As I’ve started re-reading “The Normal Christian Life,” one line has stood out to me in the opening chapter with which I now take issue. In the book, he states, “the Blood is for God,” and takes a very Reformationist stance towards total depravity, condemnation, and the need for Christ’s blood sacrifice, or any blood sacrifice for that matter, in order for God to be able to forgive us. The problem is that God Himself has said otherwise in several places in, not the New Testament, but the Old Testament itself.
In the Psalms, David writes, “For You do not desire sacrifice or I would give it; a burnt offering you would not accept. My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit; a contrite, humbled heart, O God, You will not scorn.” (51:18-19, NABRE) And in the preceding psalm he writes, “Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of he-goats? Offer praise as your sacrifice to God; fulfill your vows to the Most High.”
And in Isaiah 1:11-17, God says explicitly, “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts? Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” (KJV)
Furthermore, in Ezekiel 18 He also says explicitly, “But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him: in his righteousness that he hath done he shall live. Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord God: and not that he should return from his ways, and live? But when the righteous turneth away from his righteousness, and committeth iniquity, and doeth according to all the abominations that the wicked man doeth, shall he live? All his righteousness that he hath done shall not be mentioned: in his trespass that he hath trespassed, and in his sin that he hath sinned, in them shall he die. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” (21-24, KJV)
Here the example of the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15:11-24 should also be brought up. The father, who is meant to represent God in the parable, didn’t require restitution or a blood sacrifice in order to forgive his son. He was just waiting for his son to come to his senses and come home.
So then, why did God commission the sacrifices in the first place? Simply put, He didn’t. People were already sacrificing in 1500 B.C.E. and for millennia prior to that. Sacrifices had a number of meanings in ancient cultures, and in ancient Middle Eastern cultures in particular. One of the more relevant meanings is that sacrificing an animal was the way one might sign a contract. That is, it signified that what happened to the animal would also happen to the person who broke his side of the agreement. Sacrifices were like slavery or polygamy in that God did not commission or initiate them in the Mosaic Law, He regulated already existing cultural practices with specific limitations and purposes with a keen eye towards protecting the vulnerable.
In the case of animal sacrifices, God regulated them towards specific purposes, in specific ways, and in specific places. Much is made of the sacrifices for sins with regards to blood being necessary to forgive, but a careful reading of Leviticus, and the actual instructions for these sacrifices reveal two things. The first is that the “sin sacrifices” were for unintentional violations and mistakes which, when discovered, would make the person feel guilty. In other words, these sacrifices were commissioned to alleviate the guilt the person might feel for making their mistake. The second thing Leviticus is clear on is that there is no sacrifice available for intentional wrongdoing. Instead, if someone intentionally committed murder, the consequence was death. If someone intentionally committed adultery, the consequence was death. The same is true of disrespecting one’s parents. Theft was to be dealt with by repayment with 300% interest. But the point is that it was never written into the Mosaic sacrificial system that if someone intentionally violated someone else that they could offer a blood sacrifice and it would be forgiven. There was always a consequence, and this is the context of the forgiveness which God talks about in Ezekiel 18, where He says that it is the soul that sins that will die, literally speaking of the consequence of intentional wrongdoing. As the author of Hebrews also notes, when someone sins intentionally, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins.
Why did He then commission the sin sacrifices? He did this not for His own sake, but for the sake of our faulty human consciences. As far as anyone knows, and as far as any studies on the issue have confirmed, human beings are the only animal on the planet that feels guilt. This is because we are also the only animal on the planet that differentiates between “right” actions and behaviors and “wrong” actions and behaviors. In short, we feel guilty when we do something that we believe to be wrong in some way. We experience what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance” where a person’s behavior does not align with their belief system. Guilt is painful, and it can drive a person into further self-destructive behaviors as that person seeks to cope with it leading to genuine mental and psychological disorders as the mind tries to defend itself against what it perceives as a fatal error or contradiction (in the programming sense). Guilt can frequently only be alleviated by forgiveness, both from the person violated and the person who did the violating themselves. This being said, the faulty human conscience, depending on the presumed severity of the violation, tends to question that forgiveness even when verbally given and restitution has been made.
The sacrifices for unintentional wrongdoing were commissioned in order to deal with that psychological guilt. As a sacrifice, culturally speaking, it was a contract literally written in blood that forgiveness would be granted by God who accepted the slaughtered animal as restitution. Did God actually need the slaughtered animal to forgive? Of course not. He understands human beings are malfunctioning and make mistakes, and He doesn’t actually hold it against them. But this was about restoring the human being’s offended conscience and preventing psychological decline, not about God’s need for blood. The sacrifices provided the same psychological benefit that Confession and absolution with a priest, and being told verbally that one is forgiven and absolved, does in modern religious practice.
To say that God needed Jesus Christ to be tortured, crucified, and die on the cross in order to be able to forgive human beings of their violations and wrongdoing actually runs contrary to what God Himself says in the Old Testament about what He requires in order for forgiveness to be granted, and that is a change of mind, a turning away from one’s harmful behavior, and coming to one’s senses about it. In reality, like the father in the parable, he’s just waiting for his child to “wake up” and come home. This being said, if someone does actually believes Jesus and seeks to follow His Way, is this not a change of mind about his errors and wrongdoing? Is this not a turning away from one’s harmful behaviors? Is this not coming to one’s senses about it? Choosing to become His disciple and learning to imitate Him and follow His Way is all of these things, so of course someone who actually puts their trust in Jesus Christ to operate within them and through them is going to experience that forgiveness. The disciples of Jesus Christ would have experienced that forgiveness long before His death, burial, and resurrection, and would have experienced it without it, because choosing to follow the Way is all of these things.
God did not and does not need blood to forgive. He doesn’t need guarantees to hold Him to it. His “yes” means “yes,” and if He says He will do something, then He will do it. Period. It is only our malfunctioning minds as human beings that need these things in order to believe something which He says He will do. And so God obliges out of His mercy, and His compassion for our state of psychological error.
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