Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1 Life Is in the Blood
'Pastor Whyte, will you pray for my eyes?" Betty asked me one day. She was a young girl of sixteen who worked in a Fish N' Chips store in Toronto. "Why, certainly, Betty," I replied. "Let's just believe God together and plead the Blood of Jesus." I looked at her for a moment and felt the great compassion of Jesus stirring within me. She was totally blind in her right eye, and her left eye was wandering so that it was very difficult for her to focus at all. She was wearing very, very thick glasses--the thickest she could get. I began to pray for her, pleading the Blood strongly and emphatically. Instantly, the Lord restored the sight of her right eye. "Oh, praise the Lord!" She squealed. "I can see!" We rejoiced together at the mercy of the Lord. Over a period of weeks, the wandering eye began to focus and in a matter of months, she had
20-20 vision. That was twenty years ago, and she is still healed. This is but one example of hundreds upon hundreds of stories which I could relate, demonstrating the power of the Blood of Jesus. Each story is thrilling and convincing. But first, let me share with you some of the basic teaching of the Bible about the Blood. Blood is a strange and mysterious substance. A small, unimaginative boy gazing into a slaughterhouse can watch the blood of animals running down a drain without turning a hair; but the same boy when grown older, with a bit more imagination, may pass out in a dead faint at the sight of blood. On the other hand, excited men and women may clap and cheer when their favorite boxer causes blood to flow in a boxing bout. It seems that the baser side of man likes to see blood; it excites him. But the finer side of man is repulsed by blood, and sympathy is expressed at the suffering of those whose blood has been shed in accidents and war. Yes, blood is a mysterious substance. In the Bible we begin to get some understanding of this amazing substance. While the Bible does not tell us of the chemical composition of the red and white corpuscles, yet it does tell us something which is absolutely basic to the mystery: the life of the living creature is in its blood. Thus, in Leviticus 17: 11 we read, "For the LIFE of the flesh is IN the blood." But life is almost as mysterious as blood, and very little is understood about it. We do know, though, that man cannot create life--although he is trying to do so in laboratories. The well-known story of Frankenstein and his monster purports to portray how life came from an electric storm into a corpse made of human tissue; but this is pure imagination. It is best that we accept the Biblical explanation that both electricity and life come from the Author of all life, Almighty God. In Genesis 2:7 we read how God created man. It is important that we understand that man can never create man. Man is God's greatest creative achievement on earth, and was made in His likeness.. The Bible teaches that man is fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14), far more wonderfully made than the angels (which belong to a previous creation of God.) Angels have no blood in them, for they have no flesh. Angels am spirit and have only spiritual life. This is the way God made them. But when God made man, He formed a body from the dust of the ground--from the substances and chemicals of this planet. Then He breathed into this body the breath of life. In other words, He breathed into this chemical composition some of His own spiritual life, and that life was held in the chemical substance we call blood.
So, you see, blood is not life, but it carries life. This becomes quite clear by observing what happens at death. Immediately after expiration, the person is still warm, and will remain so for a brief time. Yet that person is dead because the mysterious life has departed from the blood. The life of man is carried in his blood stream. Life itself is spiritual, but it must have a physical carrier, and this carrier is the blood. But, to me, the most amazing thing about blood is its capacity to carry the life of God. The contact between the Divine and the human rests in the blood stream. No wonder we say that blood is a mysterious substance! It contains something which no scientist can explain. It contains the life of God! In recent years it has been possible to bottle human blood and create blood banks, and keep the life that alone comes from God in refrigerators much below the normal temperature of human blood in a body. Blood can even be frozen, but the life which is in it is uneffected by this freezing process. Apart from the variation of blood types, it matters not if the blood of a Negro is put into the veins of a white man, or vice versa, because the blood does not control the color of the skin or the culture of the person; it simply carries the life which comes from God. There would be no chemical difference between dead blood and live blood of the same type, apart from the life that God put in it, and took away from it. It is possible for a person who has been seriously wounded to literally bleed to death, as the strong heart pumps the life-giving blood out of the wound. As soon as the blood has gone, the life has gone, for the life is in the blood! One can fill the veins with chemicals, and dress up the corpse and lay it in a casket for all to see--but the corpse is still a corpse, for there is no blood in the veins. This discussion quite naturally leads to some consideration of the unique nature of Jesus' Blood. I am deeply grateful to Dr. William Standish Reed of the Christian Medical Foundation of Tampa, Florida, for his thoughts on the matter of the supernatural conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary. The female ovum itself has no blood, neither has the male spermatazoon; but it is when these come together in the fallopian tube, that conception takes place, and a new life begins. The blood cells in this new creation are from both father and mother and the blood type is determined at the moment of conception and is thereafter protected by the placenta from any flow of the mother's blood into the fetus. The Bible is explicit that the Holy Spirit was the Divine Agent who caused Jesus' conception in the womb of Mary. This, therefore, was not a normal conception, but a supernatural act of God planting the life of His already existent Son right in the womb of Mary, with no normal conception of a male spermatazoon with the female ovum of Mary. As the Blood type of the Son of God was a separate and precious type, it is inconceivable that Mary could have supplied any of her Adamic blood for the spotless Lamb of God. All the Child’s Blood came from His Father in heaven by a supernatural creative act of God. Jesus’ blood was without the Adamic stain of sin. (chapter continues)
