Among many of the things we’ve learned, the one central doctrine that should be pretty clear to all of us now is that “life is in the blood”.
The idea is that all life belongs to God and because of this He possesses the sovereign right to decide what to do with it.
To this point, the one thing the Lord has commanded us to never even contemplate doing is to ingest blood for food.
This wasn’t just a prohibition placed on the Israelites.
It was a prohibition placed on all human beings everywhere for all times whether Hebrew or pagan.
This is because aside from giving life to the body, God has set apart and assigned blood a unique spiritual quality that can also be used as a means for atonement and purification.
It is for this reason that the Israelites were forbidden from eating or drinking anything even that symbolically represented blood.
This brings me to yet another one of the great false teachings one encounters in the churches.
Have you ever heard a Christian tell you that the wine used in a Jewish ritual ceremony represents blood?
This is pure bogus nonsense.
It is a pure myth that originated from a total misunderstanding of the common Scriptural phrase “the blood of the grape” in reference to grape wine or grape juice.
That’s it.
In the Biblical culture, wine represented happiness, joy and grace and an abundance of this drink symbolized well-being and prosperity.
During Bible times, to offer a guest in your home a glass of wine was considered to be one of the highest forms of hospitality and a warm gesture that represented shalom and goodwill.
However, wine was NEVER symbolic of blood.
In fact, if it was, a Hebrew would never have drank it simply because the Torah makes it clear that it is an abomination to drink blood.
Now I betcha some of you are wondering about Yeshua’s command to his disciples to drink wine as symbolic of his blood during the last Passover he had with them?
The gentile church has even made this into a separate sacrament that they call “Communion“.
Well, we’ll get into that next time.
CONNECTING THIS TEACHING TO THE NEW TESTAMENT
“On Tuesday there was a wedding at Kanah in the Galil;
and the mother of Yeshua was there.
Yeshua too was invited to the wedding,
along with his talmidim.
The wine ran out, and Yeshua’s mother said to him,
“They have no more wine.” Yeshua replied,
“Mother, why should that concern me? — or you?
My time hasn’t come yet.”
His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
Now six stone water-jars were standing there for
the Jewish ceremonial washings,
each with a capacity of twenty or thirty gallons.
Yeshua told them, “Fill the jars with water,”
and they filled them to the brim.
He said, “Now draw some out, and take it to
the man in charge of the banquet”; and they took it.
The man in charge tasted the water;
it had now turned into wine!
He did not know where it had come from,
but the servants who had drawn the water knew.
So he called the bridegroom and said to him,
“Everyone else serves the good wine first and
the poorer wine after people have drunk freely.
But you have kept the good wine until now!”
This, the first of Yeshua’s miraculous signs,
he did at Kanah in the Galil;
he manifested his glory,
and his talmidim came to trust in him.”
-John 2:1-11
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