Word of Salvation – Vol. 26 No. 25 – April 1981
Faith…. And Blood
Sermon by Rev. A.I. de Graaf on Hebrews 11:28
Scripture Reading: Old Testament: Exodus 12:1-13
Psalter Hymnal: 14:1,4; 272:2; 272:4; 319:2; 439:1.2; 469
One reason why many people ― including ministers ― do not like the Old Testament is that it is such a blood-soaked book, and the Old Testament worship is such a butcher’s business. For all its sumptuous golden beauty the temple was one big abattoir with a special sewer drain constructed to siphon off the thousands of litres of blood poured out week in and week out!
How can all that barbarity be part of faith in God? In our violence-filled age spilling blood on the screen is big money. (Spilling blood was never done in the old days; reality was bad enough), especially now people are getting an aversion to this thing. Look at new hymn books coming out like the “Australian Hymnal” and you will find that hymns about the blood, the blood of Jesus, the blood of the lamb, are getting rare if not completely left out! And it is as if you hear a sigh of relief: At last we’re rid of that barbaric mediaeval stuff. Man is getting more and more civilized, he thinks! But at the same time his world is becoming increasingly violent. The blood keeps on speaking its mysterious language!
We still shiver when we see blood. Some people, even big burly fellows, have a way of fainting when they see, particularly their own, blood. Every blood donor experiences and somehow feels that what he does is more than a routine action. He gives of his life that others may live. Something Jesus said we have to do as an act of love.
And so in Israel’s worship service, from which our own has grown whether we like it or not, the sacrificed lamb stands in the centre. Just as John in Revelation saw that in the worship of all the universe there stands in the very centre the LAMB standing as though slain..!
In the Bible not just Jewish faith but CHRISTIAN FAITH and BLOOD belong inseparably together. I preach you the word of God this morning about Faith…. and blood.
(1) Faith and the accusing blood.
(2) Faith and the redeeming blood.
1. ― FAITH AND THE ACCUSING BLOOD
The King of Egypt does not want to let Israel go.
His predecessors had been scared of all these strangers in their land, and they had shown their racism in the Nazi way by trying to wipe them out! The Nazis thought they had the final solution of the Jewish question! But this Pharaoh was cleverer! Why wipe out such a good pool of cheap labour? And so when God comes drumming on his door with the insistent message: “Thus says the LORD! “Pharaoh! Pharaoh! Let my people go!” He shrugs it off with the sneer: “The LORD? The LORD? Who’s HE anyway!? Let Him identify Himself!” I am a God myself, why shall I do what any upstart God orders me to do?” Oh says the Lord of heaven and earth! Identify myself, must I? O.K. If that’s what His majesty wants, here I come!” God comes first softly turning water into blood, then a river full of frogs spill into houses, beds, pots and pans, which is more nuisance than anything else but the king is not convinced. Gradually the artillery gets heavier: dust becomes biting lice. And then comes that fourth plague: all kinds of insects sting and bite, pollute and devour…. now it isn’t any longer funny.
And to top it all off, from that fourth blight Israel is free of it. It only hits Egyptian territory, Egyptian people and Egyptian homes. And it gets heavier: sickness falls on beast and man, harvest hopes are wiped out – first by hail and when there is no response, what the hail left is eaten clean by locusts. There will be no food next year!
Still there is no response: then God hits Egypt’s main God Amon-Ra, THE SUN. God wipes out its light and warmth for three long creepy horrible days of a darkness so thick that you could feel it. “Things that go: BUMP!” in that constant night are bumped, but the pride of Pharaoh is not bumped. So God must hit him finally with that last blight: the death of a first-born son in every house, man and beast. All the time, from plague number four Israel had been free from trouble.
They might have started thinking they were better than the Egyptians. But then there is this command: Four nights from now the Angel of death will come and wreak judgement on all the sinners in Egypt: in each house one will die! Now if you Israelites want to escape that terror, take into your home a lamb and let it become PART of your household by being a pet among you for four days. Then kill it and paint its blood on the doorposts. And eat it with un-leavend bread and bitter herbs as your last meal in Egypt; this time the Pharaoh will let you go all right! But the blood of the lamb has to be on the door posts! The angel of death going with God’s well- deserved judgement from home to home will know: SOMEONE DIED HERE ALREADY! Then – and then only he will pass. Pass over – that means: Israelites are no different in the eye of the angel of death. Israelites are sinners before God, like everybody else. God is angry about our rebellion. He requires our life for it: Our blood!
Nobody, no matter how religious, no matter how well-meaning, no matter how engaged socially or how faithful in going to church on Sunday, can say he has a right to be exempt from death, even death everlasting. No one can say that he at least pleases God by being the way he is. ‘You hear that? No-one!
Being a Jew does not do that trick, and being a member of the Reformed Church doesn’t either! Whoever presents his or her little child to be baptised says of this child that it is not innocent. If we compare them to some of us, they may be – or appear to be innocent. But God says that in this little heart there already lives the cancer the cancer that will grow out and kill unless a miracle happens. The cancer of sin and rebellion is against our very maker. We have trouble accepting that. You and I and all of us do. Humanism (That is: faith in ourselves, a goodness of man apart from God, something we can show him!) is somehow baked into our blood. Therefore in the centre of Israel’s worship there stood the remembrance of how God saved His nation: He saved it by grace. God allowed a lamb to die in the house where a man should have died. A lamb took the place of a rebel, an offender. The father was to make sure the blood of the lamb went on lintel and door posts.
If you do want to escape with your life, the lamb’s blood must be applied. Who do you think God is? Faith and blood…… that means: to confess our faith we always first must confess guilt. The Christian faith is the faith of beggars. It can only live off what is given for nothing. And that is a hard thing for our proud hearts to take. God needed a whole Old Testament bespattered with blood to try and teach his people: that only someone dying instead of the offender can take the guilt away: that they, God’s people, were just as bad as the others were. The blood accused them. Rebels and offenders live here also. This place needs quarantine too; it is as contaminated as the Egyptian’s place next door.
May God give you to see that and confess that, member of this church! There is no Christian but a humble one. Our pride takes some killing. When God sees you and reads your inmost thoughts and motivations, what does he see and read? For you see, it is then that we will get into view that second message: That we also may believe IN THE REDEEMING blood.
Go back with me to Egypt again! What a night it was, that night of Israel’s liberation. See that Israelite family huddled together there in that small home, belongings packed in the corner, loins girded, lamps burning; and there they stand around that table on which is that unleavened bread, those bitter herbs, and in the centre the ugly spectacle of that roasted lamb, legs, tail, head and all, not a bone broken, from which they eat. Outside the eerie silence is broken by crying, bloodcurdling wails and lamentations of people who discover what the killer-angel had done in their home.
Between them inside and that untold terror outside is only one thin screen: The few dried drops of lamb’s blood on the doorposts! Ever since that night there will be that screen of blood between a polluted nation and a holy God! Between church people and their Lord is the blood.
Screaming in anguish a little boy can live only when he sheds the blood of the circumcision operation. The first-born in any home, boy OR girl had to be bought free from death even up to Jesus’ Day with animal blood! (Remember Simeon and the turtle doves?).
Then there is the guilt offering and the sin-offering, the burnt-offering and the atonement offering before at last they could sit down at the peace-offering in which God, priest and people at last shared a meal of brother-hood together. Even that cost blood, and even that was the meat of a killed animal! Then suddenly that changes!
Then suddenly there is in place of the knife of circumcision – the washing of water in baptism. Then there is instead of the butchery of the sacrifice ….the bread and the cup of wine: instead of an abattoir church there is the preaching church around the pulpit in which the word of peace sounds and we may carry the word of peace into a bleeding world. But make no mistake about it: that word of peace tells of blood! It tells of the peace we can receive only by the blood of the cross!
It is not so that religion somehow has become more evolved and more civilised, and so the blood bit could be cut out! That’s what happened in Judaism which replaced even the lamb on the seder table with a chicken. No we have not evolved and the message has not changed.
There still is and will be the terrible angel of death and the judgement of God over all we did, thought and spoke. But between us and that judgement there again is a screen of blood. The blood is not that of an animal but of the spotless Lamb of God. The great transfusion has taken place where he gave his life that we who were dead might live. He gave His blood, so God’s righteous judgement could pass-over. And as Moses sacrificed that Passover by faith so we may: celebrate that Passover by faith. We believe Jesus when we hear Him say: “It is finished!” We do not doubt that word.! Moses celebrated by faith, and so he said to Israel, “You take and kill that lamb and paint that bit of blood on the door posts. You watch: It will save you. Fear not: The death angel will pass over.” Israel could sing the next morning when they marched out into the desert: we have passed from slavery to freedom; we have passed over from death to life!
We have passed into freedom and light! There is no freedom without battle, no nationhood without struggle and dark moments! Thanks to the blood, God frees the nation! You and I can do the Lord’s work and live the free life God calls us into. A good deal better when we live with this certainty and trust in the complete finality of Jesus’ offering. We trust the power of the blood, which shields us forever from hell! Oh my brother, whatever question marks you place behind your own heart and your own works and your own fitness….. do not put a question mark behind the blood of Jesus! His triumphant proclamation: “It is finished” is also for you!
Our Passover has been sacrificed, let us now keep the feast! says Paul in 1Cor.5, a passage that DOES speak of church discipline! Right in the middle of the worship of God’s people in heaven and on earth stands a Lamb – a Lamb that has been slaughtered. That has taken place. For Israel the exodus is a fact of history, so for us the cross is a fact of history: It has been done; no one can take it away and undo it. We may celebrate! Outside the angel of death may go around, but inside, behind the screen of the blood, God’s people may eat and drink. We may live in the freedom of the new-born life.
The life we live by faith… that dares to say it after Jesus: “It is finished!
By the miracle of God’s grace for beggars like me, I, too, have been saved by the blood!”
Amen.