In scripture God says that without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.
Why does this necessitate death?
Also, why shed blood?
Edit:. Really grateful if a believer can explain why? Thanks.
A common theme throughout the Bible is the way that sin and death are intertwined. The reason why there is death is because of sin; and in a sense it is the reality of this death in us that gives rise to more sin. We can this language all throughout the New Testament, some places more clearly than others. For example St. Paul in Romans ch. 5 speaks of how through Adam's disobedience came sin and death to the world; and conversely it is through Christ's obedience that sin and death are undone. This is said again also in 1 Corinthians 15 when Paul talks about the future resurrection of the body. But perhaps one of the most explicit places talking about this is what Paul says in Romans ch. 7, where he speaks of how the law of sin is in his own bodily members, that is, it is almost as though sin (and thus death) are in his very skin and bones; and there is the struggle, a war even, between what he knows is right and ought to do with his mind and what his own hands and feet do, saying "the good that I want to do, I don't do; and the evil I don't want to do, I do".
There have been a lot of ways Christians have spoken about the Atonement, aka what it means to say that Jesus died for our sins. And that's because the New Testament itself uses a lot of different kinds of language to talk about it. Christians saw, in Jesus, the point of the ancient system of sacrifices; that the reason why animal sacrifice was done pointed to the greater truth and reality of Jesus. It is not as though God was appeased by the blood of lambs and bulls, or that the smell of their burning flesh on the altar appeased Him (the Old Testament time and again reminds us that God cared much less about the actual animal sacrifice itself as He did about the contrition which these sacrifices represented). So Christians saw in the sacrificial system of old a signpost pointing to Jesus and Jesus' death. Jesus became the true Passover Lamb, whose blood--His death--meant the freedom and deliverance from the captivity of sin and death even as the blood of the Passover lamb in Egypt meant that the angel of death passed over Jewish households and led to their freedom from captivity as slaves in Egypt.
Under the Temple system there was also a yearly sacrifice on the Day of Atonement (what is today called Yom Kippur, literally "Day of Covering") where the high priest would pass through the veil in the sanctuary of the Temple, from the "Holy Place" into the "Most Holy Place" where the Ark of the Covenant was located, understood as God's dwelling place on earth. In a sense, the Most Holy Place (or literally "Holy of Holies") was in a sense heaven-on-earth, in the sense that here was the Presence of God in a very profound way, what later Jewish writers called the Shekinah, referring to the Dwelling and Presence of God. The high priest would enter into this holiest place where God was and would apply blood of a sacrificed animal on a part of the Ark of the Covenant called the kaporet, the "covering". Since the time of Martin Luther many Christians have translated kaporet as "mercy seat", this follows Martin Luther's translation where he called it the
gnadenstahl, or "seat of grace". When the high priest did this, it was as a covering for the entire people of Israel, that the sins of the whole nation were to be regarded as forgiven--God's mercy and grace and forgiveness of the nations. New Testament authors also used the Greek translation of this word, borrowed from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) to speak of Christ's work of reconciling the world to God. So, for example, in 1 John 2:2 John says that Christ is the
hilasmos, the kapporet/mercy seat, for our sins, and not only our sins, but the sins of the whole world. When William Tyndale, in the 16th century, was making his New Testament translation into English, he coined the word at-one-ment (atonement), to refer to this.
So the language of the New Testament borrows strongly from the history and language of the Passover and the Temple. That Jesus Christ is the meeting place between God and man, and through Christ and Christ's death and resurrection He has reconciled sinful humanity to God.
Jesus is the true Passover Lamb, He is the true Temple of God, He is the High Priest and the Mercy Seat.
In this, in Hebrews 2:9 the author writes that Jesus "tasted death for everyone". God became man and bore our mortal flesh, and then He died a human death, and was then raised up from the dead as a man. Through this He has undone Adam's transgression, and in undoing Adam's transgression becomes the new Adam and thus in Him a new and redeemed humanity; He has conquered the devil who was a tyrant over us, He put death itself to death, the sins of the whole world nailed with His body to the cross, He made satisfaction for God's righteous commandments on our behalf since we were transgressors against God's commandments. In Him is therefore forgiveness and justification from God, in Him there is therefore the redemption of the whole human race, and the hope and promise of resurrection and therefore everlasting life in the Age to Come, when God makes all things new.
So "without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins" is shorthand for all of this. It's found in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which as a work addressed to Jewish Christians in the first century, uses a lot of Jewish language that the original audience would be already familiar with.
-CryptoLutheran
