Roots of Bitterness - 4

For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin; (Hebrews 12:3-4)

I am struggling with this phrase, not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood. I am praying for insight and wisdom from God because I don't think I am capable of just figuring out an acceptable explanation for this.

I now remember that I am in Hebrews and that this book talks quite a bit about the shedding of blood and the whole Old Testament system in contrast to the real system that God is trying to reveal to us. So I look back a few pages to see what I can find to shed light on this verse.

After saying above, "SACRIFICES AND OFFERINGS AND WHOLE BURNT OFFERINGS AND sacrifices FOR SIN YOU HAVE NOT DESIRED, NOR HAVE YOU TAKEN PLEASURE in them" (which are offered according to the Law), then He said, "BEHOLD, I HAVE COME TO DO YOUR WILL." He takes away the first in order to establish the second. By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. (Hebrews 10:8-10)

And according to the Law, one may almost say, all things are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. (Hebrews 9:22)

It is not real clear to me yet but it seems that this verse may have something to do with shifting my thinking away from viewing my life through the paradigm of Law and seeing life through the paradigm of being in Christ and in relationship with God. Now that I think of it that way it would make sense that possibly all bitterness is rooted in having the paradigm of Law and legal perceptions rather than God-based relationships with a proper perspective of reality and my value in God's eyes.

If Jesus had for a moment based His perception of His own value on legal thinking, the hostility by sinners against Him would have exploited instantly the weakening effects of that faulty logic and would have created an opportunity for bitterness that would have taken Him down. As I am learning elsewhere, the whole system of Law, of sacrifices and blood and appeasement, etc. that humans insist on believing in in relation to God is basically erroneous and man-made – or at least man-appeasing. But because we cannot think outside of that box, God sent His Son into our system to go through our requirements and satisfy our demand for the shedding of blood according to our perception of justice under the artificial concept of law from our perspective – He did all of this, not to satisfy God's thirst for satiating blood but for our thirst to see someone pay for sin.

But He did not do all that He did for us just to leave us to continue wallowing around in our misconceptions about law and justice and reality. He did all of that to draw us away from that self-destructive mode of thinking and into a whole new paradigm of reality where love and mercy and wholeness and joy make up the atmosphere in which to think and to live and to reason. He did all that to unlock our hearts by satisfying the demands of our view of justice so that we could then move beyond our messed up perception of reality and allow Him to reveal to us the real truth about Himself and His love for us.

How does this fit into an understanding of this verse, You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin. I think there might be a number of ways to apply these words, but I am not satisfied with many of them. I think there is a great deal more to be seen here than what we typically have drawn from it. It seems to be saying something about shifting our focus from striving against sin to considering Him instead. If our life focus is all about striving against sin we will be stuck in the legal mode of thinking and that will inevitably result in conclusions that include the need for someone to shed blood, even if it is ourselves.

I know this sounds like a twisting of a text that has long been used to prove the very opposite point. I am not saying that I am completely right or wrong here, but I have to consider this and listen to the Spirit closely on this to see if maybe our preconceptions and assumptions held for so many years may have at least blocked our perception of something much deeper if not outright misled us. Because the usual take that we have on this verse in my opinion has always resulted in greater human effort to resist sin on our part even to the point of shedding our own blood – as if the shedding of the blood of the Son of God was not enough for us. Something is seriously faulty about that kind of reasoning.

The following verses very clearly build on these past two and I do not yet know how it all fits together. I want the Spirit to continue to teach me what I need to know and see here because I want to be free of the roots of bitterness that have poisoned my life, my family and my church for far too long.

Next time I will take a closer look at the next phase and apparently Paul's choice of direction to go to answer the questions raised in these verses. He says, and you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, "MY SON, DO NOT REGARD LIGHTLY THE DISCIPLINE OF THE LORD, NOR FAINT WHEN YOU ARE REPROVED BY HIM. (Hebrews 12:5)

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