D21-3: How The Unjust Spilling Of blood Causes The Land It Was Committed On To Become Cursed

We are in the process of talking about “bloodguilt”, a subject that is given very little if any discussion in both Christian churches and Jewish synagogues.

As I mentioned yesterday, it’s no secret that the shedding of blood plays a central role throughout the Scriptures.

^“For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.”-Leviticus 17:11

It is because “life is in the blood” that “life with blood” is considered distinct from “life that exists without blood”.

In other words, animal life is considered of higher value than plant life and…

…human life is considered of much higher value than animal life. 

So to recap, what is a good working definition of “bloodguilt” we can use for our discussion here?

Again, simply put…

 …“Bloodguilt” is the condition of becoming defiled…

…when one of God’s commandments…

…involving the unjust spilling of blood is broken…

…which leads us to an interesting question.

In Scripture, what is the first recorded event of the unjust spilling of blood?

For that, we have to go all the way back to Genesis Chapter Four when the Lord rejected Cain’s sacrifice but accepted Abel’s offering.

This so infuriated Cain that he made the fatal decision to kill Abel.

The result was the first recorded murder in Scripture.

Or to put it another way, we have the first unlawful killing of a human by another human.

The Torah calls this act of murder “the taking of blood”.

When this happened, yet another principle concerning blood was established that I want you to catch.

When a human murders another human, the murderer is saddled with “bloodguilt”.

This bloodguilt is so serious that it can only be satisfied by shedding the blood of the guilty party (taking the murderer’s life).

But that’s not all.

Bloodguilt is such an extreme form of defilement that…

…it separates that person from God.

There are other sins that also cause bloodguilt such as the drinking of blood of any kind.

In fact, up until the time of Noah, one was forbidden from taking the life of an animal for food.

The only authorized source of food up until the great flood was ONLY plant life.

Are you getting this?

Let me put it another way.

Until the time of the great flood, it was an outright crime to eat meat and if you did it was considered a crime against God’s laws concerning blood.

Which means if you ate meat at that time, you incurred bloodguilt.

And then after the flood, when God said it was okay to kill animals for food, He still put some strict rules in place concerning blood.

In other words, one was forbidden from directly drinking the blood of an animal or strangling an animal or using any other method that didn’t allow the blood of an animal to completely drain out.

Now getting back to the story of Cain and Abel, when we examine the Lord’s response to Cain killing his brother, we were given another strong hint of another negative aspect of bloodguilt.

“He said, ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!  Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood at your hands.  When you farm the ground it will no longer yield its strength to you. You will be a fugitive, wandering the earth.'”-Genesis 4:10-12

Hmmm.  

This is really interesting.

Here we see that the unjust spilling of blood also affects the land.

It’s NOT that Abel’s blood physically came into contact with the soil and on some chemical level infected the dirt and thus caused it to be contaminated with a curse.

Rather, and pay close attention because this ties in with what we’re going to be studying right here in Deuteronomy 21, the blood guilt on the land or soil was connected to its proximity from where the murder act was committed.

In other words, regardless of whether the blood physically touched the ground or not didn’t matter.

What mattered was the distance from where the unjust killing occurred.

The unjust spilling of blood brought about a mysterious physical AND spiritual effect upon the land upon which it was committed.

The murder literally had the spiritual effect of cursing the ground to the effect that the land would no longer be able to produce crops.

I know all of this sounds like some ancient superstition but it’s NOT.

This is Scriptural truth and it’s something we’ve really got to understand if we’re ever going to be able to grasp why Messiah’s sacrifice was so important.

One final point.

Although these principles of blood and bloodguilt may strike you as strange, understand that they are still fully in effect today.

And they are the very reason why redemption history has taken the path it has.

With this knowledge in hand, next time we’ll jump into the text of Deuteronomy 21.