What Can Wash Away My Sin?
Our view of the Jesus’ death—of the blood of Jesus—is colored by what makes sense to us, by our experiences, by what we understand to be possible. And the reality is that COVID-19 has opened up many terrible possibilities for all of us. But these terrible realities are reminding us that Jesus blood cleanses us from all that ails us.
Lockdown
Right now I can’t go up and see my mom. Her retirement home is on lockdown.
I can’t personally deliver any of her daily living supplies or necessities. All I can do is get into her storage unit and pull out some things and have someone else bring them up to her.
And just doing that requires that I fill out a questionnaire about where I’ve travelled, whether I have cough, and if I’ve been in contact with a confirmed case of COVID-19. And after I signed my name they took my temperature—just to make sure.
Only then do I gain access to the first floor storage unit, two floors from my mom.
Only authorized personnel can go where the residents are. Where my mom is. Only those with permission, who had prepared to be there, who had a specific purpose.
And I don’t begrudge them for these measures. I support and celebrate the diligence of this retirement home.
Lives are at stake. Not just my mom’s life—who already has cancer and an impacted immune system. But for the sake of the lives of everyone there. It is the right—the loving—thing to do.
Dropped Inside the Bible
These kinds of COVID-19 required actions, from lockdown, social distancing, proper coughing technique, and hand-washing help us to see something essential about the biblical context.
When the greeter at the grocery store sprays and wipes down the shopping cart before giving it to me, we have entered the biblical worldview.
Right now we are being trained, as a society, into codes of cleansing.
The Bible, in the Old and New Testament, is filled with concern about what is clean and unclean.
What is clean brings life, allows access to life, access to God’s presence.
What is unclean partakes of death and blocks access to God.
Seeing Terrible Possibilities
I write knowing that many of us have already lost loved ones, or we know people who have, and that many others are serving the sick and vulnerable within an overwhelmed healthcare system.
COVID-19 is a social crisis effecting every part of our lives, changing all our relationships, moving silently behind the scenes.
COVID-19 is working just like sin does.
COVID-19 isn’t just an example of social and individual effects of sin. It is part of the social and individual effects of sin in the world.
And the solution to curbing the spread of COVID-19 is the same as the one for sin: we need to be cleansed.
When it comes to our faith, our understanding of the salvation, the shocking reality of COVID-19 is immersing us in a misunderstood aspect of the atonement.
COVID-19 helps us see the cleansing nature of Jesus’ blood—the reality that Jesus’ blood brings LIFE (this post goes into greater detail about life in the blood).
Access to God (to Life) Requires Cleansing
The Temple was God’s residence. And the temple was the place where the people were “cleansed” from their sins, and not just the people, but the land, and the temple itself.
Just like my mom’s retirement home, and like doctors and nurses in hospitals, only authorized personnel—the priests—could enter God’s temple for specific purposes. And they could only enter if they were clean—clean from the infection of sin and death.
The priests served God and Israel by cleaning the temple, the land, and the people.
Sin, among other things, made a person unclean—like having a viral infection. And the sin of the people infected the land. And the sin-infection of the people and the land—if left unchecked—could ultimately overwhelm the cleansing efficacy of the Temple.
Cleansing Through The Blood
The book of Leviticus describes how this works, what the sacrifices were for.
As Jacob Milgrom and many other have argued, the book of Leviticus reveals sacrifices as the process through which God cleanses Israel from its sin, purifies it from its deadly infection. The entire sacrificial system was a means for maintaining the “cleanness” of Israel, and therefore to keep it holy as God is holy. Unlike the “unclean” Gentiles, God cleanses Israel and draws near to her in and through the temple, maintained by the cleansing sacrifices.
The sacrifices in Leviticus do not reveal God punishing sin by demanding death. It just isn’t in the text. The opposite is the case. God is purifying Israel by providing life.
Even the Day of Atonement, the linchpin of many “death dealing” atonement theories, is specifically about cleansing. Here is the summary statement for the Day of Atonement: “For on that day the priest shall make atonement for you to cleanse you [Israel], so that you may be clean from all your sins before the Lord” (Lev. 16:30).
Leviticus 17:11 makes it clear that the offering of blood is for the purposes of restoring life. It says “the life of a creature is in the blood, and I [God] have given it to you [Israel] to make atonement for yourselves on the altar.”
As we now know, blood is the provider of life through the transmission of oxygen and nutrients. And blood is the protector of life by creating and delivering antibodies that detect and destroy diseases, infections, viruses and bacteria.
Sacrificial blood, therefore, has the same life-providing and life-protecting function—summed up in the idea of cleansing. The sacrifices were the means by which God keeps his people clean from the infection of sin and death.
Sacrificial blood is God’s protection from sin, not just God’s punishment for sin.
The Cleansing Blood of Jesus
The book of Hebrews affirms the cleansing nature of blood when it says, “The law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Heb. 9:22).
But for the author of of Hebrews, Jesus’ blood is far superior: “He [Jesus] did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!” (Heb. 9:12-14).
And as 1 John teaches, “…the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin…If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:7, 9).
The Cure for Sin
Like it always has been in the Bible, but so often forgotten, sin is not just personal problem needing God’s punishment. It is social problem needing God’s protection. Sin isn’t just an individual reality requiring condemnation. It is public reality requiring cleansing and a cure.
Sin, like COVID-19, is a social matter, a public contagion, that infects us whether we are aware of it or not. Sin, like COVID-19, requires strict cleansing practices in order to protect the vulnerable and the weak. Sin, like COVID-19, requires a cure.
But Sin, unlike COVID-19, already has a cure, the universal antibody of Jesus’ blood, distributed through his body, the church.
As we travel the road toward Good Friday and Easter Sunday, let us receive again—and celebrate—the cleansing life of Jesus, his very body and blood.