Have you ever had a sin that you have confessed and placed under the blood, yet it still plagued your conscience? If you haven’t, I am sure you know someone who has. Though they’ve confessed the sin and placed it under the blood, they can’t shake the guilt. Why is that?
If we offer up the sin offering, the burnt offering, and the peace offering, the Lord will appear unto us in glorious manifestation! If the letter that brought death has such a glorious promise, what will be the result in our lives seeing that we have a much better covenant? Goats, calves, lambs, rams, and bullocks were offered up in the Old Covenant and the glory of the Lord appeared! The blood of Jesus Christ is far superior to the blood of animals. His blood truly cleanses sin, consecrates the saint, and makes possible communion with God.
The leper that was to be cleansed had to bring a log of oil as one of his offerings.[1] It was from this oil that the altar was sprinkled and the leper anointed.[2] The offering became the anointing. Now, if we see in this oil the Holy Spirit, this may seem confusing. How could one “offer up” the Holy Spirit? And having offered it up, how could one then anoint with it? Strange as this might seem, it is exactly what the Lord Jesus did.
After bringing us into covenant with Him by cleansing us with His blood, the Lord leads us to a life of consecration. The longer we walk with the Lord, the more He challenges us to let go of the world. Activities we enjoyed without guilt in the past now become restricted by convictions. But with each conviction followed comes a new liberty to serve the Lord in consecrated holiness.
The devil is a defiler. He tries to distract us from God by calling our identity into question. “If thou be the Son of God,” he said to Jesus in the wilderness. If we take his bait, we disobey God and our conscience becomes defiled. But he couldn’t shake our Lord. Jesus was secure in His identity. He had the word from the Father, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” With full assurance of faith, He countered each of satan’s attacks with “It is written.”
When our own conscience accuses us, worshipping God is not only difficult; it can be downright frightening. Without a means of being cleansed, we are left with only two approaches. We either cry out with Isaiah that we are unclean and undone and stand in jeopardy of death in the face of a holy God[1] or we harden our hearts and allow our conscience to be seared.[2] Our heavenly Father has given us the blood of the Son so that we need not do either. Christ died unto sin once that we might be alive unto God.
Like the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement,[1] these two birds represent one sacrifice, but since they couldn’t kill a bird and bring it back to life again, two birds had to be used. One died as a result of sin; the other was set free, representing the liberty we have when our sins have been washed away.
Staying clean can be a dirty business. When Israelites became unclean through sin, disease, or simple contact with unclean things, they would have to be cleansed before they could once again worship with the covenant community. Sometimes this meant a simple washing. But most often it meant sacrifice and blood for “almost all things are by the law purged with blood.”[1] And then, there was the most curious cleansing agent of all—the ashes of a heifer.
In both Covenants (Old and New) real blood was spilled and then verbally enjoined. After speaking all the precepts of the Law to the people, Moses sprinkled the blood of bulls and goats on the book and the people, saying, “This is the blood of the covenant which God has enjoined unto you.”[1] After living and speaking all the precepts of the New Covenant, Jesus declared, “This is my blood of the covenant.” They each gave voice to the blood.
The revelation received on Mount Sinai and its centuries of outworking that culminated in the temple worship system all pointed to the work which Jesus Christ accomplished for us on the cross. Among New Testament books and epistles, the book of Hebrews stands out as the most explicit exposition of Jesus Christ as the full antitype of the types expounded in the Law.
The Bible Philes 