His Blood, His Death, My Salvation

Hebrews 9:15-28

After a serious car accident in Venezuela, Carlos Camejo was pronounced dead at the scene. Officials released the body to the morgue and a routine autopsy was ordered. But as soon as examiners began the autopsy, they realized something was gravely wrong: the body was bleeding. They quickly stitched up the wounds to stop the bleeding, which in turn, jarred the man to consciousness. Camejo said, “I woke up because the pain was unbearable.” Equally jarred awake was Camejo’s wife, who came to the morgue to identify her husband’s body and instead found him in the hallway – alive.

With so many forensic television shows these days … shows like Blue Bloods and Chicago PD and Hawaii Five-0, it’s easy for us to imagine this scene. We can see it vividly. Equally vivid is the scientific principle in the morgue. Sure, blood is everywhere with work in a morgue; but the dead do not bleed. Bleeding is a sign of the living.

Thought and practice in Old Testament times revolved around a similar understanding – namely, the life is in the blood. For the ancient Hebrew, there was a general understanding that in our blood is the essence of what it means to be alive. There is life in the blood; there is energy and power.

This notion of blood and its power can also be seen in the language of sacrifice and offering found throughout ancient  Near Eastern culture. Just as it was understood that the force of life exists in the blood, there was a general understanding of the human need for the power of perfect blood, a need in our lives for atoning and cleansing. The blood of a living sacrifice made this possible temporarily, but God would provide a better way.

When we speak of Christ as the Lamb of God, it is a description of the One whose blood cries out with enough life and power to reach every person, every sorrow, every shortfall, every evil. He is the Lamb who comes to the slaughter alive and aware, on his own accord, voluntarily, and with his blood covers us with life. There is life in the blood of Christ, whose entire life is self-giving love; there is power, and he has freely sacrificed all to bring it near.

Scripture tells of a time when we will bow before the slain Lamb who stands very much alive, though bearing the scars of his own death. He is not dead and buried, but beckoning a broken world to his wounded side, offering love and life, mercy and power in blood poured out for you.[i]

If you’ve spent any time reading the Old Testament at all, you may have been struck by just how bloody it is. Not just the blood of battles and wars, but the blood of sacrifices for sin. During the thousand plus years when the Old Covenant between God and his people was in effect, before Jesus, there were more than a million animal sacrifices. If you figure that one bull’s sacrifice spilled one or two gallons of blood, and each lamb or goat about a quart, times over a million … During the Passover, a trough was constructed from the temple down into the Kidron Valley for the sanitary disposal of all the blood!

We talk often in the church about Christ’s sacrifice for our sin. Crosses are everywhere. Many of us even wear them around our necks. But in our minds eye, we see it all … without the blood. Oh, we do talk about blood. Every time we take communion, we hear again the words, “This cup is a new covenant, written in my blood, shed for you. Take and drink in remembrance of me.” In remembrance of what? Of Christ’s shed blood.

We sing about it too. “What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the …Blood of Jesus.” “There is power, power, wonder working power in the … blood of the lamb.” “ Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing pow’r? Are you washed in the … blood of the Lamb?” In our world, blood is something to be washed OFF if you get it on you, not something to wash IN. So why all this sacrifice and blood talk? Turn with me to Hebrews 9. We’re going to be looking at Vv. 15-28 today. Let’s start with Vv. 15-22.

What is a covenant? It’s a word that appears often in the Bible. We talk a lot about the Old Covenant … the relationship between God and his people before Jesus, mediated by priests, law, and sacrifice. And the New Covenant, established by Jesus through his broken body and shed blood, through his death and resurrection. Today, outside the church, you probably won’t hear the word used very often. We’re more likely to talk about contracts than covenants. And even in the church, we use the word, but don’t often define it. Really the only covenant we talk about people entering into today, even in the church, is the covenant of marriage.

A covenant is very similar to a contract in that it IS a binding agreement. It IS a legal contract. But the word for covenant actually comes from the same root as the word for “to cut.” In the Bible, a covenant carried a lot of weight and was typically cut, or sealed, in blood. Not the blood of the covenant maker necessarily, but the blood of a sacrifice. And the penalty for breaking covenant required blood. It was stronger than a modern contract, although even with modern contracts, breaking them can be pricey. You might lose your home or business. But you won’t lose your life. Unless you’re in a gang or the mob.

The Old Covenant, which we encounter in the Old Testament, outlined God’s commitment to his people, how they were to live as his people, and what was to be done when they inevitably broke that covenant. That’s what sin is – breaking the covenant. Breaking a contract is serious business. It often has significant financial repercussions. Breaking a covenant is very serious business. But why the shedding of blood when that happens”

Pastor and Author J.D. Greear explains it this way. He says, “I remember a Muslim asking me when I lived in Southeast Asia, why would God need somebody to die in order to forgive our sin? He said, “If you sinned against me, and I wanted to forgive you, I wouldn’t make you kill your dog before I forgave you. Why would God require some kind of sacrifice to forgive?”

Here’s how I answered him:

Choosing to forgive somebody means that you are agreeing to absorb the cost of the injustice of what they’ve done. Imagine you stole my car and you wrecked it, and you don’t have insurance and or the money to pay for it. What are my choices? I could make you pay. I could haul you before a judge and request a court-mandated payment plan. If you were foolish enough to steal my $1.5 million Ferrari (No, I do not actually own a Ferrari), you might never pay it off, and you’d always be in my debt.

But I have another choice. I could forgive you …. What am I choosing to do if I say, “I forgive you”? I’m choosing to absorb the cost of your wrong. I’ll have to pay the price of having the car fixed. … You have no debt to pay – not because there was nothing to pay, but because I paid it all. Not only that, I’m choosing to absorb the pain of your treatment of me. … I’m choosing to give you friendship and acceptance even though you deserve the opposite.

This is always how forgiveness works. It comes at a cost. If you forgive someone, you bear the cost rather than insisting that the wrongdoer does. And that is what Jesus, the Mighty God, was doing when he came to earth and lived as a man and died a criminal’s death on a wooden cross.”[ii]

We don’t use the word sin much today, even in the church. Our culture prefers to talk about brokenness. We know that no one is perfect, that we all make mistakes, and that some of us are more broken than others. So what we do is compare ourselves only to one another. We figure its only the bottom of the heap, the worst people, that will be punished. So as long as I am not one of the worst, I’m okay. “Yeah, I cheated on my spouse, but I’m no Hitler.” Or, “Okay, so I lied to get a sale. It’s not like I’m a murderer.”

But God doesn’t grade on the curve. Someone once asked Christian philosopher and theologian Dallas Willard if he believed in total depravity. Total depravity is one of the main tenets of Christian theologies on the more Reformed side of things … Presbyterian, Reformed, and Baptist churches. It states that every human being is totally depraved. That human nature is totally corrupt and sinful. This was Dallas’ response. “I believe in sufficient depravity,” he responded immediately to the question. “I believe that every human being is sufficiently depraved that when we get to heaven, no one will be able to say, ‘I merited this.’”

God takes sin, our breaking covenant with him, seriously, because God is just. And justice demands that sin, not just certain sins committed by certain really bad people, but all sin, receive its just due. And we are all sufficiently depraved. We all fall short.

Now, look at Vv. 23-26. Not only does all of this blood and talk of blood remind us of the seriousness of sin, it reminds us of the costliness of our salvation. For roughly a millenium – a thousand years – the people of God brought sacrifices, year after year on the day of atonement. Year after year at the Passover. And at other times too when they needed to be cleansed. Blood was shed and then sprinkled. Bull after bull. Lamb after lamb. Goat after goat.

And then Jesus … God in the flesh. Lived under the old covenant just like you and I, but unlike you and I, he never once broke covenant. He never once went against the will of God. Even when he wanted to. Even when his flesh cried out for relief, he stayed the course. And then he offered up himself … voluntarily … in our place.

In March 2018 a lone gunman took several people hostage in a French supermarket. Arnaud Beltrame, a French police officer, offered to trade places with a hostage during the standoff. Because of his actions the hostage lived, but the officer died. A spokesperson for French President Emmanuel Macron said that Beltrame “died in the service of the nation, to which he had already brought so much. By giving his life to put an end to the … armed jihadist terrorist, he has fallen as a hero.” Although we don’t know for certain the state of this man’s heart his Catholic priest thinks he was a true Christian.

Father Jean-Baptiste wrote this of Officer Arnaud:

It seems to me that only his faith can explain the madness of this sacrifice which is today the admiration of all. He understood, as Jesus told us, that there is no greater love than to give one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13). He knew that if his life belonged to [his wife] Marielle, it also belonged to God, to France and to his brothers in danger of death. I believe that only a Christian faith animated by charity could ask for this superhuman sacrifice.[iii]

Jesus voluntarily offered himself in our place. When the cat-o-nine-tails – the leather whip the Romans used to scourge him – a single handle with nine leather straps into which were woven shards of sharp bone and metal – tore into his back, it was because every time that whip met his back, tearing off flesh as it was pulled back, it was by rights you and I who should be bearing that punishment. But he pushed us out of the way, pushed us in front of him, and took the flogging on himself.

When that Roman hammer beat huge metal spikes through his wrists and ankles, it was us who by rights should be nailed to that cross, but he pushed us out of the way and willingly allowed it to be done to him instead. He stood in, for you and me.

Now, look at Vv. 27-28. In all of this flowing blood and in the willing self-sacrifice of Christ, we see the seriousness of our sin, we see the costliness of our salvation, and we see the beauty of our heavenly home.

What do you think about, when you think of heaven? Most of us think of clouds, with angels playing harps on them. Or we think of an eternal worship service, because the Bible talks about us worshipping God for eternity. Of course, that’s because we misinterpret worship to be ONLY a worship service. We forget that every part of our lives, everything we think and do, is intended to be an offering of worship to God. Whether you preach sermons or rotate tires for a living, you are to do it as an offering to God.

The Bible actually talks about what we consider “heaven” as a new heaven and a new earth. A new cosmos. Without sin and fallenness. Enjoyed by God and those who choose him in this fallen, broken world. 1 Corinthians 2:9 says, “… no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him …”

You see, in the New Testament, clouds are associated with the intersection or interchange between the heavenly realm and the earthly realm. When we imagine only clouds and us as  little bare bottomed cherubs playing harps for eternity (which, let’s be honest, seems more like hell than heaven), its like we are standing at the base of a great and glorious mountain range, with our eyes downcast, looking at the rocks, and not even the rocks, but the specks of dirt on the rocks, at the foot of the mountain, as if they were the great mountain range itself.

If we don’t take sin seriously, we’ll never take our need for a savior seriously. If we don’t understand that we are all sufficiently depraved, as Dallas Willard put it, then we’ll never appreciate the costliness of Christ’s voluntary sacrifice, offering himself in our place. If we don’t realize that even the biblical writers were trying to describe the indescribable with human words when they tried to describe heaven, eternity with God, then we’ll never see it as being worth every challenge we’ll face and every cost we’ll pay as Christ-followers on this earth.

Will you pray with me?

[i] Jill Carattini, “The Dead Don’t Bleed” A Slice of Infinity RZIM.org (no date); Reuters, “‘Dead’ Man Wakes Up Under Autopsy Knife,” (11-14-07)

[ii] J. D. Greear, Searching For Christmas (The Good Book Company, 2020), p. 52-53

[iii] Phil Helsel, “French police officer who traded places with hostage during terror attack dies,” NBC News.Com (3-23-18); Archbishop Charles Chaput, “A Lesson for Holy Week From the Witness of Arnaud Beltrame,” National Catholic Register (3-26-18)