In the first half of Chapter 17 we discussed why the Lord commands the Israelites to make all their blood sacrifices at the tabernacle. Anyone who sacrifices to the Lord anywhere else is to be excommunicated from the congregation. As we look at the second half of Chapter 17 today, we'll study the Lord's command never to eat the blood.
"I will set My face against any Israelite or any foreigner residing among them who eats blood, and I will cut them off from the people. For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one's life." (Leviticus 17:10-11) It is the Lord who gives life and it is the Lord to whom life is owed as payment for sin. In Old Testament times the Lord was willing to accept the substitutionary blood of animals from a person who brought the sacrifice in faith. These Old Testament sacrifices pointed the way to a sacrifice in the New Testament that would be great enough to pay for all sins forever, and in the meantime man must be trained to consider blood as a holy thing.
We think of the things we eat as common things. When I ate a TV dinner at lunch yesterday, did I think of it as holy while I hurriedly gulped it down on my lunch break? No. I was thankful for the provision of God, but food is something we consider common because it's something we put into our bodies several times a day every day of our lives. When discussing ceremonial cleanliness, the Lord Jesus pointed out that it is far more important what comes out of a person (out of the heart) than what goes into a person (food), and in making His remark He supports what we are saying here about the ordinariness of food: "Don't you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body?" (Matthew 15:17) Since anything we eat travels through our digestive system and then exits the body during a trip to the restroom, we can see why something so holy as blood should not be consumed and turned into a waste product. The Apostle Paul backs up what Jesus said about the commonness of food, saying that the things we eat are "destined to perish with use". (Colossians 2:22) So we find Jesus telling us that whatever we eat eventually becomes a waste product and we find Paul saying that the digestive system uses what it needs from food and renders it useless (causes it to perish) once the nutrients have been drawn out. Can we treat a holy substance like blood in this manner? No, we are never to consider blood a common thing that can be consumed. It can never be considered as something from which we'll take what nutrients we can use before reducing it to waste that has to be eliminated from the body.
We see from verse 11 that blood symbolizes life: "The life of a creature is in the blood." Neither a human nor an animal can survive without blood. For a long time now scientists have been trying to develop a blood substitute that functions as well in the human body as actual blood. If a safe and effective artificial blood product can be produced then we would no longer have to worry about giving blood or maintaining blood banks. We wouldn't have to worry about running short on blood for transfusions. We wouldn't have to worry about passing along communicable diseases in donated blood. We wouldn't have to worry about the expiration dates on the blood stored in blood banks. We wouldn't have to spend time in an emergency typing a person's blood if we had an artificial product that was compatible with every blood type. But the best we've been able to do is produce an artificial blood product that helps to carry oxygen through the body. No artificial blood product has yet been produced that can replace all the other vital functions of human blood, including such things as coagulation and immune defense. The most these artificial products have been able to do, so far, is buy time for a person suffering from serious blood loss until they can be transferred to a trauma unit where real blood can be administered. There are some useful applications for such a product, such as on a battlefield or accident scene, but no artificial blood product has yet been invented that altogether eliminates the need for an actual blood transfusion. A person could not survive if most or all of his human blood were replaced with a substitute. I don't believe a product will ever be produced that is as good as the human blood that is designed to circulate through our bodies and keep us alive.
Because blood is to be considered as a holy thing, and because blood symbolizes life since no creature whose body contains blood can live without it, the people are never to treat blood as a common thing that can be eaten. The penalty for violating this law is being excommunicated from the congregation of Israel and having the Lord "set My face against" anyone who does such a thing. He will not be on the side of the person who treats blood as a common and unholy substance.
"Therefore I say to the Israelites, 'None of you may eat blood, or may any foreigner residing among you eat blood. Any Israelite or any foreigner among you who hunts any animal or bird that may be eaten must drain out the blood and cover it with earth, because the life of every creature is its blood. That is why I have said to the Israelites, 'You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off.'" (Leviticus 17:13-14) A person who doesn't consider the lifeblood of the body a vital and holy thing will not be able to consider the blood of a sacrifice---or the blood of the ultimate sacrifice the Lord Jesus made---as a vital and holy thing. The Apostle Paul, when speaking of the harsh penalties imposed when a person rejected the laws of Moses, (laws which include what we've studied today), pointed out that it was even worse to reject what God says about His Son and about what God the Son says about Himself. In some instances, breaking certain aspects of the Mosaic law put a person in danger of the death penalty, but the only thing that could be executed was the body. When rejecting the sacrifice of God the Son, a person faces a much worse fate than the death of the body. He faces eternal separation from his Creator because he has treated the blood of Christ as an unholy thing: "Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?" (Hebrews 10:28-29)
If man cannot regard the blood of human bodies and the blood of animal bodies as a vital and holy thing, he will be unable to see that the blood of Christ is vital to our forgiveness and salvation. He will be unable to accept that the blood of Christ is holy enough to sanctify forever those who put their faith in Him.
In a lot of modern churches we are seeing the doctrine moving away from any mention of the blood at all. Since the blood is at the core of the gospel message, there is no power in a doctrine that leaves out the blood. Leaving out all mention of the blood of Christ disrespects Him and dishonors the immense sacrifice He made on our behalf. Leaving out all mention of blood enables the giver of the message to gloss over the fact that we are sinners worthy of death and that we need a Savior to rescue us. How can a person come to faith in Christ if he does not recognize himself as a sinner in need of salvation? How can a person come to faith in Christ if he does not repent of his sins and accept on faith what Christ did to pay for his sins? It was the recognition of my lost and fallen state that led me to repentance and faith, and I would never have reached that point if I had not understood the message about the blood. But thanks be to God I had heard messages such as this: "What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus." When we leave the blood out of the story, we render the story as useless as a fairy tale and, as the Apostle Paul solemnly attests, we have committed the worse offense possible because we have treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctifies us.
No comments:
Post a Comment