What the Blood of Jesus Truly Accomplished

Let me take you to a street in Goshen on the night of the first Passover.

The sun has gone down. In one small mud-brick house a father kneels beside a basin. He dips a bunch of hyssop into it and lifts the dripping branch to the wooden beam above the door, then to the left post, then to the right. His eldest son, a boy of about twelve, holds the lamp and watches the dark streaks run down the wood. The boy knows what Moses has said. Tonight the Lord will pass through the land of Egypt, and every firstborn in every house will die. Every house, that is, where there is no blood on the door.

Inside, the lamb is roasting. The family eats it standing, with their sandals on and their staffs in their hands, as they have been told. Nobody goes out. Somewhere around midnight a cry rises from the Egyptian quarter of the city, then another, then a wailing that spreads from street to street until the whole land seems to be weeping.

Now imagine two houses side by side on that street. In the first, the firstborn son sits in a corner all night with his knees pulled up to his chest, trembling. Every footstep outside makes him flinch. He keeps asking his father, “Did you put enough? Are you sure it was the right lamb? What if it has dried?” He does not sleep at all.

In the second house, the firstborn son eats his portion, listens to his grandfather tell the old stories of Abraham and Jacob, and eventually falls asleep on a mat near the door. When the cry goes up at midnight, he stirs, his mother lays her hand on his head, and he sleeps again.

Which boy was safer?

Neither. Both were completely safe. The trembling boy was not in any more danger than the sleeping one, and the sleeping boy had done nothing to earn his rest. Their safety did not depend on their feelings about the blood. It depended on the blood itself, and on the word of the God who had said what He would do when He saw it.

Some Christian expressions become so familiar that we stop hearing what they announce. “The blood of Jesus” can be one of them. We sing it, pray it and shout it. But what has the blood actually accomplished? And are we living in the house like the boy who slept, or like the boy who trembled?

When I see the blood

Here is what God told Moses:

For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD . And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you , when I smite the land of Egypt.

“When I see the blood, I will pass over you.” Notice whose seeing matters. God did not say, “When you feel safe,” or “When you have sprinkled it with enough faith,” or “When you have recited the right words over the door.” He said, “When I see the blood.” The protection rested on God’s sight of the blood and God’s promise about it. The family’s part was to believe the word enough to put the blood on the door and stay inside.

We should also be clear about what the blood meant. The firstborn sons of Israel were not spared because they were morally better than the firstborn of Egypt. Israel had its own idolatry and rebellion, as the rest of the story makes painfully clear. They were spared because a lamb had died in their place. In every house that night there was a death. In Egyptian homes it was the firstborn. In Israelite homes it was the lamb. The blood on the doorposts was the visible sign that a death had already taken place in that house, and judgement passed over.

God also says, “against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment.” The Passover was a rescue, and it was also a public defeat of every power that had held Israel in slavery. When the people walked out of Egypt the next day, they walked out from under a regime of gods and masters who had been judged.

Centuries later, Paul would write, “For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). Everything that night in Goshen foreshadowed was about to be fulfilled in a single death outside Jerusalem.

The life is in the blood

To understand why Scripture speaks so much about blood, we need one verse from Leviticus that explains the whole sacrificial system:

For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood.” The Hebrew word translated life in that sentence is nephesh, and the same word appears twice more in the verse, translated souls and soul. Read it with that in mind: the life is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your lives, for it is the blood, the life, that makes atonement for the life.

Blood in Scripture is not a magical substance. It stands for life given up in death. When the blood of a sacrificial animal was poured out at the altar, it meant that a life had been surrendered. The principle was life for life. The sinner deserved death. God, in mercy, provided a substitute whose life was given in his place.

That is why Hebrews says, “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). Sin is not a minor misunderstanding that God can sweep aside because He has decided to stop caring about evil. It is rebellion against the Author of life, and its wage is death. Forgiveness was never cheap. Every altar in Israel’s history, running with the blood of bulls and goats and lambs, preached that sermon over and over again.

But those sacrifices also preached their own inadequacy. “For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). An animal could not truly stand in the place of a human being made in God’s image. The animal did not choose to die. It did not understand what it was doing. It could picture a substitute, but it could not be one. The whole system was waiting for a better blood.

We should also guard against a misunderstanding. The contrast between animal sacrifices and the sacrifice of Christ does not mean that God once enjoyed bloodshed for its own sake. The earlier order taught the seriousness of sin and pointed toward a fuller cleansing. God Himself would provide, in the end, the Lamb whose death would make all the others unnecessary.

A better sacrifice and a cleansed conscience

Hebrews brings us into the heavenly sanctuary:

But Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us . For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

Several things are said here about the blood of Christ, and each one matters.

It is His own blood. The high priests of Israel carried the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place. Christ carried His own. Priest and sacrifice were the same Person. That is why the blood of Jesus can never be separated from Jesus Himself. It is precious because He is precious. Its saving power belongs entirely to His holy, willing self-offering.

Punchline

It was offered once. The high priest went in every year. Christ entered once, and He did not need to go again.

It obtained eternal redemption. Not a redemption that lasts until your next failure, or until the end of the year. Eternal.

And it cleanses the conscience. “How much more shall the blood of Christ... purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” The old sacrifices could purify a worshipper ceremonially, so that he could take part in the life of Israel’s worship. They could not reach the inner place where guilt lives. The blood of Christ reaches there.

Notice the phrase “dead works.” These are the things a guilty person does to quiet his conscience: extra religious activity, vows, rituals, self-punishment, frantic service. They are dead because they cannot give life, and they cannot cleanse. A person may labour for years to silence guilt in this way and still never rest. The blood of Christ goes to the place human effort cannot reach, and the result is a conscience set free “to serve the living God.”

A man I will call Kolawole came to Christ in his fifties after a long career as a building contractor. For years he had inflated invoices, paid bribes to win government jobs and cut corners on materials. After his conversion he began, quietly and at great cost, to put things right where he could. He returned money to two clients. He wrote letters of apology. He told the truth to his family.

Yet every time he prayed, he would rehearse the list. He would name the projects one by one, as though God had never heard his confession. He was afraid that accepting forgiveness would mean taking the harm lightly.

Kolawole needed to distinguish forgiveness from denial. The blood of Christ did not ask him to pretend his past was harmless. It allowed him to acknowledge exactly how serious it was without making it the permanent basis of his identity. He could continue making restitution, not to buy his way back to God, but because God had already received him. He did not need to remain accused in order to remain responsible. A cleansed conscience becomes more truthful, not less. It no longer needs to alter the record in self-defence. It has found mercy in the One who knows the record fully.

Bought with precious blood

Peter uses the language of the marketplace:

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.

To redeem something is to buy it back, to pay the price that releases it. In Peter’s world the word was used for buying a slave’s freedom. Peter says plainly what the price was not. Not silver. Not gold. Not anything that can corrode or lose value. The price was “the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.” The Lamb of the Passover, which had to be without blemish, has found its fulfilment.

Look at what believers were redeemed from: “your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers.” Conversation in the King James Version means a way of life. Peter is saying that Christ’s blood bought us out of an empty way of living that had been handed down through our families.

That phrase has real force in our setting. Many believers carry a deep fear of patterns passed down through their families: a history of broken marriages, of early deaths, of poverty, of strange afflictions, or of covenants made by grandparents at shrines they never saw. Some live in constant dread that something from the family line has a claim on them.

Peter speaks directly into that fear. The blood of Christ has redeemed you from what your fathers handed down. You may still need wisdom about family patterns. A history of alcoholism or violence in a family is a real concern, and may call for honest conversation, accountability or professional help. But no inherited covenant has a stronger claim on you than the blood that bought you. You belong to the One who paid for you. Paul tells the elders at Ephesus to care for “the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). Purchased. You are not a rental. You are not on loan from your ancestors. You have been bought with a price, and the receipt is signed in the blood of the Son of God.

Brought near by the blood

Nugget

The blood of Christ does something else that is easy to forget. It brings people near: near to God, and near to one another.

But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us ; Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby.

Paul is writing to Gentile believers who had once been “far off,” outsiders to the covenants of Israel. They could not overcome that distance by making themselves culturally acceptable or religiously impressive. But now, “in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.”

And look at what comes next. The same blood that brought them near to God broke down “the middle wall of partition” between Jew and Gentile, and created “one new man” out of the two. The blood has a vertical effect and a horizontal one. It reconciles us to God, and it makes us members of one body with people we might never otherwise have embraced.

That means a teaching on the blood that never touches how we treat other people has stopped short of Paul’s argument. We cannot celebrate our personal access to God while rebuilding walls of contempt among those Christ has received. Tribe, class, education, wealth and denomination can never become grounds for treating another believer as less entitled to the Father’s welcome.

Think about the Lord’s table on a Sunday morning. A wealthy company director and the cleaner who mops the floors of his office may receive communion in the same congregation. Their economic positions are very different. But neither has a better entrance into God’s presence. The director cannot bring his influence as a second qualification. The cleaner need not apologise for coming through Christ on exactly the same ground.

And that shared redemption should reach Monday. The director must pay fairly, on time, and speak to his staff with dignity. The cleaner must work faithfully and honestly. Communion is emptied of much of its meaning when we celebrate a common Saviour on Sunday and practise contempt during the week. Paul says Christ “made peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20). We are learning to live in that peace with one another.

They overcame him by the blood

Revelation gives us a picture of spiritual conflict:

And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.

Look at how the enemy is described. He is “the accuser of our brethren... which accused them before our God day and night.” That is his main strategy against believers: accusation. He reminds you of your failures. He tells you that you are disqualified. He insists that God cannot possibly accept someone like you.

And look at how the believers overcame him. “By the blood of the Lamb.” The accusation was answered by the sacrifice. Satan could say, truthfully, that they had sinned. The blood answered that their sin had been paid for. There was nothing left for the accuser to stand on.

Then, “by the word of their testimony.” They spoke out what God had done. They agreed with heaven about the blood. And finally, “they loved not their lives unto the death.” These were believers, many of them martyrs, who were so settled in what the blood had accomplished that even death could not frighten them into denying Christ.

That is what overcoming by the blood looks like. It is not a chant. It is a settled agreement with God about what the cross has done, spoken aloud, and lived out with courage.

Punchline

The accuser can remind you of your sins. The blood of the Lamb answers that they have been paid for. There is nothing left for him to stand on.

Honouring the blood without superstition

This brings us to a sensitive matter. In many churches, believers speak of “pleading the blood” or “covering” things with the blood of Jesus. Many sincere and godly people use those expressions meaningfully. When a believer says, “I plead the blood of Jesus,” she may simply mean, “Lord, I am relying on what Christ’s sacrifice has done, and I trust You to keep me.” There is nothing wrong with that. It is faith using familiar words.

But sometimes the expression drifts into something else. The blood becomes a kind of spiritual substance to be applied by repetition, like a protective spray. Some people feel that if they forget to “cover” their car with the blood before a journey, they are exposed to accidents. Some believe that saying the phrase faster, louder or more often makes it more powerful. Some sprinkle oil or water on doors and gates while chanting, much as their grandparents once did with charms. At that point the blood of Jesus has been quietly turned into a technique for controlling unseen forces, and that is very close to the way of thinking the gospel delivered us from.

Acts gives us a sobering story. Some travelling exorcists, the seven sons of a man called Sceva, tried to use the name of Jesus as a formula. They said, “We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth” (Acts 19:13). The evil spirit answered, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye?” (Acts 19:15), and the man attacked them. The name of Jesus is powerful, but it is not a spell. Its power belongs to the Person and to those who belong to Him.

The same is true of the blood. Its power does not lie in the word “blood” being spoken. It lies in the finished sacrifice of the living Son of God, which the Father has accepted. You do not need to reapply it every morning for it to keep working. The doorposts in Goshen were painted once. The boy who slept was not in more danger because he stopped saying “the blood, the blood” at midnight.

So honour the blood. Hebrews warns sternly against anyone who “hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing” (Hebrews 10:29). Never speak of it carelessly. Sing about it with understanding. Pray in its light. When fear rises on a dark road or in a hospital corridor, by all means say, “Lord, I am Yours, bought by the blood of Jesus, and I trust You.” But let your confidence rest in the Saviour, not in the strength or frequency of your words.

The song of the redeemed

Revelation lets us overhear the worship of heaven. The Lamb has taken the scroll from the hand of the One on the throne, and the elders fall down before Him:

And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth.

The heavenly worshippers know exactly why the Lamb is worthy. “For thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood.” Their praise has content. They are not repeating a phrase for its effect. They are rejoicing in a saving act carried out by a Person they adore.

And look at who has been redeemed: people “out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.” Yoruba and Hausa, Igbo and Ijaw, rich and poor, old and young, people from every continent and every century. The blood that brought Gentiles near in Ephesus is gathering a single choir from the whole earth.

That gives shape to our own worship. When you sing about the blood, remember that you were purchased for God. When you pray, remember that the way to the Father has been opened. When an old sin comes to mind, let the sufficient offering govern your assurance. When you see a believer whose background is very different from yours, remember the reach of the Lamb’s redemption.

And the blood keeps doing its work in the life of a believer who walks honestly with God. John writes, “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” (1 John 1:7). Cleanseth: present and continuous. As we bring our lives into the light, the cleansing applies to everything we bring. Hebrews says the blood of Jesus “speaketh better things than that of Abel” (Hebrews 12:24). Abel’s blood cried out from the ground for justice. The blood of Jesus speaks a better word: mercy, forgiveness, peace, welcome.

Let us go back to that street in Goshen.

The night ended. The sun came up. The firstborn son in the first house, the one who had trembled in the corner, uncurled himself and stepped outside, red-eyed and exhausted. His neighbour, the boy who had slept, came out yawning and stretching. They looked at each other. Both were alive. Then, almost at the same moment, they turned and looked at their doorposts. The blood had dried dark brown on the wood. It had been there all night. It had never needed refreshing. And it had done exactly what God said it would do.

I imagine that the boy who trembled told the story to his grandchildren years later, in the land of promise. “I was so afraid,” he might have said. “I kept asking my father if he had put enough. But that night was never about how I felt. It was about the door.”

That is the freedom the blood of Jesus brings. It has redeemed you from an empty inherited way of life. It has cleansed your conscience from dead works. It has brought you near to God and to His people. It has answered every accusation against you. And it was applied once, by the One who gave it.

You may be living like the boy in the corner. Look at the door. God sees the blood, and He has said what He will do. You can eat your meal, listen to the stories of God’s faithfulness, and sleep.

For reflection, practice and prayer

Teaching Companion

For Reflection

• Are you more like the boy who trembled or the boy who slept? What has made you feel that way?
• How does Leviticus 17:11 help you understand why the death of Jesus was necessary for forgiveness?
• What “dead works” have you used to try to quiet your conscience? What would it mean to let the blood of Christ do that work instead?
• Is there an inherited fear or family pattern you need to bring under the truth of 1 Peter 1:18-19?
• How should the truth of Ephesians 2:13-16 change the way you treat a specific person who is different from you?

This Week

This week, read one passage each day: Exodus 12:1-28; Leviticus 17:10-14; Hebrews 9:11-28; 1 Peter 1:13-21; Ephesians 2:11-22; and Revelation 5:1-14. After each, write one sentence beginning “The blood of Jesus has...” and complete it from the passage. At the end of the week, think of one believer from a different tribe, class or background whom you have kept at a distance, and do one concrete thing to bring them near: a call, a meal, a word of honour.

A Prayer

Father, thank You for the precious blood of Your Son, the Lamb without blemish and without spot. Thank You that You see the blood and that judgement has passed over me. Thank You that it has redeemed me from the empty way of life handed down to me, cleansed my conscience from dead works, and brought me near to You and to Your people. Forgive me for the times I have trembled in the corner as though the blood were not enough, and for the times I have treated it like a charm rather than honouring the Saviour who shed it. When the accuser speaks, let me answer with the blood of the Lamb and the word of my testimony. Teach me to honour every brother and sister You have redeemed. Worthy is the Lamb. Amen.

Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.