3. The Blood That Unites: Sealed into the Family of God

“And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”

(Luke 24:27)

Goal of the Class: By the end of this lesson, you will see blood not with fear, but as the sign of the unbreakable covenant of love that God initiated in order to make you part of His family. You will understand how this foundational bond —the pillar of the covenant— is the indispensable basis, established by pure grace, that makes the enjoyment of joyful communion possible and prepares the ground for the rest of the Levitical system.

An Unexpected Beginning

The word blood has an almost automatic effect on us. Something tightens. Something prepares for the worst. We associate it with wounds, with accidents, with loss. It is the color of alarm. The color that tells us something has gone very wrong.

My wife was seven years old when her parents took her to the movies to see a film about Moses. They arrived late. When they entered the theater, the screen showed the Nile turning into blood. An entire river, red, dark, moving. Without knowing anything about what had happened before, without the context of slavery or liberation, what she saw was only one thing: catastrophe.

She cried in terror for several minutes. Her parents did not understand what was happening. Neither did she. She only knew that something terrible was happening on that screen.

Doesn’t something similar happen to us every time we open Leviticus? We see blood everywhere, and our immediate reaction is that of that seven-year-old girl in the movie theater: this is catastrophe. This is punishment. This is a God who demands blood in order to calm down. But what if that reading, like my wife’s, comes from having entered the story late? What if the context that changes everything is missing?

The Bible presents something about blood that is almost scandalous when you hear it for the first time: blood is not primarily the symbol of death. It is the symbol of family.

Genesis 15. Abram is seventy-five years old, has no children, and God has just promised him descendants as numerous as the stars. Abram asks Him, with astonishing honesty: “How shall I know that I shall possess it?” God could have answered with words. Instead, He asks him to prepare animals, divide them in half, and wait. And then, in the darkness of the night, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch pass between the divided animals. Only God passes through. Only God commits Himself. In the culture of the ancient Near East, that rite meant: “If I do not fulfill my promise, may what happened to these animals happen to me.” God signed the covenant with His own life. That is the blood of the covenant: not punishment. Irrevocable commitment.

Genesis 31. Jacob and his father-in-law Laban have years of accumulated tension. Deceptions, debts, misunderstandings. At the moment of final separation, instead of insults or threats, they do something surprising: they offer a sacrifice and sit down to eat together. The meal shared through the sacrifice is the ancient language for saying: “What stood between us has been resolved. We are family again.” The blood does not mark the moment of conflict. It marks the moment of reconciliation.[1]

At Sinai, the sprinkled blood united God with Israel before the elders “saw God and ate and drank” (Exodus 24:8–11).

How is this possible? How can something that seems repulsive to us become revelation? Scripture teaches us a transforming language: blood does not represent punishment, but the family bond that God initiates, establishing the essential foundation of the covenant —that first master key of the Prelude— which opens the door to all subsequent worship.

In each of these accounts, blood does the same thing: it does not divide. It unites. It does not destroy. It creates family. And the most dramatic moment of that story is still to come.

The Covenant That Ends in a Banquet — Exodus 24: The Scene That Changes the Story

To understand what blood means in Leviticus, we must go to Sinai. Imagine the scene: a mountain covered with clouds and fire, thunder that makes the earth tremble, and an entire nation camped at the foot of it, too terrified to draw near. In that context, Moses ascends. He comes down with instructions. He ascends again. And then something happens that defies every expectation. God invites Israel to seal a covenant.

Moses builds an altar and twelve pillars, one for each tribe. Animals are sacrificed. And then he does something no one expected: he takes the blood, divides it in two, and sprinkles half on the altar and the other half on the people. On the people. And he says: “Behold the blood of the covenant that Yahweh has made with you.” At that moment, God and His people were united by the same blood. That is what a blood covenant does: it declares that two parties are now one family.

And then comes what no reader of the Old Testament would expect. Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy elders ascend the mountain. And they see God. In Hebrew tradition, seeing God was synonymous with dying. Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord and said: “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been preserved.” It was a miracle to survive the encounter.

But in Exodus 24, they not only survive. They eat. They drink. They sit at the table in the presence of God and celebrate. The blood of the covenant did not open a wound. It opened a table.

The sequence says it all: first the covenant sealed by blood, then the vision of the living God, and finally the shared table in His presence. This is not a sequence of punishment and survival. It is a sequence of covenant, encounter, and celebration. Exactly the same arc that runs through all of Leviticus.

What kind of God concludes the signing of a covenant with a banquet? One who does not want subjects. One who wants family. The goal of the entire Levitical system is already here, in Exodus 24, before Leviticus even begins: a table. A gathered people. And God in their midst, not as a judge who observes, but as a host who celebrates.

In Exodus 24, blood unites, adopting Israel as God’s spiritual family. This union is not isolated; it solidifies the foundation of the covenant, creating the relationship by pure grace. Without it, the Levitical system would make no sense. It is divine initiative that establishes belonging, not human achievement.

Leviticus: The Maintenance of a Living Relationship

With that scene at Sinai in mind, Leviticus reads completely differently. The rites, the offerings, the purity regulations: they are not the entrance fee into the presence of God. They are the care of something that already exists. They are the way a family cares for the relationship that was sealed with blood.

Think of it this way: on the day of Sinai, God gave Israel something extraordinarily precious. Not an object. A relationship. And like every valuable relationship, it needed care. Not because it could disappear through God’s negligence, but because the people’s negligence could damage it.

Leviticus is that care. The offerings are the daily language with which Israel said: “This relationship matters. It is worth caring for.” And so, what seemed to a seven-year-old girl in a dark movie theater to be only catastrophe turns out to be something completely different when you have the full context: the provision of a Father who wants His family to remain gathered around His table.

Every application of blood on the altar declared: “We still belong to God; the relationship lives.” It was the concrete affirmation that the family bond endures. Although this primary function of blood is to unite and create family by divine initiative, within that established relationship it will have derived roles. For example, in the ḥaṭṭāʾt offering, it will purify the space of encounter, maintaining holiness for ongoing communion —not as an external payment, but as loving care within the secure family God has already formed.

The New Covenant in the Blood of Christ

The story of the blood covenant does not end at Sinai. Centuries later, in a room in Jerusalem, on the night before His arrest, Jesus took a cup of wine and said something His Jewish disciples understood immediately: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” He was not inventing a new language. He was fulfilling a very ancient one. The same language of Exodus 24. The same language of Sinai. But now, with a sacrifice that would not need to be repeated.

When the New Testament says that we are redeemed “by His blood,” it is not making an isolated reference to the biological fluid of Jesus, as if blood functioned by itself, detached from the history of the covenant. It is using covenant language. It is saying that we are redeemed by the covenant God inaugurated when the blood of His Son was poured out. By the irrevocable commitment God established at the cross. By the New Covenant that came into force through the death of Christ.

At Sinai, God had already sealed a covenant with blood. But in Christ something fuller, more definitive, and more eternal takes place. It is no longer a provisional covenant, sustained by repeated mediations, but the definitive covenant inaugurated by the blood of the Son.

Therefore, “by His blood” means: by the covenant God established in Christ; by the irrevocable faithfulness He manifested at the cross; by the eternal covenant through which God secures forgiveness, access, and communion with His people.

Jesus establishes this when He takes the cup (Luke 22:20), and the sacred authors assume the same pattern: we receive redemption and forgiveness “by His blood” (Eph 1:7), reconciliation and peace “by the blood of His cross” (Col 1:20), confident access to the Sanctuary “by the blood of Jesus” (Heb 10:19), and real purification of the conscience “by His own blood” (Heb 9:12–14; cf. Rev 1:5). In every case, “the blood” evokes the New Covenant by which God binds Himself in grace and incorporates us as His people.

The blood of Christ does two things that the Levitical system could only announce: it seals us as an eternal family and cleanses the conscience in a way no rite could accomplish. The Tabernacle could be purified. Only Christ could transform the heart.

Jesus does not merely open the door. He is the door. And what stands on the other side is not a courtroom where God decides whether you are good enough. It is the table of Exodus 24, now opened to all, forever, without the blood needing to be poured out again.

“He himself is our peace, who has made both one” (Ephesians 2:14). It is not a reminder of death, but the guarantee of eternal family. Hebrews lifts this up and applies it to heaven: “It was necessary, therefore, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these” (Hebrews 9:23). In Christ, the definitive temple is opened forever.

Conclusion: From Repulsion to Wonder — And Toward Mutual Delight

Remember that seven-year-old girl in the movie theater. What she saw terrified her because she did not have the context. She was missing the story. She did not know that the red river was not the end of something, but the beginning of the greatest liberation her people had ever known.

The same thing happens to us with Leviticus. When you enter without context, you see only blood and think: catastrophe. When you enter with the whole story, you see something completely different: a God who uses the most permanent language that exists, blood, to say one thing: you are mine. We are family.

From Sinai to the cross, the story is always the same: a God who does not observe from afar but gets involved, who does not demand from above but descends, who does not sign contracts but seals family covenants. And that redefines everything we call worship. It is not the entrance fee. It is the celebration of the family that has already been gathered. It is not what you do so that God will accept you. It is what you do because you have already been accepted, and that deserves to be celebrated.

That is the final purpose —the mutual delight and joyful communion of Chapter 2. Being constituted as family by the blood that unites is the foundation for that feast, where we rejoice with those who say: “Let us go to the house of the LORD” (Psalm 122:1), not out of duty, but out of the joy of belonging.

Every time the Church breaks the bread and shares the cup, it is saying the same thing those elders at Sinai said by their presence at the table: we are here. In the presence of God. And we do not die. We celebrate. What once unsettled us now gathers us around a table of communion, the table of a God who wanted more than subjects: He wanted children, brothers, friends —worshipers in spirit and truth (John 4:23). And to this family sealed in unconditional love by the blood, God gives a clear sign of welcome and acceptance: the divine fire descending from heaven, as we will see in the next chapter.

[1] In Genesis 31:54, the Hebrew root זבח (zābaḥ) is used in the expression זֶבַח שְׁלָמִים (zébaḥ shelāmîm), which designates a “peace sacrifice” understood as a shared meal. Jacob “offered a sacrifice and invited his brothers to eat,” a means that seals the reconciliation with Laban. See Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 16–50, Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 2 (Dallas: Word Books, 1994), 284; and Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18–50, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 292.