Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath

by Malcolm Smith

  But a covenant is between two parties, and each party has its representative. How shall such a covenant take place when the human side of the covenant is sinful, unfaithful, and loving their darkness rather than the light of God? There is no one on earth to represent humankind. Job cried for such a one who could explain God to him and speak for him to God.

  For He is not a man, as I am, That I may answer Him, And that we should go to court together. Nor is there any mediator between us, Who may lay his hand on us both.

  Job 9:32,33

  For such a covenant to take place, we need a human being to represent every man and woman to God. We need a second man to restart the human race, another Adam who can set right what the first Adam brought to destruction and then take humankind to the intimacy with God that he had been created to enjoy. We need one who can represent us to God saying the yes to Him that the first Adam failed to say, and in that yes lead us all to the destiny for which we were created.

  The Divine Representative

  The Gospel is the announcement that God has provided this Man in a way that no one could dream of in one’s wildest imagination. Before time, everlasting love and infinite wisdom produced the plan. God the Father in His great love for us determined to send His Son who, without ceasing to be God, would take to Himself our humanity and become flesh. The Son in love for us agreed to come and as a true human live out our human life, face our hardships and temptations, and finally offer Himself to die as and for us. He would rise from the dead, having put away sin and achieved the reconciling of the world to God, and bring about the new covenant. The Holy Spirit agreed to come and make the covenant a reality in the lives of those who believe.

  As our representative, He is the Mediator of the new covenant. The word in the Greek literally means “a go-between,”1 one who goes between two parties to bring peace. He possesses the nature and attributes of God and so represents Him to humankind; He has taken the nature of humankind (without sin) and so fully knows the needs of each one of us and can represent us to God. This is the same word that Job used— his cry for one who could lay hands on God and man is answered in Jesus.

  For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus.

  1 Timothy 2:5

  My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

  1 John 2:1

  Another word that belongs to this family of words is “intercessor,” which means to go or pass between; to act between parties with a view to reconciliation; to mediate.2 He was our intercessor and ever lives to make intercession, or to be our representative.

  The word also means “one who acts as a guarantee” so as to secure something which otherwise could not be obtained. Jesus is our guarantor of the better covenant, guaranteeing its terms for His people.

  But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, inasmuch as He is also Mediator of a better covenant, which was established on better promises.

  Hebrews 8:6

  And for this reason He is the Mediator of the new covenant, by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant, that those who are called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.

  Hebrews 9:15

  To Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel.

  Hebrews 12:24

  Jesus, the Son of God, is the covenant in Himself. The representative of God and the representative of the human race meet in this one person, Jesus Christ.

  The first and most basic thing we have to understand is that the new covenant is not made with us as individuals. It is a covenant made by God the Father with God the Son. The Father guarantees the divine side of the covenant, and the Son guarantees the human side having taken our humanity as us and for us. It becomes ours individually as we believe on the Lord Jesus and are joined to Him. The new covenant is out of our hands and beyond our ability to break; it is guaranteed by the Triune God and, therefore, is unconditional and unbreakable.

  Jesus Christ is the representative Man of the new covenant. As the Son of God, He stands in an eternal, infinite love relationship with the Father; and as the sinless Man, He is worthy to enter into covenant with Him. He makes the covenant solely as and for us. As the eternal object of the Father’s love and delight, He does not need to enter into covenant with Him; He has no need of any of the promises and blessings of the covenant. In limitless love for us, He has joined Himself to us, never to leave us. We are inseparable from Him; He achieves the covenant and earns all of its blessings not for Himself but for us. When the Spirit joins us to Him, all the promises of the covenant made to Him become ours.

  The prophet Isaiah, in a series of prophecies, spoke of Jesus as the Servant of the Lord. One of these prophecies defines Him as the covenant:

  In an acceptable time I have heard You, And in the day of salvation I have helped You; I will preserve You and give You As a covenant to the people, To restore the earth...

  Isaiah 49:8

  Jesus is the Man who is God: He is the covenant, the joining of God and Man in Him. He represents God to humankind and is the final revelation of God to man. In Old Testament days prophets brought the message of God’s self-revelation, but He is the message in flesh.

  No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.

  John 1:18 NASB

  The word “explained” literally means to exegete or inter-pret;3 Jesus is God explaining God to the human race.

  Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Christ Jesus.

  Hebrews 3:1

  He is the Apostle from God to humankind, and the Priest carrying humankind to God. He is the ultimate Man. We must not think of Him simply as an individual man who lived in Israel. He was an individual, but as the Mediator of the covenant He must be thought of as Humankind. When Pilate brought Jesus, having been cruelly beaten and mocked and adorned with a crown of thorns and a purple robe, to the religious leaders and people of Jerusalem, he said, “Behold the Man.” He spoke in Latin, and the sentence would have been “Ecce Homo.”4 The Latin lacked the definite article and, literally translated, he said, “Behold Man.” He said more than he realized, for that brutalized One who stood before him was indeed more than a man, He was Humankind. Jesus is not just a man but the Man saying the yes of unqualified obedience to the Father, and at the same time He is God achieving all the terms and promises of the covenant.

  Even as Adam was an individual but also literally contained humankind within him, so Jesus contains the New Creation in Himself; He is the New Man. He takes our place, representing us to God in covenant. He enters into and walks our history into the death where sin had put us, and in resurrection joins us to His history carrying us into union with the Father.

  Qualifications of the Representative

  For Him to be our representative in the covenant He must be infinitely more valuable than any one human, for He is taking the place of every man and woman of Adam’s race. Even one perfect man could not represent everyone, for one human life even if perfect could only take the place of one human. Only the sacrifice of God would be enough to take the place of the entire race and the fallen creation. In Him, the Lord Jesus, we have the Man who is of infinite worth to God and man; for He is God the Son, infinitely beloved of the Father. Such a Man who is God can take the place of and represent every man and woman born of Adam. He can embrace us all in His history and live and die and rise again as us, making His history ours.

  But the one who would represent us in covenant must be our relative, a human who is one of us, one whom we can call our kin. If he came as a new kind of created being, then he would start his own race of which we would have no part. This one must be fully human, a brother to us all. He could then truly rep
resent us and speak for and as all humankind in saying the yes to God and the no to Satan that the first Adam failed to say.

  But God is not a human relative. He is our Creator and we are creatures. He is pure unembodied spirit, and He is not one of us. He cannot experience our temptations, nor can he experience our death. If God is to be our representative Man, He must take to Himself our humanity and become our brother with a body in which He may experience the limitations and privations of human life. He must face the temptations that can only be experienced with a human body and human passions.

  He needed a body to take the sin, grief, and sorrow of humankind to Himself and suffer and die on our behalf. God needed tear ducts to weep over humankind that He had joined Himself to. He needed hands and feet that He might be nailed to the cross as the criminal that we were. He needed the flesh of man that He might be whipped and scourged for our healing. Above all, He needed blood, the blood that was the blood of the God Man, that it might be poured out for our sin. He was born to be the sacrificial Lamb that would take away the sin of the world.

  Psalm 40:6-8 is described in Hebrews 10:5-7 as being the voice of Jesus:

  Therefore, when He came into the world, He said: “Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, But a body You have prepared for Me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You had no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come—In the volume of the book it is written of Me—To do Your will, O God.’”

  In the womb of the Virgin Mary God became flesh, taking to Himself our humanity, His body prepared for Him by the Holy Spirit from the humanity of the Virgin.

  In order to represent us, He must be totally free from the virus of sin that Adam infected the race with, also having faced temptation in His own experience and overcome it. A representative who had his own sin to deal with could not take the place of anyone else, for he would be in the same plight that we are in.

  He experienced all of life as us and for us. He was God as a human babe in the womb of the Virgin, God in the human birth process, God as a human toddler and young boy, God as a teenager and young businessman. He fully experienced all that it meant to be a developing human being. He was tempted with the temptations unique to childhood, the temptations that only teenagers experience, and the temptations of the adult— and all without sin. He as us said the yes to God, His Father.

  Without a body, God cannot know the hunger pains that are so strong that a man will steal to have food in his stomach. He cannot know the torture of thirst that would make a man kill for a drop of water. He cannot know the exhaustion of the body that is unable to put the next foot before the other. He cannot know the fear of death, the separation from the body, that is a dark shadow over humans throughout their entire existence. He cannot know what it is like to have a body that shakes under the sobs of grief at the loss of a dear friend. God cannot be the sport of leering, evil men. He cannot know the horror of a fist smashing His face, nor can He have His body tortured until He screams with pain. He cannot know the humiliation of nakedness and the mocking laughter of perverted men. In all of this He cannot know the questions, the confusion of the persons so treated, the feelings of abandonment by friends and by God Himself.

  If God is to represent us He must know all of this, entering into the hell of human suffering and the agonizing temptations that are found there, and to come through it without sin.

  Temptation, Grief, and Sorrow

  At thirty years old, He was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness to meet with Satan. The first Adam met with Satan in a luxurious Garden with every physical need supplied. This One, the Last Adam, having been without food for forty days, met with Satan in a desolate wilderness.

  In each step of the temptation presented to Him, He said the resounding yes to His Father and no to Satan. For the first time in the history of creation, a human said no to Satan. And He did it as a human. We in Him said yes to the Father.

  He knew intense hunger in the wilderness after forty days without food. (Matthew 4:2.) He knew a craving thirst on the cross and begged for water. (John 19:28.) He sat tired and thirsty at noon beside Jacob’s well asking for a cup of water, and on another occasion was so exhausted that He slept on the deck of a fishing boat through a raging storm that threatened to drown everyone.

  He not only would bear our sin, but in the hours of suffering before He went to the cross He went to the bottom of all the hurt and suffering and anguish that sin brought to human experience. Isaiah 53:4 says, Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. The words “grief” and “sorrow” carry the idea of mental, emotional, and physical pain that has been caused by others; the agonizing pain of living in a sinful world bearing not only one’s own guilt but being hurt by the sins of others.

  He knew the anguish of betrayal by His dearest friend; He knew abandonment as His other disciples forsook Him and His closest friend denied that he knew Him. He experienced it as us and for us that He might come under our burdens in similar situations and be our strength. He was physically abused in vicious beatings and mocking. He was verbally abused in cruel, jeering words. Crucifixion included the victim being stripped and hung naked on the cross. The leering Roman soldiers laughed and shouted their bawdy jokes at the sight of the naked Man on public show. In such treatment, Jesus the Son of God knew the horror and terror that only the sexually abused know. He came under the whole spectrum of human suffering caused by sin and took it to Himself.

  The final yes of obedience to the Father was in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of His suffering and death. He was the Man facing the unspeakable horror of being nailed to a cross as a criminal, for crimes He had not committed, the wickedest death by torture ever invented by man.

  God the Father did not force Him. As Man, He freely chose to do the will of the Father and willingly take the place of each one of us. The yes did not come easily. His blood began to be shed as His sweat turned red with the blood oozing through the pores of His skin, so great was the agony of the choice. But He said the final yes:

  “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.”

  Luke 22:42

  Having submitted freely to the will of His Father, He gave Himself to those who came to arrest Him.

  Laying Down His Life

  Freedom from sin would mean that He was unaffected by the penalty of death that we are under. If He were going to die one day like the rest of us, His death on the cross would merely be premature death and not an offering for sin. The representative would have to be able to take His sinless and immortal life and freely lay it down in death.

  As the Father knows Me, even so I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep.

  “Therefore My Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This command I have received from My Father.”

  John 10:15,17,18

  The religious leaders were insistent that He be crucified. One would think they would have hired an assassin to quietly kill Him in far-off Galilee. Why have Him publicly crucified in Jerusalem at the Passover when to do so would bring the city to the verge of riot? Under the law, capital punishment was by stoning or strangling; but in some cases after the victim was dead he would be crucified, hung on a tree until sunset, declaring him cursed by God.

  If a man has committed a sin deserving of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, 23 his body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall surely bury him that day, so that you do not defile the land which the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance; for he who is hanged is accursed of God.

  Deuteronomy 21:22,23

  The leaders wanted Jesus crucified so that He would be declared the cursed of God in the eyes of the people and all His claims to being Messiah invalidated. They did not know that in so doing the curse that was upon the law-breaker was being transf
erred from us to Him and the blessing of God that He had walked in all of His life given to us.

  For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse; for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them.”

  Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

  Galatians 3:10,13,14

  He took the sin, the insolent no of humankind that had been hurled at God throughout all of time, and accepted the death that came with it.