The Value of the Blood of Christ

 •  14 min. read  •  grade level: 12
 
IT had come to my knowledge that some Spiritualists were holding meetings at a village near my house, and it was pressed upon my heart to go there and distribute some Gospel books.
Now Spiritualists deny the atonement, and the divinity of Christ; they claim to be in communication with the spirits of the dead; certain among them termed "mediums" are said to be under the influence of the spirits who speak through them, and, among other things, describe the unseen world and the condition of the departed.
It is one of the most awful wiles that Satan has ever invented for the destruction of men; it is a revival of that abominable system which Jehovah warned Israel against in Deut. 18:9-12,9When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. 10There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, 11Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. 12For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee. (Deuteronomy 18:9‑12) for the spirits who speak through the mediums are not those of the dead, they are demons who personate the departed, and, as the agents of the devil, allure millions to eternal destruction. Paul spoke of it as a terrible form of wickedness that should characterize the latter times—" Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils" (demons), 1 Tim. 4:11Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; (1 Timothy 4:1).
Well one Lord's Day I and my two brothers started off with a quantity of Gospel books, and on arriving at the village, went from house to house distributing them. We had nearly finished our work, when I was directed in a most wonderful way to the house of the leader of the Spiritualists.
The door was opened by a respectably dressed, elderly woman, to whom I at once gave a book.
As she glanced at it, I said, “It is about the Lord Jesus Christ.”
“Oh," remarked she quietly.
“Yes," I said," there's nothing like the blood, is there?”
“We don't believe in His blood," she quickly replied; "it's His love.”
“And because of His love He shed His blood for us," said I.
“It's a lie," roared a voice from behind a screen that hid the other occupants of the room from me.
“Oh, but," replied I, “God’s Word says, ' The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin”
“It's corruption," again roared the voice.
“I've been a Christian for years," said the woman, "and I know all about these things.”
“Yes," said I; " and you will know something else if you die unsaved and stand before the Great White Throne of Judgment—you will then know that you are lost forever, because you haven't got Christ.”
“It's all rubbish," shouted the unseen speaker;
“we don't believe in it.”
“It's our works that'll save us," said the woman confidently.
I replied, " God says, ' without the shedding of blood is no remission,' for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul ' " (Heb. 9; Lev. 17).
While I was speaking the door was banged in my face, but as I turned away from these determined rejecters of the blood, I thanked God for having permitted me to deliver my message, and prayed that His blessing might rest upon it.
At the present moment there is to be seen on all sides an awful disposition among men to treat the death of Christ as a thing of naught. Much of the popular preaching, and the so-called Christian literature of the present day, while descanting upon the life of Jesus, and holding it up for imitation by unregenerate men, as a means of their moral and social improvement, and ultimate salvation, deliberately keeps His death in the background, or else ignores it altogether.
It is easy enough to trace this soul-destroying system to its source. Satan is deceiving men as to their true position before God, leading them to think lightly of sin, and persuading them, that as God is love, He will not punish His creatures; and because this suits the sinner's desires, he eagerly embraces the lying suggestion. But God is also light, and the cross is the eternal witness to created intelligences of God's abhorrence of sin. His holiness and love were there fully and perfectly displayed. His holiness in the judgment of sin in the person of the Son of His love made sin, though personally sinless. His love in the wonderful fact, that that Son, as the only one who could enter into the question of sin with God, so as to make a perfect and eternal atonement for it, was sent to the cross to endure the judgment instead of the sinner, that the latter might be saved.
It is thus in atonement—the very work that men are seeking to discard—that God, in His nature and character, has been perfectly manifested, and can alone be fully known.
Now, whosoever refuses to avail himself of that expiatory sacrifice, is the destroyer of his own soul, for he shuts up to himself the only way of escape from hell, and must personally bear the weight of God's wrath forever and ever.
The life of Jesus could never save the sinner, for God had said, “Without the shedding of blood is no remission," for "It is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul." Without doubt, His life was a wonderful one. It stands on the page of eternal truth in all the glory of its absolute devotedness to God, the standing witness against the terrible and irretrievable failure of the whole human race.
Never before was man's utter ruin and incompetency to fulfill God's righteous requirements made so manifest. It was a divine light that fully disclosed his condition, his guilt, and the condemnation in which he lay on account thereof.
But man refused the light, and cast Jesus out of the world; the crucifixion of God's Son was the most complete proof of the incurable evil of man's wretched nature. The descendants of the crucifiers are amongst us to-day, preaching salvation by works, as determined rejecters of the light as their fathers.
It is an awful proof of his blindness and ignorance of the truth of God, when an unregenerate man coolly, and without exercise of conscience, expatiates upon the perfection of a life which is but the witness and measure of his own failure; for the life of Jesus never assists the sinner to do better than he has done, it merely shows him what is lacking in his own. To endeavor to imitate it, is to demonstrate at once his weakness, and to court still greater failure; the divine and oily remedy is to be found in the expiation for sin made by a (lead Christ, and the communication of a new and divine life and nature by Christ risen from the dead.
Jesus sounded the death knell of every hope and aspiration of fallen human nature when He said to the fairest and best of unregenerate men, "YE MUST BE BORN AGAIN;" but He instantly pointed to Himself as the one who, when lifted up at Calvary as representing the sinner, should receive in His own sinless person the judgment due to unregenerate man, that out of His death everlasting life might spring forth as the gift of God to every sinner that believeth (John 3), a life which should connect the receiver with Himself as the one risen out of death, and ascended into the glory of God.
Jesus Christ, the Man there crowned with glory and honor, is the beginning of the new creation of God. On that Man and His race God looks with ineffable and unchanging delight; but as to the family of the man who was driven out of Paradise six thousand years ago—the world of sinful men and women on whom the wrath of God is resting, and whom Satan is deceiving as to their real state before God—none can ever enter heaven unless they first accept the death of Jesus—which before God closed the history of the first man—and receive as His gift that eternal life and Holy Spirit which bring the redeemed into eternal association with Christ the second Man.
In His earthly life Jesus might, as indeed He did, alleviate in measure the woe and misery of men in drying the mourner's tear, in healing the sick, and giving sight to the blind; but sin, the source of all the woe, was not so easily disposed of—the life of Jesus, all grand and beautiful as it was, was ineffectual to put that away, derail, alone would suffice, and the Spirit of God, in Rev. 5, directs our gaze from earth to heaven, the seat of everlasting bliss, the place where sorrow and pain can never come, and there shows us the redeemed host saved and taken out of the misery of earth, whose triumphant anthem of worship is to the Lamb who was slain, and has redeemed them to God by (not His life, or His love, but) His BLOOD.
Their redemption from sin and its consequences, their eternal joy and glory, are seen to be founded on that very cross which men are now endeavoring altogether to ignore.
The crimson thread of atonement runs right through the Book of God, from Genesis to Revelation, uniting and reconciling the truths of the love and righteousness of God as displayed in the forgiveness and salvation of the sinner, who has brought wrath upon himself, and had nothing to bring to God to satisfy His holiness.
These unhappy Spiritualists, and indeed all who deny or seek to explain away the atonement, are of the same persuasion as Cain, the first man born into the world, for he was a despiser of the blood. Though born of sinful parents, the inheritor of a, sinful nature, and consequently at a distance from God, he yet considered he had a perfect right of approach to Him if he thought at all about sin, he doubtless relied, as do his followers of to-day, upon the mercy and love of God, forgetful of the fact that sin has outraged His majesty, and that His holiness demanded its punishment. So he came into God's presence with a gift, on the ground of his own personal merit and acceptability, and was instantly rejected.
His brother Abel, who was exactly like him as to natural sinfulness and unfitness for the divine presence, came also to God with a gift, but he, first of all, put the blood between himself and God, and he and his offering were at once accepted. Honestly and sincerely accepting the truth of his sinfulness and personal inability to satisfy the holy claims of God, and that nothing but death could satisfy them, Abel, in simple faith, offered up a sinless victim, and God, in view of the offering up of its antitype at Calvary, was satisfied.
Now mark the after-career of the first despiser of the blood. He murders his brother, goes out of Jehovah's presence a fugitive and a vagabond, builds a city, and becomes the founder of a godless family, every member of which perished in the flood, which, seventeen hundred years afterward, came as the judgment of God upon a world of incorrigible sinners.
Abel is the type of those saved by the blood in all ages.
Cain heads the list of all subsequent despisers and rejecters of the blood, whose end, like his, is eternal misery.
From eternity it was ordained that the blood of Christ should be shed to put away sin.
When Adam lost his innocence God drove him from His presence, and though in after-years He, in grace, came down to dwell among Adam's sinful children, it was on the ground of sacrifice that He did so. Even then He was in a sense hidden, for He dwelt in the holiest, between the cherubim, shut off, by the veil, from men. “The priest went always into the first tabernacle, accomplishing the service of God, but into the second went the high priest once every year, not without blood, which he offered for himself and for the errors of the people, the Holy Ghost thus signifying that the way into the holiest (God's presence and dwelling-place) was not yet made manifest" (Heb. 9).
During the first four thousand years of the world's unhappy history, while Satan wielded o'er men his awful power acquired through sin, God unweariedly taught by type and symbol the solemn truth that it was only through sacrifice (i.e., the death of a victim as a substitute for the sinner) that man could escape either present or future judgment. The varied offerings under the law were but so many voices foretelling the atoning death of the Son of God, presently to be accomplished at Calvary.
The New Testament commences with the record of the incarnation of the Son, and the Epistle to the Hebrews explains the reason and necessity for that incarnation. The Jewish offerings could not take away sins "Wherefore," the Son says, "a body hast thou prepared ME." In that body He offered Himself at the cross as a sacrifice for sin, and by that death He hath perfected forever them that are sanctified. Of such God says, "Their sins and iniquities I will remember no more.”
The moment Jesus emerged from the obscurity of Nazareth, the Baptist, sent to prepare His way, directed the attention of men to Him as "the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world;" a title given to Him to indicate the sacrificial character of His death and its results. And the Spirit traces through the gospels His wonderful pathway, from Bethlehem's manger to THE CROSS, a destination which Jesus had ever in His mind and when, at last, the hill of Calvary is reached, we see the Son of God suspended in death on the central cross, with the blood of atonement flowing from His riven side.
“And behold the veil of the temple was rent in twain, from the top to the bottom..... Having, therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest, BY THE BLOOD OF JESUS, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say his flesh, let us draw near" (Matt. 27.; Heb. 10).
There is no veil or barrier now, the death of Jesus has removed it forever, and the God of glory beckons the sinner up that blood-marked way, to Himself and His home of light and love.
And now, out from that wonderful past, come to us the voices of the apostles— those mighty servants of Christ, who sealed their testimony in their martyrdom; bearing witness, in language clear and unmistakable, to the necessity for, and the value of the blood of Christ.
The ardent Peter, who once, through ignorance of God's thoughts and counsels, would have saved his Master from that death, now glories in the redemption that springs from “the precious blood of Christ.”
The gentle John, who, when Jesus was on earth, reclined in His bosom, and learned its thoughts and secrets, now points to the blood as the source and ground of that holy and blessed fellowship with the Son and with the Father; for, he says, “The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin.”
And faith in the Accomplisher of the work is all that God requires from the repentant sinner, for it is written, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved" (Acts 16).
Fellow-traveler towards eternity, in the presence of that eternity, I ask you on what are you resting for the salvation of your soul?
A. Z.
CHRIST has gone up on high, as man, into glory; and as His work was for us, righteousness must put us there. It is righteous, for God has been perfectly glorified in His whole being and nature by Christ on the cross. And we know the first fruits of this in His being glorified; but thus it becomes but righteous that we should be in the glory with Him. J. N. D.