His Precious Blood: A Dramatic Tale
Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I’m come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home:
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wand’ring from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.
(“Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” Robert Robinson, 1757)
The word interpose simply means “to put between.” The same thought could have been phrased, “Jesus placed his blood between me and danger.” The poet knows, however, that one well-chosen word can conjure a mental picture worth thousands of words.
Many things can be put between other things: cheese between slices of bread, one’s hand between a lamp and a wall to make a shadow bunny, a bit between a horse’s teeth. But the picture here is of infinitely more consequence. What Jesus did saved my life. He didn’t simply step between death and me; he made himself a sacrifice. The price of my life was his blood.
While it’s possible for the perfect word to invoke a vivid mental image, sometimes what we need is a well-drawn picture. C. S. Lewis was a master at painting spiritual truths in words. In his book The Horse and His Boy, Lewis embedded a moving illustration of interposition.
The boy, Shasta, having successfully delivered an urgent message to the king of the country bordering Narnia, finds himself falling further and further behind the king’s party. Shasta knows nothing about the country or about guiding a horse, and he’s soon riding alone in the dark. Suddenly he senses that someone or something is walking beside him. The horror stories he’s heard about giants in this land come back to him. He heartily wishes the Thing would go away.
When Shasta finally dares to ask who’s there, “Whatever it is” invites him to tell his sorrows. Shasta explains why he believes himself to be the unluckiest person in the world. For one thing, he seems to encounter lions at every turn. The Thing informs him that there was only one lion: “It was I.”
He tells how he has been guiding events in Shasta’s life since Shasta was a baby. The rising sun gradually reveals to Shasta a huge, shining lion walking beside him. Though he has never heard of Aslan, he is comforted and continues his journey after the lion disappears.
The next morning Shasta meets a group of Narnians with whom he travels back over the ground he had covered during the night.
The hillside path they were following became narrower all the time and the drop on their right hand became steeper. At last they were going in single file along the edge of the precipice, and Shasta shuddered to think that he had done the same last night without knowing it. “But of course,” he thought, “I was quite safe. That is why the Lion kept on my left. He was between me and the edge all the time.”
The Master of the word, the Author of true stories, knows we need illustrations. It would be nearly impossible to enumerate the pictures of interposition in his Word. One of the most striking Old Testament examples in when God places himself between the Israelites and the Egyptian army in the form of a pillar of cloud. The Israelites are trapped between the quickly advancing enemy and the Red Sea. All night, God stands between the Israelites and danger until they have crossed the sea on dry land. The psalmist recounts the familiar story:
Yet he saved them for his name’s sake,
that he might make known his mighty power.
He rebuked the Red Sea, and it became dry,
and he led them through the deep as through a desert.
So he saved them from the hand of the foe
and redeemed them from the power of the enemy.
And the waters covered their adversaries;
not one of them was left.
Then they believed his words;
they sang his praise.
One of Frank Boreham’s books includes an essay titled “Hairbreadth Escapes.” He begins by telling of a story he read of a man who escaped death at the sinking of the Titanic. This story sets Boreham thinking about hairbreadth escapes. He goes on to list several biblical examples of hairbreadth escapes, including events in the lives of Lot, Joseph, David, and Daniel. Then he names some of the most popular novels, such as Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, featuring multiple hairbreadth escapes. He concludes: “[A certain man’s dream] led him to the Saviour because he saw that, of all life’s miraculous and hairbreadth escapes, the escape by way of the cross is by far the most wonderful and by far the most amazing.”
In the subsequent essay, “Escapes—Not Hairbreadth,” Boreham points out that he had, himself, also escaped death on the Titanic. He escaped by not being anywhere near it. The conclusion here is that “Hairbreadth escapes are splendid, simply splendid; but, after you have unfolded their most thrilling story, a still more wonderful tale remains to be told.”
By way of example, he says that once Archbishop Whately heard a man telling the thrilling story of his escape from a burning ship. He responded, “A wonderful occurrence! A great and signal mercy indeed! But I think I can surpass the wonder of it with an incident from my own experience!” Everyone listened intently, prepared for an even more marvelous account.
His story was this: “Not three months ago I sailed in the packet from Holyhead to Kingston, and by God’s mercy, the vessel never caught fire at all! Think of that, my friends!”
We humans need pictures, and we love drama, but we should also be mindful that our very lives depend on God daily placing himself between us and dangers of every sort, all day, every day. We seldom see drama in the mere fact of getting home safely from work every day. I know that I don’t acknowledge often enough how spectacular it is that, at the end of each day, I am still alive.
Even more astounding, though, is that if I know Jesus as my Savior, I have been rescued by Jesus’s blood, which he placed between me and death. This is true whether or not I have a dramatic story to tell. This is true whether or not I think to be grateful every day for the blood of the Master who bought me by his sacrifice.
First Peter 1:3–5 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (ESV).
Through the gift of a faithful mother and grandmother, grew up knowing Jesus as a friend. Married for nearly two-thirds of her life, there has been time for several seasons, from homeschooling to owning a coffee shop. She has three grown children and eight grandchildren. An element of this season is writing about literature and life at Plumfield and Paideia.
Photograph © Josh Applegate, used with permission
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