Blood

There are memories from childhood that stay with you forever. Examples are your first pet, first school day, first kiss, pet’s death, or loved one’s death. You may even have remembrance of a particular event, whether good or bad. You may relate them to the seasons and relive the moments each year. For me, that season was summer.

As a boy growing up in the South, things triggered summer. School was out—hooray! Summer church meetings took place. The fireflies appeared at night—first, an occasional flicker that I chased to predetermine its next signal. I gathered as many as I could into the glass jar I carried. To my dismay, I never achieved the lantern effect I expected in my room later that night.

The primary indicator that summer arrived was that it got hot! It became hot enough to drain every drop of liquid from every pore of my body. This required incessant, often futile hydration with water or any available drink, popsicles, and other frozen treats. One drank from the garden hose and did not worry. Those days were carefree, at least for kids. Helmets or pads for riding bicycles or any other wheeled objects were unheard of, as bumps, bruises, cuts, and sometimes breaks became the unfortunate “normal” parts of growing older.

One such summer day, my most memorable event occurred. My family lived in Nashville for the summer, as my parents attended school. As we drove on our usual route, we stopped at the traffic light. A man walking on the sidewalk teetered and fell straight backwards and we watched with disbelief as the back of his skull burst on the sidewalk! Blood splattered, and he shook uncontrollably. Bystanders rushed to him, one cradling his head while applying pressure with a white handkerchief, which became saturated.

Why did that man fall? Was he sick, drunk, or overheated? I did not have any medical science to even parlay a guess. A man fell and broke his head, which was abnormal. Even now, I remember the scene and the aroma of the restaurant nearby. Every time we drove past the site, being our usual route, I saw the blood-soaked sidewalk; a vivid reminder of what took place, which then triggered an instant multisensory recall.

One day, as we drove past, the scene changed. I could not see the blood stain on the sidewalk! The site was unmistakable, but the blood was not there, gone—clean! As I reflected on this in the recent past, it reminded me of the spiritual correlation of blood.

The theme of blood as a redemptive source ripples through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. The story is told in the Old Testament book of Leviticus that blood served as the symbolic means of cleansing the Israelites from their sins. In the sanctuary service, each station represented an attribute of Christ as Redeemer. This included blood transferred from the sinner’s animal sacrifice in progressive steps to the veil that shielded God’s presence after confession of sins. Each year on the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, the sanctuary became cleansed of accumulated sins after being transferred to a scapegoat. The blood no longer remained as a silent witness of one’s sins, but gone! The sinner, the guilty sinner, stood guiltless—he was clean!

Jesus Christ today offers each one of us pardon, not based on symbolic animal blood, but on the merits of His shed blood over two thousand years ago (Hebrews 9:28; I John 4:10). The Bible says that we all have sinned (Romans 3:23) and deserve to die (Romans 6:23). But if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and make us clean (1 John 1:9).