http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15932394/by-gods-grace-through-gods-power-for-gods-glory

Audio Transcript

Well, if you’ve read and studied the Gospels, you notice that in the life of Christ there’s not a lot of detail about temple practices — in particular, animal sacrifices. We know that Jesus, as a small child, was presented at the temple with an offering of turtledoves or pigeons (that’s told to us in Luke 2:24). This was the offering of a poor mother, in lieu of a lamb sacrifice (as permitted in Leviticus 12:8). But this is a pretty rare connection between Christ’s life and temple sacrifices. In fact, later in his ministry, Jesus will forgive sin all by himself, bypassing the whole Jewish sacrificial system altogether. And that leads to a question from Karen, a listener to the podcast who wants to know why.

Here’s her email: “Hello, Pastor John, my name is Karen, and I live in Germany. Thank you for this podcast. My question concerns the act of forgiveness mentioned in the Bible. I have learned that without blood there is no forgiveness. Hence the sacrifices in the Old Testament and the dying of Jesus in the New Testament. I understand that. But what I don’t understand is the period between the two. When Jesus walked on earth, he often addressed people by simply telling them that their sins were forgiven. He didn’t prescribe an offering in the temple. And he had not shed his own blood yet. So how was that possible, under the assumption that blood is still needed for forgiveness?”

This may sound like a question with limited application or a question of interest to only a tiny number of Christians. But I want to show that it touches on the issue that is at the heart of Christianity. Every Christian needs to be aware of it for our own stability and courage and joy. So, hang on.

Forgiveness Requires Blood

The question starts with a biblical assumption from Hebrews 9:22, which says, “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” That’s what it says. So God instituted in the Old Testament the way, the plan, that there would be animal sacrifices, and that sinners who looked to God and, by faith, identified with this killed animal would be forgiven for their sins. The death of the animal would be counted, so to speak, as the punishment for their sin.

For example, in Leviticus 4:15, if the people as a whole have sinned, it says, “The elders of the congregation shall lay their hands on the head of the bull before the Lord, and the bull shall be killed before the Lord.” Then verse 20 says, “The priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven.” So that’s where Karen’s question starts. God regards sin as so evil and so destructive that in order to set things right there must be a death, a blood-shedding, in order for sins not to be counted — that is, to be forgiven.

“God regards sin as so evil and so destructive that in order to set things right there must be a death.”

Then the second premise of Karen’s question is that Christ has in fact shed his own blood for sinners so that, if we are united to Christ by faith, our sins are forgiven for his sake. His blood-shedding counts for us.

He became “a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). He bore our condemnation in his flesh (Romans 8:3). This is the center and the glory of the gospel. So Paul says in Romans 5:9, “We have now been justified by his blood,” or in Ephesians 1:7, “In him we have redemption through his blood,” or in Ephesians 2:13, “You who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

So Karen’s question is, When Jesus walked the earth, he often addressed people by telling them that their sins are forgiven, but (she says) there was no offering in the temple, and Jesus had not yet died — how’s that possible under the assumption that blood is needed in order to have the forgiveness of God from all the sins that we do or that take place?

Animal Blood Was Not Enough

Now let’s clarify the question, first of all. Whether or not there were sacrifices being offered in the temple, Jesus pronounced forgiveness on his own authority, without any reference to those sacrifices. For example, in Mark 2:5–7, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” And the scribes say, “Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

So Karen wonders about this relationship of forgiveness that Jesus pronounced to the God-appointed shedding of blood, when Jesus hasn’t yet shed his blood and he isn’t pointing people to the blood-shedding of the animals. And here’s one of the keys that unlocks this puzzle for Karen. In Hebrews 10:4 and 11, the writer says, “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. . . . Every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.”

So now we get the startling revelation that all those animal sacrifices actually in themselves accomplished nothing. Oh, we’re not between two really effective seasons here — Old Testament, New Testament. The forgiveness that God pronounced on faithful worshipers in the Old Testament was not ultimately owing to animal sacrifices.

The true saints in the Old Testament, they grasped this — they did, at some level. For example, David said in Psalm 51:16–17, “You will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrary heart, O God, you will not despise.” And God said in Hosea 6:6, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” And Jesus quoted that verse, Hosea 6:6, twice to show how badly some of the Jewish leaders were misreading the Old Testament (in Matthew 9:13 and 12:7).

Every Sacrifice a Pointer

So now we can see that Karen’s question about forgiveness during Jesus’s lifetime really does apply to the entire history of Israel. The animal sacrifices were not achieving the forgiveness of sins — not ever. So what were they doing?

The answer is, they were pointing to Jesus — God’s final, once-for-all, decisive sacrifice for sins. They were foreshadowing the blood-shedding of Christ. So it says in Hebrews 9:12, “[Christ] entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.” So the reason all blood-shedding has ceased — animal blood-shedding has ceased; Christ’s blood-shedding has ceased once for all — is that Christ’s sacrifice was so complete, so glorious, so full, so decisive that it secured an eternal redemption.

“Christ’s sacrifice was so complete, so glorious, so full, so decisive that it secured an eternal redemption.”

If you have Christ, you have eternal forgiveness for all sins. Now I think Karen knows this, but what she may have overlooked (I don’t know) is that not only does the sacrifice of Christ extend forward as an eternal redemption but also backward in history as a redemption for all those saints who put their faith in God for his forgiveness — through the foreshadowing of the cross in the animal sacrifices. The cross worked effectively backward and forward.

And that’s what Paul makes clear in Romans 3:25. He says, “God put [Christ] forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.” In other words, the reason God was righteous to pass over — that is, forgive — the sins of all Old Testament saints, and the sins that Jesus forgave during his lifetime, was that God was looking to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. So just as our sins two thousand years after Christ are covered by the blood of Christ, so Abraham’s sins were covered by the cross of Christ two thousand years before Christ existed. And so it was with all the saints in between.

Glorious Divine Achievement

So, Karen’s question is not of limited significance. It takes us to the very center of the gospel — indeed, the center of reality. It shows us that all forgiveness, and all the benefits that flow from forgiveness through all time — as far back as you can go, as far forward as you can go, all of it — all of that forgiveness is based on those few hours when the Son of God suffered and bled and died for sinners.

If we grasp how central, how profound, how glorious was that divine moment, that divine achievement, our lives will be more stable, more courageous and more joyful.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to this new week on the podcast on this Monday. Well, 2023 ended with two huge declarations that got a lot of attention online and led to a pile of emails for you, Pastor John. First, and most talked about, the pope said Roman Catholic priests can now “bless” (so-called) same-sex couples, which is a move that confused and angered many Catholics and non-Catholics alike, as you would expect.

According to the Vatican’s statement, this blessing is “for couples in irregular situations and for couples of the same sex, the form of which should not be fixed ritually by ecclesial authorities to avoid producing confusion with the blessing proper to the Sacrament of Marriage.” This so-called divine blessing is for “those who — recognizing themselves to be destitute and in need of [God’s] help — do not claim a legitimation of their own status, but who beg that all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit.” The pope is trying very hard to thread a needle here.

More bluntly, two weeks after this, Reuters reported that Burundi president Évariste Ndayishimiye called on his citizens to respond in a different way. “If you want to attract a curse to the country, accept homosexuality,” he told journalists. Then he said, “I even think that these people, if we find them in Burundi, it is better to lead them to a stadium and stone them. And that cannot be a sin.” This was a statement made to his predominantly Christian nation, perhaps drawing from a text like Leviticus 20:13. So, Pastor John, how would you respond to the pope and the president of Burundi?

Well, let me preface my thought with the fact that I’ve tried very hard to understand the pope and that needle that you said he’s trying to thread. I can’t quite make sense out of it. It just seems contradictory. But let me take it for what I do see.

I think the New Testament directs us away from the kind of blessing that the pope is endorsing and directs us away from the mob rule or the official capital punishment that the president of Burundi is endorsing. In other words, the New Testament is pushing us away from both of those steps.

And I think the New Testament also gives Christians another way to disapprove and another way to love those that we think are walking in behaviors that are ultimately and eternally destructive. So, let’s start with the Old Testament and the threat of the president of Burundi to stone those who practice homosexuality.

Excommunicate, Not Execute

Do the laws of capital punishment in the Old Testament — for things like adultery, dishonoring parents, having sex between two men or two women — define the way that the Christian church is to deal with those sins? And the answer is clearly no.

We’ve had several podcasts in which we try to unpack how the Old and the New Testament relate to each other. And I say that without denying the authority of the Old Testament — with its validity for Israel at the time and its ongoing authority for Christians, with an awareness of how the coming of Jesus the Messiah has changed things.

“When you curse others, you want them destroyed. When you bless others, you want them saved.”

When the New Testament deals with immorality like adultery or incest, which would have been a capital crime under the old covenant, the way it handles that sin — for example, in 1 Corinthians 5 — is to excommunicate the sinner from the church rather than execute the sinner. In the church, the new people of God (which is not a political or ethnic or civil body), excommunication has replaced capital punishment in cases like this.

Blessing Sin?

When we turn to the instructions of the pope that faithful Catholic priests may bless same-sex unions, we need to be very careful how we are understanding the nature of blessing.

I’ve tried, like I said, to understand the wording of the pope’s proposal, and I have listened to a Catholic priest defend the pope’s proposal, and I cannot escape the impression that even though the effort is being made not to consecrate the so-called “irregular situations” as marriage, nevertheless, the very effort to provide an official way for there to be a blessing on a kind of same-sex togetherness, which the Bible warns is evil and eternally destructive, inevitably communicates that the pope does not hold that biblical view, at least not with the same ultimate seriousness that the New Testament does.

And the reason I say that we need to be careful how we understand the nature of blessing is that the New Testament does tell us several times, very clearly,

“Bless those who curse you” (Luke 6:28).
“Bless those who persecute you” (Romans 12:14).
“Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called” (1 Peter 3:9).
“When reviled, we bless” (1 Corinthians 4:12).

Now, none of those uses of the word bless is intended to signify an official or unofficial gathering in which you bring people together who in their hearts are celebrating sin. That’s not what blessing means. Whether it’s two men having sex or people celebrating fraud or celebrating witchcraft or celebrating slander or celebrating devil worship, whatever the sin is, the biblical commands to bless our adversaries, our opponents, our enemies are not a command to hold a service in which you extend a hand of blessing over those who are celebrating behaviors that lead to their own destruction and which God calls an abomination.

That gathering will not communicate the biblical truth of heartbreak and danger and warning. If you made those dangers and those warnings part of the service of blessing, we know the so-called couple would reject it. They would reject it. If the warning of hell were made part of the service of blessing, if the sin were called an abomination in the service of blessing, the couple would not have the service.

Longing for Another’s Good

The meaning of blessing in Luke 6:28, Romans 12:14, and the others is that we seek the temporal and everlasting good of our enemies — or those we disagree with; they don’t have to be just enemies, but just anybody we disagree with. That’s what blessing means. We seek the temporal and everlasting good of our adversaries, both with words and with deeds, even if it costs us our lives. We are not eager for the destruction of anyone. Blessing is the opposite of cursing. When you curse others, you want them destroyed. When you bless others, you want them saved.

We want our words and our actions to count for their good. It’s not a blessing to give the impression of treating lightly something that God treats dreadfully. It feels kind — it’s not kind. It feels tender, but tenderness is not love where clarity and firmness are needed to save life.

The form the blessing takes in Romans 12:20 is this: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” In other words, the aim is not affirmation but contrition and repentance and salvation. We want them to be our brothers or our sisters in the presence of God forever, forgiven and transformed into the likeness of Christ.

Final Warning

And before I go, I think I should conclude by warning Roman Catholics that they need to be especially concerned about this pope, Pope Francis, because this is not the first time he has gone astray. He has espoused unbiblical thinking in other ways, not only on this matter.

I watched him in a video counsel a child — about a six- or eight-year-old child — who had lost his father in death. The child said that his father was an atheist — never went to church, didn’t believe in God — and then he asked where he was. And the pope said that his father was in heaven. The pope said that that was the case.

“It’s not a blessing to give the impression of treating lightly something that God treats dreadfully.”

Now, that’s very contrary to what the Roman Catholic Church and all other Christian churches have taught. I doubt that this pope believes anyone will suffer eternally in hell. I could be wrong about that, but if so, then the warnings of 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 — that those who practice homosexuality will not enter the kingdom of God — lose their ultimate seriousness for him. That’s the direction our culture has moved for decades, and that’s where the pope appears to be moving as well.

So, by all means, let us bless those who curse us — but not extend a blessing over a same-sex union.