“And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission.” (Heb. 9:22) “And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” (Gen. 4:10) “For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.” Heb. 10:4)
No, this letter is not about blood, not about the blood that we are covered with, (Eph. 1:7) or even the fact that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, (1 Cor. 15:50) or the millions upon millions of animals that were sacrificed upon the alter, but to only this one question, why did God decide that by blood we would be accepted into His covenant with us.
It is through the death of His Son Jesus that we come to the Father, “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6) But why, why even the need for a sacrifice, why not, as the Lord asked in the garden, if there is any other way, (Matt. 26:39) but there wasn’t, there never has been, and every great theologian, every man of God will sit there for hours and expound upon this subject, and every one of them can tell you what, but not why, why this path of blood. There is only one answer, because it is the way that the Almighty has chosen, “Thy will be done,” that is the answer.
From the first animals, killed by God Himself, right in front of Adam and Eve, for their clothing, to our Lord on the cross, death is the way, the death of Christ is and was and always will be the only way. All of the animals killed before Him were a shadow of the thing which must come to pass, that moment on the cross when the perfect sacrifice was willingly offered and accepted. All of the wrath of God poured out upon Him, and that is as close as we may ever come to the knowledge of the reason for the blood, for the death of those animals in the Old Testament, the death of Christ as the propitiation for all men on the cross, God’s wrath.
I think of it, possibly completely in the wrong way, for no man can know the mind of God, (yet, we can have the mind of Christ 1 Cor. 2:16) but before the Lord created man, before the fall of Satan, perhaps even before any of the created works of His hands, where did the Lord release, or express if you will, His wrath? It did not simply manifest itself, come into being as it were, because of the actions of either man or the fallen angels, God always has been, He has always been who He is, He does not change, diminish or grow.
“The life of the flesh is in the blood,” (Lev. 17:11) Jesus was made flesh, fully God and fully man, completely sinless, yet tempted as we are, and so as such, the perfect sacrifice, the Scriptures show the clear truth of this, yet all of these truths lead us back to the beginning, without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. The who, what, when, and where are easy to those who will but study the Scriptures, the why we may ponder for all eternity. Sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one, because it was the will of God.
“These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes.” (Psalm 50:21) Think on this, did the Lord create hell and the Lake of Fire before He created even the angels, on what did the Lord pour His wrath out upon before He made anything that is, upon what was the recipient of His love before the foundation of the world?
It is Christ for the glory of God that our minds are to be stayed on, from the time we arise in the morning until we lay our heads down again at night, but it is the unanswerable questions that the mind of the man of God ponders, for they show us that He is far above all of the possibilities that we can ever imagine, and always will be. Here is where your faith must rest, here is where you will find peace and comfort, and perhaps come to a little better understanding of Proverbs 3:5, “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.”
