Title of the message, Blood Defiles
the Land. Numbers 35. Starting in verse 30. I'm in the wrong chapter. Here we are. Verse 30. Whoever kills a person, the murderer
shall be put to death on the testimony of witnesses. But one
witness is not sufficient testimony against a person for the death
penalty. Moreover, you shall take no ransom
for the life of a murderer who is guilty of death, but he shall
surely be put to death. And you shall take no ransom
for him who has fled to his city of refuge that he may return
to dwell in the land before the death of the priest. So you shall
not pollute the land where you are, for blood defiles the land. And no atonement can be made
for the land for the blood that is shed on it, except by the
blood of him who shed it. Therefore, do not defile the
land which you inhabit in the midst of which I dwell. For I, the Lord, dwell among
the children of Israel." Now, there are many things that God
is. He has many attributes. He's merciful and gracious. He's compassionate and faithful. He's mighty, but He's also jealous. He's protective and wise, and
He's holy and He's righteous. Now that last one, righteous,
means to be in accordance with divine or moral law, or sinless. Now God cannot sin, we all know
that. He won't think it, He won't act
on it. Sin is any act or thought that
goes against God's will and His decree. God cannot be against Himself. So it follows that He cannot
sin. Now He created all things in
perfection. When He created, it was all perfect.
It was the stars, all the way down to the sand, the rocks,
to living creatures, they were all untouched by sin in the beginning. Now remember that God is righteous.
He cannot create something sinful. Yet humanity today falls under
the judgment for its sins. And this sin causes all kinds
of wickedness. All kinds of weaknesses from
lies to genocide and man has yet to produce a cure for it. It's not as if they haven't tried.
Today it's inner peace. Get yourself inner peace. Or finding religion. I've heard
that phrase used before. If you just find religion, you'll
be okay. I think what they're finding
is good feelings. I don't think it's religion. Now some people
try to make up for their bad deeds by doing good ones, like
there's a balance, a balance. You know, make your good side
weigh more than your bad side by heaping up good deeds. Some people feel so guilty or
at least feel that they'll be better if they go into seminary
and get a doctorate of divinity. They think that the position
of a preacher or priest or what have you absolves them of guilt. But sin, it can't be taken away
in degrees. Little by little, chunk by chunk. And man's condition is far worse
than these people know. Sin is in the blood. It's in
the blood. People keep wondering on TV and
in books, you know, why are people so bad? What happened to the
world? It just got worse. It's never
been so bad. Where'd all these evil people
come from? What made them act this way? But I tell you, it's our genealogy.
It's in our DNA. That's what makes people act
bad. Adam and Eve begot sinful children. That's what happened. Just as
two owls always beget another owl. An owl will never beget a lion
and the children of Adam will never beget a righteous person. It doesn't work that way. We
can only transfer our sinful condition down to our children. That's all we can really give
them. We will never beget righteous
children. And so the burden of our guilt is never taken away. If we were a part of a story,
what have you, call it the story of humanity, we'd be the bad
guys. God would be the only good guy. But yet, in our telling
of history, there's a lot of good guys, especially when you
listen to people's funerals. You listen to the words that
the person says at the funeral. We're all pretty good. But in
our telling, there's so many good guys. They're all over the
place. There's just a few bad guys. But the good guys, they fight
against the bad guys. And they win, for the most part. You know, we're pretty plucky,
we're good. The way we tell our stories nowadays,
you'd never think there was such an evil man, ever. More evil
man, I should say, than Adolf Hitler. He's the worst. He raised
the bar on what it means to be evil. And he's just the worst
that humankind has ever produced in all its history, all the way
back to year zero, whatever you want to call it. Well, I've got news for you.
He's not the worst sinner since humans started to defile the
land. We're all sinners in our blood. In God's eyes, Hitler's no worse
than anyone else born of Adam. We're all equally unrighteous. If there's a floor for sin, for
the worst sinner, we're all down there in it. We all defile the land in which
we inhabit. God says that no atonement can
be made for those who defile the land. A man or woman guilty
of murder is guilty until they die. until they're put to death. I
know that's the same thing, but two different actions. Now, do you want to know how
exacting God's justice is? Just look at verse 30. It says,
the murderer shall be put to death. Now, our translators did
a really good job in this verse, but there's something interesting
about it. And it's not obvious unless you have A concordance. The word for murderer and the
word for be put to death, they're the same Hebrew word. The exact
same one. It could very well read, the
murderer shall himself be murdered, or the slain, or the slayer,
sorry, shall be slain, or the causer of death will have his
death caused. It means equal punishment for
the sin committed. It's the same word. In other
words, only blood can pay for blood. Only the blood of the
one who sinned can make atonement for the blood that fell to the
ground because of that sin. It's exactly equal. God won't
accept anything else, least of all money. The ransom price is
blood. This is not a fine you can make
or pay and make it all go away. It says, moreover, you shall
take no ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of death,
but he shall surely be put to death. No pigeons, no doves, no goats,
no bulls, blood for blood. God only takes payment for sin
and blood. Now, that won't stop us from
trying to find some sort of loophole. Turn to Deuteronomy chapter 12.
I'm sorry, chapter 21. What if the land is defiled by
a murder, yet no one saw it and no one knows who did it? Would
God curse the land on which these innocent people toil for sustenance. Let's read chapter 21, starting
in verse 1. If anyone is found slain lying
in the field in the land which the Lord your God is giving you
to possess, and it is not known who killed him, then your elders
and your judges shall go out and measure the distance from
the slain man to the surrounding cities. And it shall be that
the elders of the city nearest to the slain man will take a
heifer which has not been worked, and which is not pulled with
a yoke, the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to
a valley with flowing water which is neither plowed nor sown, and
they shall break the heifer's neck there in the valley." Then
the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come near, for the Lord
your God has chosen them to minister to him and to bless in the name
of the Lord. By their word, every controversy
and every assault shall be settled. And all the elders of that city
nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer
whose neck was broken in the valley. Then they shall answer
and say, Our hands have not shed this blood, nor have our eyes
seen it. Provide atonement, O LORD, for
your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and do not lay
innocent blood to the charge of your people Israel. And atonement
shall be provided on their behalf for the blood." The land is defiled by blood.
No matter if the murderer is known or is unknown, the only
payment that God will accept is blood. Either by the one who
committed the murder or by an innocent substitute. Now do you recall the conversation
God had with Adam in the garden? He told Adam, of every tree of
the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you
eat of it, you shall surely die." You shall surely die. And before Eve was tempted by
Satan, she told him, Satan, We may eat the fruit of the trees
of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst
of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat it, nor shall
you touch it, lest you die. Now before Eve ate that fruit,
there were at least four people who knew what would happen if
she ate that. That was Adam, Eve, God, and
Satan. We know of at least those four.
They all knew eating that fruit would result in death. But that's
not what Satan told Eve. He told her, you will not surely
die. And she ate that fruit. Then
Adam ate that fruit. And just as God said, they surely
died. They died spiritually. Spiritually. Cut off from God, from communion
with God, a death. had just occurred when they ate. And therefore the land was defiled
by blood. The murderers of Adam and Eve
must pay the ransom. Justice demands blood. They died. Somebody killed them. Justice demands the blood of
the murderers. which are Adam and Eve. Only their blood can take away
the guilt of the land. They will die if that happens,
but there will be justice, and God is just. Unless the ransom can be paid
by an innocent substitute, one who is not murdered, one
whose blood is not defiled by sin, and God provided that substitute
himself. He had a son named Jesus, and
he was God's only son. The father of Jesus was not Joseph,
but God himself. And so the sin of Adam was not
transferred to him. Now how do we know this? God
himself says of Jesus, you are my son, today I have begotten
you. Remember how Adam and Eve begot
people? They were all full of sin. Then
God begot someone, and that someone had no sin. Adam did not beget Jesus, and
therefore the stain of Adam's race did not touch him at his
birth. Yet at the appointed time, God
made him who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become
the righteousness of God in him. Why did Jesus die? To be our
substitute and to pay the blood ransom. We defiled the land with murder.
We did. Every one of us. Whether the
stories they tell about us are good or we're the good guys,
or whether we're the bad guys. We defiled it. That was our fault.
Yet it was God's own son who took the burden of death upon
himself because of his great love with which he loved us.
God declared this would happen before it even happened. One
way he did it was through Elihu in the book of Job. He says to Job and his three
friends, yes, his soul, that is a person's soul, yes, his
soul draws near the pit and his life to the executioners. Now,
what does that mean? It means justice is about to
be satisfied by our blood. They're drawing near to the pit,
that's death. The wages of sin is not money. It's not lands, it's not cattle. The wages of sin is death. Then Elihu reveals this little
prophecy here. If there is a messenger for him,
a mediator, one among a thousand, to show man God's uprightness,
then he, God, is gracious to him. and says, deliver him from
going down to the pit. I have found a ransom. I have found a ransom. And we
didn't find that ransom. God said, I found that ransom.
We didn't go to God. He came to us. He had to. We
didn't ask the Messiah to even die for us. The Bible says the
Messiah died for us while we were still sinners. How's that okay with you? Do you find it reprehensible
and shameful and embarrassing that God had to send his only
son to die in your place Because A, you could not become righteous
by yourself or go to him, and you would not seek his face.
You could not, would not. Or instead, is that your peace? Do you see him as your shield
and exceeding great reward? Or let me ask you this instead.
When justice comes, and if you like to think of something, maybe
that angel of death back in Exodus. When justice comes, do you want
to pay for the blood you spilled on God's land with your own blood,
or will you plead the blood of Jesus Christ the substitute? Either way, it must be paid in
blood. Now, I know whose blood I want
on my hands when I am before the throne of mercy. And don't
be worried if you feel you are late to the game, as it were,
and perhaps there have been too many people claiming Christ's
righteous blood. Maybe He just can't do anything
for you. You know, you're too old. You sin too much. I tell you, if you can hear His
voice today, if you hear it, plead the blood, His blood, not
your own. It flows as if from a fountain
that will not run dry, and there is enough of His blood to cover
not only your hands, but your entire body. There's a phrase in a song that
says, my sin had left a crimson stain. And that just wasn't on the pinky. That was the whole body. He says he washed it white as
snow. And I'll leave you with a verse
from a hymn by Ed Hale, which we sing sometimes, Oh How Merciful.
It says, I'm not ashamed of all thy grace when thou came and
took my place. Blessed Lord, how merciful thou
was to me. And when this world ceases to
be, this is the part that drew me, eternal blood, eternal blood
will speak for me. Blessed Lord, how merciful thou
was to me. May the Lord be honored and glorified
by this message. Drew, will you close us please?