By Richard Harp
While living in Southern Ohio, our freezer was often supplied with deer meat. This was to save money on groceries and also ensure we were eating lean, healthy meat.
One year I decided to save even more by processing the deer myself. Unbeknownst to me, the muzzleloader season that year would be the coldest of the winter, and I would acquire the deer on the coldest day.
It froze solid and in order to thaw it out, I had to bring it to our basement to process it. My wife puts up with an awful lot.
The process was messy to say the least. Trying to clean up blood is an extremely challenging procedure, especially with “blood on your hands.” This very vivid phrase is sometimes used to describe guilt.
The Carnton House is a historic home in Franklin, Tennessee, just North of Huntsville, Alabama. The main house was used as a hospital during the battle of Franklin in the Civil War.
There is an eye-opening fact about this time capsule to a much more disturbing time. The original floors still have blood stains from the thousands of soldiers who stayed there. Many came in one door of the house and left another to become one of the occupants of the 1500 grave cemetery on the property.
To compare guilt to this picture causes me to shudder. Is guilt really like this? Isaiah said, “…but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear. For your hands are defiled with blood and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies; your tongue mutters wickedness” (Isaiah 59:2-3)
Sin cuts us off from God. Isaiah is saying that iniquity literally leaves us with blood on our hands. Your sin and my sin leaves us hopelessly lost. Is this the end of the story? Is this the conclusion of the matter?
Maybe you noticed the passage began in the middle of a thought. The first part of this passage leaves us with hope. It leaves us with a way to have the bloodguilt washed off of our hands.
“Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear” (Isaiah 59:1).
The Lord’s hand is able to save you. The Lord’s hand can wipe away the guilt. It just so happens that the Lord’s hand has already gone through the process to provide you and I with cleansing. He gave us a way to remove the guilt. The Lord’s hand was nailed to a cross where He shed His own blood to remove our guilt.
“This is the message we have heard from Him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:4-7).
When you think of the picture of the bloodshed at Carnton House, it’s a gruesome picture that can still be seen today. Over two thousand years ago, the blood that was shed at the cross can still be accessed today.
The blood on His hands cleanses the blood on our hands.
A Note From the Harp: Richard is the Pulpit Minister for the Deerfoot Church of Christ.