bleed to death, and therefore salvation was not a result of His bleeding.

The phrase, Blood of Christ, brings together two unlike things, the physical death of the animal sacrifices, which portrayed the spiritual death of Christ on the Cross. The phrase blood, or blood of Christ, refer to the saving work of Christ, and express the fact that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the lessons described in all of the animal sacrifices from all of those past centuries.

The animal sacrifices were teaching aids, shadows of the reality. Jesus Christ on the Cross is the reality, the actual fulfilling event which solved and secured salvation for humanity.

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