Saving the World of Mankind by Blood

“‘Blood of the covenant,’ which is to be poured out in behalf of many for forgiveness of sins.”​—Matt. 26:28.

 1. Who first said the words “The life of the flesh is in the blood”?

“THE life of the flesh is in the blood.” Who first said those words? It was not Hippocrates, the Greek philosopher and physician of the fifth century before our Common Era, whom The Encyclopœdia Britannica calls “Father of Medicine.” Neither was it Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, of the seventh century of our Common Era, who had something to say about eating.a Nor was it Moses, the Hebrew prophet of the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries before our Common Era. It was no one else but the Giver of life himself, the Creator of mankind’s blood and the One who put the life in that blood. He himself is the One that said it, more than a thousand years before Hippocrates was born on the Island of Cos.

2, 3. Why was it appropriate for him to say those words, and to whom did he dictate them?

² How appropriate it was that the Creator of this red stream of life of mankind should make such a scientifically correct statement! The prophet Moses merely wrote down this statement as God dictated it to him in the wilderness of Sinai in Arabia in the year 1512 B.C.E. In the Third Book of Moses, or Leviticus, as it is also called, the record (American Standard Version) says:

³ “And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying, Speak . . . 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 maketh atonement by reason of the life.”​—Lev. 17:1, 2, 11.

 4. The life-giving qualities of blood were recognized how far back anciently, as shown by what practice, and did God take note?

⁴ Who will dispute the divine statement that there is life in this vital fluid of our human bodies? No one successfully will. This is why, as the medical profession has established, this precious stream courses through our bodies normally once every twenty-three seconds to bring life-sustaining elements to the various tissues of the body. The life-giving qualities of this fluid in our arteries, veins and capillaries were early recognized, for we are informed that “transfusion of blood dates as far back as the time of the ancient Egyptians.” If such a practice was going on there in Egypt at the time that the prophet Moses led his people out of the land of Egypt in 1513 B.C.E., it did not escape the notice of the God of Moses. Not inconsistently, God would have this Egyptian practice in mind when he gave his law to the people of Moses concerning blood and the correct disposing of it.​—The Encyclopedia Americana, Volume 4, page 113, edition of 1929.

5, 6. (a) How is the relationship of blood with life shown in the account of Abel’s murder? (b) By whom has this crime connected with religion been repeated many times, and how is this shown in the last book of the Bible?

⁵ The life-giving, life-sustaining property that plays its part in this matter was well recognized by the writers of the Bible, from the first one (Moses) to the last one (the apostle John). That was why the lawless taking of another person’s life was spoken of as a shedding of One’s blood, since this is where the life resides. Take, for example, the murder of the God-fearing Abel by his jealous brother Cain. When identifying Cain as being the murderer, God said to Cain, who was trying to cover up his crime: “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” (Gen. 4:10) That crime, which was committed over the matter of religion or of the right form of worship to God, has been imitated millions of times over by the world empire of false religion that the apostle John calls Babylon the Great. Showing the responsibility of this long-lived world empire of false religion for the worldwide taking of human life in the name of religion, the last book of the Bible pictures that religious empire as an immoral woman and says:

⁶ “Upon her forehead was written a name, a mystery: ‘Babylon the Great, the mother of the harlots and of the disgusting things of the earth.’ And I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the holy ones and with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus.” “Yes, in her was found the blood of prophets and of holy ones and of all those who have been slaughtered on the earth.”​—Rev. 17:1-6; 18:24.

 7. Why can Babylon the Great be said to be cannibalistic, and what question does her sacrificing of human life arouse?

⁷ This prophetic picture presents this symbolic woman Babylon the Great as being cannibalistic inasmuch as she is said to be “drunk” with human blood. And yet the Babylonish religion of the world claims to have as its purpose the saving of human life for all eternity. But has God’s Word overdrawn the picture of cannibalistic Babylon the Great? Not at all, when a person honestly considers the sacrificing of human life that has been carried out in the name of religion, even God’s name being presumptuously attached to such death-dealing conduct. So we ask, Will God never call religion to account for all this bloodshed?

 8. (a) Because of its association with life, how could human blood be reasonably used with benefit? (b) How is a word of caution regarding the healing profession given by Luke?

⁸ Both inside the Bible and outside in the world, blood is associated with life and is used to represent life. Because of its having this quality and value, even in God’s sight, human blood could reasonably be used to impart life to others, yes, even to the whole world. But how is this to be done? Who will do it by this means? In the opinion of many people today, the followers of Hippocrates, who take what is called “the Hippocratic Oath,”b are the ones to do this, using all kinds of modern professional techniques, even squirting the “liquid of life” directly into a patient’s body. This confidence in the modernly trained professional medics ignores the Bible’s word of caution. This is set out in a case of nineteen centuries ago that is cited by a physician, a Bible writer named Luke, whom the Christian apostle Paul calls “Luke the beloved physician.” (Col. 4:14) Luke writes of this as the case of a “woman, subject to a flow of blood for twelve years, who had not been able to get a cure from anyone.”​—Luke 8:43-48.

 9. What does Mark have to say on this same case?

⁹ A fuller description of this same case is given by Luke’s friend named Mark, who writes: “Now there was a woman subject to a flow of blood twelve years, and she had been put to many pains by many physicians and had spent all her resources and had not been benefited but, rather, had got worse.” But Mark and the physician Luke report how this desperate woman was cured miraculously by merely touching from behind the outer garment of the great Healer, Jesus Christ. Says Mark: “Immediately her fountain of blood dried up, and she sensed in her body that she had been healed.”​—Mark 5:25-34.

“SAVE-LIFE DOCTORS”

10. How did the British Medical Association’s statement of 1965 show that it regarded God’s law on blood as death-dealing?

¹⁰ Today, however, the public press gives out the idea that God’s law on blood is death-dealing and speaks of modern professional physicians as “save-life doctors.” The London (England) Daily Herald, under date of February 26, 1965, says regarding the British Medical Association: “The society said a doctor has the ‘supreme duty’ of saving a patient’s life. Any doctor, faced with legal proceedings for trying to save a life by operating against parents’ wishes could count on the societies’ support.”

11. How do many medical men compare God’s law in the Bible with modern medical science, and what do evolutionists think of blood?

¹¹ Hailed as lifesavers, and impressed with their professionally assumed role of saving the present life of other humans, these men, for the most part, think that the advance of modern medical science has made God’s law in the Holy Bible out-of-date, unscientific, and having no force today because of its great age. “Look!” say they, “the Bible was written and finished nineteen hundred years ago. So what did those Bible writers know about medical science, to compare with our know-how today, our combining of technology with medicine to save human lives?” If they are evolutionists, who reject the Bible teaching of creation and willfully grab at the evolution theory, they have no respect for God’s law but establish their own medical ethics. In their view, blood evolved; it was not created by the Creator of man.

12. What opinion do others hold as to blood, and on what is their conclusion based?

¹² However, free persons are entitled to hold opinions and to express them. There are those who hold the opinion that blood is not the product of impersonal, blind, brainless, accidental evolution, but is the matchless work of an Almighty God. Their opinion is really a fine logical conclusion, based upon irrefutable facts. We are reminded of an article, written before gory World War I, by William Hanna Thomson, M.D., who was outstandingly connected with New York City hospitals for years. As published in the New York Times, Doctor Thomson’s article said:

13, 14. (a) What about the hemoglobin of our blood shows whether a molecule of it could come by chance? (b) How is the complexity of hemoglobin thrown into the shade, and what is modern science finding as to the problem of the origin of life?

¹³ “But for any animal on this earth with red blood it must, in order to live, have in its blood cells that definite substance called hemoglobin. Now a molecule of hemoglobin must contain the following number of different atoms in their due proportions, namely, of hydrogen atoms, 1,130; of carbon atoms, 712; of nitrogen, 214; of oxygen, 245; of sulphur, 2, and of iron, 1, or 2,304 atoms in all. Moreover, if that one atom of iron, in its peculiar relation to the rest (‘masked’ as some physiologists say) were left out, the animal could neither absorb oxygen nor give off carbonic acid; in other words, it could not breathe. I once asked a well-known physiological chemist, himself of German extraction and educated in Germany, how could those atoms in a molecule of hemoglobin thus come together by chance. His brief reply was, ‘No chance.’

¹⁴ “But the complexity of hemoglobin is thrown into the shade by those chemical substances which chemical research has discovered in the investigation of the mechanism of immunity against infectious diseases. . . . Modern science now finds that the problem of the origin of life becomes more and more inscrutable in proportion to the progress of investigations of the subject.”​—The Watch Tower, as of July 1, 1911, pages 198, 199.

15. How is the theory that blood is the product of evolution overwhelmingly ruled out?

¹⁵ The very nature and makeup of the blood and the marvelous fact that it bears life rule out its being the product of lifeless, mindless, purposeless evolution. Overwhelmingly these features of the blood call for the creative activity of a living, intelligent, constructive, purposeful God, the Maker of man.

16. (a) What about red blood corpuscles proves the need for a Creator? (b) How early did God talk about blood, and to what extent?

¹⁶ Just take into account the shape and the functional performance of the red blood corpuscles. Only a highly mathematical mind could design and arrange them. Hence every one of the thirty trillion red blood corpuscles in the vessels of the average man is an unbeatable argument and proof that there is a Creator, who is also man’s Maker. He knows better than the most advanced medical practitioner the vital need, the properties and the purpose of this red fluid of life. Why, more than five thousand eight hundred years before the first use of stored blood in making transfusions, by the professor of medicine of the University of Chicago, in the year 1918, God was talking about blood to the first man born, Cain, after he secretly slaughtered his younger brother Abel. (Gen. 4:10, 11) Ever since then God has had much to say about blood. In fact, in his written Word of sixty-six books, 1,189 chapters, blood is mentioned 447 times, from Genesis to Revelation (AV).c

17. (a) Who, as illustrated through Jesus Christ, must be the greatest Physician of them all? (b) How does he speak authoritatively to us today?

¹⁷ Since God empowered his Son, Jesus Christ, to perform miracles of healing, not with drugs, medicine, or surgical operations, but instantaneously, stopping chronic blood flows, giving sight to the blind, making the deaf and dumb hear and talk, restoring the crippled, healing the lepers, even raising the dead, repairing the brain, God the Creator is the greatest Physician of them all. He knows more about the human body and its makeup and how to repair it and restore it and revitalize it than the most highly educated medic of today. He is the infallible, absolute Authority on the subject. Let Him speak! Let Him be heard! We all stand to learn and to benefit when He speaks. He now speaks to us through his inspired, unchanged written Word. What does it say?

18. Why was there no need for a divine law against eating blood in the Garden of Eden?

¹⁸ Mankind eats to live. For how long, then, has mankind been authorized by God the Creator to eat the flesh of animals? Not from the creation of the first man, but for the last 4,335 years of mankind’s existence. In the paradise Garden of Eden the perfect man and woman were authorized to eat and live on fruits, nuts and vegetable products of the ground. (Gen. 1:29, 30) There was thus no need for a law against living off the blood of animals.

19. (a) On expelling Adam from the Garden, did God authorize the eating of blood? (b) What shows whether Abel drank the blood of sacrificial victims?

¹⁹ Even when God drove man out of the Garden of Eden because of rebelliously sinning against Him by eating the forbidden fruit, God did not say that from then on man should eat animal flesh. God said to man: “You must eat the vegetation of the field. In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it [not out of some lower animal by evolutionary process] you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.” (Gen. 3:18, 19) Years later, when Adam’s second son Abel offered the sacrifice of sheep to Jehovah God, there was the shedding of blood of such sacrificial victims, but Abel did not drink the blood. So God accepted his sacrifice.​—Gen. 4:3-11.

DIVINE LAW AGAINST EATING IT

20. When Noah came out of the ark, what did he at once do?

²⁰ More than fifteen hundred years later, in the days of the God-fearing Noah and his three married sons, came the great deluge. For at least one hundred and eighty days the earth and its mountains were completely covered with the floodwaters. (Gen. 7:11 to 8:5) Months later, when the eight human survivors of the deluge came out of the flood-proof ark, Noah at once offered a sacrifice from among all the clean animals and birds to Jehovah God. But Noah and his family drank none of the blood of the sacrificial victims, nor even ate any of the flesh of them.

21. What law did God then establish and state to Noah?

²¹ God was pleased at this. He blessed them and told them to fill the whole earth with their offspring. Then, as with Adam and Eve in Eden, God established a law regarding the food of the whole future human family, including us today. He said: “Every moving animal that is alive may serve as food for you. As in the case of green vegetation, I do give it all to you. Only flesh with its soul​—its blood—​you must not eat. And, besides that, your blood of your souls shall I ask back. From the hand of every living creature shall I ask it back.” (Gen. 8:18 to 9:5) After that the first rainbow appeared, and God made an everlasting covenant never again to bring a global flood upon mankind.​—Gen. 9:8-17.

22. (a) Thus how is it evident that God’s law against blood did not come into force through the Law of Moses? (b) Why does God’s law against blood still apply to all of us even since 33 C.E.?

²² There were then no Hebrews, no Israelites, no Jews and no circumcision. There were just the forefathers of the Semitic, Japhetic and Hamitic branches of the human family present. That was in the year 2369 B.C.E., or eight hundred and fifty-six years before Jehovah God gave the law to the prophet Moses, including the Ten Commandments, to deliver to the nation of Israel. Consequently God’s law forbidding the taking of animal blood into our human bodies did not come into existence through the divine law delivered through Moses in 1513 B.C.E. This makes it certain that God’s law on this vital matter was not and is not restricted to the Hebrews, Israelites or Jews. This particular law did not pass out of existence or out of force in the year 33 of our Common Era, when God nailed the Law of Moses to the death stake of Jesus Christ and abolished it. (Col. 2:13, 14; Eph. 2:13-15) That law of Noah’s day still applies to all mankind just as surely as mankind still continues to eat the flesh of beasts and birds and as surely as mankind has failed to return to the Garden of Eden and to an exclusively vegetarian diet.​—Gen. 1:29, 30; 2:15-17.

23, 24. (a) What did the disciple James recommend that would show that apostolic Christians still insisted on God’s law to Noah? (b) How did the wording of that decree show the holy spirit’s part?

²³ Yes, Christian as well as Jew, non-Christian as well as non-Jew, are under that law about eating as given to our common forefather Noah after the flood. Apostolic Christians of the first century of our Common Era recognized that fact and insisted on it. Sixteen years after the Law of Moses was, figuratively speaking, nailed to Christ’s death stake as fulfilled and abolished, the Christian disciple James recommended to the Jerusalem Council of the apostles and other older brothers to write to the non-Jewish Christians, namely, “to abstain from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from what is strangled and from blood.” That recommendation to abstain from “the meat of strangled animals, and the tasting of blood” (AT) was not just the idea of the disciple James but was also dictated by God’s holy spirit. This serious fact is emphasized in the way that the official decree to the non-Jewish Christians was worded. It read as follows:

²⁴ “The apostles and the older brothers to those brothers . . . who are from the nations: Greetings! . . . For the holy spirit and we ourselves have favored adding no further burden to you, except these necessary things, to keep yourselves free from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication. If you carefully keep yourselves from these things, you will prosper. Good health to you!”​—Acts 15:19-29.

25. (a) How long does history show that true Christians observed that Jerusalem decree? (b) Why do Jehovah’s witnesses keep it today?

²⁵ Years later, after the third missionary trip of the apostle Paul, the disciple James spoke to him about that same decree of the Jerusalem Council as still being enforced toward non-Jewish Christians. (Acts 21:18-26) According to early religious writers of the first three centuries this inspired decree against taking blood into a person’s body was held to by Christians for centuries after it was published. Especially from the days of the Roman Catholic saint named Augustine, Christendom has ceased to observe that inspired decree, and the medical profession of Christendom has ignored it as not binding upon Christians.d But who abolished that decree? Not God, forasmuch as he himself inspired it and published it through his faithful organization in Jerusalem. It certainly was not abolished with the abolition of the Law of Moses. For that Scriptural reason Jehovah’s Christian witnesses of today continue to keep that decree, abstaining not only from fornication and idolatry but also from blood.

A TYPICAL PICTURE OF SAVING BY BLOOD

26. (a) How did the Jerusalem decree agree with the Mosaic law on the question of to whom blood belonged? (b) Of what was a Jew guilty when he shed sacrificial blood but did not present it to Jehovah?

²⁶ That Jerusalem Council’s decree came many years after Jesus Christ shed his blood on the death stake at Calvary. But by the decree God made it plain that he was still holding to what he had stated in his law given through Moses, namely, that the blood of man and animals belongs to God the Creator. This is right, inasmuch as he is the Fountain of life and he has put the life of man and of animals in the blood and made it the chief conveyor of life. That is why, if a man in Israel slaughtered an animal for sacrifice and did not present it to Jehovah, it was as if he had committed murder: “Bloodguilt will be counted to that man. He has shed blood, and that man must be cut off from among his people.” He was to be killed. (Lev. 17:3, 4) That is why, too, Jehovah commanded that the priest should pour the blood of sacrificial victims at the base of the altar of sacrifice. (Lev. 4:7, 18, 25, 34; 8:15; 9:9) The blood was a sacred thing, like life, and must be treated as such.

27, 28. (a) In God’s law to Israel, what quality was accounted to blood, and so what can be done with the lifeblood? (b) How did Leviticus 17:11-14 show this?

²⁷ In God’s law to ancient Israel, as well as in the case of his law to faithful Noah, this sacred quality of the life stream was accounted not only to animals that were offered in sacrifice but even to the clean animals that men hunted for food. In any case, lifeblood that is sacred was involved and hence it could be used for a sacred purpose. Since the penalty for sin is death and since the soul or life is in the blood, it can be used for the cancellation of sin and the turning aside of sin’s penalty, death. We do not need to argue about what this law means; it plainly reads:

²⁸ “The soul of the flesh is in the blood, and I myself have put it upon the altar for you to make atonement for your souls, because it is the blood that makes atonement by the soul [or, life] in it. That is why I have said to the sons of Israel: ‘No soul of you should eat blood and no alien resident who is residing as an alien in your midst should eat blood.’ As for any man of the sons of Israel or some alien resident who is residing as an alien in your midst who in hunting catches a wild beast or a fowl that may be eaten, he must in that case pour its blood out and cover it with dust. For the soul of every sort of flesh is its blood by the soul in it. Consequently I said to the sons of Israel: ‘You must not eat the blood of any sort of flesh, because the soul of every sort of flesh is its blood. Anyone eating it will be cut off.”’​—Lev. 17:11-14; compare Deuteronomy 12:16, 23-27.

29. (a) In what marvelous way can God use the life stream of the human body? (b) What does use of blood in any way other than God’s way amount to, and why does this apply to the medical use of it?

²⁹ Because of the life value that is contained in the red stream that the heart pumps through the body, Jehovah God can use the blood in a marvelous way in saving the world of mankind for eternal life. So this is a matter that has to do with the eternal life of all mankind. It has such a serious meaning that in the typical nation of Israel the person who partook of blood as food was to be killed or had to fulfill a special program of cleansing. (Lev. 17:15, 16; 7:26, 27) The use of this precious life stream in any way other than God’s way is a misuse of it, a perversion of its use. This principle applies to the medical use of blood from the days of ancient Egypt down to our day. Why so? Because the medical practitioners are not God’s ordained priests serving at his holy altar and offering to him blood of mankind according to God’s directions. Long ago God took care of saving the world of mankind by blood, and he does not need their so-called scientific use of blood. Their use of it in the name of medicine is not God’s will.

[Footnotes]

In a footnote on the word “invocated” the book says: “For this reason, whenever the Mohammedans kill any animal for food, they always say Bismi··llah, or In the name of God; which if it be neglected, they think it not lawful to eat of it.”

Another clause in the Hippocratic Oath reads: “I will not at any time give to a woman any drug or instrument for the purpose of causing abortion.”

See Dr. Immanuel Jacobovits’ book entitled “Jewish Medical Ethics,” published in 1959 (third printing 1967), pages 124, 172, 208-210.