Chapter Eight

  Dr. Jay Snell Newsletter Feed and Free Bonuses

The Three Sprinklings of Jesus' Blood and What This Does To Power You Up Now

There are four things we must settle concerning the blood of Jesus before we can correctly appropriate it and power up with it. Number one - What is the great importance about the blood of Jesus?  What makes His blood any different from anybody else's?  Number two - What is the relationship of the blood of Jesus to the Abrahamic Covenant?  Number three - What does the Bible mean when it talks about sprinkling of blood, and what is the differences between the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus versus the sprinkling of the blood of a bull or goat.  Number four - How does this apply to us today.

 A lot of the problems that Christians experience is a result of a defective view of the blood of Jesus.  Once we have the proper concepts fixed firmly in our minds concerning His blood, we will find that our lives are going to be different

 Let's answer the first question.  What is so special about the blood of Jesus?  What's different about His blood?  Why couldn't the blood of a Roman soldier accomplish the same thing that Jesus' blood did?

 Look at Acts 20:28.

 28 Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

 Notice that the purchase price that is paid for the church is the blood of God.  We all know that God is the Father, Jesus is the Son, and the Holy Ghost is the third member of the Godhead.  We talk a lot about the blood of Jesus, and yet this verse says that the church was purchased with the blood of God.  If, in fact, Jesus was the Son of God only, why does this Scripture say that the church was purchased with the blood of God?  Why didn't it say purchased with the blood of the Son of God?  Because Jesus was the Son of God for the simple reason that God created His body.  But Jesus Christ was more than the Son of God, Jesus Christ WAS God.  John 1:1 declares,

 John 1:1

 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

 And John 1:14 says that same Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.  In other words, two thousand years ago God, the same God that spoke everything into being, the same God that holds everything in orbit in it's place by the power of His spoken Word, stepped out of eternity and entered time and became flesh.  God was born and lived and walked on this earth, beginning as a little baby named Jesus and growing up into a man who died as God in a human body.

 What is different about the blood of Jesus, and why is it so important?  When Jesus came, Jesus was God, and the blood that was inside His body was God's own blood.  It was energized by the power of God and the life that was in it was the life of God.  Jesus had no male parent; therefore, the life that was in his flesh was in His blood.  But the life that was in His blood was the life of eternity itself, for His blood was energized by God.  That's the difference between the blood of Jesus and the blood of a Roman soldier or any other man.  The blood of Jesus is important because literally it was the blood of God, and that blood purchased the church of God, whose church we are right now.

 The second thing I want us to see is that the blood of Jesus is not just the blood of God but is something else also.  Look at Hebrews 13:20.

 Hebrews 13:20

 20 Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant,

 When God raised Jesus from the dead, He did it through the blood.  And here He calls that blood "the blood of the everlasting covenant".  I want you to get this term fixed in your mind.  I want to share with you exactly what it means, so that when you hear the expression "the blood of Jesus" it will set off bells and whistles in your spirit, because the blood of Jesus Christ will take on new meaning for YOU.

 What does it mean God raised Jesus from the dead through the same blood which He calls the blood of the everlasting covenant?  The everlasting covenant is no more or no less than the Abrahamic Covenant.  Abraham was a man just like you and I.  God singled him out by His grace and His sovereignty with the intention of doing things through him that He had never done before with the human race.  God gave him things that were to belong to him and that he was to pass on to his children, whether those children were his physical descendants or spiritual descendants.  He set up a covenant with Abraham that would be eternal.  What God promised him would never pass away.  The things that God would tell Abraham would last forever.  This is the same covenant that God made with Jesus Christ, His Son, before the world was framed.  He would begin now to work it out through time beginning with Abraham.  What God promised Abraham would belong to all Christians and would last forever.  And He then sealed the covenant with blood.

 Now pay close attention to what I'm about to say.  That Abrahamic Covenant appears in the book of Genesis, in chapters 12, 13, 15, 17, and 22.  There are 60 different promises God made to Abraham, everyone of which is an eternal promise.  All of these promises apply and belong to us because Christians are included in that series of 60 promises.  So the covenant is an eternal promise for you and me, as it was for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the children of Israel.  God in essence said, "Abraham, I'm going to set into motion these promises.  They're going to be eternal, they will last forever throughout eternity, and I'm going to seal it in blood."

 How was all this going to take place though?  There was in those days what was known as a blood covenant of friendship.  Two people would enter into covenant and both would shed blood.  They would seal the agreement in blood.  They would do this with their own blood, or they would do it with the blood of a substitute, as in an animal sacrifice.  Then they would have a feast, eating flesh and drinking blood; not usually their own, although savages did.  In the Bible they would eat the flesh of an animal, but instead of drinking it's blood, they would drink wine or juice.  (This is where our Lord's Supper originates from.)

 Now the blood of the covenant is simply this. When God and Abraham made the covenant,

Abraham had to shed his own blood through circumcision.  God shed blood through a sacrificial animal (Genesis 15 and 17).  Jesus ratified the Abrahamic Covenant when he ascended Golgotha to be nailed to the cross.  His own blood flowed out of his body as it was cut to ribbons, His hands and feet were sliced open as he was nailed to the cross, and He was stabbed with a spear.  At that point in time the blood of God Himself was shed completing the Abrahamic Covenant from the God-ward side.  So the death of Christ simply ratified what God had promised Abraham would last forever.

 Up to that time all male Jews had to be circumcised, but when Jesus came and the blood of God was shed, then circumcision stopped, because the covenant was completed.  Now we have what is known as a completed covenant.  God raised Jesus from the dead through the blood of that everlasting covenant which is the Abrahamic Covenant.  So then, it is the blood of God Himself that 1) bought the Church and 2) enabled Jesus Christ to be raised from the dead through it, because it was the blood of God's own body that was shed for the ratification of the Abrahamic Covenant.

 Understand though, that this covenant was not complete until Jesus came and completed it.  He ratified Abraham's Covenant.  So, the blood of Jesus Christ is 1) the blood of God, and 2) the blood of the everlasting covenant which Jesus ratified sealing for us the promise of salvation, healing, and prosperity.

 Let's look at the third point - the sprinkling of blood.  How does the blood of Jesus affect us?  Since it is the blood of God and the blood of the everlasting covenant, how do we apply it and make it real in our own lives?

 You see, we plead the blood, but we don't have the slightest idea what we're doing.  We don't know how it works.  We don't know what it is.  We know that it's the blood of Jesus, but we don't know what the ramifications of His blood are.  What does the blood of Jesus have to do with me?  And how does God deal with me because of the blood?  We have to go back and get some Old Testament background information on the law which God set up under Moses.  We find that information in Hebrews 9:19-22.

 Hebrews 9:19-22

 19 For when Moses had spoken every precept to all the people according to the law, he took the blood of calves and of goats, with water, and scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book, and all the people,

20 Saying, This is the blood of the testament which God hath enjoined unto you.

21 Moreover he sprinkled with blood both the tabernacle, and all the vessels of the ministry.

22 And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission.

 The word "testament" in verse 20 is the Greek word DIATHAKA, which means "covenant".  When you see the word testament, to make it more understandable, translate it covenant.  Now look at the word "purged" in verse 22.  It comes from the Greek word KATHARIDZO, which means to "cleanse or purify".  We get our word catheter from this Greek word.

 We understand that the blood of Jesus Christ is the blood of God, the blood of the eternal covenant, but how is it applied?  According to the Old Testament law, everything had to be cleansed by blood.  How was it done?  By being dunked or baptized?  No, by being sprinkled.  So to cleanse something you sprinkled blood on it.  Moses sprinkled the book and the people, the tabernacle and the vessels inside it, and verse 22 says that almost all things are by the law cleansed or purged by the sprinkling of blood.  In the Old Testament the blood of bulls and goats was used, but that has passed away.  Now there is the THREE SPRINKLINGS of another blood, THE BLOOD OF JESUS.

 Hebrews 9:13-14

 13 For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh:

14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

 Do you see the relationship between the sprinkling of the blood of bulls and goats and the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus?

 Remember now, Jesus' blood is the blood of God.  As such, it was the blood poured out to fulfill the Abrahamic Covenant.  And now that blood, like the blood of bulls and goats in the Old Testament, must be sprinkled.  But there is a difference in the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus and the blood of bulls and goats.  When they sprinkled the blood of bulls and goats, they had to do it over and over and over and over.  But when the blood of Jesus was spilled, since it is an eternal blood, then that sprinkling is an eternal sprinkling.  It only has to be done once.

 I want to make sure that you see and understand the sprinkling of blood.  Moses sprinkled the book, he sprinkled the people, he sprinkled the tabernacle, he sprinkled the vessels of the ministry, he sprinkled almost all things in order to make them clean.

 Brother Jay, what does all this have to do with me?  It's the sprinkling of the blood in the salvation process that gets you saved.  We all know that we're redeemed by the blood of Jesus.  We all know that Jesus is the satisfaction for the sins of the world through faith in His blood.  But how do we have faith in His blood?  When someone tells me to have faith in something, what are they talking about?

 If I had died before I was 23 years old, I would have gone to hell.  Do you know why?  Nobody could explain to me what they meant when they said, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ."  They kept telling me, "Have faith."  But I didn't know what they meant.  I had two Sunday School teachers when I was in high school who would witness to me all the time, because they wanted to get me saved.  I'll never forget what they did, and I appreciate it to this day.  I had a Godly pastor who talked to me about being saved.  My parents prayed for me and talked to me about it.  But I was hung up on one concept.  I did not know what they meant when they said, "Believe."  I didn't know what they meant when they used the word "Faith".  I believed that Jesus was who He said He was, but I said, "I don't feel saved."  I just couldn't get a handle on "Faith".  Now, my whole ministry is built around showing people what faith is and helping to stabilize and make them solid.  I'm not interested in making people into a bunch of sky rocket Christians.  I want you to know who you are, what you have, where you came from, where you're going, and how you're going to get there.  I know what faith is now, because the Holy Ghost finally taught it to me.  Faith is knowing the will of God in advance and then acting on it.  For when you know the will of God, that knowledge is your faith.  And when you believe, you'll act on that knowledge.

 So when the Bible says that we are to have faith in the blood of Jesus, that means that I've got to know some things about it.  I've got to know what's different about it.  I have to know that the blood of Jesus Christ is the blood of God Himself in human form.  I have to know that Jesus' blood was the very blood that ratified the everlasting covenant between God and Abraham.  I have to KNOW it.  And when Jesus shed His blood, it was God saying in essence, "Now I've put My own stamp of approval on the Abrahamic Covenant.  Everything in it is now yours, because I ratified it with My own blood."  The blood of Jesus Christ is something solid upon which you can stand and base your hope.

 I have to know that in the Old Testament they cleaned things by sprinkling the blood of bulls and goats on it.  And I have to know that the same concept is followed in the New Testament, except not with the blood of bulls and goats, but with the blood of Jesus.

 1 Peter 1:2

 2 Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied.

 So people are elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father through two things.  Do you want to know what it means to be an elect of God?  There are two things that makes it happen through the foreknowledge of God: sanctification of the Spirit, and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.  When someone receives Jesus Christ as their personal Savior, two things happen simultaneously.  Number one, the blood of Jesus Christ is sprinkled over that person by the Holy Ghost.  And second, the Holy Ghost separates that person from then on for the use of God.  (Sanctify means to separate.)  You don't have anything to do with it, God does it.  When you receive Jesus as your personal Savior, all your old past sins come under the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus, and the moment you are sprinkled all the past is gone and you stand clean before Almighty God.

 Go back to Hebrews 9:22 again.  "And almost all things are by the law purged with blood...."  Again, the word purged is the Greek word KATHARIDZO, from which comes our word catheter - a means to cleanse the inner body.  And the blood sprinkled is God's cleansing agent.  Brother and sister, that eliminates any hope for works - me doing this or that.  It's the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus that does the cleansing, or YOU'RE NOT CLEAN!  It's as simple as that.  The moment you are sprinkled with that precious blood of Jesus, bless God, you ARE the elect.

 So, the blood of Jesus is the entrance into the door of salvation.  And just like all things are by the law cleansed by the sprinkling of blood, the moment you receive Jesus as your Savior you are sprinkled by God Himself with the blood of God Himself.  You become clean on the one hand, and separated on the other.  It's a supernatural act; you have nothing to do with it, except receive what God has done. 

We're sprinkled in order to get us clean for salvation, but there are two other sprinklings that happen to us once we are saved.  Each person undergoes THREE SPRINKLINGS of the blood of God, the blood of the everlasting covenant.  The first SPRINKLING brings us into the elect, but the other two make changes after the cleansing has occurred.

 Hebrews 10:22

 22 Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.

 What does this mean, "...having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience...."?  I'll illustrate the meaning like this.  If I said that "Joe, had an injury from an auto accident," I would simply mean that the auto accident caused his injury.  Consequently, the verse above says that our hearts need cleansing because our conscience, our voice of our spirit man, has been evil.  In other words, our evil conscience has left our heart in need of cleansing.  So the SECOND SPRINKLING of Jesus' blood, then, is our heart or our spirit man.

 Let me explain something to you.  The conscience is the voice of your spirit man.  Every one has a spirit man.  When you're lost your spirit man is in tune with the Devil.  You can do things and your conscience won't bother you.  But when you get saved your spirit changes, it's different.  It now has the life of God in it.  It has been sprinkled with the SECOND SPRINKLING OF JESUS' BLOOD.  The Holy Ghost begins to speak the words of God into you, and when you do something that is a sin you automatically know it.  You can feel it, and your conscience starts screaming at you.

 When we are lost our conscience is an evil conscience.  It will permit evil and will not say anything against evil.  So when we get saved God has to do a number on that evil conscience.  He has to change it so that it is able to tell you when you're doing something that is not right, because when you're lost your conscience simply doesn't operate like that.  Now your conscience can pick up words of fear from your parents.  For instance, my Mother used to say, "If you do that I'm going to tear you up! "  And when I did it, my conscience warned me it didn't bother me that what I had done was wrong.  What bothered me was that I was going to get my seat blistered.  So my conscience warned me of that kind of thing.  But I didn't give any thought to the concept that I had wronged God.  That didn't bother me much, because my conscience was evil, as was the rest of me.

 So, there has to be something happen to clean up the evil conscience so that it no longer functions like that.  What is it?  "Our hearts are sprinkled from an evil conscience." There is a sprinkling of the blood of Jesus directly to our heart which changes the voice of the spirit, which is our conscience, so that we can draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.

 I see Christians belaboring the fact of their sins, and this bothers me.  It tells me that you have not yet mastered the doctrine of THE THREE SPRINKLINGS OF THE BLOOD OF JESUS.  You still have a defective view of the blood of Jesus Christ, because once you understand the work of the blood as it is sprinkled to your heart to get rid of your evil conscience, you will begin to stop thinking about your sin and start thinking more about the blood.  The sprinkling that first cleansed you from sin is the same sprinkling that keeps on cleansing you from all sin.  Remember 1 John 1:7, "...the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleansed us from all sin."  This verse was written to Christians.  Once you understand the function of the blood of Jesus your conscience will not register every little thing that happens.  You'll shove it where it belongs - under the blood of Christ.

 Why do I believe and teach so strong about the blood of Jesus?  Because God wants us to walk in power; He wants us to reign in life as kings.  But in order to reign, we are going to have to get rid of some ideas and beliefs which are weighing us down, because the power of God will never manifest itself where the people of God are so burdened down and under so much bondage because of past mistakes and sins which they think are so terrible.  If that's all we think about we will never release the power of God out of our spirits.

 So what we have to do is package up this sin problem and get it under the blood.  For once it's under the blood we quit worrying about it.  We go on with God and start manifesting the power of God.  There will be no power of God as long as we are on a guilt trip, because we're not concentrating on releasing the power.  In the back of our minds we're  thinking, "I'm such a bad person; I'm not worthy for God to manifest Himself through me."  You're right, you're not.  But that has nothing to do with it.  It's the blood of Christ that makes the difference. We must understand how the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus works.

 Now let's look again at Hebrews 9:13-14 to see the THIRD SPRINKLING which Christians undergo.

 Hebrews 9:13-14

 13 For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh:

14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

 Here is another reference to the conscience.  First of all, the heart is sprinkled to get rid of the evil conscience.  When this has occurred, there is still one problem that has to be dealt with.  You see, the conscience is evil on one hand, and it's dirty on the other because of dead works.  The conscience has a two-fold problem, both of which are dealt with by the  sprinkling of the blood of Jesus.  This is where most of us live - hung up because of our conscience.  The spirit of man has to be sprinkled with blood because his conscience is evil.  Once that evil has been removed from the heart by cleaning up his spirit, his conscience still has a problem because of dead works that he has been involved with.

 Most people in the Christian realm, and this includes full-gospel people, are very religious.  But all religious works are dead works.  There is not one thing about a religious activity that is pleasing to God.  The thing that pleases God is when the Spirit of God can manifest Himself spontaneously through Christians.  Now there are some works which are pleasing to God.  When you lay hands on the sick, that pleases God.  When you go visit the fatherless and the widows, that pleases God.  When you tithe and then give offerings, that pleases God.  So there are some things which you can do, works which are not dead, that are pleasing to God.  But there are a whole lot of things which we do that are dead works.  This messes up the conscience, because the conscience has been lulled into sleep by thinking that all the things we do makes us religious.  And God hates religion.  I'm not a religious person - I'm a saved person with the Spirit of God living in me, and as I walk through life God lives through me.  But I'm definitely not religious, in fact I refuse to be religious.

 There are people whose "calling" is to go into churches and ministries and play church policeman.  They want to tell pastors and ministers what they need to do and what not to do, when to do it and when not to do it.  But let me tell you something; I've never had even one of those "policemen" go out into a parking lot with me to hand out gospel tracts. They think they're really religious.  They're right, they are religious, but that's all they are. They are of no benefit to the Kingdom of God.

 Now listen to me, until you understand that your conscience has been sprinkled, purged and cleansed, from dead works, it will be very hard for you to hear the Holy Ghost.  The reason for that is your conscience has been buffeted to the place where it can't even sense the Spirit of God because your conscience is cluttered up with dead works.  What we need to do is back off and subject everything we do to the sprinkling of the blood.  For when the blood of Christ is applied to the work that we do for God's Kingdom, and is sprinkled on our conscience, then our conscience will filter out what shouldn't be there.

 So, there are three sprinklings of the blood of Jesus which we must undergo.  The first is the initial sprinkling where we are ushered into the body of the elect.  When we receive Jesus as our Savior, simultaneously the Holy Ghost sanctifies us.

 Let's stop right here and kick another religious work in the head.  I've heard some of the weirdest sermons about what sanctification is since I've been in the full-gospel ranks, and it absolutely staggers my mind.  Let me tell you  what the word sanctify really means in the Greek New Testament.  It has only one meaning; it means separated for somebody's use.  When it says in 1 Peter 1:2 that we are elect through sanctification of the Spirit, that means the Spirit separated us the moment we received Christ Jesus as our Savior.  We had absolutely nothing to do with it.  God did it all.  If we're separated at all, it's because of an act of the Holy Ghost, the grace of God, and the blood of Jesus.  MY HOPE IS BUILT ON NOTHING LESS THAN JESUS' BLOOD AND RIGHTEOUSNESS!!

 The second sprinkling is when the heart is cleansed by the blood of Jesus.  The third sprinkling is when the conscience is purged because it is insensitive to the things of God - it's completely covered up with dead works of religion.  Jesus said in John 14:12:

 John 14:12

 12 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.

 What did Jesus do?  He laid His hands on sick people, and they got well.  He cast devils out of people with His word.  We can do that.  Why?  Because He said we could do it.  And when our conscience has been subjected to the sprinkling of His blood, it becomes sensitive to the Holy Ghost, it can pick up and hear the voice of God.  The conscience then turns around and talks to us.

 It says, "You can do whatever the Word of God says you can do!  "Just do it!

 These very things, THE THREE SPRINKLINGS, are what powered Peter up to heal the man at the gate Beautiful.  They belong to you too.  Never let the Devil rob you of your power by getting you on his proverbial "GUILT TRIP".

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Date Last Updated: April 15, 2009
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