Bible Says? | The Podcast Team

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Why does Christianity talk so much about blood?
Why does something so violent have to happen to reconcile humanity to God? Why animals? Why sacrifices? Why does Jesus have to die? And if God is all-powerful, couldn't He have simply forgiven us without any of it?
Questions like these expose something important: every one of us approaches the Bible with assumptions. We have traditions, experiences, cultural lenses, and ways we've been taught to understand Christianity. Sometimes what we've been taught isn't necessarily wrong. It's just incomplete.

Christianity didn't begin with us.
Every influential Christian thinker or leader, from Billy Graham to Martin Luther, John Calvin, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and countless others, lived at a particular point in church history. Each was shaped, at least in part, by the culture, traditions, questions, and challenges of his or her time. Their teaching, writing, preaching, and leadership have also shaped the way generations of Christians understand Scripture, theology, worship, and the life of the church. We are not approaching the Bible in a vacuum; we have been formed by the people, traditions, and movements that came before us.
That doesn't mean we dismiss them. We respect tradition, but we're passionate about truth.
That includes the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, the Reformation, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Anabaptists, revival movements, and the denominations that exist today. All of these traditions are part of the story that brought us to where we are.
But protecting a tradition can never become more important than pursuing truth.
Part of studying Scripture faithfully is recognizing the lenses we bring to it and doing the hard work of understanding the Bible within its own context and worldview. We want to read Paul the way Paul intended to be read and Moses the way Moses intended to be read.
That doesn't mean everyone before us got everything wrong and we've finally figured it out. Far from it. In fact, we have access to resources earlier generations of Christians could only dream about: ancient manuscripts, archaeology, historical research, biblical languages, cultural studies, digital resources, and centuries of scholarship.
But these tools aren't valuable merely because they help us go deeper into our traditions or confirm what we've already been taught. They can also help us identify the assumptions and traditions we've layered onto the text, strip them away, and return to the worldview of the Bible itself.

We inherit traditions, theological categories, familiar phrases, and explanations of the cross that can shape what we notice in a passage, and what we overlook. Sometimes those traditions are helpful. But they can also cause us to read later ideas back into earlier texts instead of allowing each passage to speak within its own context.
So as we trace the theme of blood through Scripture, we need to pay attention to the story the Bible itself is telling.
What does blood mean in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and the prophets? What did sacrifice accomplish within Israel's covenant relationship with God? And how do the New Testament writers use those earlier images to explain Jesus?

Why does something so violent have to happen to reconcile us to God?
Before answering, we need to expose an assumption that can hide beneath the question.
Christianity is sometimes presented something like this:
Humanity sinned. God became angry. Humanity deserved death. Because God demanded punishment, something had to die before He could forgive us. Eventually Jesus stepped in and received the violence God intended for us.
But is that the whole story Scripture is telling?
That way of describing the cross can make it sound as though God is standing outside the human story, demanding that someone suffer before He is willing to forgive. But the biblical story presents something more profound. From the beginning, humanity's sin has brought alienation, corruption, violence, and death into God's good creation. We are not merely guilty before God; we are also trapped in the consequences of our rebellion and unable to restore ourselves.
So the cross is not about Yahweh desiring violence against us or needing violence before He can forgive. It is about Yahweh entering into the consequences of human sin in order to rescue, cleanse, reconcile, and restore humanity. In Jesus, Yahweh does not remain distant from the suffering and death sin has produced. He takes them upon Himself, bears them faithfully, and overcomes them through resurrection life.
Paul says that sin entered the world through Adam, and death through sin.¹ Humanity rebelled against the source and giver of life, and death followed.
But throughout the biblical story, God isn't working to perpetuate death. He's working to defeat it.
We created the need for rescue.

So why couldn't God just forgive? Because we don’t need just forgiveness. We need to be rescued, restored, and reconciled, and…
We need life.
Our problem isn't simply that we've accumulated a debt that needs to be canceled and forgiven. Scripture describes humanity as enslaved to sin, subject to death, alienated from God, and in need of reconciliation and new life.²
God is the source and giver of life (Genesis 2:7; Deuteronomy 30:19–20; Acts 17:24–25). Humanity's rebellion wasn't merely the breaking of an arbitrary rule. God warned Adam that if he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would surely die (Genesis 2:16–17). Humanity turned away from the One who gives life, and death became our enemy—the final enemy to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26).
So the question isn't only, How does God forgive people who have sinned?
The deeper question is:
How do you give life to what is dying and dead?
That's where the biblical meaning of blood becomes so important.

When we hear the word blood, we tend to think of violence, injury, and death. We see blood in emergency rooms, crime scenes, horror films, and news reports, so our first instinct is often to think of blood as evidence that something has gone terribly wrong. But in the sacrificial system of Leviticus, blood carries another important meaning: life.
God tells Israel, "For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your lives."³
That verse changes the way we should think about what's happening at the altar. The blood certainly comes through death, but its significance isn't simply that something has died. The blood represents the life that was given. As God says, "the life of the flesh is in the blood."
And notice who provides it: "I have given it for you."
That's an important detail. Israel isn't offering blood because they've discovered that violence is the price required to convince an angry God to forgive them. God is the one who gives Israel the sacrificial system. He provides a means of atonement so that sin and impurity don't permanently separate His people from His presence.
This would have been especially significant in the ancient world, where sacrifice was already a familiar part of religious life. Israel's neighbors also brought offerings to their gods, often seeking favor, provision, or divine attention. But Israel's relationship with Yahweh begins with a very different movement.
They don't sacrifice so that God will notice them.
God notices them first.
He hears their cries in Egypt. He remembers His covenant. He comes down to deliver them.⁴ Only after rescuing Israel does He bring them to Sinai, dwell among them, and give them the sacrificial system.
He hears their cries.
He comes down.
He rescues them.⁴
That's why the order of the story matters so much.
Leviticus comes after Exodus. Rescue came first.

God didn't tell Israel, "Make all these sacrifices correctly, and then maybe I'll rescue you from Egypt."
Rescue came first. Then He brought them into covenant relationship with Himself. He came to dwell among them, and within that relationship He gave them a sacrificial system that addressed sin and impurity so they could live as His people in the presence of a holy God.⁵
Rescue came before sacrifice.
Grace came first.
Once we understand that blood represents life, the sacrificial imagery begins to look different. Blood on the altar wasn't an image of violence. It represented life given in the context of reconciliation and restored relationship with God.
The sacrificial system certainly dealt with sin and forgiveness, but its imagery also includes purification, cleansing, consecration, and restored covenant fellowship.
This isn't about a God who needs to be fed or appeased before He will come near.
This is the God who has already come near making a way for His people to remain with Him.

The Day of Atonement gives us another important piece of the picture.
There were two goats.⁶
One was sacrificed, and its blood was brought into the sanctuary as part of the ritual of atonement and purification.
But the other goat wasn't killed.
The high priest placed his hands on the living goat, confessed Israel's sins over it, and the goat was sent into the wilderness, symbolically carrying the people's sins away from the community.
Two goats. Two images.
One involves sacrificial blood used for atonement and purification.
The other carries Israel's sins away.
Keep these two goats in mind.

Then there's Passover.
Israel was enslaved in Egypt, and judgment was coming after Pharaoh repeatedly refused to let God's people go. Before the final plague, the Israelites were instructed to kill an unblemished lamb and put its blood on their doorposts.⁷
God tells them:
"The blood shall be a sign for you... And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you."⁸
Passover isn't presented as a sacrifice for Israel's sins.
The threat confronting Israel that night is death.
And God provides a way through it.
The blood marks the homes of God's people, and they are delivered through judgment, out of slavery, and toward life with God.
Passover is a story of rescue.
A story of salvation.

Then we reach the New Testament.
John the Baptist sees Jesus and declares:
"Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"⁹
Paul calls Christ "our Passover lamb,"¹⁰ and Hebrews describes Him through the imagery of sacrifice and atonement.¹¹ The New Testament draws on several lamb images from Israel's story to explain what Jesus accomplishes.
We've seen three of them:
The Passover lamb represents rescue from death and slavery. Its blood marks God's people and delivers them through death.
The sacrificial lamb represents atonement and purification. Its life is given so that sin can be dealt with and God's people can remain in covenant fellowship with God.
The lamb that carries sin away represents the removal of guilt from the community. Israel's sins are confessed over it, and it is sent into the wilderness.
Jesus fulfills all three images. He is our Passover lamb, rescuing us from death. He gives His life for our atonement and cleansing. And He bears our sin and shame away from us.
The images overlap and build on one another, giving us a fuller picture of what Jesus accomplishes through His death and resurrection. He brings about a greater Exodus, makes atonement through His blood, and bears our disgrace "outside the gate," beyond the camp.¹²
So which lamb is Jesus?
The answer is: all of them.
That's why reducing everything Jesus accomplished to a single tagline can leave us with an incomplete picture.
"Jesus paid a debt I couldn't pay" can express something true about the cross.
But it doesn't express everything.

When many Christians hear the word salvation, we immediately only think about forgiveness of sins.
But forgiveness is only part of the biblical picture.
In Exodus, Israel doesn't simply need forgiveness. They need rescue.
They need liberation from slavery.
They need deliverance from death.
They need God to bring them out.
That's salvation.
The New Testament expands that same story around Jesus. He deals with sin, but He also defeats the powers that enslave humanity and ultimately conquers death.¹³
So when we think about salvation, we need categories bigger than simply I've done bad things and need to be forgiven.
We need to think in terms of sin and death, slavery and freedom, exile and homecoming, corruption and cleansing, old creation and new creation.
Jesus forgives sin.
And He brings the dead to life.

Some people hear the Christian explanation of the cross and picture an angry Father brutally punishing His innocent Son because of us.
If that's our picture, it's understandable that someone might ask whether the cross amounts to a kind of divine child abuse.
But that picture divides the Father and Son in a way Christianity cannot.
Jesus isn't portrayed in Scripture as an unwilling victim. He says:
"No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord."¹⁴
The Father isn't the angry, violent member of the Trinity while Jesus is the loving, forgiving one.
**God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.**¹⁵
The cross is something the Triune God is doing for humanity, not something an angry Father is doing to an unwilling Son.
Jesus willingly gives His life.
And if "the life of the flesh is in the blood," then the shedding of Jesus' blood is inseparable from the giving of His life.
The cross isn't God standing at a distance from our broken world demanding violence before He will forgive.
It's God entering our brokenness to rescue us from sin and death.

But that raises another question.
Why did Jesus have to be whipped, beaten, tortured, and crucified?
Why so much violence?
It's worth asking whether every violent detail of the crucifixion is there because God required a particular quantity of suffering, or whether much of what we see at the cross reveals what human sin actually does when confronted by God.
When God enters our story, humanity kills Him.
Religious leaders conspire. An empire crucifies. A friend betrays. A crowd mocks. Soldiers beat. Human beings do what human beings have always done with power, fear, violence, and self-preservation.
And Jesus receives it all.
He doesn't return violence for violence.
He carries our sin and shame outside the city.¹⁶
The cross doesn't simply show us the seriousness of sin before God. It also shows us what sin does and how far God's self-giving love will go to rescue His creation from it.

And this brings us to something essential.
Suppose Jesus dies but never rises from the dead.
Has the problem actually been solved?
Paul's answer is no.
"If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins."¹⁷
That's remarkable.
If our entire problem were simply that someone needed to die so God could forgive us, we might expect the cross to be the end of the story.
But it isn't.
Sin and death both have to be defeated.
At the cross, Jesus deals decisively with sin. In the resurrection, death itself begins to be undone.
That's why the resurrection isn't an interesting epilogue tacked onto the gospel.
It is essential to salvation.
Jesus doesn't merely die for us.
He rises as the beginning of something new, "the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep."¹⁸
New creation has begun.

And this brings the story full circle.
In the beginning, humanity is given access to the Tree of Life. After the fall, that access is lost.¹⁹
At the end of Scripture, the Tree of Life appears again, now bringing healing to the nations in God's renewed creation.²⁰
Between those two gardens stands Jesus.
The New Testament doesn't simply call Jesus "the Tree of Life," so we shouldn't force the imagery. But the themes converge around Him in striking ways. Jesus dies on a tree.²¹ He offers eternal life. He tells His followers that whoever eats His flesh and drinks His blood has eternal life.²² And through His resurrection, the life of the age to come breaks into the present.
He is our Passover lamb.
He takes away the sin of the world.
He makes atonement.
He conquers death.
And He gives life.
Eternal life isn't merely something we receive after we die. In Jesus, the life of the age to come has already begun.²³ We can begin participating in that life now, even as we wait for the day when God makes all things new.
Jesus doesn't merely forgive sin.
He defeats the powers that enslave us, conquers death, and brings us life.

Maybe the biggest thing that needs to change is our picture of God.
God isn't an angry deity reluctantly persuaded to forgive because enough blood has finally been spilled.
This is a woefully incorrect view and understanding of Yahweh, the God of the Biblical Story.
From Exodus to the cross and resurrection, God is the One who rescues.
He hears the cries of His people.
He comes down.
He delivers.
He provides.
And ultimately, He enters the sin, chaos, violence, and death of His creation and does for us what we could never do for ourselves.
He defeats them.
The cross shows us how far God is willing to go to reclaim His creation.
And He doesn't stop at death.
He goes through it.
Then He comes out the other side victorious.
That's a much bigger story of salvation.
And that's a Jesus worth worshiping.