Even the First Covenant

Not Without Blood

Ix. — 18. Wherefore even the first covenant hath not been dedicated with out blood.

19. For when every commandment had been spoken by Moses unto all the people according to the law, he took the blood of the calves and the goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself, and all the people, saying,

20. This is the blood of the covenant which God commanded to you- ward.

21. Moreover the tabernacle and all the vessels of the ministry he sprinkled In like manner with the blood.

22. And according to the law, I may almost say, all things are cleansed with blood, and apart from shedding of blood there is no remission.

THE writer returns here to the idea of the covenant in ver. 15. He had there said that a death was needed for the redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant, ere Christ, as Mediator of the new, could put the heirs in possession of the promise. In confirmation of this necessity, he reminds us how even the first covenant was not dedicated without blood.

God has made more than one covenant with man, but ever, not without blood! And why? We know the answer (Lev. xvii. n): The life (soul) of ‘the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your

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souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life. The life is in the blood. The blood shed is the token of death, life taken away. Death is always and every where God’s judgment on sin: The sting of death is sin. The shed blood sprinkled upon the altar, or the person, is the proof that death has been endured, that the penalty of the transgressions, for which atonement is being made, has been borne. In some cases the hands were laid upon the head of the sacrifice, confessing over it, and laying upon it, the sin to be atoned for. The shed blood upon the altar was the pledge that God accepted the death of the substitute: the sins were covered by the blood, and the guilty one restored to God’s favour. Apart from blood-shedding there is no remission; in the blood-shedding there is remission, full and everlasting.

Not without blood! This is the wondrous note that rings through all Scripture, from Abel’s sacrifice at the gate of paradise to the song of the ransomed in Revelations. God is willing to receive fallen man back again to His fellowship, to admit him to His heart and His love, to make a covenant with him, to give full assurance of all this; but — not without blood. Even His own Son, the Almighty and All-perfect One, the gift of His eternal love, even He could only redeem us, and enter the Father’s presence, in submission to the word, not without blood. But, blessed be God, the blood of the Son of God, in which there was the life of the Eternal Spirit, has been given, and has now wrought an eternal redemption! He did, indeed, bear our sins, and take them away. He put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. The life He poured out in His blood-shedding was a life that had conquered sin, and rendered a perfect obedience. The blood-shedding as the completion of that life, in its surrender to God and man, has made a complete

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atonement, a covering up, a putting away of sin. And so the blood of the new covenant, in which God remembers our sins no more, cleanses our heart to receive His law so into it, that the spirit of His law is the spirit of our life, and takes us into full and direct fellowship with Himself. It was in this blood of the eternal covenant that God brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus: the blood had so atoned for sin and made an end of it that, in its power, Christ was raised again. It became the power of a new life to Him and to us. With it He opened the way into the Holiest for us; the way into our hearts for Himself.

Not without blood! In earth and heaven, in each moment of our life, in each thought and act of worship, this word reigns supreme. There can be no fellowship with God, but in the blood, in the death, of His blessed Son.

But, praised be His name, in that blood there is an access and a fellowship, a life and a blessedness, a nearness and a love, that passeth understanding! Let us seek to cultivate large thoughts of what the blood has effected and can effect. Men have sometimes rejected the word: its associations are so coarse and at variance with a finer culture. Others do not reject it, and yet have not been able to sympathise with or approve the large place it sometimes takes in theology and devotion. The strange fascination, the irresistible attraction the word has, is not without reason. There is not a word in Scripture in which all theology is so easily summed up. All that Scripture teaches of sin and death, of the incarnation and the love of Christ, of redemption and salvation, of sin and death conquered, of heaven opened and the Spirit poured out, of the new covenant blessings, of a perfect conscience and a clean heart, and access to God and power to serve Him, personal

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attachment to Jesus, and of the joy of eternity, has its root and its fruit in this alone: the precious blood of Christ; the blood of the eternal covenant.

1. Hear what Slelnhofer says: “One drop of that blood, sprinkled out of the sanctuary on the heart, changes the whole heart, perfects the conscience, sanctifies the soul, mattes the garments clean and white, so that we are meet for fellowship with God, ready and able to Hue in His hue. Such a heart, sprin filed and cleansed with the blood of Jesus, is now fitted for all the grace of the new covenant, all the heauenly gifts, all the holy operations of divine love, all the spiritual blessings of the heauenly places. The blood of the Lamb does indeed make the sinner pure and holy, worthy and fit to partake of all that the inner sanctuary contains, and to live In God. Therefore the apostle says: Let us, as those whose hearts are sprinkled from an evil conscience, boldly draw near before the face of God. To be sprinkled with the blood, to have the living, cleansing, all-pervading power of the blood of Jesus In the heart, — this fits us for serving God, not In the oldness of the letter but In the newness of the Spirit.”