Brent Pollard
A hematologist once quipped that the bone marrow is like a brick-making factory. The bricks are blood cells. He told me that my body made poor bricks.
Hence, anemia has been an issue I have dealt with for a long time. I have sometimes joked that if “the life is in the blood,” then there have been periods when I must have been partially dead.
Obviously, that is only a joke. When Moses wrote, “the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Leviticus 17.11), he was not saying that someone with a low hemoglobin count possesses only part of a life. Nor was he giving Israel an advanced lesson in modern hematology.
His point concerned sacrifice.
The Life of the Flesh Is in the Blood
God continued: “I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement” (Leviticus 17.11).
Blood represented a life surrendered.
Anyone in the ancient world could observe the connection between blood and death. An animal whose blood poured out soon ceased to breathe. Long before anyone understood hemoglobin, oxygen transport, or circulation, people understood the more basic truth that blood was intimately connected with life.
But God took that observable reality and gave it theological significance. He did not describe biology; He assigned meaning.
The blood placed upon Israel’s altar said, in effect, that a life has been given.
That explains why blood was treated with such seriousness under the Law. Israel was forbidden to consume it because “the blood is the life” (Deuteronomy 12.23). It belonged to God, who had appointed it for the altar. Hebrews compresses the arrangement into a clause: “without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9.22). Sin has never been cheap.
Sacrificial Anemia: Bulls and Goats Fell Short
Yet there was a problem.
An animal’s blood represented a life, but it could never equal the human life stained by sin. Hebrews states the limitation plainly: “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10.4).
Those sacrifices were not mistakes. God commanded them. They taught Israel holiness, guilt, substitution, death, and atonement. But they were shadows pointing beyond themselves.
A bull could die. A goat could bleed. A lamb could be offered. But none of them could provide the final answer to human sin.
They were, in a sense, sacrificially deficient.
That brings us back to anemia.
When a person is anemic, the blood is deficient in something the body needs. Perhaps too few healthy red blood cells, perhaps too little hemoglobin. Whatever the cause, the blood cannot do its work, and the person may grow weak, tired, dizzy, or short of breath.
Israel’s altar carried a comparable deficiency. Every priest stood “offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins” (Hebrews 10.11). Standing. Always standing. The tabernacle held no chair because the work was never finished.
Human blood can be deficient. The blood of Jesus Christ never is.
Blood and Water at Calvary
John brings us to Calvary in his nineteenth chapter. Because the Sabbath was approaching, the soldiers intended to hasten death by breaking the legs of the crucified men. They broke the legs of the two beside Jesus.
“But coming to Jesus, when they saw that He was already dead, they did not break His legs” (John 19.33).
Then John records the detail we cannot forget: “One of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out” (John 19.34).
Notice the order.
The soldier did not take Jesus’ life. Jesus was already dead. Earlier, He had said of His life, “No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative” (John 10.18). Rome furnished the spear. Rome did not furnish the sacrifice.
The spear demonstrated what had already happened. Jesus had truly given His life, and Calvary fulfilled the principle God had taught Israel through centuries of sacrifice.
The blood represented life. And this time, the life offered was not that of a bull, goat, or lamb. It was the life of the Son of God.
Jesus anticipated this when He took the cup and said, “This is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26.28). Peter described Christians as redeemed “with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1.19). Weigh the adjective. Precious. Paul wrote that in Him “we have redemption through His blood” (Ephesians 1.7). Hebrews says Christ entered the holy place “through His own blood” and obtained “eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9.12).
The Blood of Christ Never Runs Low
Moses’ sacrifices continued to be offered because their work was never complete. Jesus did not need to repeat His sacrifice. His offering was sufficient, and He “sat down at the right hand of God” (Hebrews 10.12).
Once was enough.
Yet here is the wonderful paradox: the sacrifice happened once, but its cleansing power continues. John writes: “If we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1.7).
John writes to Christians—people who have already come to Christ. Yet they still need the cleansing His blood provides.
Christ’s blood does not become less effective with the passing of time. It does not weaken after cleansing a certain number of sins. It does not become depleted because millions have appealed to its power. It does not cleanse yesterday’s sins only to prove insufficient for today’s.
There is no shortage in the supply God has provided. Stop rationing your repentance as though the fountain might run dry.
Walking in the Light
John does not teach that Christians may deliberately live in darkness while presuming upon that sacrifice. The promise belongs to those who “walk in the Light.” Neither does it mean sinless perfection; John immediately acknowledges that Christians still sin. “If we confess our sins,” he writes, God “is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1.9).
So walk. Confess quickly. Forgive the brother whose debt costs far less than yours.
The Christian lives, therefore, not in terror that Christ’s sacrifice may someday prove insufficient, but in grateful dependence upon the blood that never loses its sufficiency.
My bone marrow may occasionally make poor bricks. My blood may sometimes fail to carry what my body needs as efficiently as it should. I can joke that there have been times when, if life is in the blood, I must have been only partially alive.
But there is nothing deficient about the blood upon which my spiritual life depends.
The blood of bulls and goats could point toward forgiveness but could never finally provide it. The blood of Jesus does what theirs could not. It cleanses. It redeems. It reconciles.
And for those who continue walking in the light, it continues to cleanse “from all sin.”
Human blood may become anemic. The blood of Christ never will.
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