Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: April 28th

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST

The blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel. - Hebrews 12:24

That dim figure, standing on the very horizon of time, has a tragical significance. Abel’s was the first death, the first murder, the first fratricide, the first martyrdom. And so, according to the energetic phrase of the Book of Genesis, his blood had a dolorous voice. It cried to God from the ground for retribution. It prophesied of much more to follow. It proclaimed the hatred of the evil against the good, and so it was a voice of lamentation and of woe.

The blood of Jesus Christ has a significance broadly distinguished from that of all innocent martyrs. Abel is the first of the class, the type of the whole, and "in his hand a glass which showed many more" to follow; for the same causes will produce the same effects. The death of Christ belongs to that class. He, too, is an innocent Victim; He, too, dies because bad men hate the good with a murderous hatred; He, too, dies because He bears witness to the truth, and for the truth to which He bears witness. He is a Martyr.

And is that all? Does the blood of Christ speak the same things as the blood of Abel, only more tenderly and more loudly? Nay; there are some of us, I am afraid, to whom it does; to whom it only reiterates the old lesson of the world’s wages to the world’s teachers; to whom it is nothing more than the highest, the most touching, the most tragic example of what the good man has to meet with when he asserts the principles of his own life against the principles on which the world’s lives are mostly regulated. Let me urge upon you that if Christ’s blood says nothing more to you than that He is the foremost of the martyrs and the innocents, who have died because the world hated them and their goodness, Christ’s blood is dumb to you.

It speaks other lessons altogether than these, dear brother; does it speak them to you? Have you penetrated beneath that surface significance which, blessed as it is, is only surface, and have you come down to the characteristic thing, the something more, which makes Christianity all that it is, of blessing and power? And do you hear another proclamation altogether from the shed blood than the proclamation of innocent martyrdom, as over the fate of the good and the pure?

"We love Him, because He first loved us." Very simple words! But they go down into the depths of God, lifting burdens off the heart of humanity, turning duty into delight, and changing the aspect of all things. He who knows that God loves him needs little more for blessedness; he who loves God back again offers more than all burnt offering and sacrifices.