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40 DAYS OF LENT: DAY #38 – Maundy Thursday
WORD OF TODAY: Hebrews 9:13-14 (ESV)
13 For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
THOUGHTS ON THE WORD:
We often hear “life is precious”, and so it is! As Christians we understand that the very life within us, and that of all living beings, is a blessed gift given by God. In the time before sin entered the world, death did not exist. Consider what living into that Truth would be like, where there is no death!
Yet sin brought with it a consequence, and death is its name. From the heart of Truth, we all know death to be unnatural and foreign to our design. We mourn a life lost because life lost is not part of God’s will, but a consequence of our own unrighteousness.
God, in his grace, provided for the transfer of guilt and satisfaction of consequence in the sacrificial system, and in our Scripture today we are wise to hear how precious the life of the goats and bulls were to purify the flesh of the defiled persons. Consider how the innocent animals bore the weight of the unrighteous, and the value their lives had as a substitute for mankind’s.
The offering of a life for a life in substitution for the consequence of sin sanctified the flesh, and the lives offered were precious for the precious lives saved. How much more precious, then, is the life of Christ Jesus and the blood from His body offered to purify not only the flesh but even the soul, purifying the conscience from dead works to serve the living God! Consider the precious Incarnate life sacrificed, His life for our life, given freely to purify your soul.