“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” 2 Corinthians 5:21

A medical author, Ronald J. Glasser says that “No matter how we may wish to view ourselves, despite all our fantasies of grandeur and dominion, all our fragile human successes, the real struggle … has always been against bacteria and viruses, against adversaries never more than seven microns wide.”

That’s a chilling reality. Viruses have killed more people than all the wars, fires, floods and earthquakes put together. For example, the First World War was responsible for the death of eight and a half million people but during the armistice that followed an influenza epidemic broke out and twenty-five million people around the world were dead within a year.

But tools have been developed to fight against the diseases that once wiped out entire populations. Jenner, Pasteur and others have given us a procedure called immunization. With immunization, a vaccination exposes the body to a virus in a safe form: either a weakened or “tired” virus, or a “killed” virus with its outer shell intact to stimulate antibody production. This gives the body an advantage. For when a virus attacks a previously immunized person it has a prepared assortment of antibodies in the blood that can quickly target, deploy, and fight off the invading disease.

Dr Paul Brand tells of how, as a child in a remote part of India, his parents were involved in the vaccination for smallpox. They had limited quantities of vaccine, and no facilities for cold storage, so runners would bring the vaccine up mountain paths and hand the precious lymph to his father. His father would waste no time in breaking open the tubes of lymph and vaccinating the waiting crowd. “Later, from one infected arm he would draw enough lymph to vaccinate ten other Indians. Those ten yielded enough to vaccinate a hundred more. The blood of each vaccinated person locked away the memory of the pox virus so that any contact with smallpox alerted an army of defenders capable of overcoming the threat.”

This property of blood, which can be shared from person to person, helps explain how blood overcomes in the spiritual realm. For in the fight against the virus of sin a vaccination was needed. A vaccination which could be shared from Person to person. A vaccination that worked through the blood. So God became a man. In medical parlance, He entered our microbe world with the genetic material needed to correct it. And in so doing He overcame the virus of sin by taking it on Himself, and, finally, by forgiving it. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” 2 Corinthians 5:21.

Which means that Christ overcame sin by taking on the shell of a victim cell of that repugnant virus in order to immunize humanity against death and destruction. This phenomenal achievement is summarized in Hebrews 2:14-18 when it says that Christ shared in our “humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death … For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”

Yes, the blood of Jesus has overcome sin and the devil. Thus, when we are included in Christ we are inoculated with the “serum” that enables us to overcome sin and the devil, not by our own resilience or vitality, but as a result of the immunity in Christ’s blood. Praise the Lord!