Leviticus (16) Why Blood?

When I spill blood from a cut on my hand or face, it stains the garment it drips on. The stain is very hard to get out. Therefore, I have always been puzzled by the way blood is used to cleanse things in the Old Testament, particularly in Leviticus, which I have studied in detail in an attempt to get an understanding of how cleansing with blood works. For impurities that pollute the tabernacle, the remedy is cleansing with blood. We need to understand how people and things become impure, and why blood has this effect.

The key to understanding why blood cleanses is recognising the human situation. When Adam and Eve sinned and trusted the deceiver, they placed themselves under his authority. Because God had given them authority over everything on earth, this was a huge disaster, because it gave the spiritual powers of evil authority over the earth. This meant that God could not rescue humans from their situation without getting their permission.

The spiritual powers of evil demanded the lives of all humans in their power. This was clever, because if they could wipe humans out, they would have free rein on earth. They demanded the shedding of blood as a ransom payment for setting humans free. As the ones with ownership authority over humans, they had the right to decide what the ransom payment should be. It seems that they accepted the animal blood offered in the Tabernacle as a down payment for the blood of his Son that God had agreed to eventually give them.

The blood poured beside the bronze altar was a partial ransom payment to the spiritual powers of evil, so the tabernacle offering set the people free from the immediate consequences of their sins. However, the people could not be completely transformed until the Holy Spirit was poured out, so during Old Testament times, they kept falling back into sin. This is why the tabernacle offering had to be repeated again and again.

The people urgently needed the full and final ransom that Jesus would pay when he died on the cross. His death and the blood that he shed satisfied the demands of the spiritual powers of evil, so they had to give up their authority over humans and over the earth. His death was a terrible defeat for them.

Whereas waiting and washing were enough to deal with minor impurities, spiritual contamination of the tabernacle is much more serious because the spiritual powers of evil could do terrible harm if they were not controlled. Prior to the cross, when they were defeated by Jesus, the best way to restrain them was by offerings in the tabernacle. The tabernacle could be cleansed by the sprinkling of blood. The spiritual powers of evil could be appeased by the blood that was poured out beside the bronze altar at the entrance to the tabernacle courtyard when they brought their offerings to the priests. The Leviticus offerings are based on the reality that “life is in the blood” (Lev 17:11).

• Blood is physical. It operates in the physical realm.
• Life is spiritual. We cannot see it.

Blood combines the physical and the spiritual. This means that it operates in both the physical and the spiritual realms. It is physical, but contains life, which is spiritual. It functions in both realms.

When God created Adam, he breathed life into his nostrils. God is spirit, so his breath was spiritual. This spiritual life went into Adam’s lungs and was absorbed into his blood. The life of God, which is spiritual, was absorbed into his blood through his lungs. His blood then carried life that came from God. Animal life is different, because God did not breathe in them when he created them.

Blood that has been offered in obedience to God carries good life, which pushes into the spiritual realms and squeezes out the unclean spiritual residue that has been deposited on an object or place by the spiritual powers of evil. When blood was sprinkled on the covenant box and the horns of the golden altar, the life in the blood seeped into the spiritual world in the place where the tabernacle linked to it. This removed the unclean residue that the spiritual powers of evil have put in place and closes any authority they think they have gained.

A Decontamination Offering was often made after the birth of a child (Lev 12:6-8), persistent menstrual bleeding (Lev 15:25,30), sometimes for a house that was contaminated (Lev 14:48-53) or a person with malignant skin disease (Lev 14:21-22,30-31). This blood removed the unclean residue the spiritual powers of evil had left behind in the tabernacle by getting access through the impurity on the person’s body.

In these situations, the person may not always have been attacked by an evil spirit, but the people in Old Testament times did not have the gift of discernment to know. So it was best to make the offering for cleansing with blood in case they had. The Torah rules were based on a conservative strategy of playing on the safe side.

We don’t need to sprinkle blood on objects and places these days, because we sit with Jesus at God’s right hand, far above all spiritual authority, so we can command them to leave a place or thing, and we can speak life into it to push out the unclean spiritual residue they have left. Hebrews 9:22 says that all things were cleansed by blood.