Nothing But The Blood Of Jesus

Nothing but the Blood of Jesus

You know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And the ransom he paid was not mere gold or silver. It was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God.

1 Peter 1:18-19

Every once in a while we’ll be watching the nightly news in our home and hear about a tragedy that compels our attention. It could be something on the global scale, like a massive hurricane, or on a more localized level, such as a house fire. Whatever the sad story, we will sometimes ponder out loud together what we would do in such a circumstance.

That was the case some years ago when we heard the news of a terrible terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Do you remember the story? On November 26, 2008, a gang stormed the Taj Mahal hotel, shooting people randomly. In the aftermath, two hundred people were dead.

A reporter on the scene interviewed a number of guests who were at the hotel that evening, but one interview stood out. The guest described how he and his friends were eating dinner when they were startled to hear gunshots. Someone grabbed him and pulled him under the table. The assassins came striding through the restaurant, shooting at will, until everyone had been killed. Or so they thought. Miraculously, this man survived. The interviewer asked the guest how he had lived when everyone else at his table had been killed. The man replied, “I suppose because I was covered in someone else’s blood and they took me for dead.”

In his book Has Christianity Failed You?, author Ravi Zacharias uses this story to illustrate the sufficiency of Christ’s death for our sin. It’s a powerful illustration. One that every believer should ponder. Even as husband and wife, consider God’s gift through Jesus Christ to each of you.

We recently read these relevant words from nineteenth-century British preacher Charles Spurgeon:

Remember, sinner, it is not thy hold of Christ that saves thee—it is Christ; it is not thy joy in Christ that saves thee—it is Christ; it is not even faith in Christ, though that is the instrument—it is Christ’s blood and merits; therefore, look not to thy hope, but to Christ, the source of thy hope; look not to thy faith, but to Christ, the author and finisher of thy faith; and if thou doest that, ten thousand devils cannot throw thee down.

Spurgeon would have appreciated the modern-day metaphor of Mumbai. It illustrates the unfathomable gift of God’s gift to us. Because Christ paid the penalty for our sin—because we are covered in the blood of his sacrifice—we may have eternal life

This is faith: a renouncing of everything we are apt to call our own and relying wholly upon the blood, righteousness, and intercession of Jesus.

—John Newton