There is no telling how many times I’ve heard the hymn “Old Rugged Cross”. But for some reason, the verse below (at the 2:40 mark of this video), especially the highlighted phrase, stood out to me recently.
In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,
a wondrous beauty I see,
for ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died,
to pardon and sanctify me.
Can God bleed? Is there any such thing as divine blood? Yes…but it took a lot of doing! And therein lies a tale, the greatest story every told.
Spirit Doesn’t Bleed
In His own divine nature, God can’t bleed. He is Spirit, with no physical body. If I think about it, that point seems pretty obvious. The God who created the cosmos — who could do so because He existed before that cosmos and is still outside of and transcendent to it — isn’t limited to a breakable human body. He doesn’t need to eat or sleep. He can’t scrape His knees or get a stomachache or a broken bone. He doesn’t depend on oxygen captured by lungs and circulated to the body through the bloodstream. He is immeasurably far above such things.
Humans Bleed, But Don’t Obey
We humans can certainly bleed, however. We are actually quite good at it. What we are not good at, is being what God created us to be. We can’t “love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). We may try, but we will always fall short. That shortcoming breaks our relationship with God beyond our ability to repair. Since that relationship is our entire reason for existing, we have a problem!
Our problem started when the first humans, Adam and Eve, chose to follow their own inclinations instead of obeying God’s commands. Love and trust for their Creator — not to mention simple respect for His authority — should have resulted in obedience. When it didn’t, they passed that flaw down to all their offspring.
God Was Needed To Do What Humans Cannot
Note that this was not God’s problem. Adam was the one who failed; God didn’t. Since it was a man who started the problem, it was up to a man to resolve it (1 Corinthians 15:21-22). But no created human being could have done so. All have inherited the same flaw, so all are incapable of fixing it or atoning for it. Oops.
But God still loves His fallen creatures. He chose to turn the dead end into life again…by making Himself able to die! His justice demanded death as a consequence for sin. His love made Him cause that consequence to fall on Himself.
Note: The death sentence to fulfill justice for sin isn’t vindictive. It is simply the natural result of rejecting that which gives us life. To reject life is to receive death. To reject God is to be separated from Him, and from the life He gives.
How did He do that? By literally becoming a man named Jesus, a human being who could bleed and die. That death did something magnificent: It paid the penalty for every sinful action committed by every person who would ever live. Not only that, but what it really did was atone for the underlying flaw, the sinful nature that is the cause of those actions.
A normal human death, the shedding of normal human blood, would have been of no benefit toward bridging the gap and reconciling humanity to God. The most it could have done was atone for that one individual’s sin, with nothing left over to help anyone else. Only the shedding of Divine Blood could have achieved that goal.
Jesus Succeeded Where Adam Failed
How can we be sure that Jesus’ death accomplished such a thing? His last words from the cross were “It is finished”, but how do we know that His mission was successfully completed? Because He then accomplished another magnificent achievement: He defeated death itself. Three days after He was buried, He wasn’t. The tomb was empty, and He was meeting in person with His followers again.
Because He chose to share in our humanity, we can share in His resurrection:
Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.
Hebrews 2:14-15
This is why Christians cherish that cross. The wooden upright post and cross beam aren’t worth cherishing. But the God who shed His blood there on my behalf is worth everything!
Note: A couple of similar articles on this site are “Power in the Blood” and “God Became Man“.
