Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness
Hebrews 9:22 - The bloody sacrifice of Jesus on the cross atoned for the sins of believers once and for all time
“In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”
Hebrews 9:22 NIV
The Lord obviously wants me to really understand the lessons found in Hebrews, because this is the third time in a little over a week that He has pointed me to the book. I don’t want to be repetitious with my writing, but for those of you who might not have seen the previous posts, here’s the gist of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “Hebrews is traditionally attributed to Paul, and it is a letter to Jewish Christians explaining the superiority of Christ and the New Covenant with all believers in comparison to the Old Covenant between God and His chosen people Israel.”
The intended audience of this epistle would have been quite familiar with “the law,” in particular the ritual purification outlined in Leviticus. The author is explaining to his readers why Christ had to die on the cross. Earlier in Hebrews 9, he explains that a will or testament requires a death for the will to become effective (which is still true to this day), and in Hebrews 9:18 he begins to explain why blood must be shed in order to bring about forgiveness.
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This verse says that “nearly everything” must be cleansed with blood, which in many cases was the sacrifice of bulls, lambs, goats, turtledoves, and so on. Almost everything required a blood offering, in which an animal was sacrificed. There were wave offerings, where an object or part of an animal was waved from side to side. There were heave offerings, where a cooked item was lifted up, as if to the Lord. With drink offerings, wine or oil was not consumed, but poured onto another offering before offering it to the Lord or being eaten by the priests. A burnt offering burned an entire animal as an offering, while a grain offering (either unmilled grain or small bread cakes) was offered either with a burnt offering or as a separate offering… and had to include frankincense, oil, and salt. Got that?
Most of these offerings required killing of animals (and thus the spilling of blood), but it was the sin offering that was most associated with blood. This was a mandatory offering made on specific dates, in which the worshipper laid his hands on an animal, confessed his sins, and then the animal was sacrificed. This ritual demonstrated God’s command to Adam in Genesis 2:17, where sin results in death (“but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”). The worshipper recognized that his sin was worthy of his death, and was giving up the animal as a substitute.
What does all of this ritual slaughter have to do with Jesus? That’s all answered in the second part of the verse — “and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” Almost nobody can explain substitutionary atonement — the blood offering of Jesus on the cross to atone for our sins — better than Charles H. Spurgeon:
There is no truth more plain than this in the whole of the Old Testament, and it must have within it a very weighty lesson to our souls. There are some who cannot endure the doctrine of a substitutionary atonement. Let them beware lest they be casting away the very soul and essence of the gospel. It is evident that the sacrifice of Christ was intended to give ease to the conscience, for we read that the blood of bulls and of goats could not do that. I fail to see how any doctrine of atonement except the doctrine of the vicarious sacrifice of Christ can give ease to the guilty conscience. Christ in my stead suffering the penalty of my sin—that pacifies my conscience, but nothing else does.
All the repentance in the world cannot blot out the smallest sin. If you had only one sinful thought cross your mind, and you should grieve over that all the days of your life, yet the stain of that sin could not be removed even by the anguish it cost you. Where repentance is the work of the Spirit of God, it is a very precious gift, and is a sign of grace; but there is no atoning power in repentance. In a sea full of penitential tears, there is not the power or the virtue to wash out one spot of this hideous uncleanness. Without the blood-shedding, there is no remission.
Jesus Christ Himself cannot save us apart from His blood. It is a supposition that only folly has ever made, but I must refute even the hypothesis of folly when it affirms that the example of Christ can put away human sin, that the holy life of Jesus Christ has put the race on such a good footing with God that now He can forgive its faults and its transgression. Not so—not the holiness of Jesus, not the life of Jesus, not the death of Jesus, but the blood of Jesus only, for “apart from the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”
Hebrews was the attempt in the early days of Christianity to explain to Jewish Christians how the bloody sacrifice of Jesus on the cross atoned for the sins of believers once and for all time.
Heaven On Wheels Daily Prayer:
Today’s prayer comes from Knowing Jesus:
Heavenly Father, thank You for the new and better Covenant that was inaugurated at Calvary’s Cross, knowing that without the shedding of Jesus’ sinless and precious blood there would have been no forgiveness of my sins. How I praise and thank You that Jesus died for me and gave me Your Holy Spirit to live Your life in me. Help me to live a life that is holy unto the Lord. In Jesus' name I pray, AMEN.