Derek Prince - The Sevenfold Sprinkling Of The Blood Of Jesus
This is a clip from the full sermon: How To Apply The Blood Of Jesus
Generally speaking in my ministry I like to deal with a theme, not just one topic in one message. I believe that is part of the gifts that God has given me to deal with the truths of the Bible thematically and systematically. And so I was asking God what theme He would want me to deal with here in Christchurch. And I felt that the Lord showed me that He wanted me to focus my teaching on the cross. And in one way or another that is what I will be doing. When I speak about the cross, I need to make it clear to you I'm not talking about a piece of metal or wood that people hang around their necks or on the wall of churches. I have nothing against those. But I just need to explain that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about what was accomplished for us by the death of Jesus Christ as the sacrifice for sin, on the cross.
So I just use that simple phrase 'the cross' to cover all of that. Last night I had the privilege of being, not for the first time, in Christchurch Town Hall. Just let me have a little check: How many of you were there last night? That's wonderful. That's a good representation. We are sorry for those of you who missed it, we had a wonderful time. Isn't that true? Not so much because of the preacher, but because of the Lord. Because the Lord came in and really visited us. We ended - I think it is reverent to say - on cloud nine last night. I tell people: Don't talk about the seventh heaven, because that's not scriptural. But if you want to say you are really happy, it's alright to say you are on cloud nine, because there are lots of clouds up in heaven.
I talked about the love of God revealed in the price that He was willing to pay to redeem each one of us. The price was the precious blood of Jesus. And I showed from the Old Testament scriptures, that God had foreshown the shedding of the blood of Jesus. And in the ceremony of the day of atonement, recorded in Leviticus 16, God had foreshown that there would be a sevenfold sprinkling of the precious blood of Jesus. And last night we traced this through the gospels. And I just want to recapitulate briefly what we said. Those that have listened to my radio teaching know that I'm strong on recapitulation. I don't believe in saying a thing once and just believing everybody got it all. Because most times they didn't. For five years in East-Africa, I was a trainer of teachers for the schools of Africa. And one thing we used to impress upon our teachers, was that recapitulation is a part of good teaching.
So I'm going to very, very briefly go through the successive sevenfold sprinkling of the blood of Jesus, as recorded in the gospels. First of all in the garden of Gethsemane. As He prayed in agony, His sweat fell down like great drops of blood on the ground. Then when they took Him to the house of the high priest and began to abuse Him. They struck Him across the face with rods. It brought out the blood. At some point in their mistreatment of Him they began to pull out the hair of His beard in tufts. And of course the blood came out. Then He was handed over by Pontius Pilate to be scourged. And a Roman scourge was a whip with many thongs in which were embedded pieces of bone and metal. And so as the thongs fell across a man's back they literally tore open the flesh. And then in mockery, because He claimed to be a King, they planted a crown of thorns.
If you go to Israel, you can see the same thorns today. They are long and extremely hard and tremendously sharp. And they put this on His head and then they beat Him on the head, pressing the thorns down into His scalp causing the blood to well up and run down His face and coagulate in His beard. And prophetically, in Isaiah 52, Isaiah was predicting that. He said that His visage was marred more than any man. One of the modern translations says that He lost even the appearance of a human being. And then they nailed Him to the cross. And put the nails through His hands and His feet. And finally, after He was dead, a soldier thrust a spear into His side in the area of the heart and blood and water gushed out. So that's the sevenfold sprinkling that was predicted in the ceremony of the day of atonement.
And then I pointed out that in Leviticus 17:11 the Lord says the life or the soul of all flesh is in the blood. And He says: I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls. That's another of the amazing prophecies of the Old Testament. It wasn't just a regulation for whether the Israelites should eat food with blood or without, but it was a prediction of the cross. The life or a soul of all flesh is in the blood and I have given it to you upon the altar of Calvary to make an atonement for your souls. And then in Isaiah 53:12, in the great prophetic picture of the atonement, Isaiah says that He poured out his soul unto death. How did He do that? In His blood. The soul is in the blood. And Jesus poured out His soul as the sin offering for the whole of the human race. His soul took the place of your soul and my soul. He became the final sin offering.