The
Power of the Blood of the Lamb
When Aaron and
his sons were consecrated for service to the Lord (Leviticus 8 v 22 - 30),
a ram was slain and its blood was put on the right ear, the right thumb and the
right great toe of Aaron and his sons. Everything that is presented to God
for His use has to be cleansed by blood
If we are to offer the members of our bodies (eyes, ears, hands, feet, mouth
etc) for God's service (Romans 6 v 13, 12 v 1), then they need cleansing from
the daily misuse.
1 Peter 1 v 2 says that we have been elected 'unto the sprinkling of the blood
of Jesus Christ'. Hebrews 12 v 24 says that we have come 'to the blood of
sprinkling'.
In Leviticus 8 v 30 the blood of sprinkling was part of the ceremony of
consecration.
Of course we don't actually sprinkle blood on our bodies but we can confess the
blood or plead the blood.
Cleansing of
the blood for consecration precedes the
anointing of the Spirit for service.
There are other
important applications for confessing the word of the blood of the Lamb
The bible
say’s, “resist the devil and he will flee from you”.
I was thinking, how can we resist the devil in such a way that he will
flee from us? Now of course there
are lots of angles we could look at, such as not giving in to temptation,
however my thoughts ran along the theme of recognizing that the key is knowing
what his name means and resisting accordingly.
The devil and
Satan are the same person all the others are evil spirits or demons.
Demons afflict people with
diseases among other things, but the name devil means false accuser or
slanderer.
Satan is our
adversary who is accusing us before God. Jesus
is our advocate who intercedes for us before God, He pleads our cause.
His intercession is based on the fact that we believe in the finished
work of Jesus Christ on the cross and we are justified by faith.
The devil tries
to undermine our faith, making us feel guilty and unclean by pointing to our
sins, causing us to take our eyes off Jesus. He then fills us with doubt about
our salvation. There are many things that make us unclean and the devil will be
sure to point them out in order to break our fellowship with God.
When Satan
tempted Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus quoted the word of God.
What must we do
in order to overcome Satan and resist the devil?
The bible says
in Revelation 12 v 11, “they overcame him (the accuser of the brethren), by
reason of the blood of the Lamb, and by reason of the word of their testimony
and have not loved their life, even unto death”.
This is the key
for resisting the devil, the blood of the Lamb and our testimony, that we
believe in the finished work of Jesus on the cross and believe that He rose
again from the dead.
Now this makes
sense doesn’t it. If we take the
example of Jesus and quote the appropriate word then we will quote the word of
the blood because it is the blood of the Lamb that cleanses us from all sin.
The place that
the devil attacks us is our mind. He
accuses us and slanders us to try and undermine our faith so that his demons can
afflict us. We resist the devil by
the word of the blood, we rebuke demons in the name of Jesus (Luke 10 v 17).
We rebuke demons that would afflict us with sickness and disease on the
authority of the word of the cross and the word of the blood.
Galatians 3 v 13 says we are redeemed from the curse of the law because
Christ has been made a curse for us by His death on the tree, and Ephesians 1 v
7 says that we have our redemption through His blood.
We can only
come to God by the merits of the blood and its cleansing power.
We resist the
devil by the word of the blood.
Why can’t we
just confess the word of the cross?
Well yes we
can. The cross separates us from
the law, the world and sin. We
reckon ourselves dead to sin because we have been crucified with Christ on the
cross.
If we plead the
cross of Jesus the devil will point to our sins and say ‘it doesn’t work
because you still sin, you are sinning everyday, your sins make you unclean you
cannot stand before a righteous God’. When
we point to the blood, it is the work of the blood to cleanse us, so even though
we sin habitually everyday the blood is continually cleansing us.
I like Kenneth Wuest’s translation of 1 John 1 v 7, “---- and the
blood of Jesus His Son, keeps continually cleansing us from every sin”.
He says that this refers to the constant cleansing of the saint from the
defilement of sins of ignorance by the blood of Jesus.
These are habitual and perhaps unknowing in the life of the believer.
In 1 John 1 v 9 these aren’t so much habitual sins that we do without
realizing it but one off sins that we know about, these need confessing.
(All sins need confessing as the Holy Spirit reveals them to us.)
I John 1 v 9
says, ”if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins
and cleanse us from all unrighteousness”. All the sins that a believer
commits, past, present and future are put away on a legal basis at the cross.
When a believer sins, it is between a Father and his child.
We grieve the Fathers heart when we sin (KW).
When we confess it He not only forgives us (the cross), but cleanses us
(the blood). We are once more clean
in His presence.
When we come to
God we come with faith in the cleansing blood.
When the devil condemns us in our mind, the way to victory is by
confessing the word of the blood.
Do we need to
confess it? Well, Jesus didn’t just ignore Satan in the wilderness but
confronted him with the word. Therefore
let us not neglect confessing the word of the blood when the devil accuses us in
our mind. The helmet of salvation, is our understanding of the work of the cross
and the power of the blood.
One other thing
I should mention, when the bible tells us to resist the devil it doesn’t mean
in a haughty attitude, but rather
it says we need to submit to God, and in 1 Peter 5 v 5 – 9 tells us that God
sets Himself against the proud but gives grace to the humble. Therefore we need
to humble ourselves and then resist the devil.
Proverbs 3 v 34
says, “He indeed scorneth the scorners but giveth grace unto the lowly”.