Life is in the Blood. And Blood is Red.

A couple days ago, my freight train of thought ended with the phrase 'The red letters are the blood of the Bible'.  I have no clue how I got there.

    But it makes a little bit of sense. The basis of the Christian faith is the fact that Jesus [that being, The Son (of God), who is God] died for an eternity in three days. The red letters are his [directly] quoted words. They are about where the heart would be, if Genesis was the foot and Revelation the hair of the head. 

    And if it weren't for them, nobody would know about the death. They started a wildfire in the people, showed them who he is, so that they would be confident of who he is. They would be confident that Jesus WAS God. That He is. His words finished the understanding of the law, that all men were known to the Father by their hearts, as well as their deeds. 

    They are the words, that by simply being heard, change a man, washing the inside, so that the outside might become clean. The ultimate version of 'Clear Eyes'. (You've seen the commercial. You see how clean those eyes become.) They are the blood of that book. The muttled understanding of the old testament, the confusion and offensive nature of the epistles, and all the "Wait, What?" moments in the Bible, they can be seen clearly. The Truth becomes alive. 

    Now, if we are talking blood, I can't take a platelet and say 'This is blood!', that would be a synecdoche. I would be calling a part a whole. Like cheating me on pie. Bad idea. 

    However, I can grab a microscope, and look at the red blood cell, the platelet, the white blood cell, I can look at all of them, and say, 'This is blood. These are the parts. Together, they bring and maintain life. And I can see the plasma. The plasma alone is naught, but it allows the rest to live well. (I don't know where that last bit was going.)

    I know Matthew Chapter Five, with the beatitudes, is absolutely a cakewalk. But what comes after, along with the rest of his words, make the blood hard to take. It involves condemnation, torture, and difficulty. But the result of that... is life. 

     For the blood is the life of the body, without it the body is dead. Likewise with the red letters. Without them, my heart is laws, rebellion, and vanity. Without them, I am dead of heart. But with the words of a Savior feeding my soul, my life becomes abundant in beauty, despite the pain of my healing.