When I See the Blood

Recently, my Bible reading plan led me to the book of Exodus, which records the account of the Israelites being rescued from Egyptian bondage by the hand of God through ten incredible plagues as He executed judgments “against all the gods of Egypt.” (Exodus 12:12)

I don’t know how many times I have read through the story of the exodus, and yet this time a single phrase jumped off the page and pierced my heart.

The context is during the tenth and final plague when God instructs the Israelites to sacrifice an unblemished lamb at twilight. They were then to take some of the blood and put it on the two doorpost and lintel of their front door. This was to mark their homes so that those inside would be spared from God’s judgment He was executing throughout all of Egypt.

And the Lord said, “…when I see the blood I will pass over you.”

When I see the blood I will pass over you.

And then it hit me – everything that I am physically, emotionally, and spiritually, is riding on the truth of that one phrase: “when I see the blood I will pass over you.” If that is not true, then my life is completely worthless and all would be for nothing.

What’s important to note is that God who is the omniscient Creator of the universe who knows the heart and mind of every person did not actually need to see the blood on the lintels and doorposts in order to keep things straight in His mind as to who was His and who wasn’t. He knew the heart of every person with the blood smeared on the doorpost as well as the heart of every person who did not have it. So the blood served as a reminder, not for God but for those inside the house. It was to show them that it was out of their hands; their salvation depended wholly on God alone. The Lord told them, “I am about to release a judgment on the land of Egypt so fierce and terrifying that there will be a great cry throughout the land such as there has not been before and such as shall never be again. And this judgment will be so encompassing that it will strike every single household in Egypt. But I have made a way of escape for you. Just do what I tell you and trust Me.” This is the theme throughout redemptive history that would point not just to a symbol or a shadow of things to come, but the reality of Christ being the source of salvation for all who trust in God alone.

Picture in your mind an Israelite family by faith sacrificing the lamb, by faith preparing the unleavened bread, by faith spreading the blood on the doorposts, and by faith eating the Passover meal. Their hope was beyond themselves; it rested in the One who said “when I see the blood I will pass over you.”

Martin Luther wrote in his classic Bondage of the Will:

God has surely promised His grace to the humbled: that is, to those who mourn over and despair of themselves. But a man cannot be thoroughly humbled till he realizes that his salvation is utterly beyond his own powers, counsels, efforts, will and works, and depends absolutely on the will, counsel, pleasure and work of Another – God alone. As long as a man is persuaded that he can make even the smallest contribution to his salvation, he remains self-confident and does not utterly despair of himself, and so is not humbled before God. Such a man plans out for himself – or at least hopes and longs for – a position, an occasion, a work, which shall bring him final salvation, but which will not. Conversely, the man who is out of doubt that his destiny depends entirely on the will of God, despairs entirely of himself, chooses nothing for himself, but waits for God to work in him; and such a man is very near to grace for his salvation.

The Feast of Passover is also known as the Feast of Unleavened Bread. God commanded them to remove all of the leaven from their homes and to bake their bread without leaven because they would not have time for their bread to rise before they were rescued. So with that, it is much easier to understand Paul’s words to the Corinthians: “Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (1 Corinthians 5:7-8)

The bread and the cup of communion before you are to serve as a reminder that Christ is our Passover lamb and we, by faith, consume all that He is, and by faith we place our hope firmly and exclusively on the Person and work of Jesus Christ so that when our heavenly Father sees the blood, He will pass over us.

Incurvatus In Se

I have been alive now for 42 years; 22 of those years as a husband, 20 as a father, and going on 10 years as a pastor. Through all these years of life experience and observation – especially of myself – it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the essence of sin is self-centeredness. Martin Luther used the Latin term incurvatus in se which means “to be curved inward on oneself” throughout his lectures on Romans to describe the essence of the sinful human nature. So, regardless of whether it is pride or self-loathing, the focus remains inward toward oneself.

This self-centeredness is not only acknowledged but is set as the goal of secular humanist psychology. From the idea of self-actualization introduced by Goldstein and popularized by Maslow to Nietzsche’s Übermensch, this psychology preaches – and make no mistake, it is preaching – that the greatest goal is to look inside oneself to find one’s meaning and to achieve one’s greatest potential.

We, of course, should expect nothing less from secular humanist psychology, because if the basic belief is that there is nothing beyond us, then it stands to reason that there is nowhere to look except inward. The problem is that this doctrine of self as the ultimate goal has crept into the teachings of those who would call themselves Christians. Thus we see the rise of the so-called prosperity gospel and we hear sermon after sermon of pop psychology self-improvement with a little Jesus mixed in for good measure.

The truth remains, however, that we are, as Augustine put it, a massa peccati – a “mess of sin.” We are spiritually bankrupt by sin. It is therefore utterly crucial to understand Romans 3:23 in its context. If we are careless with the Scriptures, it is easy to read “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” to mean that we “fall short” or “miss the mark” because we are immoral or bad people. Therefore, the proper remedy is to make bad people good; to clean them up. And tragically most people, including many who would call themselves Christian, have completely missed the gospel by believing that its aim is moral reform.

C.S. Lewis wrote,

“We must not suppose that if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world.”

The aim of the gospel is not moral reformation – to make bad people good. That is a false gospel, which is just another manifestation of incurvatus in se because the focus still remains inward toward ourselves. No; Christ Jesus did not come first to make bad people good. He came to raise the spiritually dead to life.

When Paul says we have fallen short of God’s glory, he means that we have been created to revel in the glory of God, to make much of Him and glorify Him. But sin has caused us to turn away from God’s glory and to seek our own. It makes us live our lives incurvatus in se. As John Piper wrote, “We have turned our back to the breathtaking beauty of God and fallen in love with our shadow.”

The gospel is that Christ came to turn our deadly focus from ourselves to the live-giving focus on the glory of God. Paul summed up the gospel when he wrote that “[Christ] died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.” (2 Corinthians 5:15)

In other words, Christ died to save us from ourselves so that we would no longer fall short of our created purpose to glorify God.

As we take communion together, let us remember that through Christ’s spilled blood and broken body, we are justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; a justification that is not by moralism but by faith apart from our works to the glory of God. (Romans 3:21-28)