The Blood Transfusion for the Sin Virus

“To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood...”—Revelation 1:5 (NKJV)

  What is the value of the human soul? The value of the soul brought Jesus Christ, the crowned Prince of heaven, to leave the splendor of glory for a stinking manger in Bethlehem filled with the stench of livestock, to be born as the Son of Mary. The Seed of Mary punished the prince, the powers, and the principalities of darkness permanently. The Lion of the Tribe of Judah crushed the roaring lion. You can’t win against a lion when your head is in its mouth. Jesus lost His life at Calvary, but He didn’t lose the fight. Jesus, from outside of history, entered into history and would have bankrupted heaven for you, the value of your soul. He came to seek and save which was lost! For the value of your soul, Jesus Christ did not come here with a pretty face and a pretty message, but with a salvation message.

  The value of your soul drove Jesus to Gethsemane, with the enemies of the cross lurking in the shadows. Jesus kneeled beneath the olive tree in the shadows of Gethsemane, and His foot was on the doorsill of the house of death. The drops of sweat and blood flooded down His sacred brow, and the chariots of sin were placed upon His shoulders.

  Jesus was having severe anxiety and panic attacks, and He had not slept for days, knowing the cup of His Father’s wrath had to be filled. His stress was so intense that He began to sweat blood. This is a rare condition known as hematidrosis, which occurs when capillaries that feed into the sweat glands brutally explode due to extreme stress and anguish (Luke 22:44). Jesus slammed His face to the ground and prayed, “Father, let this cup pass from Me! Not as I will but Your will!” Be grateful that God doesn’t answer every prayer because if the Father had answered this prayer, 100 percent of humanity would be going to hell.

   With hundreds of flaming torches that could be seen through the olive trees, five hundred hardened-battle-ready Roman soldiers and one traitor, Judas, the devil’s advocate, came from the Antonia fortress and invaded the garden to arrest one Jewish Rabbi praying with twelve sleeping disciples. The apostles were sleeping in Jesus’ most crucial hour of His ministry. Are we sleeping now? Is the church sleeping and slumbering now in the most crucial hour in the Age of Grace?

  Back to the severity in Gethsemane, the Roman soldiers said, “We seek Jesus of Nazareth!” So humble and so meek, Jesus replied, “I am He!” Standing next to the portrait of Absolute Power, the armed guards and shielded soldiers fell to the ground, trembling in catastrophic, catatonic fear, powerless and pitiful. Why? Because no one takes Jesus’ life, He lays down His life. Immediately, an apostolic slugfest broke out, and the tribe of twelve began to fight to prevent the Son of God from being apprehended and arrested.

  Peter took a sword and slashed the ear off of Malchus, a Jew, the servant of Caiaphas. Why? According to the Law of Moses, if you were a Jew with a physical defect, you could not serve in the temple. Peter ended his entire career. Then, Jesus miraculously healed his ear and restored his career. Jesus said, “Peter, lay down your sword! Live by the sword, die by the sword!” The message is that people are never won over to Christ by violence but by the demonstration of love.

  The value of your soul drove the Lamb to Pilate’s politically correct whipping post and stripped naked. They tied the Creator’s hands together, which healed the sick, healed the blind, and atomized the spots of leprosy, then brutally beat Him to a bloody, pulsating pulp and leaving a scourging portrait of pain on His back. The relentless whipping tore into His flesh and tissue from His buttocks up to His shoulders, exposing muscles and even His spine. “I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting” (Isaiah 50:6, NIV).

  They whipped Him thirty-nine times because forty was considered a death sentence. With thirty-nine lashes, listen to the bone, steel, and leather Roman cat of nine tails sizzle through the silence of the air. Each time the merciless steel lashes the Redeemer’s back, it rips into the layer of the epidermis and grabs the subcutaneous tissue off of His back and bone. The blood begins to run down His back into a dozen streams, making an audible voice, “By His stripes, I am healed,” and then the blood drips onto the sacred concrete of the sacred city, like water dripping from a leaking faucet.

  The value of your soul allowed Herod’s men-of-war to rip off His seamless robe and mock Him with a purple robe. Artists depict Jesus on the cross in a loincloth; the Bible depicts Jesus on the cross naked. His only wardrobe was the faucet of blood on His skin. “Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment” (Psalm 22:16–18, NIV). While the crude crucifixion was an execution, it was also a humiliation by making the condemned as vulnerable as possible.

  In merciless mockery and unmatched cruelty, the soldiers began to beat, punch, and slap the mouth that would breathe life into a handful of dirt, and it would become a living soul. Then they spit on Him and crowned Him with thorns of humiliation, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” The woven thorns were about two inches long and as sharp as steel-stained ice picks. His hair began to be matted with blood, and strands began to fall out due to the severe trauma. The thorns reached down into His skull, and parts of His scalp were exposed. Beyond any recognition, His face was infused with coagulating blood and the spittle of Rome. “…his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness…” (Isaiah 52:14, NIV).

  The Roman flogging was child’s play compared to what was about to happen next, the crucifixion. Go back to Pilate’s court, where Jesus was on trial for His life with cold-heartedness like men dragging an ox to be slaughtered; they dragged Jesus Christ with sacrilegious hands from the place of prayer to the place of pain. After visiting Pilate several times, Jesus was sentenced to death by crucifixion. The crowd could vote to set either Jesus or Barabbas free. The crowd chose Barabbas because they loved the lie and voted to kill Jesus because they hated the truth, just like today.

  From Gethsemane to Calvary, the value of your soul compelled Jesus Christ to carry the rugged cross on His blood-soaked open back through the cobblestone streets of Jerusalem to the crest of Calvary. From Pilate’s Palace to Calvary was the distance longer than six football fields. From Pilate’s post to the cross post, people would collapse because of the trauma and loss of blood. Jesus was believed to have collapsed while carrying the cross and possibly multiple times because Simon of Cyrene was compelled by the Romans, the devil’s demonic army, to carry the cross of Christ.

  The daughters of Zion were watching from the sidelines, crying and screaming. Jesus said, “Daughters, don’t weep for Me. Weep for yourselves and your children!” Jesus could see through the lens of time, and He knew in about three decades, the Romans would surround Jerusalem and murder millions. He knew that under Titus, thousands of Jews would be captured and hauled off to Rome to construct the Colosseum, the amusement park of Jewish and Christian butchery, and would birth the Diaspora.

  Jesus could see the Crusades, where the Jews would be slaughtered by the Crusaders who carried a sword in one hand and a cross in the other hand, the army of the Roman Catholic Church. Before the Crusaders would leave Europe, they would confess their sins before they would commit the sin of Jewish torture and antisemitism. The Roman Catholic mob that abused the Jews was no different than the Islamic fascists: convert or die, the same ideology. The Crusaders, the Roman Catholic army, would set synagogues on fire, chanting, “Christ we adore thee!”

  The value of your soul apprehended the Lamb of God on the cross. His arms were stretched six to seven inches beyond their normal length, causing His shoulders to be dislocated and His bones to be pulled out of the joints. The soldiers drove spiked nails through the metacarpals and hit the median nerve in His wrists, causing the nerves to explode. The created drove nails through the hands of the Creator that sprinkled the stars like diamonds on Creation’s morning.

  The unbearable pain from the spikes went up into His arms, into His brain, and down into His spine. This piercing, flaming pain is like hitting the funny bone but thousands of times worse. In His feet, they drove spiked nails through the metatarsal bone, hitting the plantar medial and lateral nerves, producing a very similar unbearable pain. His feet were strapped to the cross, so the trapped Son of God could not move. The Romans and religious pierced the feet of the Son of God, who walked on water.

  Once Jesus was locked to the cross, the Romans lifted the cross and slammed it into the bowels of the earth. Suspended between heaven and earth, Jesus could not breathe; there was no asthmatic inhaler. While suffocating and possibly defecating on that cross, Jesus had to lift Himself every time that He needed to breathe and speak using any muscle remaining. He was able to suck air in, but He could not exhale until the buildup of carbon dioxide in His lungs and bloodstream stimulated His breathing to relieve the cramps.

  Listen to the wheezing, weeping, and suffocating Son of God, dying for your sins, screaming, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” Meaning, “Father, why hast thou forsaken Me?” Cursed and crushed on the cross, He was fettered naked; His muscle tissue showed, and His spine was exposed for the world to see. Birds would peck at his open wounds. The wood splinters and wood chips would penetrate all His cuts, bruises, and wounds from the Roman whip and would rub against His open back.

  Fulfilling Psalm 69:21, Jesus said, “I am thirsty!”; the Creator created every stream, river, lake, and ocean, yet He said, “I thirst!” His bodily fluid hydration was lost through His sweat, breath, and blood and the immense physical trauma. His lips were dry; there was no ChapStick or Vaseline. His gastrointestinal tract had lost all its ability to process anything (think of battery acid in your stomach, a piranha of ulcers eating at your stomach lining), and his kidneys were struggling to function due to dehydration.

  Expressing His thirst, the soldiers offered Him vinegar on a sponge. Imagine drinking apple cider vinegar as your last drink before you die. His unquenchable thirst increased, burning His crinkled lips and parched throat. He asked for water, just like the rich man in Luke 16, and couldn’t even get that. The Son of God needed water just as much as someone in hell needed water.

  Jesus’ suffering was not just physical but deeply emotional and spiritual. All through His agony and torture, Jesus had full control of His mind. He had to push against the nails even to speak, and the nails dug into the rugged wood. He forced Himself to lift His blood-soaked face to the stars, saying, praying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do,” a prayer that shook from Calvary to the Roman Empire and eventually echoed throughout the whole New Testament. He forgave them while they were in the act of murdering Him. When you know all, you can forgive all! Even after every lash, slap, and spit, He ruled the Roman Empire with mercy.

  The Man who raised the dead was hanging and dangling from the cross, mocked by the Romans and the religious, “If You are the Son of God, save Yourself!” Jesus denied His deity to rely solely on His Father as an example for us to rely solely on our Father. Jesus could have called on twelve legions of His Father’s army to save Him. He couldn’t save Himself and you; He chose you and not Himself. With spinal splinters and wood chips hanging out of His spine, He lifted Himself one more time to exhale, “It is finished,” for you, the value of your soul. Then He bowed His head adorned with a crown of thorns, and the sacrifice was satisfied. When He died, death died!

  With twelve legions of angels standing on the balconies of heaven with their swords drawn, they watched the Son of God draw His last breath and die for the sins of humanity. Jesus had the power to smash us, but He stooped to save us. The created killed the Creator. He suffered and died alone, as the forsaken Lamb of God, for your redemption! Jesus forgave you handsomely; forgiveness plunges you into the fountains filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins. He endured it all to communicate a spinal message that He was indeed the Lamb of God.

  For the value of your soul, heaven had one thing on its mind: the death of Jesus Christ. Without the substitutionary death of Christ, there would be no salvation, and mankind would be eternally lost. Without the death of Christ, there would be no church built on the Solid Rock. Without the death of Christ, the song Amazing Grace would have been lost at sea. Without the death of Christ, Satan would be supreme and control men. Without the death of Christ, there is no New Jerusalem over the hilltop. Without Christ and Him crucified and the shed blood, there is no church. It was the Father’s will, the death of His only Begotten Son for the value of your soul.

  If the devil is working tirelessly to steal your soul, and the Lamb of God died to save your soul, there is nothing in the world that is more important than your eternal soul. “Consider how precious a soul must be when both God and the devil are after it” (Charles Spurgeon).

  “He had no stately form or majesty to attract us, no beauty that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. Surely He took on our infirmities and carried our sorrows; yet we considered Him stricken by God, struck down and afflicted. But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. We all like sheep have gone astray, each one has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth. By oppression and judgment He was taken away, and who can recount His descendants? For He was cut off from the land of the living; He was stricken for the transgression of My people.”—Isaiah 53:2–8 (BSB)

  In the life of my mind, I see this: On the cross, God saw the sinless, spotless, undefiled Lamb of God as if He were me; and after the cross, it’s as if God sees me as if I were Him. Religion puts you around the cross; righteousness puts you on the cross. Religion will let you sing about the cross, but it will not put you on the cross. “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21, NKJV).

  The cross of Calvary was the place of the great exchange. Do you think a loving God would have put His only Son through hell on the cross just so He could write something in the books Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, so that we can have a feel-good, emotional experience? Never! Or do you think a loving God would have put His Son on the cross if there were other ways to get to heaven? Absolutely not!

  Jesus Christ went to the cross because it was imperative for everybody’s redemption. Jesus Christ paid the ultimate bill because we could not pay the debt. When Jesus Christ was on the cross, suffering for our sins, God poured out His wrath on His Son as our substitute. Anyone who rejects the substitute will have the wrath of God upon them. “...you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:5, NIV).