Covenanting with God

The Prophet and Priest Samuel, Offering Up Sacrifices for Israel Before King Saul

On The Mystery of Family Headship, Priesthood and the Blood Covenant

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” (Leviticus 17:11)

“That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well.” (Acts 15:29)

By Bp. Joseph Boyd

The Metaphysics of Blood

The first promise that God made to man was in the form of a command. He told Adam and Eve “to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the whole earth.” (Genesis 1:28) In this command, God promised to honor the liturgy of love and the gift of blood that occurred between the husband and wife, the offering that was to be laid upon the altar, made by God Himself, hidden and holy, and inaccessible without the communion of flesh. God’s Covenant empowered that liturgy by the descent of the Holy Spirit for the impartation of new life in a supernatural and natural way. This was one of two supernatural gifts that mankind was given in the Garden - The first was the ability to gain new life from God through the “knowing” of man and wife, and the second was to walk with Him in the cool of the day, to “Know God”, and thus accomplish God’s purpose for the creation of mankind, true communion between God and Man. Life was a gift from God in both forms of communion. 

Man’s communion with God was broken through sin, the creation of an idol that blocked out God’s commandments and promised “forbidden fruit.” “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.” (Genesis 3:6) Then, their “eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked.” We know from the Church Fathers and from the way that the Hebrew rhymes here in these passages, that Adam and Eve had been covered with “garments of light,” with the Presence of the Holy Spirit, which brightly shone in them as it did when Moses descended from the mountain of God after glimpsing the pre-Incarnate Christ from behind. This is seen in the use of the Hebrew, “Kothnothor” and “Kothnot’or” being “covering of light” and “covering of skins.” This was expounded by the Cappadocians in their writings on mystical contemplation, and St. Basil references man’s original brightness in both his “On the Holy Spirit” and the Hexamaron. St. Maximus Confessor refers to it in the Ambigua in reference to the glorified Christ, who remakes the cosmos through His Body, the Church, which shines with the light of the Presence. The Jewish scholars agree with them, and the Mishna and the Zohar draw the conclusion that Adam and the Messiah are one in glory. When Adam and Eve disobeyed, they lost the glory of God, and could see their own nakedness and the nakedness of the spouse. They had originally been called to know one another through the glow of God’s Presence, but now they knew each other without God, and they were afraid and ashamed. Their loss of communion with God made them afraid and disgusted at the thought of communion with one another. Both supernatural gifts of holy sex and true worship were broken in a moment of idolatry and disobedience. 

The Bible continues its story as the narrative of God making blood Covenants with Men - Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, and Solomon. Christ’s story can only be understood as the fulfillment for all of the Covenants that God made. Each Covenant was sealed with a blood sacrifice, an offering to connect life with life and empower man with His Uncreated Life, the glory of God’s Presence that was lost in the Fall, in order that they could do God's will in the keeping of the Covenant which he otherwise could not do on his own. These sacrifices pointed to and participated in the final sacrifice of God, which had been embedded into the foundation of creation before the beginning of time. (Revelation 13:8, Ephesians 1:4) God walked a pathway of blood, throughout the biblical narrative, made by cutting apart sacrifices and imparting His life to those who walked with him through the blood. (Genesis 15:9-21) In the blood of the sacrifice, the life of the Creator was offered to the Created, covering sin and restoring man’s lost glory through God’s Presence. (Genesis 3:21) In the Temple, blood was offered upon the Mercy Seat and then put upon the foreheads of the People of God, connecting them to God and sealing them in His work. (Exodus 24:8, Leviticus 16:19) Mankind was given God’s life, was able to walk in God’s ways, and empowered to keep God’s Law, through the power of the Holy Spirit that was brought to them in the blood. While many see St. Paul’s dismissal of the “Works of the Law” as being “unable to save us” (Romans 3:20, 8:3, Galatians 3:10-13) but those sacrifices participated in Christ’s coming sacrifice enough that God could impart forgiveness and righteousness in the Old Covenant, even though they were incomplete. (Galatians 3:14-18) God himself says in the Old Testament that he “accepted their sacrifices” (Genesis 4:4), “smelled a sweet smelling savor” (Genesis 8:21, Leviticus 1:9,13, 2:2, 23:18), and “stayed his wrath” (II Chronicles 7:14) and "brings blessings" (Deuteronomy 28:1) and there was a great distinction between those in Hell and the righteous in Abraham’s Bosom. The ancient sacrifices of bulls and goats prefigured and participated in Christ’s work, just as the Church’s sacraments today participate in Christ’s finished work on the Cross and His glorified and heavenly offering. (Hebrews 4:14, 9:12, Ephesians 2:6) The whole sacramental world was held together by participation in the Life of Christ, the God-Man! 

The Old Testamental System of Temple Sacrifices 

Symbol of the Covenant

We receive our human, fallen nature from our fathers, from their blood. The blood is present in its "highest form" in the seed. Blood and seed are equivocated ritually, but seed is holy in a way that blood is not by being the locus of the inter-generational covenant (“with thee and thy seed forever”, seen in Genesis 17:6, Dueteronomy 28:46). This is why seed is holy in Scripture and cannot be wasted or abused, such as in the story of Onan in Genesis 38:3-10, and has legal responsibilities in the Covenantal Law. In Leviticus 15, both the emission of male semen and the monthly cycle of female menstruation blood disqualified the faithful from approaching the sanctuary of God. The mixing or sharing of blood is dangerous because it makes “one”, spiritually and metaphysically indistinguishable, and thus, judgment and blessing come through blood bonds and cannot be expunged for generations. This principle of unity through the exchange of attributes, called “Communicatio Ideomatum”, becomes a major theological study in the Church Fathers, as the implications of sharing in Christ’s humanity allows humanity to approach the Uncreated Life of the Holy Trinity becomes fully realized in Patristic writings. This is also why St. Paul tells us that, if we are joined to a prostitute, we join the whole Body of Christ to this immoral bond supernaturally (I Corinthians 6:13-19). Both forms of expression of blood, both seminal and sanguineous, disqualify one from making blood sacrifice, because of the possible confusion on an offering. Offerings are life for life, life covering life, blood for life. If another life is included, which contains the weight of a spiritual curse or the debt of unatoned sin, then this passes through the sacrifice to those involved with it and can undo the salvific effects of the offering. The life of the blood of the one making the sacrifice cannot substitute for the person, because it represents the whole life of that person. Therefore to have blood or seed on or near that which is being offered up as a blood offering would be to defeat the reason for offering and bring danger upon oneself and the congregation - for the person offering or being offered for would become the offering itself. 

The mark of the Old Covenant and that which made children clean and within the biological confines of God's Covenant was the symbol of circumcision, and circumcision is a cutting off, a setting apart, a blood offering and a marking of both the implement to implant male seed and the seed itself through the likeness of man that it bore. This outward reproductive symbolism of the circumcised male generates more in his “original” likeness, which then must go through the process of having the progeny undergo circumcision again, “being made in the likeness of the father” over and over. This is a mark through which the seed passes, only to be fully realized later within the product of the seed itself is renewed in the Covenant. It is both inherited and personally applied. Children were created by God “through” the sign of the Covenant, by the blood that had been offered up to Him, for the propagation of more life that would continue to be offered to Him. It was an exclusively male symbol, and the Covenant was renewed every generation through it, as all male children entered into the Covenant of Abraham and were marked as members of God’s household, His “Economy of Grace.” 

“As for me, behold, my Covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations. Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee. And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee. And I will establish my Covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting Covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee. And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God. And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my Covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations. This is my Covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the Covenant betwixt me and you. And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed. He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my Covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting Covenant. And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my Covenant.” (Genesis 17:4-14) 

Why circumcision? Because men spiritually and physically rule the household, being “first” in creation and the physically stronger partner. Man is also the “giver of blood” in that he is the one who gives of himself in the sexual act, received, grown and nurtured by his wife. Fatherhood is pictured in Scripture as the way in which we receive, as individuals and groups, both spiritual blessings and curses, being bound to our blood and traveling through the seed, so that blessings and curses can travel through human reproduction for up to seven generations. These same spiritual realities are not binding through mothers, because mothers are not the source of the blood, but they are through fathers, visited upon the thousandth generation. Male blood connects fathers with children, as anthropology shows and male psychology confirms - with its focus on owning the child and the strong, innate, paternal reaction to being cuckolded and a child not being the offspring of their seed within their wife. Men give their sons the "Y Chromosome" that makes them male, the “Male Gene”, and this gene is never diluted by the mother, but passed on intact and unchanged. 

Through the male blood we are linked as a group, sharing the lineage, the nature, the combined human attributes through this process of progenation. Therefore, in Scripture and in the culture of the Ancient Near-East, groups could only receive and be bound by a sacrifice made by their fathers, by the eldest members of their clan, or a group descending from the eldest son of a tribe. Someone who held the blood from above stream could make a covenant for you. This was also the requirement of kings, the “first-born of the nation,” whose sacrifice was for all of his "children'' and whose rights were patrilineal and could only be passed from eldest down. The first born son was holy unto the Lord because of this link, and was taken as a sacrifice in Egypt, or was offered up to God in the wilderness. Isaac, Jacob and Levi are all called to this priestly function. When God makes a new covenant, he often upsets the paradigm by making it with the youngest child, who then carries out the Covenant through the eldest, making a new thing of the old order, but which is enforced in a new way - this can be seen in the lives of Joseph, David, and Solomon. 

Noah Offering Sacrifices to God after the Great Flood 

Baptism and Circumcision

"Then Peter said unto them, 'Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call..'" (Acts 2:38–39) Here we see that baptism is a promise for the believer and their children. Baptism is a mystery, a sacrament of the Church, realized in repentance and kept in faith. It is not effectual because of the decision of the believer, nor is it powerful because of the individual's personal choice or memory of the act of baptism. It is not a private experience or a public statement of faith. We are told that it is the circumcision of the New Covenant (Colossians 2:11–12), and that it was administered to the whole house of a believing "pater familias," the head of the "Oikos," the households that are described in the New Testament. (Acts 16:14-15, 18:8, 1 Corinthians 1:16) It is clear from the Church Fathers that these families included children and that baptism of the whole family was the common apostolic practice in the Early Church (Tertullian, Origen, Hippolytus, etc.), even though there is not explicit reference to the act of baptizing a child in the biblical text. All of this shows us that baptism is the "Crossing of the Jordan" into the "Promised Land" of salvation, as a member of God's Chosen People, His New Israel. It is both a Covenant with God and also an admittance into the Church, the community of faith, in which salvation is administered through the communion that we have with Christ through His sacrifice, kept by God's grace through the presence of the Holy Spirit. 

"Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power: In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ: Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it." (Colossians 2:8-15)

The Old Testament makes the requirements of the Covenant extremely clear, requiring circumcision of all who were in the household of a patriarch entering into the Covenant with God, the sign and seal of God's promise to his people. The Book of Acts mentions that this practice was kept for households, in Romans we are told that Christians have been grafted into the Old Covenant and that while we are not bound to circumcision anymore, we are bound by water baptism to Christ. St. Paul also tells us in Colossians that baptism replaces circumcision, and thus makes the Church's Old Testament-based hermeneutic of New Testament practices possible. This occurred across the board, as Pauline and Petrine Christian communities grew together and the Greek Christians grew deeper in the Old Testament Scriptures - Churches were built with altars, holy of holies, arks, and priestly vestments and incense that mimicked the commands of God for proper worship in the Temple. Tertullian shows us, in his “Treatise on Baptism,” that infant baptism was happening as the common course of the Early Church. St. Augustine gives us a detailed understanding of baptismal theology as it has been understood in the West, as the Cappadocians do in the East, and both perspectives show that infant baptism was the standard practice embraced by the whole Christian world, understood as the entrance into Christian community that would allow children to grow into a saving faith. Baptism fully replaces circumcision and the New Covenant is established in it, identifying with the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, rather than in the cutting and offering of lambs and goats. 

Blood in the Canon Law of the Church

In the first Council of the Church, recorded in Acts 15, the judgment of the Apostles in Jerusalem had to do with the proper Christian attitudes toward idolatry, blood, ritually clean food and sexuality. They declared, after receiving the guidance of the Holy Spirit - “That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well.” (Acts 15:29) In this judgement, they distilled all of the Old Covenant for the New, and made a pathway for Gentiles to enter into the New Israel of the Church. In this, the basic metaphysical understanding of the mechanics of sacrifice and purity remained the same between the Law of Moses and the Apostolic Deposit. Christ had not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill. (Matthew 5:17)

Covenanting with God occurs when the sacrificing community makes promises that only God can fulfill in His grace, the power of His indwelling Spirit. The moral law follows, not as a “work of the law” but as the process of living out the divine life that we have received from God through the blood of Christ’s sacrifice. Just as in the Old Testament, the Covenant is made through our fathers, by a priest, who represents to us the reality of all that was before in the Old Covenant and in Christ's work. This is why confession of sins, fasting and abstinence are necessary preparations for the offering of the Eucharist, and why "uncleanness" (sexual relations and menstrual blood) are not to pollute the offering of the Bread and Wine. This is why Women, who, by God-given and blessed nature, bleed in a cycle of sacred reproduction, and who are not the spiritual heads of their household by mystical precedence of Adam before Eve, cannot function as sacrificing priests. Not only do female priests break the image of Christ in the Last Supper, which is an iconographic figuring of the reality of Christ’s commandment and institution, which allows the priest to work “In Persona Christi”; but women cannot offer up their own blood with the blood of the sacrifice without counteracting Christ’s work and interposing themselves as a false savior. According to the canons, women are not to take Communion when they are menstruating, and is not supposed to partake before her “churching” after the birth of a child. Such an offering would be a “mixed offering” (Luke 13:1) or “strange fire” (Leviticus 10:1), unacceptable to God and doing only what Christ was able to do and be - both the sacrificer and the sacrificed. Properly understood, this shows that women are not inferior or unholy, since their bodies are sacred temples and holy altars upon which the Holy Spirit descends, giving life, raising up righteous generations and building up the Church on earth. Without holy motherhood, there is no sacramental action for men to do, no offerings upon the altars of the Church through which the Holy Spirit may bring new life. Without their sacred motherhood, the holy blood-work of their consecrated femininity, there are no sacraments of Church. The work that they do is holy to God and cannot be replaced by other, lesser, sacramental actions. 

The prohibition against inappropriate use of blood and seed is also the basis for the exclusion of practicing homosexuals from the priesthood. It is precluded from priesthood in Scripture and in the Holy Canons of the Church - being by definition an unclean offering of blood outside of the holy altar appointed for that offering by the will of God, without the anointing and consecration of the temple for acceptable sacrifices through sacramental marital blessings, and lacking any possibility for the visitation of the Holy Spirit and the impartation of created life. This is also why the use of birth control is also morally wrong, since it also reduces sacred offerings to the pleasurable components - effectively creating an ornate and beautiful liturgy, without a true offering or the invocation of the Holy Spirit, "having the form of godliness but denying the power thereof." (II Timothy 3:5) Regardless of how "beautiful" it may be, or how closely is imitates the true sacraments of the Covenant of God, these actions are "without grace" and cannot lead to salvation. They represent, at their core, the de-sacralization of the body, of seed, of blood, and of life - and the worship of a false god by offering up blood to an image of self for self-gratification and pleasure. 

Covenant in Christ

When Christ came, in order to save us, He had to be "Seed of the Woman" (Genesis 3:15) in order to have our human nature without Adam’s sin, a human soul without bondage to Satan, and the “fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9), the mystery of the Incarnation in which Christ is fully God and fully Man, not just half of His father and half of His mother. He fulfilled the Old Covenant in receiving the mark of circumcision himself (Luke 2:21), and fulling all of the Law (Matthew 5:17). Christ also had to be patrilineally a priest, a king, and the chief sacrificer in order for His oblation to be full, sufficient and perfect sacrifice, wholly acceptable before God and completely representative of man. These were imparted to Him by the adoption of his earthly protector, Joseph of Nazareth. God made Christ uniquely, without a human father, He was a replacement for Adam and could be made "upstream" from us if we joined the sacrifice by taking His blood into our bodies and became one with Him through blood. By his blood being the sacrifice, he was doing what was absolutely forbidden in the Kosher Laws of the Old Testament - He mixed the roles of sacrificer and sacrifice, He included us in His sacrifice, so that we are co-laborers and co-receivers of it. And, because He was both man and God, He offered it for all mankind and for God, because He is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) God gave Christ the dreaded cup in Gethsemane for the salvation of the world, and Christ had to submit Himself to it - “Not my will, but thine, be done.” (Luke 22:42) We who were alienated and estranged by Adam's fall and the ensuing loss of divine life were given the gift of Christ’s Life through the metaphysical laws of covenants, set into the foundation of the world. “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” (I Corinthians 15:22) 

The Christian Covenant is Found within Holy Communion, the Eucharistic Meal, which Fully Presents to Us Christ's Holy Body and Precious Blood. It is a Real and Eternal Participation in Christ's Last Supper, His Suffering on the Cross, His Sacrificial Death, Burial, Bodily Resurrection and Glorious Ascension. It is Eternally Offered by Christ Himself in the Temple of Heaven before the Father, as Our Great High Priest, and Our Eucharists on Earth Participate in This Heavenly Mystery by the Power of the Holy Spirit.