Revealing Jesus in the Blood Covenant

A blood covenant between two parties is the closest, the most enduring, the most solemn and the most sacred of all compacts; it absolutely cannot be broken. When you enter into a blood covenant with someone, you promise to give them your life, your love and your protection forever. It is much like a marriage, which the Bible calls a covenant.

And although the Bible consists of 66 different books, they all tell one central story. The story is that God has taken the initiative to enter into a blood covenant with Himself through the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Those who embrace Jesus as their Messiah, Lord and Savior enter into the covenant with God through Jesus. The covenant in the blood of Jesus is the “scarlet thread” that runs through both divisions of the Bible.

In the first or older blood covenant, God says that at a point in the future, He would enter into a newer blood covenant with Himself that comes to us through Jesus. In fact, the entire Hebrew Bible is simply a picture of God’s salvation message in Jesus. It is God’s picture book of Jesus, but the picture is in the ancient culture of the Bible, which is foreign to modern Western people. So we don’t see these pictures. They seem to be meaningless rituals, customs, places, names and unrelated happenings. Nevertheless, they are all individual pieces of the same picture.

God painted a picture of Himself in the Hebrew Bible that pointed everyone to Him when He would come to cut the covenant, as recorded in the New Testament of the Bible. Every believer in the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, offered an innocent, substitutionary sacrifice to cover their sins and point them into the future when God Himself, through Jesus, would come to take their sins away. He would be the once-and-for-all perfect sacrifice.

The Hebrews had a blood covenant ritual that was similar to the other nations around them. All nations practiced blood covenants because humans instinctively sought this kind of relationship. So this practice was not unique to the Hebrews. When studying ancient blood covenant rituals, you discover that they all had certain, common elements in the rituals. To make this easy for us to understand, I have taken the common elements and organized the ritual into 9 steps. We are going to go through these 9 steps with you and see how they point to Jesus. We will also read some Scriptures that show His happening. One thing to keep in mind is that the Bible does not stop to explain all of this for us, because the people knew what it was all about. We have to study the culture and the rituals for ourselves to learn what they knew. {eoa}

Dr. Richard Booker is the author of The Miracle of the Scarlet Thread and 40 life-changing books and has developed 18 college- level Bible courses from a Judeo-Christian perspective. He has made more than 550 television programs and serves as a spiritual father to many. He is known for his ability to explain complicated subjects in easy-to-understand language for everyday people. He and his wife, Peggy, have led tours to Israel for 30 years where for 18 years, Richard was a speaker at the International Christian Celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem. This event is attended by 5,000 Christians from 100 nations. Dr. Booker and Peggy hosted a Kristallnacht Memorial for eighteen years during which time they worked closely with the Holocaust Museum and Survivors in Houston, Texas. They also participated in a Holocaust educators tour to Europe. In addition, they hosted an Erev Shabbat event for fifteen years, where they taught the importance for Christians and Jews to discover one another in mutual love and respect. To learn more, see their website at rbooker.com.