D ear Family
The night when Jesus reclined at the table with His disciples (yes, they reclined and didn’t sit neatly in a row on chairs as portrayed in that famous “Last Supper” painting of Leonardo Da Vinci in 1494—so much for those hidings to keep my elbows off the table) and told them that the cup of wine which He held represented the new covenant in His blood, I’m pretty certain they were somewhat confused. They missed much of His mission throughout His ministry and so this was probably also quite beyond their grasp. They certainly would have known the reference to Leviti-cus 17:11 which reads, “For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atone-ment for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.” But the full impact of that was initially lost on them. A “new” covenant for atonement? In His blood? Perhaps they had heard of or remembered Cousin John the Baptist’s words when he said, “Behold, the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.” If so, I can just imagine the vibrant excite-ment of anticipation in that little up-per room of earth shattering an-nouncement. The universe had nev-er ever heard such sweet words spoken before!
The new covenant is nothing short of glorious, divine, awesome! God’s standards for holiness and right-eousness certainly have not and cannot change, but His means for atonement have been made com-plete and fulfilled in Christ Jesus, applicable as before by faith.
This wonderful covenant commemo-rates the purchase of the covenant by the blood of Christ, and confirms the promises of the covenant. Those incomprehensible promises which are all “Yes” and “Amen” in him.
So, when we share in the Lord’s supper and pause to contemplate the new covenant, let’s remember that He shed His blood for us be-cause we needed it. We had no hope in the old covenant focused on sin and impossible obedience, but instead, because He loved us, and gave Himself for us, we now have a covenant found on better promis-es—put in our minds and written on our hearts by God Himself.
Oh that we would heed Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 7:1, “Since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, per-fecting holiness out of reverence for God.”
Tag Archives: blood
The Blood
D ear Family
There is so much quick and easy access to information today. For a start, one simply has to type some-thing into Google and within seconds the answer is there. It’s an exciting time to live in. We no longer have to spend hours pouring over a multitude of books in order to access information. Now it’s right there at our finger tips.
The downside of all of this is that when the wrong information is disseminated, then it gets out to every-one just as quickly. Our politicians, for example, are skilled in this art. A lie repeated often enough soon be-comes truth and it’s then almost impossible to recognize right from wrong.
In the church this wrong information also happens, often as a result of selfish people trying to manipulate others, and sometimes as a result of well meaning people trying to find more tangible facets to their faith. For example I’ve heard things like this said, “Brother, to get out of the mess you’re in, you need to apply the blood of Jesus.” “Sister, while your husband is asleep, cover him with the blood of the Lamb.” “Granny, don’t stop pouring the blood over your grandchildren for protection.” And so on and so forth. Soon this very warped concept of the blood becomes normal practice in the church. And, at the end of it all, this false information results in nothing more than an attempt to use the blood as a sort of spiritual voodoo. Nowhere is the Bible do we ever read of people doing this type of thing or anything close to it. Rather, we read of the effects of the New Covenant which Jesus instituted by His own life, death and resurrection. For example, 1 John 1:7 reads, “The blood of Jesus, His Son, keeps on cleansing us from all sin.” This is not a mandate for us to “splash the blood all over”. Instead, it is yet another promise of God’s incredible life-giving power to under-take for all our sin for all time.
We have a real responsibility in this day and age of mired teachings to stay with what we know is written and not to cling to what people (or the internet) may be saying. Go for God and stick to His Word!
The Power Of The Cross – The Blood Of Jesus Speaks A Better Word Than The Blood Of Abel
THE POWER OF THE CROSS
THE BLOOD OF JESUS SPEAKS A BETTER WORD THAN THE BLOOD OF ABEL
You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire . . . But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Heb. 12: 18; 22-24)
Better, better, better! Have you noticed how many times the writer to the Hebrews uses the word “better”? Everything about the new covenant is better because it is based on better promises and mediated by a better high priest, one who offered Himself once for sin, rose from the dead to prove that His sacrifice was acceptable to the Father, and sits at the right hand of God in the seat of authority and power.
Why does the writer single out Abel’s death as the contrast between the death of a murdered man and the death of Jesus? There were many murders that are recorded in Scripture. Why Abel? Is it because Abel’s was the first murder recorded in Scripture?
Both Abel and Jesus had their lives taken from them violently. Both Abel and Jesus died for doing the right thing. The perpetrators hated them because they were righteous and, instead of changing their ways and following their example, they killed them because of envy.
God demanded an explanation of Cain for what he had done, because He heard the blood of Abel crying out from the ground. Of course we don’t interpret those words literally. God didn’t need Abel’s blood to tell Him what had happened. It was His way of informing Cain that He knew what he had done. Cain hid Abel’s body in the ground, but nothing could hide the guilt of his crime. Sooner or later even his parents would know when Abel failed to appear.
But why was the killing of Abel different from the killing of Jesus? There are several reasons why the blood of Jesus speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. Abel died violently but unwillingly at the hands of his brother. He had not part in his own death. Cain lured him into a field away from his home and rose up and killed him.
On the other hand, the Old Testament prophesied that Jesus would die. He was Yahweh’s Suffering Servant, whose coming was foretold by the prophets and whose death is described in detail. He was the lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Jesus’ life was focussed on His death. He came to die. He predicted His own death at the hands of the religious leaders. His own people would disown, reject and kill Him in the most violent and cruel way.
More than that, He made it clear that no one could take His life from Him. He would lay it down willingly as an atoning sacrifice for sin, and He would take it up again.
The reason the Father loves me is that I lay down my life – only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father. (John 10: 17-18)
Now that is amazing? It’s no wonder His opponents said He was crazy! He was either crazy, or He was speaking about an authority far about the understanding of human beings.
And even more than that, His death was the will of the Father.
Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer . . . (Isa. 53: 10)
And more than that, His death had a purpose.
For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh be a sin offering. And so He condemned sin in the flesh. (Rom. 8: 3)
And His resurrection had a purpose.
He was delivered over to death for our sins and raised to life for our justification. (Rom 4: 25)
He came back to life not only to prove that death could not hold Him because He was sinless, but also to confirm that the Father had accepted His death of behalf of sinners, that the debt of sin had been paid in full, and that the Father could declare all sinners justified, that is, not guilty.
Of what, then, does the blood of Jesus speak? While Abel’s blood cried out for vengeance, the blood of Jesus speaks of mercy.
“Abel, the first martyr of faith, is a foreshadowing of our Lord Jesus, whose “blood… speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Hebrews 12:24). For though Abel’s innocent blood cried out for justice against sin, Jesus’s innocent blood cried out for mercy for sinners. Abel’s blood exposed Cain in his wretchedness. Jesus’s blood covers our wretchedness and cleanses us from all sin (Romans 7:24; 1 John 1:9).”
http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-dead-abel-speaks-to-us (- retrieved October 2015)
Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Have you read my first book, Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart (Copyright © 2015, Partridge Publishing)? You’ll love it!
ISBN: Softcover – 978-1-4828-0512-3, eBook 978-4828-0511-6
Available on www.amazon.com in paperback, e-book or kindle version, on www.takealot.com or order directly from the publisher at www.partridgepublishing.com.
My second book, Learning to be a Disciple – The Way of the Master (Copyright © 2015, Partridge Publishing), companion volume to Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart, has been released in paperback and digital format on www.amazon.com.
For more details, check my website:
http://luellaannettecampbell.com/
Have you read my blogs on www.learningtobeason.wordpress.com ?
The Power Of The Cross – Our Consciences Cleansed From Dead Works
THE POWER OF THE CROSS
OUR CONSCIENCES CLEANSED FROM DEAD WORKS
The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ who, through the eternal Spirit offered Himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God. (Heb. 9: 13-14)
“The law of God given to Moses is a comprehensive set of guidelines to ensure that the Israelites’ behaviour reflected their status as God’s chosen people. It encompasses moral behaviour, their position as a godly example to other nations, and systematic procedures for acknowledging God’s holiness and mankind’s sinfulness. In an attempt to better understand the purpose of these laws, Jews and Christians categorize them. This has led to the distinction between moral law, ceremonial law, and judicial law.”
http://www.gotquestions.org/ceremonial-law.html (- retrieved October 2015)
According to the writer to the Hebrews, the sacrifices prescribed in the Mosaic Law could do no more than remove their guilt for transgressing the ceremonial law. Let’s look at an example. A woman has a baby – which involves the shedding of blood. There is nothing morally wrong with giving birth but, because she bled, she became ceremonially unclean because the shedding of blood was contrary to God’s perfection. She, therefore, was obligated to offer a sacrifice to remove her ceremonial impurity.
All the animal sacrifices prescribed for every condition and every transgression in the old covenant served one of two purposes; firstly, they covered ceremonial guilt but could not change the status of the worshipper. No matter how many sacrifices they offered, they could not approach God except through a priest who was their designated mediator, because of sin. Secondly, they reminded the worshipper of the barrier of sin that separated him from a holy God.
The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming – not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. . . But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sin. (Heb. 10: 1; 3)
Animal sacrifices were a foreshadowing of something much better that was to come.
What are the “acts that lead to death”, to which the writer refers? Sin can be both the things we do, say or even think that transgress God’s absolute perfection and the so-called “good works” we do to try to gain God’s favour. In His mercy God intervened to change our status before Him by sending His own Son to take our place. He came under judgment for our sin and paid our debt by submitting to death although He had no guilt of His own.
Jesus was born of a human mother, but He was not conceived by a human father but by the Holy Spirit. He became the “last Adam”, without sin, but subject to our human condition in a fallen world so that he could prove His love for the Father as a son by living in perfect submission and obedience to Him. After 33 years of sinless living, He gave up His life by being executed on the cross – condemned as a criminal, but not guilty.
His death became an atoning sacrifice for all people, for all sin, for all time. He is the only human being who ever died as punishment for sin He did not commit, qualifying Him to be the Saviour of the world.
The human problem is that we are not only guilty of transgressing God’s laws and His holy nature, but we are also guilty of believing that we can balance our sin by doing “good works” which we think will satisfy God’s justice. How can a murderer hope to make amends for his crime by doing community service for a prescribed length of time? No amount of “doing good”will make up for taking a life. The law demands appropriate punishment for the crime. But we apply that kind of cock-eyed thinking to God!
All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are as filthy rags . . . (Isa. 64: 6)
God demands the death of the sinner and no amount of “community service” will take away the guilt of our sin. The problem is that we are already dead because sin has killed us. So it’s not a case of balancing our bad deeds with good deeds. No amount of good deeds will bring us back to life.
But, because of His love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions . . . (Eph. 2: 4)
We have been declared “not guilty” because our debt has been paid and our sentence carried out by Jesus. We now have a clean conscience and a clean slate and can approach the Father acceptably because we have peace with God (Rom. 5: 1)
Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Have you read my first book, Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart (Copyright © 2015, Partridge Publishing)? You’ll love it!
ISBN: Softcover – 978-1-4828-0512-3, eBook 978-4828-0511-6
Available on www.amazon.com in paperback, e-book or kindle version, on www.takealot.com or order directly from the publisher at www.partridgepublishing.com.
My second book, Learning to be a Disciple – The Way of the Master (Copyright © 2015, Partridge Publishing), companion volume to Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart, has been released in paperback and digital format on www.amazon.com.
For more details, check my website:
http://luellaannettecampbell.com/
Have you read my blogs on www.learningtobeason.wordpress.com ?
The Power Of The Cross – They Overcame Him By The Blood
THE POWER OF THE CROSS
THEY OVERCAME HIM BY THE BLOOD
Spiritual warfare is big on the agenda of Christians today. Many “weird and wonderful” teachings abound about spiritual warfare – most of which originate from the Old Testament, as though the death of Jesus means nothing when it comes to the devil.
People do prayer walks and Jericho marches; we are taught to identify the principalities and powers that hold countries or regions in their power (the “Jezebel spirit” is a big one); we have to identify and pull down altars; we must “bind” the evil spirits and “take authority” over them; we must “loose” the power of God and we must “pray against” whatever it is that we must pray against!
Now all of this sounds very “spiritual”. It gives us something to do when we are discouraged by the situations and circumstances around us. We feel better when we have done “spiritual warfare”, even if nothing changes. We do it again and again in the hopes that it will eventually “take” and give us immunity – like a measles vaccine!
But where in the world do we see the apostles doing this in the New Testament? Even Jesus, who should have known better than anyone else how to do spiritual warfare, didn’t do all this stuff. After all, wasn’t the devil after Him? The most Jesus ever did was to send His disciples ahead of Him into the villages and towns where He was to go, not to do prayer walks and Jericho marches, but to proclaim and demonstrate the presence of the kingdom of God. It was the reality of God’s presence and power in the person of Jesus, not their ritualistic prayer efforts that sent the devil and his squatters packing.
Another glaring problem lies in the fact that we don’t understand how God works. When stuff happens in our lives, we blame the devil and go to “war” against him. We are “under attack”, so we declare, almost triumphantly as though being “under attack” somehow makes us important in Satan’s eyes. We must be a threat to him, or he wouldn’t “attack” us!
But that is not what the Bible says.
Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as His children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined – and everyone underdoes discipline – then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all . . . They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in His holiness. (Heb. 12: 7-8; 10)
Satan may be responsible for the hardship, but God uses it for our good. So why fight the devil? James and Peter said that we must resist the devil by submitting to God. (James 4: 7; 1 Pet. 5: 8-9)
As a matter of fact, the very hardships we go through, which we so eagerly attribute to the devil, are the evidence of our sonship and the means of God’s grace. If we understood that, would we so enthusiastically launch into spiritual warfare against Satan, using all the tactics we have learned from the self-proclaimed “generals” of spiritual warfare? By doing that, we are actually fighting, not the devil as we may think, but the very means God uses to purify our faith in Him.
Take Peter, for example. Jesus warned him of what was to come and even said that Satan would do it. He promised to pray for him – not that God would get him out of it but keep him through it because there were important lessons Peter had to learn.
Did you notice, for example that Jesus did not pray that God would stop the devil from sifting him. Instead He said, “I have prayed for you, that your faith will not fail.” Did you get that? Trials and hardships are not “attacks” from the devil, as though God were powerless to do anything about it. No! They are God’s means of strengthening our faith in Him.
In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed. (! Pet. 1: 6-7)
How do we overcome the devil? Not by fighting him but by trusting in God. What guarantee do we have that we have the right to trust the Father?
They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. (Rev. 12: 11)
It was the cross that made all the difference. Jesus dealt with our sin – the very reason for the devil’s power over us – and He exposed the devil as a liar and a thief. He is not Lord; Jesus is.
What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all – how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things? (Rom. 8: 31-32)
The devil loves the limelight. He wants to be noticed and he’ll get attention by any means as long as he can take our attention away from Jesus. God gave us weapons – faith and truth, all directing our attention away from the devil and onto the One who gave us the victory by His blood.
Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Have you read my first book, Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart (Copyright © 2015, Partridge Publishing)? You’ll love it!
ISBN: Softcover – 978-1-4828-0512-3, eBook 978-4828-0511-6
Available on www.amazon.com in paperback, e-book or kindle version, on www.takealot.com or order directly from the publisher at www.partridgepublishing.com.
My second book, Learning to be a Disciple – The Way of the Master (Copyright © 2015, Partridge Publishing), companion volume to Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart, has been released in paperback and digital format on www.amazon.com.
For more details, check my website:
http://luellaannettecampbell.com/
Have you read my blogs on www.learningtobeason.wordpress.com ?