The Voice of Your Brother’s Blood
A Devotional Series from Genesis
Online Bible Audio/Readings Links (ESV)
4/16 Reading Portions: Leviticus 20; Psalm 25; Ecclesiastes 3; 1 Timothy 5
Genesis 4:10
And the LORD said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground.”
BLOOD
Because of the precious shed blood of Jesus, shed blood has a voice, metaphorically speaking. The writer to the Hebrew Christians said:
By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. Hebrews 11:4
How did Abel’s faith speak? By the voice of his shed blood. It pointed to the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. In that Day of Judgment, every evil deed of the unrepentant, unredeemed soul will be condemned by the testimony of the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. While for the redeemed soul, salvation through the forgiveness of sins must come by the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ (Heb 9:22), apart from Christ’s soul cleansing blood, there will be no peace, no propitiation, no promise of hope, and no purging of man’s wicked perversions of life. The murder of Christ, by His shed blood, is the indictment for every evil deed, every wicked thought, and every sinful utterance.
Yet to you and me who have been saved by God’s grace through the substitutionary death of our Lord Jesus Christ, though we may not have heard the testimony of Christ’s blood in our ears when we were first saved, the shed blood of Jesus did testify on our behalf for our salvation. It is written,
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the Mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. Hebrews 12:22-24
Abel’s shed blood had indeed cried from the ground. But his shed blood was merely a prophetic foreshadow of the better, precious, perfect testimony of our Friend, Brother, and Bridegroom, the Lord Jesus Messiah, whose shed blood eternally speaks to the heavenly Father on your behalf and mine.
You see, when the Law of Moses stated that…
…the life of the flesh is in the blood… Leviticus 17:11
…it wasn’t speaking of the formation of blood for the child in the womb. It was speaking of the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Apart from His shed blood, we would be dead in trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1-2).
Hallelujah! What a Savior!