THE BLOOD OF JESUS
Andrew Martin
Genesis 4: 9-10, 42: 22
Exodus 12: 21-23, 24: 3-8
Leviticus 1: 1-5, 16: 11-14
It will be evident from the scriptures that have been read that my impression is to speak of the blood of Jesus. It is a subject which has been spoken about so many times - it was not so long ago in this very room That we had a word about the blood of Jesus; it is an inexhaustible subject. It is something, I believe, that God loves to hear spoken about, because it is only spoken about by those who love Him. You may hear people speak about the Lord Jesus, but has anybody heard an unbeliever speaking appreciatively about the blood of Jesus? It is something which is treasured by His own, His loved ones.
We read first in Genesis 4. In the book of Genesis, the blood is presented as the evidence of man’s guilt; in Genesis there is not the solution to that guilt. In chapter 3, we find the fall of man; Adam was driven out of the garden. In chapter 4, we find the first of his seed coming to light, and one of them is righteous and the other is a murderer. The righteous one, Abel, speaks to us of the Lord Jesus: He is the righteous One; He is called that. In the New Testament, you will find references to the Lord Jesus as the righteous One. There was even one, whose background and history we do not know - neither do we know about her state of soul - who sent her husband a message to say, “Have thou nothing to do with that righteous man”, Matt 27: 19. Pilate, her husband, was about to condemn Him to death; the righteous One condemned to death. She said, ‘Don’t do it!’. As I say, we know nothing more about that woman; I do not even think there is much about her in history, certainly not in the Scriptures. But one thing she did know, that there was One who was appearing before men’s judgment seat and He was the righteous One. The judge, the one who sat upon that judgment seat, was certainly not a righteous man. The righteous One was before Him.
And here we have Abel; he was a righteous one; he brought an offering for God. Someone might say, ‘Well, Cain was the first one to bring an offering for God’, but Abel brought an offering that was suitable to God. What Cain brought to God was the fruit of a cursed earth; could that be acceptable to God? What Abel brought to God was a life laid down. Oh, beloved, think of the Lord Jesus, in all His holiness and perfection, a righteous One indeed, but He laid down His life, in accord with the will of God; yes, in order that men should be accepted before God His life was laid down. And the circumstances in which His life was laid down, were circumstances in which men had a responsibility. They said it themselves; when Pilate remonstrated with them and said that he found no ground for putting Jesus to death, they said, “His blood be on us and on our children”, Matt 27: 25. How fully that wild statement has come about in the history of Israel; His blood has indeed returned upon their heads and upon their children’s. How much they have suffered because of their rejection of the Lord Jesus. God looked upon Abel, but He did not look upon Cain. But He said to Cain, “What hast thou done?”. God knew well what Cain had done; he had slain his brother; he had killed the righteous one. He said, “What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground”. Oh, think of that, beloved, the blood of the righteous one, crying to God. It has been crying to God for six thousand years. Will God come in, in relation to that cry? Indeed, He will. He has come in already, actually. Yes, the One of whom this speaks - God raised Him from the dead. You think of how long that time had been, and the answer came in resurrection. He raised Him from among the dead; He could not leave Him there. The Lord Jesus laid down His life; men did not take it from Him. Men were responsible for doing so - if they could have taken His life, they would have done, and indeed, what they did was because of that. They were responsible for the murder of One who was righteous.
Well, I do not want to dwell on man’s responsibility. I just want to touch on Genesis 42. Joseph had not actually been slain, had he? Joseph was alive, and there was Reuben; I find him a most unlikable man. He may have intervened so that Joseph’s life was spared, but then when he gets to this situation he says, ‘I told you so’. He says, “Did I not speak to you, saying, Do not sin against the lad? But ye did not hearken”. I do not know whether what they did to Joseph was made known to Reuben. It seems that he was not present at the time. He came back to the pit where they put Joseph, and he said, “The child is not; and I, where shall I go?”, chap 37: 30. It seemed as though the other brothers had carried out their devious plan and not even told their brother about it. Reuben says now, “his blood also is required”. Think of this; this was Joseph. Joseph appears to my mind as a type of the Beloved. He was the beloved of the father. “Israel loved Joseph more than all his sons, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a vest of many colours”, chap 37: 3. The Beloved, the Lord Jesus, is the One in whom every divine thought is established, and in whom it all centres - Joseph, the beloved - and this is the one of whom Reuben speaks, “his blood also is required”.
We read in the epistle to the Ephesians that we have been taken “into favour in the Beloved: in whom we have redemption through his blood”, Eph 1: 6, 7. The blood of the Beloved was the price of our redemption. The One who meant so much to God - it was His blood. There was no other being, no inferior being, who could have secured redemption; no one could have brought to God what was suited to Him. It was the Beloved, the One who was entirely in accord with His own heart and mind in every respect. We read of the blood of Jesus in other ways - it also speaks in Ephesians of “the blood of the Christ”, chap 2: 13. But I find that touch peculiarly affecting, that it is the blood of the Beloved. Well, these men were found guilty; their guilt rested upon them; they could not evade it. Man is guilty in relation to the blood of Jesus.
There was a time in the history of the world, for many hundreds of years in fact, when people, especially in the western world where the light of Christianity had come, would persecute the Jews, and they would justify it by saying that the Jews were the slayers of Christ. But every class of man was implicated. The Jews had a prominent place, and that is why they were persecuted throughout the Middle Ages, but all classes of men were implicated. Take account of the gospel account, and you find there is the Jewish hierarchy - the priests, the Levites, the scribes - they were all involved. You find there were the Gentile powers - the Romans, the authorities were involved in the crucifixion of Jesus; the military powers were involved. It even speaks about the passers-by reproaching the Lord Jesus. Every kind of man was involved in the rejection of Christ - everyone. And yet, God has an answer. The whole world is under judgment because it has rejected Christ. How can there be an answer if the whole world is under judgment? God used the very means by which His beloved Son was rejected, to bring about the means of salvation for those who have rejected Him. What a God we have!
It has often struck me, that when we bury a saint, we are conscious of the fact that we are having to do with something which is very precious - with that which has been the vessel of the Holy Spirit, and consequently there is a great deal of respect and care. And that is right, it must be so. Think of the Father when He saw His beloved Son treated without care, put to death, and even when He was in death His body was abused by that soldier. Think of the awful callousness of that. Normally a person would recoil from it. And God saw that soldier using that spear to pierce the side of Jesus, His beloved. God saw that take place; how the feelings of God must have been involved in that, and what does He do? He says, ‘This is an opportunity in which I am going to display my love to men’, because at that point the blood of Jesus flowed, and it gave God a basis to show how great His love is towards men, that souls should be saved on the basis of that shed blood, in spite of man having committed such a foul deed. God, as it were, said, ‘My love has now a basis to express itself to the worst sinner’. What a God we have! What love was displayed in the death of Jesus and in the shedding of His precious blood. You might say He could have come in and cleansed the whole scene in judgment; but what would He have secured from that? Instead of which, He has secured men, women and children who have an impression of His great love that they would never have had in any other way.
In Exodus 12 we get a picture of the world under judgment. It is just like the world as it is today. The sentence is passed, waiting to be carried out. And the word was that God was going to extract people from it. In Exodus, the blood is presented as securing the people for God. It is not a question here of man’s responsibility - that was Genesis. In Exodus, it is a question of securing people for God. We have this section in Exodus 12 where the blood was to be upon the lintel and upon the door post. We referred in the reading to the power of the blood that keeps us from the wrath to come; how precious it is!
We know well what happened: “Moses called all the elders of Israel, and said to them, Seize and take yourselves lambs for your families, and kill the passover.” He does not dwell upon the four days they were to keep the lamb in the house. It just says to take the lamb and kill the passover; that was the most important thing. The four days in the house were important; we can feed upon those, can we not? The four gospel writers give us different aspects of the Lord Jesus when He was here. In that sense, He was ‘in the house’, and men can take account of Him, and His actions and His movements. But Moses, in type, is saying that the important thing for your salvation is not the life of Jesus, precious as that is; the important thing for your salvation is that that Lamb had to be slain.
He says, “take yourselves lambs for your families, and kill the passover”. “Take yourselves”, he says - we each have to do that, do we not? I trust that all here have, that we have each laid hold of the Lamb, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God. He says, “take yourselves lambs” and “kill the passover”, and then he says, “And take a bunch of hyssop”. Who told him to say that? Moses would have had some impression of the kind of manhood that is suitable to God. The hyssop that springs out of the wall is the most lowly kind of plant; it is not imposing like the tree; it is a bunch of hyssop. That is the kind of manhood which is pleasing to God. He says, ‘You have to take it’, that means ‘take it on’, that kind of manhood. It is not the assertive man; it is the lowly man. He says, “dip it in the blood that is in the bason”. I suppose the reference there to the bason shows that the blood had value; it was precious; it was not to be lost. He says, “dip it in the blood that is in the bason, and smear the lintel and the two door-posts with the blood that is in the bason”. There it was, beloved. And what Moses is saying is that the only salvation is in the house. It is in the house: “none of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning.” What a night that was going to be in Egypt - a night of mourning for the Egyptians, and a night of rejoicing for Israel. None would go out of the door of his house until the morning. The blood was there, not for the families to gather round and look at it; no, the blood was there for God, that He should see it. “And Jehovah will pass through to smite the Egyptians: and when he sees the blood on the lintel, and on the two door-posts, Jehovah will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come into your houses to smite you.” The destroyer is coming to the world; certainly that is assured. But no believer in the Lord Jesus will suffer that. The blood of Jesus Christ is the only means of salvation, but what an effective means it is.
In chapter 24 there is another step forward. God had spoken from the mountain. His people had come out of Egypt; they had been secured. They were about to go through the wilderness, but God wanted them to know that they were His. It is one thing to be saved, but do you have a sense that you belong to God? God says that He was prepared to make a covenant with them. And the people said, “All the words that Jehovah has said will we do!”. Poor people - little did they understand their own hearts! They could not keep the word, but they promised to do it; and Moses took the blood. This was the blood of burnt-offerings and peace-offerings that had been made. Moses took the blood and he sprinkled the words of the covenant and he sprinkled the people, saying, as it were, that this was sealed, Heb 9: 19. Everything God has established with His people is sealed; it can never be changed. The covenant can never be changed, because God has entered into it. And God said that, if they had said they were going to obey, this would be the seal of it; it was sealed with blood. Beloved, we have a covenant. It was not made with us; it will be made with Israel. But we have the terms of it, and we have the blessing of it. We remember it every week when we see the cup on the table, do we not? The new covenant - it has been sealed with blood. As we partake of that cup, beloved, in a sense we are entering into the covenant. What is the covenant? The covenant is very simple; “their sins and their lawlessnesses I will never remember any more”, Heb 10: 17. He says first, “Giving my laws into their mind, I will write them also upon their hearts” (Heb 8: 10) - to have the word of God written upon our hearts would affect everything we did, everything we said. God’s words written upon our hearts; how can that be? That is the effect of the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. The Lord Jesus has done the work - He has secured us, brought us out of Egypt. We have been sealed by His blood, but we have also been sealed by the Holy Spirit. He is the One who is able to write God’s words in our hearts. And so, you have a people - they were His own; they were secured for Himself. It is a blessed thing, to have a people secured for Himself. But how am I going to serve Him?
In Leviticus it is not a question of a people being secured; nor is it a question of man’s responsibility. In Leviticus the blood is presented as a means by which we approach to serve God. In the very first chapter of this book, Jehovah speaks to Moses and says, “When any man of you presenteth an offering to Jehovah”. He is expressing confidence that the people will want to present an offering to Himself, the One who has done so much, brought them out of the house of bondage and secured them for Himself. He is expressing His confidence that they will want to serve Him, although, because of the state of the heart of man, the people did not serve Him in the wilderness as they should. Stephen tells us that; he tells them that the people had served other gods in the wilderness; and they should have just served Jehovah, Acts 7: 42-43. “When any man of you presenteth an offering to Jehovah”; this is a burnt offering. It says, “shall he present it, for his acceptance before Jehovah”. We know we have been secured; we know that God has come out in grace to us: are we sure that we are acceptable to Him? We are acceptable to Him as we present what is of Christ, as we tell Him about our impressions of the Lord Jesus; we tell Him of our love for Him, and we seek to follow Him. Our appreciation of the work of Christ and the shedding of His precious blood, in a sense ensures our consciousness of acceptance before God. The burnt offering speaks so much of the love of Jesus, and our appreciation of that, and it is for our acceptance before God.
In chapter 16, there is the basis on which we can approach God. We can come into His very presence. Where we have read in chapter 16, Aaron makes atonement for himself and for his house. Who is the house of Aaron? That is us; in type, we come into the house of Aaron. And he went right in. He slaughtered the bullock of the sin offering, and “he shall take the censer full of burning coals of fire from off the altar before Jehovah, and both his hands full of fragrant incense beaten small, and bring it inside the veil”. He went where no one else before could go; he went right into the holy of holies. He brought the incense into the holy of holies. That is the fragrance of Christ, the fragrance of our Lord Jesus, in all that He is in every trial, in every testing. The fragrance of incense was brought out by the fire - it did not involve death, but it was brought out by fire. And it is all taken into the very presence of God; it is placed there before Jehovah. “That the cloud of the incense may cover the mercy-seat which is upon the testimony, that he die not”.
And then, “he shall take of the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle with his finger upon the front of the mercy-seat eastward; and before the mercy-seat shall he sprinkle of the blood seven times”. What does that mean? It means for us, beloved, that we have access to the very presence of God; not only are we claimed by Him as His people, not only has He entered into a relationship with us, we can know His favour towards us, we can even have access into His very presence, the presence of God. On what ground do you stand before God? The blood of Jesus - that is the ground on which you stand. In other scriptures the blood is sprinkled elsewhere - in one place, it is sprinkled before the entrance to the tent of meeting (Num 19: 4); in another place it is taken into the holy place and sprinkled before the veil, Lev 4: 6, 17. But this is the highest of all, taken into the very presence of God and there sprinkled before the mercy-seat. What is the mercy-seat? It is Christ; He Himself is the Mercy-seat. He is the One in whom God rests; every thought of God rests in Him. And the blood is there. There was the mercy-seat and the two cherubim over the mercy-seat and their faces were towards the mercy-seat. Of course, they were made of gold, they were not actually animate, but if you think of them as beings, what would they see? There were only three things they could ever see: one was the gold, one was the cloud of incense, and the other was the blood: three things. Their faces were directed towards the mercy-seat. Here we have the cloud of incense covering it, and the blood upon it. Every divine thought has been secured and settled and established through the shedding of the blood of Jesus. Man has been secured, extricated from all that would have held him, brought into a known and confiding relationship with God. Access has been given to men to come into the very presence of God, and every divine thought secured and settled for God’s glory and praise by the blood of Jesus.
I have not said anything new, beloved. May these thoughts, as we go over them again, serve to endear the One whose blood it was, to our affections, for His Name’s sake.
Buckhurst Hill
25th July 2021