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June 3, 2007
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Relationship
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Pastor Brian Shimer
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"The Blood: Repulsive or Precious?"
John 6: 54-69
- On Saturday May 26th my family and I went to Karen's parent's house to offer our birthday gift to her dad, a work day in their yard. It meant the world to them as we worked the day away mowing, trimming, pruning, weeding, sweeping, etc, etc. The lawn was long and we could not get all the way to the edge of his nearly acre lawn with the mower so there were some edges that needed to be trimmed. I was the one to tackle that job, and found grass shears to do so. But grass shears for an edge as large as that was, soon became a bit tiring. Then I wondered if Dad might have a weed eater. He said he did, and told me where to find it. When I arrived at the shed, I found it but it had no string on it anymore so would not be able to cut anything and try as I might I could not find any fresh string.
So I picked up the shears and went back to work on the edge. Hours later I actually finished.
Have you ever had to work really hard at something that way? When the new fangled tool you had did not work or was not accessible, so you had to "do it yourself"?
I find that I have approached faith in Christ that way off and on over the years. Whereas true Christian faith is about a trust and transformation that is worked within by the power of God, my false version tends to be the "I must work to prove I am acceptable" kind of model. Have you ever been there? Where although your mouth would claim, "Yep, Jesus did for me what I could not do for myself" still in your heart you think you have to "do it alone" that you have to "earn God's favor" that you need to "prove you are redeemable or worthy of that redemption"? Well, if that is you, then, this message is the Good News of the Gospel.
It was truly Good News that Jesus was sharing with the fickle crowd that day at the Capernaum synagogue - a crowd who the previous day had experienced a great miracle when more than 5,000 men plus women and children had been fed from five small loaves and two fish. But they had missed the miracle entirely. They had received a free lunch and have now followed Jesus across the lake to get fed again!
And thus had begun the conversation found in John 6, the last part of which Dana Gale read for us today. In it Jesus compares himself to the Manna that the Israelites had eaten in the wilderness. That had been bread from heaven, but still those who ate it eventually died; but how much more is Jesus the Bread of life also come from heaven? And those who eat of this bread would live. Here Jesus used language to show how central He was to their lives, the language of food and drink.
- No, Jesus was not literally meaning that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood - that would be a sin by Old and New Testament standards anyway - but rather Jesus is talking here about faith and obedience. Jesus says as much in 6:63 saying, "The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life."
Although his hearers did not get this, we are not to take him as meaning we literally need to be eating his body and drinking his blood. Thankfully! But rather, we are to allow His Words to bring him into the proper place in our lives.
First, Jesus said he was the bread of life. To compare Himself to bread in that culture, meant the part most needed to eat. Generally, we eat either with silverware or with our food wrapped in the wrapper from the restaurant, but in that era, bread was the means to eat. They used a flatbread as their silverware. No one would eat anything with their fingers alone, but only wrapped in bread. Without the bread you would not eat. The bread was your means of eating.
Second, Jesus says in 6:35 "He who comes to me will never go hungry and he who believes in me will never be thirsty."
As you hunger and thirst multiple times a day and satisfy those needs with food and drink, so is our spiritual need of Jesus. Our true thirst and true need for nourishment are quenched by Him. Jesus offers what mere physical bread could never offer, He is offering life, eternal life.
So His words are challenging the people to do the work of this "food that endures to eternal life" - and that work is to put faith in His name. It is the work of not trusting in themselves but instead trusting in Him -making Him the center of their whole lives, as bread as the center of the meal.
- It is really good News that Jesus offers life to us that we need to receive not earn. Truly with Peter we can say at the close of this passage, "Jesus alone has the words of eternal life, HE alone is the Holy One of God" so it makes good sense to listen to Him and do what HE says! It is this really essential Good News that causes His death and shed blood to take a central place in the New Testament. It is not because the culture was more primitive than ours, nor because they were more carnal - just look at our forms of entertainment, and you may realize that we take the prize for carnality.
So, why do we need to hear language related to His blood?
The answer takes us back a few weeks when we spoke of how covenants were made in the Ancient Near East and that those covenants were always cut - there was no covenant made without a sacrifice. And the parties in the covenant would finalize their agreement by sharing in a fellowship meal using the meat of that sacrifice. Jesus connects the meal of Holy Communion to such a fellowship meal when he says, "This is the blood of the covenant" the very phrase used by Moses in Exodus 24:8 at the inauguration of the covenant God made with Israel.
In the stipulations of that original covenant, the worship of God also centered around sacrifice. You brought sacrifices to the altar in order to honor and obey God. When separated by sin, you brought a sacrifice to be restored into the covenant. So, the first answer to the question why blood so central is simply the reality: God sovereignly chose to place blood at the center of his salvation plan, saying through the writer of the Book of Hebrews in 9:22 something I want you to see. Turn with me there and read: "the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness."
Since blood had to be shed, but the sacrificial system would be shut down, God came. As songwriter Michael Card wrote: "(God) spoke flesh and blood so He could bleed and make a way Divine." Jesus the Second Person of Trinity, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, came demonstrated God's love for humanity, died an undeserved death - for you and for me - to do the work we could never do, to grant us the eternal life we could never earn.
As Jesus says here in John 6:51: "This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."
His hearers mistake him to mean that they are to physically eat Him, but Jesus is speaking of His death on the cross, His shed blood the victory won over sin, the offer of life, eternal life to all who believe in His name: "Yet to all who received Him to those who believed in His name he gave the right to become children born of God!"
In Ephesians 2:13-16 we are told that we have been brought near through His blood and been given access to God, the Father.
In Ephesians 3:12 and Hebrews 10:19 we learn we can approach God with freedom and confidence because of the blood of Christ.
In Acts 20:28 we are told the church was purchased through the blood of Christ, and in 1 Corinthians 3:20 we learn that you and I were bought with a price, the blood of Christ!
In 1 Peter 1:18-20 Peter writes of the incomparable redemption God has given us out of the "empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers". We were redeemed "with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect."
Imagine the cost of my redemption and yours that causes the blood to be spoken of as so very precious. Without His life poured forth, we would still be "without hope and without God in this world".
It is by the blood that we have been justified - made right with God-that we have been saved from the coming wrath and that we have been reconciled to God (Col 1:14-20). We lean not upon what we can do for God, but upon what God has done for us. For all that God did, we read in the fifth chapter was done because we are so greatly loved - loved when still enemies, when still dead, when still powerless to do a thing for our own rescue.
True forgiveness as I said above is given us, by which is meant a cleansed conscience. If you are still carrying around the burden of sins long past, ask the Heavenly Father to give you a new understanding of how the blood shed by Jesus cleanses you from all sin, it washes your conscience clean (1 John 1:7, Heb 10:22).
By the blood we have been cleansed from a guilty conscience, (Heb 10:22), purified from all sin (1 John 1:7).
If all this came through the blood of Jesus and with this life I have just scratched the surface of what God has done, is it any wonder that the blood carries such prominence in the pages of Scripture? And is it any wonder that Jesus spoke of his own life so graphically for HE knew that what He offered truly was life and light to the world.
- So, we embrace this gift of life in Jesus. We welcome Him into our lives. We do so not just in coming to worship on a Sunday but day by day giving over the controls of our days to Him and allowing Him to bring life through our lives. We do the hard work of trusting Him with everything and stop trying to earn salvation by what we do.
So is it any wonder hymn writers wrote on this theme?
Fanny Crosby: "Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer blessed Lord, to They precious, bleeding side."
Again: "Blessed Assurance Jesus is mine! O what a foretaste of glory divine! Heir of salvation, purchase of God, born of his spirit, washed in his blood."
William Cowper: "There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins, and sinners plunged beneath the flood lose all their guilty stains."
Charles Wesley: "And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior's blood! Died He for me? Who caused his pain! For me? Who Him to death pursued? Amazing love! How can it be that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?"
Robert Robinson: "Jesus sought me when a stranger, wandering from the fold of God; He, to rescue me from danger, interposed His precious blood." (p 400)
When you remember that it is by this blood you are cleansed, renewed, freed, given life, hope and joy; when you remember that it is by the blood Jesus shed that you are reconciled to God, redeemed, justified, saved; when you remember that it is by the blood that you have life abundant, it becomes a theme that can be precious indeed.
- As I put away my grass clippers the last time I set them onto the same table from which I had taken them in the first place and there right beside them was the string for the weed eater. Here I had worked for hours painstakingly trimming the grass by hand and there was this powerful tool available.
This reminded me of how often I do that in my spiritual life. I work so very hard when all that I need has been provided, when I need only accept what is there, when the Gospel truly is GOOD NEWS and I need not earn, or prove my worth, nor can I do so, but need only accept what God has done for me.
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