Blood, Thicker Than Water and Sufficient

 It's fairly hard for me to write about the same subject again and again. I think the author of Hebrews can teach me a lot about that. He writes over and over again about what Jesus had done. I suspect he does it to really push that point home. I think he is afraid that his readers don't really understand what Jesus had done for them. Maybe he was afraid that their traditions were stopping the message from really hitting home.

Maybe something like the traditions with which we grew up, or something else prevents us from clearly hearing the message. So, let's look again at what Jesus had done for us, as described once again by the author of Hebrews.

13 If that animal blood and the other rituals of purification were effective in cleaning up certain matters of our religion and behavior, 14think how much more the blood of Christ cleans up our whole lives, inside and out.

I'm reminded of something from my childhood. When we were children, there were no such things as water restrictions. I loved playing with water. I put the garden hose in an elevated part of the garden and turned it on, allowing a trickle of water to come through. Then I built rivers as the water ran down the slope. Eventually, I got to the flat part where I built walls all along the trickle of water to guide it along.

But when I turned off the tap, the water flowing and my man-made rivers dried up. I first had to turn on the tap to get my river flowing and for it to go further.

God keeps our rivers flowing. He uses His Godly weather systems to make water evaporate over the sea. With His breath, He blows the clouds over the land, and at the right time, rain falls over the land so that the rivers can flow to the sea, competing the cycle. The system is perfect and works automatically.

People can't make it rain like that. Human attempts to do this on a smaller scale, for example to irrigate farmlands, are not automatic or sustainable. It's very expensive to move water around - I know! I thought I was clever to plant pumpkins on the open fields on the farm. The irrigation aged me five years in one season.

Then you realise how little we can do. Our efforts are simply too small. Like the efforts to get rid of the debt we owe for our sins. The priests sacrificing animal blood was just a short-term solution and it had to be repeated again and again.

When God intervenes, His plan is big enough so that He does not have to repeat it like the human priests did. And the only way that He could do this, was to provide the blood through Jesus as sacrifice for people's sin. Jesus' blood was so much thicker than water. Much thicker than animal blood.

This blood is different. It is Godly. It is special. It is sufficient.