BLOOD ON THE ALTAR

BLOOD ON THE ALTAR

                As far back as I can remember, preachers and writers have been describing the gruesome details of Jesus’ death on the cross. Mel Gibson spared nothing in bringing to us the reality of Roman crucifixion. It was not a pretty sight by any means and given the description of all that took place on that day, makes me think that Jesus not only shed His blood for us, but ALL of His blood. Coming from His hands, His feet, His side, His head and from the massive injuries on His back, it is likely that there was no blood left in Him by the time He died.

                Many songs have been written about the blood of Jesus, about its power to save and to cleanse and to cover our sinful lives, thus reconciling us to the Father. But the horrors of sin have been downplayed in recent years and the necessity of Jesus’ shed blood has been minimized and replaced with psychology and self-help and promises of prosperity.

                Unless you have come to the end of yourself and there discovered the mighty power of Jesus to turn darkness into light, addiction into freedom, depression into joy and sinfulness into righteousness, and to literally uproot the devil and send him fleeing; then perhaps you don’t have a personal testimony of the power of the blood.

                Some may say, “I have always been a good person. I grew up in the church and I never got into any of the bad stuff that many have been delivered from.” And yet they may be involved in gossip, or they may ignore the needs of the poor, or they may keep their mouth shut when God provides an opportunity for them to witness or to pray for, or to encourage another person. Gossip is one of the seven deadly sins, right there beside murder, but because of our own apparent goodness, we fail to see the abomination of our sins.

                Jesus had His strongest criticisms against the religious leaders of His day simply because they relied upon their own righteousness and good deeds and traditions, be they ever so riddled with selfish motives, carless attitudes and pride.

                Jesus came to seek and to save, not only the drunkard in the gutter or the thief on the cross, but also the religious person that doesn’t realize his need of a Savior… and which one do you think is the hardest to reach?

                One of the great dangers in being religious is that we tend to justify ourselves by our own good intentions. We go through the motions and the rituals of Christianity. We maintain a good relationship with the organization and we meet all of its requirements and perform all of its deeds, but we are still far from the Lord in our hearts. If only we could see the coldness and distance and the estrangement that still remains between us and our Lord we would certainly fall on our faces and cry out for the blood of Jesus and the Holy Spirit to bridge that gap and to draw us into true fellowship with Him… into true love for Him, far beyond all of the facades of religion.

                When questioned about his commandment keeping, the rich young ruler replied that he had done all of these things from his youth. He presented to Jesus a clean slate… but Jesus saw beyond his good intentions to that one veil of pride that kept them apart. His riches were really his god and he didn’t even know it. They were the one source of his pride and they were the one thing that he was unwilling to trade in for a relationship with Jesus. He turned away sorrowfully, for Jesus had hit the nail on the head. (This story was so important that it was covered in 3 of the Gospels. Mt. 19:16-30. Mark 10L 17-31 and Luke 18:18-30)

                Each of us has gods in our lives… things which on the bottom line, we are not willing to sacrifice. Our riches, or our talents, or our opinions, or even our good religious intentions, we cling to as our ticket into an audience with God… and because we have never really allowed the Holy Spirit to unveil these things for us, we fail to see the horrendous sinfulness that keeps us apart from God.

                In truth we cannot really love Jesus until we have allowed Him to identify and to remove the veils that stand between us and Him. Like Paul in Romans seven, we keep convincing ourselves that we can do better next time. We can get our act together. We can somehow qualify for God’s love and approval.

                But like Paul we also need to come to that point where we suddenly realize that none of our good intentions can outweigh the evil that resides in us and so we finally throw ourselves at Jesus feet and cry out: “Oh wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” Rom. 7:24

                After having justified himself for a lifetime of religious purity, Paul eventually came to the realization that even though he served the law of God with his mind, in his body he was nevertheless serving the law of sin and apart from Christ he had no cure for the problem. All of his layers of self-righteousness could not cover the root problem. He had been born a sinner and he would always be a sinner apart from the blood of Jesus. Nothing but the blood of Jesus could get to the root of His problem.

                For all of us, Romans 7 must come before Romans 8. If it does not then we will never fully understand the infinite power of Jesus to save us. We see others in a deep pit of sin, but we don’t see ourselves that way, because we judge ourselves by our good intentions. We are way too generous in our self-evaluation for we see what we want to be, rather than what we actually are. We are children of fallen Adam and we need much more than an attitude adjustment or a better ritual to follow or a better set of doctrines to believe.

                We need to acknowledge that we are truly worthy of the death that all men enter into when they are born into a fallen human race. In this particular assessment, everyone is in the same boat. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (romans 3:23)  Need we say more? God created us to be like Him and yet here we are infinite lightyears away from what we were originally created to be. We don’t glow in the dark… we have none of the power and majesty with which we were first created and truth be known, we have absolutely no ability to even come close.

                I often use the example of a little robot that serves you faithfully doing all that you ask it to do. But one day you take his batteries out and set them two feet in front of Him and then you ask him to keep on serving you as before. But without the batteries, the robot is absolutely helpless to reach out and to take the batteries and put them back in. He is dead in his sins, so to speak and totally incapable of doing anything about it.

                This is exactly what happened to Adam and Eve only it was not God who took the batteries out. They allowed Satan to take them out in their moment of betrayal and now they have no way to put them back in. They are dead as far as heaven is concerned with no way back, because Satan is certainly not going to put them back in… and since Adam and Eve are both dead, neither can they help each other.

                When we come by faith to the foot of the cross, we enter into Christ’s death and then in the power of His resurrection we are born again. Jesus  puts our batteries in so to speak and we come alive again, with new power to serve our Savior with gladness and joy. And this time our batteries are rechargeable and constantly being renewed by the Spirit of God that now resides within us.

                The fact that many Christians have lost the true assessment of their condition and their immediate need of a new birth and a restoration of their spiritual batteries, they are falling away… going back to the weak things of the Law which only has the power to tell them that they have no batteries, but no power to put the batteries back in.

                The Law can only tell us our need of Jesus, but it can do nothing to give us life or to restore our batteries or to reconcile us to God. That is not the Law’s job. It can only tell us what is wrong. It can’t fix it. Therefore the Law is a tutor to lead us to Christ and once we have come to Christ we are no longer under a tutor. (Gal. 3:22-26) Jesus has put our batteries back in and now we live by His Spirit who alone can keep our batteries fully charged on a permanent basis. This also is why we need a permanent High Priest who lives forever and who alone has the power of resurrection and eternal life..

                The blood of Jesus covers who and what we really are so that we can be born again by His Spirit apart from our own goodness and once we have accepted and entered into Jesus’ plan of salvation by His blood, then we can enter into Romans 8. We can now live by the Spirit of Christ.

                “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did; sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

                Can you not now see the difference between the new birth and any other form of religion? Satan doesn’t hate the many religions of the world. IN fact they are at present coming together to form one global religion. They can perform every dead ritual there is and it doesn’t bother Satan a bit. What he hates is truly born again Christians who have had life restored to them. In this dark and dead world any robot that is moving around, having its batteries restored sticks out like a sore thumb… and just as moths are attracted to a lightbulb, so are demons attracted to those who are alive and they are filled with a desperate need to snuff out the light and to keep it from exposing their evil deeds of darkness or bringing the presence of Christ into their dark domain.

                If we belong to Christ and we are living by His power and not our own, then our presence in this dark world should cause a stir… a war of spirits… an exposing of evil and darkness. But we have become accustomed to a form of godliness without the power. We don’t cause the kind of ruckus that Jesus did when He walked this earth. Everywhere He went demons were flushed out of the woodwork and exposed. They knew who Jesus was, but do they know who Jesus is in us? (See Acts 19:11-20)

                Indeed we need to cry out for something that we do not yet possess. We are alive. Our batteries have been put back in, but as Romans 8 says, we need to learn how to live by the Spirit and not by the flesh. True Christianity is not an improvement of the flesh, it is the death of the flesh, so that Jesus may be our new life. Instead we have become satisfied that our batteries have been put back in, but we don’t often seek the power of Christ to far exceed our religion. We need the holiness and righteousness of Christ not only in our legal account somewhere, but we need it to animate and empower our lives so that we can be as Christ was in this world.

                To this extent we have yet to discover the power of the blood and cross of Jesus, to bring us to a complete death in Satan’s kingdom, and then to become a powerful lighthouse in the Kingdom of Christ. We still fall short of the glory of God and for that reason we must seek Him with all of our hearts.