The Blood in Jesus' Veins
Pastor Mark Stephens
God had a foolproof strategy for bypassing the tainted blood of Adam and getting heavens anointed blood back on earth. A virgin by the name of Mary found favor in His sight. He dispatched an angel to tell her:
"Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women...The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." (Luke 1:28, 35).
Skeptics and secular-theologians cast doubt on the virgin birth. Consider the significance of the virgin birth. Mary had not intimately known a man, there was no way the fetus, planted in Mary's womb by God, could have had tainted, Adamic blood.
As you know already, conception occurs when he female ovum is united with the male sperm. Only after fertilization does life and embryonic growth commence. Cardiovascular development occurs soon after fertilization. Without fertilization there could be no blood.
Mary was unfertilized; meaning she didn't know a man in the biblical sense. She conceived the Son of God by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit. The virgin birth produced a human being with sin-free blood that was not of Adamic origin.
Yet, Christ did have blood, didn't He? Therefore some form of fertilization must have taken place. She was impregnated by the Word of God through the Holy Spirit!
John 1:14 says, "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth."
It is a biological fact that Mary could not have independently furnished Jesus with her blood. What she did supply was an egg that God would use to prepare Jesus' earthly body. Mary carried in her body the egg, which contained all the chromosomes to grow the fingers, toes, hands, ears, eyes, and nose, but she did not contribute directly to His blood; that was the work of the Holy Spirit.
As a baby develops in the womb, it is separated from the mother by the placenta. The mother's blood comes to the placenta, but stops there. It bathes the outside of the placenta, then through the process of osmosis, diffusion, and capillary attraction, the necessary nutrients and oxygen flow through the membrane that separates mother from child, and eventually pass into the baby's bloodstream through the umbilical cord. the infant's umbilical cord is attached to the placenta, not the mother. The mother's blood circulates on one side of the placenta. The baby's blood circulates on the other side.
The baby's blood, which is a self-contained cardiovascular system, doesn't mingle with its mother's blood. It receives nutrition and oxygen indirectly from her blood, but does not receive her blood itself. In fact, the child's blood is often a completely different blood type than the mother's.
The significance of the virgin birth means that because Jesus was truly born of a virgin, there is only one place His blood could have come from, and it wasn't of this earth! He had His Father's blood!
As we saw earlier, Jesus said, ". . .A body hast thou prepared for me." (Hebrews 10:5). Notice, He mentions the body, but He didn't say anything about the blood. God prepared a body for Jesus, but the life of that body came down from heaven. The life is in the blood, and Jesus blood had to come from heaven. Jesus body was exactly like yours and mine, in every way, except His blood was like Adam's blood before sin came into him.
Before the cross, Jesus never knew sin. Had Adam's sinful blood been flowing through Jesus' veins, then Jesus blood would have been useless for redemption. If Adam's death-infected blood, by way of Noah and David, had been in the Messiah, then we would have been doomed forever.
Sin is innate. It is just there. Unregenerate man doesn't have to do anything to become a sinner. Sin is a congenital disorder on a spiritual level. David said, "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me" (Psalm 51:5).
Jesus never knew sin. He was a unique man walking this earth like you and me in every respect except that He did not know sin or sickness. Jesus lived and walked as Adam should have lived and walked.
Throughout the entire thousands of years from "In the beginning God. . ." to "unto you is a Savior born . . " There were exactly two God-men with pure blood, Adam and Jesus. They are the First and Last Adam respectively (1 Corinthians 15:45.)
Before the fall, Adam could not have been sick as long as he had untainted blood. After the fall he became susceptible to sickness and death. If we were more yielded to the divine life of God, we wouldn't be sick either. Adam's blood, at first, had life in it. His blood had the ability to resist any kind of injury or infection until it became polluted with sin. He didn't succumb to physical death until he was nine hundred and thirty years old. His body had to learn how to die!
Jesus was free from death. No one was capable of killing Jesus. Jesus said, "Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself." (John 10:17, 18). Jesus even told Pontius Pilate, " . . .Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above" (John 19:11). On the cross He said, "It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost" (Jon 19:30).
The Bible did not say that Jesus died. It says He "gave up the ghost." Man could not have killed Jesus. There was not way humanity could have killed our Lord. He had divine life in Him. If He had not willingly given up His life; He could not have died. For Him to die, something had to happen to His blood. He had to receive the nature of death into Himself.
Surgeons take care to reattach severed blood vessels so the tissues will receive an adequate supply of blood. Otherwise the tissues will die. Healing is in the blood. If the blood is not healthy, the body is not healthy. Without healthy blood there can be no lasting health.
The life of all flesh is in the blood. In Leviticus 17:11 God tells us: "For the life of the flesh is in the blood . . ."The only life that flesh has is the life it gets from the blood.
Blood is a unique, living substance. It is not like the other fluids in our bodies, such as tears. Those secretions are merely organic compounds, but blood is actually liquid, living tissue! When the blood supply is cut off, the flesh dies. Without blood there is no life. It's that simple.
Blood travels from the heart, through the arteries, into the capillaries, and back through the veins to the heart, making two complete cycles every sixty seconds. The systemic cycle travels tot he far reaches of the body in about thirty seconds. That is amazing to a simple mind such as myself. That means if a main artery were severed, you could bleed to death in just a few short seconds! When the apostle Paul was preaching to the Athenians about the "THE UNKNOWN GOD" ( Acts 17:23), he said, God ". . .hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation" (verse 26).
The Amplified or "loud" bible says it this way: "On[common origin, one source, one blood] . . ."All men derive their bloodline from one common ancestor. That common source is Adam, the first man. The Hebrew word "ADAM" is from a word that means "to show blood" (as in the face).
In John 1, John is speaking of Jesus the "Word" who existed from the beginning, prior to Adam's creation, but came to earth as the Second Adam, the Word was made flesh.
Read if you will in John 1:1-5, 9
God is life. He gave the initial spark of life, biological life, which animates every person who has ever lived. Life didn't begin from lightning striking swamp ooze or from cosmic rays. Acts 17:28 says, "In him we live, and move, and have our being."
Everyone's "light" was lit by God, and He made all men--of all nations--on one common origin, Adam. There is no biblical basis for racism. Biologically all people are the same. Our common denominator is blood. It is commonly accepted that all human beings have a common ancestor. We know from reading God's Word that every man's DNA goes back to Adam and Eve.
Acts 17:26 (NIV) "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth...."
Genesis 3:20 "And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living."
Genesis 1:26, 27 "And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
The life that Adam and Eve had was the life God gave them. He made them in His image. This is hard for religious people to grasp, but initially, Adam and Eve had exactly the same quality of life and the same quality of being as God.
Look at Genesis 2:7 "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life . . ."
The reason man needed to be redeemed was sin. The Bible says that because of Adam's transgression, all men became sinners (1 Corinthians 15:21, 22). But it also says that if through the First Adam all men were made sinners and all men die, then through the Second Adam (Jesus) all men will be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:45-47)
What are the differences between the First and the Second Adam? More importantly, what are the similarities between the First Adam and the Second Adam? Have you thought about the quality of life that Adam and Jesus had in common?
God formed Adam from the dust of the ground, elemental particles, and created his physical body. At this time it was just a mere body, inert and lifeless.
Likewise, God also created a body for Jesus. In Hebrews 10:5 Jesus is quoted as saying prophetically to God, "Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me." His body was prepared for Him. The life of all flesh is in the blood, not just in the body. When Adam was first created, he had no life. He was merely dust formed into a body, until God breathed life into him. The life of God went directly into the first man's blood.
God took Adam, a lifeless form, mute, cold, and breathed into his lifeless nostrils the breath of life. The same life that God had on the inside of Himself was imparted into Adam's blood particles.
The most intimate correspondence between the blood and the outside world is breath. Oxygen goes directly into the bloodstream by way of the lungs. Then through a process, oxygen diffuses through the capillary walls from the lungs into the blood. The oxygen cycles throughout the body and waste gasses are exhaled. This cycle, when completed, cleanses the blood and recharges it with oxygen.
Adam, at his inception, had no life in his blood. His blood-fluid was inert. Then God breathed into his lungs the breath of life. Immediately Adam's blood became charged with life. His heart, touched by divine life, began to beat. It picked up the heavenly substance that came from God's breath and began pumping it throughout his bloodstream. In a matter of seconds Adam was totally alive!
Adam was a God-class of being. He walked upon the earth with God's life resident in his blood! The life is in the blood!
