5.5.26 – Cleansing Sacred Spaces, Part 2: It's All About the Blood

In our last study, I began to introduce a very expanded view of blood: cleansing the sacred space.

The accumulated effect of humanity's limitations—we could say the limited life of our death-related impurities—presses against those holy objects. The sacrifice they make after being cleansed purges that accumulated effect and clears God's side of the equation. What does the person get out of the deal? Who is it for? What is the deal? Inquiring minds want to know :-)

Namely, they are not considered fully restored until the relationship with God in sacred space has been restored. They are out of fellowship. They are out of the community. After the offering, atonement is made. Atonement allows them to re-enter sacred space, restoring their relationship and purity. They are now in a position to hear—welcome back.

That is why in Leviticus 14, when the chatat is brought, it is followed by a burnt offering. Remember what I told you about the burnt offering in the Tamid offering? This wonderful aroma invites God's presence. So you bring this offering, cleanse the space, and then offer a burnt offering to invite His presence. It is a tangible, visible indication of your invitation to the God of gods—an aroma that draws Him near again. The person is back.

And it is important to also understand that the Israelites cannot do this purging on their own. They do not have access to the sacred objects that need to be cleansed. They cannot walk into the holy place and sprinkle, dab, or smear their cup of blood, or do anything with it. They cannot put blood on the altar's horns. They need someone to do that for them. That is why the grammar of the word Kippur (atonement) is something that is done for them. They are not doing it. The priest carries it in on their behalf.

Let me give an example for dog lovers (and the rest :-)): imagine a public park with signs posted everywhere. Dog owners are responsible for cleaning up after their dogs. The excrement is the contamination in the park. It is defiling the shared public space. The owner has the responsibility to clean it up; that belongs to the owner. It is their dog. It is their mess. When they remove it, they are released from their liability. They are not removing it from themselves; they are removing it from the public space, even though that removal is what releases them. Now imagine someone walks away from one of these very not-nice things that have been deposited there. They left it sitting there. A witness saw the excrement, picked it up, disposed of it, and reported the negligence to the authorities. The contamination is literally no longer defiling the public space—it is gone—but the owner is still liable. They face a fine for cleaning up the mess and bearing the penalty for neglecting the mess.

These are two distinct things, but the $64,000 question is: what is it that actually purges all the contamination from the sanctuary? What is the active agent in the system? Where does the restoration of life come from? And this brings us to Leviticus 17:11. Where does the restoration of life come from? One word: blood (dam).

"For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement."
(Lev. 17:11)

How does this important process happen? By reason of what? The life. Not because of the death. The blood makes atonement because it carries life. Now, think about what we have already established multiple times. Sacred space is concentrated life—God's sanctuary, the dwelling place of undiminished, undying life. And the impurities that corrode and contaminate our lives? Corpse contamination. Disease that makes the living resemble the dead. The boundary between life and death. Even the grave. Moral impurities—the ones that penetrate deepest—they are still fundamentally about the destruction of life: murder, degradation of human beings through sexual immorality, the worship of dead things instead of a living God. Blood is life's detergent deployed against the forces of death.

Every time it is applied to the altar, to the horns, or to the sacred furniture, the life described in Leviticus 17:11 is used to counteract death, making atonement for you so that your soul might be fed in sacred space by being restored in relationship. Life overcomes the accumulated contamination. To put it plainly, the blood scrubs the death from the sacred spaces. Now, there is no mention—and I briefly discussed this last week, but it is important to note—of the killing. There is no mention of the animal's death or slaughter; there is no mention that releasing the blood is necessary. The offerer kills it, and then we move immediately into what happens next. The atoning power has nothing to do with dying. It is in what the blood carries: the sacred space life.

And you remember that the blood is the vehicle of the victim's life. Death, while achieving nothing other than procuring the blood, has no particular atoning significance in and of itself. Now that is incredibly bold if we overlay that later thought into the "New Testament." Death is necessary to procure the blood, but it has no particular atoning significance in and of itself. That is the death—a bloodless killing would accomplish nothing. Stop and think about that again :-)

And we said a strangled animal cannot do this (Acts 15:20, 29; 21:25). This is why the entire system is not built around death. It is built around the maintenance of life: the daily burnt offering and the covenant blood. It bonds two parties. The ordination blood transforms a common man into a guy who can walk into sacred space in God's presence. And the purifying blood removes death and contamination from everything so that life can remain.

Every aspect of what the blood does points in the same direction: toward life, toward presence, toward God coming and remaining with His people, despite our own human issues. This is also important to realize about the Torah and death. The Torah does not describe the sacrifice's death as a form of punishment. No, the animal is not chosen to suffer on behalf of the offerer. There is no theology of pain in the sacrificial system. No suggestion that there must be torment, that extra suffering makes the offering more effective, or that God's wrath is being absorbed by the creature on the altar. The opposite is true.

The foundation of proper slaughter in the Torah requires that the animal be killed swiftly and cleanly. It is all about what happens after that. If sacrifice were ultimately and fundamentally about substitutionary punishment, you would expect them to dwell on death, to describe that, to describe the suffering, to emphasize the transfer of guilt at the moment of slaughter. But the Torah does none of that. It moves past death into the blood—the source of life—because the system was never about death paying for sin. It is all about the blood.

Happy 31st day of counting the Omer!

Shalom,
Alan