Why is the Bible so Bloody?

One of the strangest parts of Christianity, especially to those of us in the modern, Western Hemisphere, is the seeming obsession with blood. God commanded the slaughter of animals as part of the Old Covenant, and for centuries His followers slit the throats of goats and sheep without batting an eye. In order to appease God’s wrath, the animal’s blood was sprinkled onto the mercy seat atop the Ark of the Covenant. This was commanded and carried out for hundreds of years.

Even before the first Passover, where through Moses God instructed everyone to put lamb blood on the posts of their front door, God killed a lamb in the Garden of Eden. After Adam and Eve sinned and realized they were naked, they tried to cover themselves with fig leaves, but God made them clothes of animal skin. The only way to skin is animal is to kill it, and it is a bloody process. While the Bible does not specify the type of animal skin, I absolutely believe it was a lamb. This may seem unsettling to some. What is with all the blood in the Bible?

The gruesomeness of the blood makes it crystal clear to us that sin is a big deal. We may be tempted to downplay sin, especially in this era of grace, but sin leads to death. Our first parents were warned that if they ate from the forbidden fruit, they would surely die. Once they ate it, the ones who deserved to die did not die, and instead, an innocent animal died in their place. That was the first death in history, and it came about because of sin. Adam and Eve would forever remember the wages of their sin.

Animal sacrifices forever looked back to that sacrificial animal in Eden. When the Israelites deserved to die for their sin, God promised to transfer His wrath to a lamb; when they offered it as a sacrifice, God was punishing their sin by punishing an innocent animal. Again, the ones who deserved to die did not die, because an innocent lamb died in their place.

That takes us to Mount Calvary. When Jesus came on the scene John the Baptist introduced Him as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29).” As we noted last week in Isaiah 53, God was pleased to crush His Son on the cross, for it was “by his wounds we are healed.” Calvary was the culmination of years of animal sacrifices, and now we “are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Hebrews 10:10).” Because of the cross, those of us who deserve to die do not have to because the innocent Lamb died in our place.

Some reject the idea of the Suffering Servant; they cannot comprehend the necessity of God’s Son dying on the cross. My question is, if the Messiah didn’t pour out His blood on the cross, then what are all the sacrifices about, and why did they end? Only Jesus explains the blood; just as the sacrifices looked back to the animal in Eden, they also looked forward to Christ on the cross. The only reason the sacrifices ended is Jesus rendered them unnecessary with His perfect blood.

What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.