IT'S ALL ABOUT THE BLOOD

Since the slaying of Eden's animal to provide the covering for the garden-leavers' sins, blood has always been the currency of redemption.

Through all millennia, rivers of blood have streamed from the veins of sacrificed animals onto temple altars. The pattern, indeed, the need for the blood, the awareness to the power of the blood is embedded in the human heart deeper than conscious understanding.

Knowing the blood comes from a much deeper place than the mind.

From Adam to Noah, children and children's children saw the blood's atoning role.

The devil hates the blood.
In hellish burlesque he mocks the blood. Not content with just the blood of animals, he demands the crimson price from men's own veins--a just price for sinner men to pay had it not already been paid by Calvary's blood of God's own Son.
On Calvary's cross the most horrific, yet holiest of all deeds climaxed God's plan for redemption sinners' souls.

Truly, the devil knew that Calvary defeated him. And just as truly he shakes his fist at God and says, "Yes, you win, but I'll make you pay every drop of the blood-price."

And, again throughout the millennia, a river of blood--human blood--has soaked the earth.
I have stood at the places of the blood.
At Rome's coliseum I heard history's echoes of the crowd's roar of delight as gladiators and beasts sundered believer's bodies.
I've walked the Waterloo sod where more than 70,000 died in one battle. Europe's cobblestoned and forested battle sites still bear the scars bloody World Wars.
I've dodged the traffic on London's streets and alleys where Hitler's bombs once killed thousands.
It seemed I could still hear the screams and smell the smoke at Breendonk and Dachau--part of Hitler's "final solution" slaughtering 6 million Jews.
I can still smell the rancid, sour-sweet smell of Corregedor's Malinta Tunnel in the Philippines. I can feel the cold marble of the grave marker crosses in the American War cemetery in Manila. And the same stone crosses that remember slain American comrades in Luxembourg.
I remember the grasp of tiny hands, the sobbing pleas of the children on Cambodia's killing fields where haters spilled the blood of 2 million people.
And then there are my days in Vietnam--both before and after the war's bloody end. The blood of 3 million Vietnamese and 58 thousand Americans soaked that tiny land. They tell me that here at home three times as many American war veterans have poured out their own blood in suicide.
Then I walked through the children's ward of the Viet Duc hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam where medical professionals didn't even have aspirin to ease a fever.
My emotions still swirl as I recall standing at the killing tree in the Congo jungle where believers, black and white, were butchered. Or standing on the banks of the river where they threw to the crocodiles the body of a boyhood hero of mine--martyred missionary Tucker.
Most of the time my mind lives in Zimbabwe and Swaziland and Mozambique where about half of the 3000 AIDS orphans we take care of are HIV themselves. Once you hug them you'll never forget their fevers--or their eyes.
At the Incas' altars of human sacrifice at Machu Picchu high in the Peruvian Andes I dealt with my own attempts as a young man to defend my atheism. I claimed that the Christian Eucharist was but a grizzly rite borrowed from the ancients. Peace came to my soul when I realized that it was the other way around--the pagan's blood rites and cannibalism are in fact the devil's device to warp and twist that "blood-consciousness" that was passed down from Adam and Noah.
In a tiny village on a Haitian mountainside, I saw the starkest display of the devil's hatred of the blood.
It was a cross about a foot high.
On it was a crucified rat.
The rat's blood-soaked the wood.
The devil's voodoo priest had mocked God's Son's blood in worship of the devil.

Christianity has become uncomfortable with the blood and espouses a bloodless redemption, a feel-good religion. The sanctuary used to mean the place where the blood is. Without the blood it is but a haven for whitewashed minds and unrepented hearts.

For a world awash with violent blood of pain and evil there remains that healing flow of Calvary's crimson stream--a stream of the forgiving, redeeming, healing blood of Jesus.
It's an unending flow "drawn from Immanuel's veins and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains."
Appreciate again with me the old songs of the church that so often tell about the blood. Bathe your mind and soul in their sweet refrains.
Old and wonderful words are even now sweeping over my soul.
"Oh, precious is the flow,
That makes me white as snow.
No other fount I know,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus!"

It's all about the blood.