02.04. IS MY BIBLE A BLOOD-STAINED BOOK?

IS MY BIBLE A BLOOD-STAINED BOOK?

Paul, in Hebrews 9:22, says:

“Almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission.” This very term “blood” has become an offense to certain intellectuals of this generation. It is quite the habit of modern theologians to decry the term, and to declare that “in a day when war is being outlawed, the gospel of blood is an insult to intelligence.”

Paul, the most prominent exponent of Christianity in its beginning days, did not so think. On the contrary, to him any aspersion upon “the blood” was a Divine offense, destined to dire judgment. He wrote:

“If we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins. But a certain fearful looking for of judgment, and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries. He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?” (Hebrews 10:26-29) To bring any reproach, therefore, upon “the blood” is to fall under Divine condemnation, and as the apostle writes: “It is a fearful thing To fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31).

However, we shall proceed to study the matter of blood-shedding as it is found in the Scriptures, whether it relates to murder, war, or the sacrifice of lambs in atonement for sin.

Three phrases may suffice for all: The Blood Trail: The Blood Truth: and The Blood Atonement. THE BLOOD TRAIL

It is true that a scarlet thread runs through sacred scripture and not all of it expressed the divine pleasure, nor was shed by Divine appointment.

There is the blood sinfully shed by man-murder; the blood shed with God’s consent-war; and the blood shed at God’s command-sacrifice.

1—The Blood Sinfully Shed by Man! The first frightful fruit of sin on man’s part, voiced itself in the shedding of Abel’s blood by his brother Cain. That was not God’s will, but Satan’s work instead. Upon that sin and upon all its kindred successors, the wrath of God has rested. “Now art thou cursed;’’ “the ground shall not henceforth yield unto thee;” “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” (Genesis 4:11-12).

We will have gone but a little way into the history of human kind until God finds it necessary to express his appreciation of human life and at the same time voice dire judgment against anyone who dared to ruthlessly destroy it. “Whosoever sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed.” (Genesis 9:6).

There are those who imagine that God had his specially favored, concerning whom His law would be more leniently interpreted; who, therefore, conclude that when Moses interfered in a fair fight between one of his own kin and an Egyptian and smote the Egyptian, he excited little or no Divine wrath. But all such as reach that conclusion indulge prejudiced minds rather than consult the course of history. Moses, object of God’s marvelous grace as he was, paid the penalty of his deed. His life was sought by Pharaoh and he had to flee the land, and for forty years dwelt, practically a prisoner, on “the back side of the desert” You will find it uniform that God’s judgment follows those who ruthlessly, or with malice of forethought, destroy their fellows. God never has and never can condone murder!

There is no more maudlin sentiment abroad today than that which interprets the sixth commandment—“‘Thou shall not kill,” as opposing capital punishment. In fact, it does the exact opposite—it demands capital punishment. In the chapter following the one that contains God’s decalogue, we have it written with the pen of inspiration: “He that smiteth a man so that he die, shall surely be put to death,” and while there was a place of refuge for the one who unwittingly killed, if a man “came presumptuously upon his neighbor to slay him with guile, even the holiness of the altar itself was not to save him from the executioner’s hand. (Exodus 21:14), My beloved Minnesota is bleeding today because its cheap politicians have put aside God’s law and through soft and sinister legislation converted the state into a mecca for murderers.

2—The Blood Shed with God’s Consent.

Here I have found my most serious mental and moral problems. I confess, frankly, that for a long period of time the pages of sacred Scripture that record the capture of the cities of ancient Syria, later known as Palestine, giving the slaughter of the natives dwelling there, proved to me the hardest portion of Holy Writ to accept with equanimity, or explain with satisfaction.

We remember the covenant with Abraham: “Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates. The Kenites, and the Kenizites, and the Kadomites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the. Girgasites, and the Jebusites.” (Genesis 15:18-21).

We follow on to discover that the cities of these people fell before the hordes of Israel: and in the process, men, women and children were slaughtered without mercy in mighty numbers. But a fresh reading, and a more careful one, of the whole history shows that Israelites, who engaged in this wholesale slaughter, were seldom acting on direct Divine advice! They followed instead the usual lines of warfare—they killed the enemy in order to conquer his country. That does not necessarily involve the Divine pleasure, or even certify the Divine consent as to methods.

We have little doubt that God was in the migration of the Pilgrim Fathers, and that He, in His infinite wisdom, brought their bark to Plymouth Rock; nor is there much less question that God’s providence was in the white man’s capture and settlement of America. Here was one of His greatest and richest of continents, yea two of them, North America and South America, inhabited by wild, nomadic tribes, who, in their indolence and lust, lived without labor upon nature’s almost inexhaustible resources. They hunted, they fished, they fought, they died; life had little meaning to them, and God had no place among them. Righteousness was practically an unknown word, and their land, while teeming with animal life, was a moral waste. It is not surprising, even, that an infinitely wise God should both prefer and plan its different and better occupation. But that is not to say that He consented to all the deceptions and cruel methods of the white man; nor do we believe that the Old Testament binds Bible lovers to an endorsement of all the immoral deeds in taking the cities of that great oriental section and reeking slaughter upon its thousands and tens of thousands of debased, ignorant and helpless people. The objective of another occupation of the land, He did approve. But not all the ways of men in working their own wills. To be sure there was a point of danger that had to be guarded against or else Israelitish occupation would have proven little better than that of the Canaanites, Hittities and Amorites— namely, amalgamation. To have preserved the women and children alike would have resulted in a hybrid-race and a possible degeneracy of religion; and, instead of a land that would honor God, it would have lapsed into a state of equally gross idolatry. Without saying they were always justified in means and methods, it may be admitted that an all-wise Administrator of earthly affairs could not ignore final consequences and retain either a reputation for intelligence or His estimation of the good.

We come then to a further consideration, and to the direct object of this confessedly crimson text:

3—The Blood shed at God’s command.

We speak now of the system of sacrifices, inaugurated in the Old Testament, where animal blood was shed at God’s command, to adumbrate the sacrifice of “the Lamb of God” in the New Testament.

Leviticus 16:1-34 is the Divine record of the Great Day of Atonement. On that day Aaron, the High Priest, must put on the holy linen coat to typify the holy character of Christ—the High Priest to come. He was to wash afresh in water to symbolize that in Him—Christ, there should be found no spot or stain. He was to bring a young bullock for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering, the bullock for himself to make an atonement for him and his house, acknowledging thereby the fact that he, unlike his Lord (who should finally fill the High Priest’s place) was not without sin. This bullock and this ram, and the two kids of the goats, from the congregation and for them, he was to slay and the blood was to be sprinkled by Divine appointment. This was the beginning of a system which, carried through Israelitish history, involved not only hundreds but thousands and tens of thousands of animals that lost their lives in the foundation laying of the Christian faith.

It is against this slaughter that the critics have revolted; this destruction of God’s beautiful and innocent creatures against which the modernists rave, calling it “the gospel of the shambles.” But how superficial such conclusions! In the first place man has always lived upon the lower creation of vegetable and animal life, and the same individuals who stand aghast at this slaughter, kill the chickens that have gathered at their feet for their daily feed, and have trusted them as friends and defenders, the lambs that have gamboled with the children on the green, and the faithful ox that labors to produce for them vegetable food, they slay and eat with never an inkling of wrong. But when it comes to our religion, how keen is their revolt and how sensitive become their sympathies. The reason for these facts is found in the scripture statement: “The natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit.’’ But someone says: “Think of the waste of animal life!”

Such critics only voice their ignorance. The bodies of the sacrificed beasts and birds were not thrown away. When the blood with which the altar was to be sprinkled, had been used, typifying the Great Atonement to be made on Calvary’s Cross, the carcasses went to the priest and people for consumption. God prohibited the eating of the blood since “the life is in the blood,” but never the consumption of the flesh of the beasts, since they were originally created for man’s sustenance. This revolt, then, is not against the shedding of blood, but rather against God!

Let us consider further THE BLOOD TRUTH God’s sacred law is against the shedding of Human Blood.

We have already shown how it was with Cain and even with Moses. We might follow through the Old Testament and multiply the names of murderers, only to find that God followed each with certain adequate judgment. His law is sacred and should he so regarded, and all the laws of man that are righteous and true and good are substantially based on the decalogue. “Thou shalt not kill” is written into the statutes of practically every state on earth. But man at his pleasure, in foul courts and at so-called bars of justice, but limply executes that law, and the majority of murderers now escape trial even, much less life-incarceration or capital punishment. That is why the world multiplies its highwaymen, increases its bank-robbers; why newspapers have their pages stained daily with bloody reports. The law of “a life for a life” is left in the limbo of court-failures, or in the morgues of injustice. The disregard of Divine law is the destruction of Human statutes—the suicide of civilization.

God’s justice often manifests itself in war.

These are days when the same sentimentalists who would let the murderer go free (or at most enclose him in a pen and feed and clothe him there until, being paroled, or having escaped, he attempts taking another life) assume to themselves the high sounding name of Pacifists, and plead for the destruction of armies and navies, sadly forgetting that there are some things far worse than civil or even international conflicts.

Russia, who is training the largest army the world ever knew in one nation, is professing pacifism towards her sister states, but practicing diabolical butchery against every man who dares resist her system of civilian slavery or utters the slightest criticism of her autocrats.

God is not in that—a thousand times no! He was, we believe, in the war between the United States and Spain, when our government sought freedom for the people of the islands to the southeast of us. He was with the armies that marched into China to end the bloody Boxer regime. In fact it would be quite impossible to study any great war in history without reaching the firm conviction that God finally interfered for right and righteousness.

There are principles of righteousness, so in-wrought in the shedding of blood, that they prove themselves fruitful in the lives of men. We have seen that the crimes in America today are committed by youths on parole. Imprisonment taught them nothing except new notions on how to more successfully engage in a holdup, bank robbery or murder, for money. But the executioner of the law is differently affected! The sheriff who cuts the rope on the old gallows, or the jailer who straps the victim in the electric chair, how rarely have these men ever gone from their jobs to wilful murder of their fellows. They have seen the final fruits of sin and crime and learned; their practice has been abstinence from such sins and such crimes. You will see that the righteousness of God’s law and the unfailing custom of the Divine law to follow iniquity with retribution, is both intelligent and wholesome. It impresses respect for law, and even its executioner is profited thereby. But God’s symbols are found in sacrifices. The bullocks, the sheep, the goats, the doves, that whole dripping company of old Testament slaughter, pointed with unerring finger to the sacrifice on Calvary. Our conviction is that if the same critics who condemn it, would give themselves to a study of the Epistle to the Hebrews, they would turn from its censure to its approval. The High Priest there was only a prophecy of our High Priest, who, for us, “has entered in within the vail.” The blood shed there was only a type of the blood shed in our behalf. The atonement in Leviticus was intended to teach the atonement made on Calvary’s cross.

Let us consider, then, THE BLOOD ATONEMENT This blood atonement involved only principles of justice.

It regards the breaking of a righteous law as worthy of penalty. It involves the fact that sin was an offense to a righteous God, and His judgment was a result of His holiness.

“Under an Eastern sky, Amid a rabble cry, A man went forth to die For me.

Thorn-crowned His blessed head, Blood-stained, His weary tread.

Cross-laden He was led, For me.

Pierced were His hands and feet, Three hours o’er Him heat Fierce rays of noontide heat For me.

Thus wert Thou made all mine Lord, make me wholly Thine, Grant grace and strength divine To me. In thought, and word, and deed, Thy will to do; Oh, lead My soul, e’en though it bleed, To Thee.”

Still further, The doctrine of Atonement Defends God’s Mercy. When atonement is made He can be at once “just, and the Justifier of the wicked.” My friend Dr. Massee delights to illustrate this by telling the story how, when a youth, he was disobedient and deserved the stripes that his father threatened, should he be found guilty again. But just as the lash was lifted to fall upon his little back, his big brother flung himself over him, literally covering him with his greater body. This elder brother took every stroke willingly that the little brother might be saved the same. The word “Atonement” means “covering.” That is what our brother, Christ, did on the cross. He covered us with His own body.

Then again, Atonement Cleanses Character.

We may not be able to explain the process by which the crimson from the veins of Christ takes the color out of our sins. The Word is “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord, Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” A few days ago in the South with a number of friends we visited the beautiful grounds of Mrs. Gray, the millionaire, just out of Winston-Salem, N. C. One of them asked the manager of the estate for a red poppy that was in full bloom. He readily clipped it and handed it over. My friend took it home, connected up a red electric light bulb, and turning on the light, held it over the scarlet poppy. Instantly every bit of color left it and it became as white as snow.

Such indeed is the effect on character when the blood of Christ is applied to the crimson stain of sin, but with this difference, the poppy was made white temporarily; the sin-stained soul is made white eternally. “If the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh; how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9:13-14). The atonement tends to change the wicked into the Holy.

Dr. A. T. Pierson, in his volume, “God’s Living Oracles,” recites this interesting incident as of the war between Russia and Circassia in the middle of the last century:

“The prophet chief Schamyl, almost adored by his followers, found that some one was exposing to the enemy his designs and plans; and he made a decree, which he promulgated to his followers, that if the traitor were found out, one hundred lashes on the bare back should be administered for the offense. A few days later, it was discovered, to his astonishment that the guilty party was his own mother. He went into fasting and retirement for two days, and coming out, pallid and ghastly, ordered his mother to be brought from the tent and her back bared for the scourge. He stood by while one, two, three, four, five of those fearful lashes gashed her flesh; then he bade the executioner arrest his blows; bared his own back, and took the other ninety-five lashes on his own person, till the flesh hung in shreds. The effect, it is said, was electric—his followers were melted, and even his mother was utterly subdued, as she could never have been by mere force.”

There is nothing known to the experiences of men, that, for the breaking down of a stubborn heart, equals the exhibition of vicarious love. There is in “the goodness of God,” who in the person of His Son died that we might not die, that which leads us to repentance, shakes us out of ourselves and subdues us to His ways and will. The Bible is not a blood-stained Book, but rather the Book that shows how the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son cleanses us from all sin!”

“Not all the blood of beasts, On Jewish altars slain, Could give my guilty conscience peace, Or wash away its stain. But Christ the heavenly Lamb Took all my guilt away; A sacrifice of nobler name And richer blood than they. My soul looks back to all The burden thou didst bear When hanging on the accursed tree For all my guilt was there.

Believing I rejoice To see the curse remove And bless the Lamb with cheerful voice And sing redeeming Love.”