Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
After all these ages, common questions people ask are, “Why does God demand blood sacrifices in order to be nice to people and save them? Is He bloodthirsty? For 4000 years He demanded untold numbers of innocent animals to be sacrificed in a bloody manner in order to forgive the sins of human beings. Now it appears that He demands the blood of His own beloved Son in order to forgive. Why this apparent obsession with blood?” multitudes ask.
We can reply with the time-honored traditional answer, “Without shedding of blood there is no remission [of sin]” (Heb. 9:22). But why? This 6000-year-old answer appears on the surface to support the fear-driven old covenant ideas of a mysterious, vengeful God who delights in cruelty, punishing people, perpetuating an ever-burning hell fire wherewith to torture the people He doesn’t like. We know that this is a distortion of truth, but how can we make the truth appealing in such a way that it changes hearts?
(1) The first animal sacrifice was slain in the Garden of Eden not to appease an angry God, but by a tearful God Himself to provide clothing for a fearfully cold first human couple, and to cover their lethal shame. (Their leaf skirts were hopelessly inadequate.)
(2) Human hearts became so hard, so selfish that there was no way in the universe to melt them with love (agape) except to let man act out to the full his resentful hatred of God (that’s what sin is!) by murdering, torturing God’s own Son, their Savior. The legalistic lawyer’s arguments are valid, “the law demands it”; hold them. But a reason of love transcends them all.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: January 14, 2005.
Copyright © 2013 by "Dial Daily Bread."
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