God created man in His image (Gen 1:26). Made in the image of God, man is able to have a personal relationship with God (Gen 3:8-9). God also made man a corporeal being. However, the human being is not just a physical creature consisting of flesh and blood but also spiritual one possessing a living soul that bears the image of God (Gen 2:7).

After the Fall, man became totally depraved and corrupted by sin (Rom 3:23). Man stands condemned before God and is unable to save himself (Rom 3:10-12). As such, if man is to be saved, he needs a sinless and perfect Substitute to bear the penalty of his sin. Only God is sinless  and  perfect.  However, God cannot represent man unless He becomes man Himself.

Can God become man? The answer is yes. It is not strange for God to take on human nature since man in the first place was made in His image. The image of God in man makes the incarnation of the Son of God possible. The Lord Jesus Christ “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men” (Phil 2:6-7). “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb 2:14).

Hence, when the 2^nd Person of the Holy Trinity took on humanity at the incarnation, He became fully God and fully Man in one Person. The Westminster Confession of Faith VIII:2 affirms this truth: “The Son of God, the second person in the Trinity, being very and eternal God, of one substance, and equal with the Father, did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon him man’s nature, with all the essential properties and common infirmities thereof, yet without sin; being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost in the womb of the virgin Mary, of her substance. So that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion. Which person is very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and man.”

God had to put on humanity so that He could taste death for every man and shed His precious blood to make atonement for sin. “And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission” (Heb 9:22). God certainly has no blood, does not suffer, cannot be handled, cannot be seen, but Christ is true God as well as true man, and as both God and Man in one Person He suffered, bled and died for us. Although it was His humanity that suffered and bled and died, yet because He was also deity, all His deeds were ultimately deeds of the Theanthropos (God/Man). We must neither separate nor confuse the two natures of Christ.

The Blood of God

On the basis of the inseparable union of the divine and human natures of Christ in one person, theologians of days gone by found it most valid to describe the blood of Christ as divine. Here are some of their statements:

Lewis Sperry Chafer wrote, “He being the God-man could shed the ‘precious blood’ which, because of the unity of His being, was in a very actual sense the blood of God”; A W Pink, “He being both God and man in one Person, His life was the life of God (1 John 3:16), His righteousness was the righteousness of God (Phil 3:9), His blood was the blood of God (Acts 20:28).” John Bunyan, “the Blood of Christ, his own Blood … is also the Blood of God”; John Newton, “But the blood of Messiah, in whom were united the perfections of the divine nature and the real properties of humanity, and which the apostle therefore styles the blood of God”; John Owen, “there he puts forth his creative power and transforms them into the likeness of Christ himself, clothes them with his righteousness, washes them in the divine blood, which was shed on Calvary”; John Gill, “which being the blood not only of a pure and innocent man, but of one that is truly and properly God as well as man”; Matthew Henry, “the blood was his as man, yet so close is the union between the divine and human nature that it is here called the blood of God”; Matthew Poole, “the blood of Christ, called truly the blood of God, there being in Christ two natures in one person, and a communion of the properties of each nature.”

The blood of Christ was thus no ordinary blood. It was blood most extraordinary because it was not only human but also divine. Only the precious blood of the God/Man is powerful to cleanse us of all sins. “Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot:” (1 Pet 1:18- 19).

The blood of Christ is therefore unique. It is the blood of Him who is both God and Man. There is none like Jesus Christ. That is why His blood is so special and has power to save.

MacArthur’s Error

Now, John MacArthur of Grace Community Church and The Master’s Seminary denies that our salvation was due to the blood of Christ. He avers, “Jesus was 100% human. He had human blood and He shed human blood. There was nothing in the chemicals of His blood that could save. … It was His death that was efficacious … not His blood. … It is not His bleeding that saved me, but His dying.”

But what does the Bible say? The Bible makes it very clear that Jesus had to bleed in order to save for “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Heb 9:22). MacArthur has clarified that he does not deny that Jesus had to bleed in order to save us from our sins. It must also be stressed that there is no salvation either if Jesus did not die. Jesus not only had to bleed, He had to die as well. That is because “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 3:23). To be our Sin-Bearer, Jesus had to die. Both the bleeding and the dying were necessary. Romans 5:9-10 makes this clear, “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.”

Now, although MacArthur believes in the shedding of blood for remission, he does not believe that the blood of Christ itself has any power to save. He says, “We are not saved by some mystical heavenly application of Jesus’ literal blood … It is not the actual liquid that cleanses us from sins”.

But this is not what the Bible teaches. 1 John 1:7 says, “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” Revelation 1:5 likewise says, “And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood”.

To MacArthur, blood is simply another word for death. He calls “blood” a metonymy. A metonymy is a figure of speech which substitutes one word for another. In other words, when you read “blood”, think “death.” MacArthur said, “The shedding of blood has nothing to do with bleeding … it simply means death … violent sacrificial death.”

MacArthur’s take on the blood of Christ is no different from the liberal Today’s English Version (TEV, aka Good News Bible) which took the “blood” out of the blood of Christ and replaced it with “death” in no less than 10 places in the Bible (Acts 20:28, Rom 3:25, 5:9, Eph 1:7, 2:13, Col 1:14, 20, 1 Pet 1:19, Rev 1:5, 5:9).

We reject MacArthur’s view that the blood of Christ is to be read figuratively. We believe the blood of Christ should be read and understood literally. The Bible’s plain sense makes good sense. This has always been the golden rule of  biblical interpretation. The blood of Christ is not a symbol; it is His actual, literal blood that flowed through His veins, and was spilled on the cross.

Besides MacArthur’s erroneous view of the blood of Christ, we also reject the following unbiblical views on the blood: (1) The Roman Catholic view that every drop of Christ’s blood is now contained in a chalice in heaven and offered by the Virgin Mother to God the Father to be used by her to dispense grace to every soul who will ask her for it; and (2) the Charismatic view that the blood of Christ can be used by believers to bind the devil and cast out demons, or to drive out sickness and disease.

Mystery of the Blood

The question remains: How can the blood of Christ shed 2000 years ago be effective to cleanse a person from sin today? There is really no scientific explanation for this. All we can say is that when a sinner comes to Christ and prays, “Lord Jesus, I believe you died on the cross and shed your precious blood for my sins. You truly died, were buried and on the third day raised from the dead for me. Please save me now from all my sins”, God sprinkles the blood of Christ on him and he is cleansed and saved. His sins are all forgiven, past, present and future, and he becomes a child of God. That is a divine miracle that happens to a man when he is born again. In some divinely mysterious way, the blood that was shed on Calvary so many years ago not only atoned for sin that day, but keeps on atoning for sin throughout time. The blood of Christ is always available and applicable to any and every sinner who is willing to put his trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and in the power of His blood to save. JK