Written By Ken

The attempt to save mankind with blood has gone on since the beginning of time. It is against all odds that man continues to not only live, but to thrive in this world, surviving pestilence, plagues, and wars. If that is not enough, evil rulers have wiped out millions of their own people all for power, and diseases of all sorts have made the average age of man just fifty short years this last millennium. Now, here we are again in 2020 looking for someone or something to step in and save us from this virus. Often, the solution is found in the blood whereby antibodies of those who have been bitten or by vaccines that create antibodies, we become immune to the disease.

Little did Adam and Eve realize when their sin plunged mankind into death and disease that God was promising salvation in the blood. The wily Serpent of Old had convinced Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit and Adam followed, plunging mankind into the fall. God promised that if they ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, “You will surely die.”

As God gave curses to the man, woman, and Serpent, He also gave the promise to the Serpent that becomes the hope for mankind: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). This cryptic promise becomes the salvation for mankind as the seed of woman would become the Savior of the World, the Messiah, the Lamb of God.

Fast forward many world tragedies later, including a flood that wiped out all but one family, we find the Children of Israel are enslaved for hundreds of years by the Egyptians. God sends a savior in Moses who delivers them from the hand of the Pharaoh, but not until Egypt suffers some of the greatest pestilences ever of frogs, boils, gnats, flies, hail, locusts, and darkness. Nothing moved the heart of Pharaoh and he would not let the Jews go. Finally, there came the last plague. The one where the first born in each home was to be slain by the Angel of Death unless the family took an unblemished lamb and killed it, painting its blood on the doorposts.

Sure enough, just as God promised, the first born in Egyptian homes were all killed, including Pharaoh’s own son, and the Jews were spared the misery by the blood of the lamb. Pharaoh finally let them go and they took off in a hurry for the desert on their way to the land that God had promised to Abraham 400 years earlier.

Now with all this misery, one would think that God would have just walked the Jews into the promised land in a couple of weeks, but it took little time before His Children began to murmur and complain. Remember that the flesh we are born with longs for pleasurable things, and the Children of Israel began to long for being back in their homes, back in slavery.

God sent vipers throughout the camp whose sting was terribly painful and many died. Moses begged God for mercy on his people and God told Moses to make a brazen serpent and put it on a pole, where everyone who looked upon the serpent would be saved. Remember that Serpent of Old, and that bite he inflicted on mankind in the garden deceiving Eve and plunging mankind into all sorts of troubles and trying times? Well, now we find that looking upon the serpent held high on a pole became the antidote for the sting of the viper.

The question begs to be asked, what in His-Story is God doing to bring a bunch of slaves out of Egypt to wander around a desert heading to an unknown land? This was a pretty special group of people, the offspring of Abraham, the line from which the Promised One, the Messiah, was to come; heirs to the promises God had given Father Abraham. God was taking His people into the promised land and the nation of Israel was born.

The old nation Israel stands as God’s experiment in working with mankind on the basis of law. God gives laws and expects that the Jews will follow them. After all, His people had seen Him do miracle after miracle for them in their rescue from slavery, and now in the promised land that was flowing with milk and honey, surely mankind would obey His laws!

“And I will be there God and they will be my people” is a theme repeated regularly in the Old Testament. In many ways, the experiment was successful with man in his fleshly willpower choosing God and His ways and reaping God’s many promised blessings. But just as the flesh failed Adam and Eve, so too the flesh failed the Jews, but this time God provides the ultimate way to healing and forgiveness through the sacrifice of a perfect Lamb of God.

Now into the fullness of time, the Promised One appears, born of a virgin, just as was promised by the prophets. Jesus walks this earth for thirty years and then has a three-year ministry loaded with wisdom and miraculous power. The Son of God had come to earth, the One promised in the garden and throughout history to be the Savior of all mankind. But as you know, the Serpent of Old did exactly what God promised and bruised the heel of the seed of woman by putting Jesus on the cross.

Just on the day that Passover was to be celebrated, the Messiah, the perfect Lamb of God, was sacrificed upon a cross for the salvation of mankind. Years and years of promises and thousands of bulls, rams, and lambs slain upon the altar of the temple, now coming true in the sacrifice of the Son of God on a cross to take away the sins of the whole world. Now, anyone who looks upon the cross of Christ, as the Jews looked upon the brazen serpent on a pole, and believes in their heart that Jesus is Lord, shall be saved according to the great mercies and grace of the promises of God.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16-18).

We need this Savior desperately today. Not just because one more plague or virus has struck mankind, but because this world is filled with sin. Hatred, war, violence, husband and wife fighting and divorcing, children messed up by alcohol, drugs and porn, sexual immorality, hedonism, and pride, are all symptoms of the underlying disease of sin and the selfishness of the flesh that plagues us all. Even when God Himself ruled Israel and gave Prophets and Priests, His own chosen people proved incapable of following after God longer than but a few moments or years at a time. Mankind desperately needed a permanent antidote to sin.

God needed a far better solution to the problem of sin, and that was to allow His Son to be stung by each and every sin imaginable. As Jesus hung on that cross with his lungs collapsing around him as if he was deathly ill like with Covid-19, God placed the sins of the world on His body. And why? So that when we believe in the Lamb of God, we are placed into Christ. Christ becomes our new identity and His blood, the blood of the body that was stung over and over again by sin, now contains the antidote for our own sins.

The story is told of the blood researcher who raised deadly snakes at his home in the Mohave desert to milk the snakes for their venom to create an antidote to their stings. One day he got a call from his wife that his child had somehow been bit by a most deadly snake and was being rushed to the closest hospital. He headed straight to the hospital and upon entering, the doctor met him to tell him there was no hope. The closest antivenom was in Los Angeles and would never arrive in time. “Your son sill surely die.”

“No, No! He won’t die!” cried out the father.

The doctor reach over and placed his arm on the father’s shoulder to comfort him and one again said, “Yes, there is no real hope without the serum.”

“You don’t understand said the father, I have been bitten by almost every snake and lived! Let me give him my blood.”

Within minutes the Dad was strapped up to his son and his blood coursing through his little boy’s veins. The boy lived and was saved by the stings of the vipers that could not kill his Dad.

This is you and me, and to whoever chooses this day to look upon Jesus and receive His blood to course through our veins. Jesus has been stung by every sin imaginable, so that no sin can kill us anymore. We can still get stung and be pained over our sin, but in Christ Jesus, we are promised we will never die. We will soon shed this dead flesh that is incapable of pleasing God on its own, but who we are, the real soul and mind inside of your body and mine, will live forever with God or without Him. That is our choice to accept the antidote or not.

It’s a little ironic that as we battle the Corona virus, the greatest hope seems to be in acquiring the antibodies of the blood of those who survived the sting of the disease, just as our salvation from sin and for eternity is found in the blood of Jesus. God has provided the antidote and we receive it by His grace through faith; it’s His gift to mankind. But the only way to get it is to look upon Jesus on the cross and believe that Jesus is the Son of God who died for your sins, was raised from the dead on the third day, and now sits at the right hand of God, ready to return any day now to redeem the whole world.

At this time of Easter, we pray that if you do not know the Lord Jesus as your Lord and Savior that you would bend your knees and pray that God would put you into Christ. That you would believe in Jesus and His saving grace and that the promise of eternal death given to mankind in the garden would Pass Over you just as death passed over those who placed the blood of the Lamb on their doorposts.

Choose today to paint the blood of Christ on the doorposts of your heart so that when you stand before God on the day of judgment, God will see clearly that you belong to Him, sharing the blood of Christ. If you choose to do so for the first time, please let us know and grab a hold of a strong Christian you know to share the good news with them. Tell them you are saved and now are a Child of God, clean and forgiven by the blood of Christ Jesus, the true Passover Lamb.

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
2 Corinthians 5:21