 I'd like to begin with a quick sign of the cross, but we'll open in prayer somewhere into the first paragraph. And I have reasons for doing that. So in the name of the Father, Son, and of the Holy Spirit. So I'm going to begin by introducing myself. My name is Marcus Peter. I'm a covenant theologian. I'm a preacher. I do a lot of work now on radio and TV. I didn't expect that this was going to be my life, but I'm really joyous and blessed by this. And for those of you who listen to EWTN and Avi Maria radio, I'm regularly on, especially for the program, Cresta in the afternoon, and a guest on other programs as well. And it's been wonderful to be able to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth without having to always hop on a plane and leave my family. And that's what I mean by I never thought. So this is the background. I lived my life as a militant atheist until about age 20. I mean, the militant part really was in my late teens. I was heavily influenced by contemporary philosophers. Nietzsche, at one point foolishly, was a hero of mine. And I had this overnight encounter with Jesus Christ when I was 20 years old. I was a, I'm going to say this. This is going to go on camera. And then the rest of posterity is going to remember this. I was a rapper at one point. I was a hip hop artist. And that's my background if you can. Oh, and by the way, if you haven't figured it out from both the accent and the way I look, I'm from Malaysia. I'm not from America. I moved here six years ago. And before you ask why I speak English, Malaysia is a British Commonwealth nation. So it's a common question. That's why I just feel the need to put that out there. Now I begin with this because I want to introduce you to just how I very quickly became immersed in the theology of the Covenant. When I was 20 years old, I had an overnight conversion experience. And I started devouring scripture. The Holy Spirit compelled me to start reading scripture. And every day at three a.m. I would wake up as if I knew what I was doing. I went downstairs. I picked up our family Bible. My parents were nominalistically Catholic and I'd read, but I never could understand it. All I knew was scripture made sense and it stood out to me, but I never quite understood it. I was very quickly taken under the wing by the assemblies of God back in Malaysia. And those guys are on fire for the faith. They are evangelists to the call. And so they very quickly taught me not only how to read scripture, but they taught me about the reality of inter-testamental work. And what that means is it's the science of typology which most of you are very familiar with. It's finding Old Testament symbols as revealed in New Testament realities. We call them type and anti-type, two-posts and anti-two-posts in the creek. And this opened up a whole new avenue for me. And so what I wound up doing was I started devouring scripture from that lens. For 15 years now, I'm 35, for 15 years now I've been studying scripture through the lens of the biblical covenant and I feel like I've only just scratched the surface. I view life in the world through the theology of the covenant. And one of the big things that came about very early on in my excursion into reading scripture was that my assemblies of God pastors, and for those of you who know people from the assemblies of God tradition, you will find these phrases familiar. We were always told, claim the blood of Jesus upon, and my pastors all sounded like they were Southern Baptists even though they were Malaysian. So, claim the blood of Jesus upon you. Somebody say amen. It's because they came here for seminary. They would say, claim the blood of Jesus and claim that as your protection. And so the words, the blood of Jesus was thrown around so much. And at the same time, claim the name of Jesus, pray in the name of Jesus, use the blood of Jesus, pray in the name of Jesus. I remember at one point early on in my preaching career, or ministry I should say, I was at home and I was just sitting down, mulling over which was more important, the name of the blood. And I just wrestled with this and I didn't get an answer, not from Pentecostalism anyways, because it really depended on the preference of my pastors. See, if pastor A loved praying with the power of the blood of Jesus, that's what we did. And if pastor B loved praying in the name and authority of Jesus, that's what we did. And so we emulated what our pastors did, but I kept asking questions. And my pastors, they couldn't agree on things which really irked me. You belong to the same circle, same umbrella. You're training us to be pastors at the very least agree on something because truth cannot contradict itself. So I remember one day my pastor looked at me and said, you have a lot of questions. And he did this with the shoulder tilt and everything. It was all in his Bible. And you will come to know the truth and the truth will set you free. He didn't answer my question. And I nearly bugged out. My eyes nearly fell out of my head because I wanted to yell back. I had too much respect for him to do that, but I wanted to yell back. Well, I'm sorry, but right now the truth is making me mad. And I'm asking you for answers and I'm not getting it. So I gave up on my pastors and I started to look up their professors, the people who taught them in seminary. And I found out that their professors didn't have a consensus on what they believed and core things. And mind you, they wanted us to go to seminary. There was a small group of us who were young preachers and I felt that my calling was to be an itinerant preacher to travel and to preach. So we were going to go into seminary and we were going to go through the works, get ordained and then I had this whole vision. I wanted to be the traveling preacher. We'd homeschool our family, the pastor's wife on the keyboard and pastor's kids in the worship band, the ministry family. I wanted that so much and I really believed God was calling me to that. I even started envisioning and you know, if there are times when my bride and children can't come with me to preaching events, I'll just kind of motorcycle, travel faster. And I had these weird things in my head, right? Now, the reason why I tell you that is this, when my pastors couldn't agree with each other, it caused major problems for me. And this is why for some reason, God had ingrained in me a capacity of knowing. Now this was, by His grace, I can't really credit this to a well-formed intellect. But the principle of non-contradiction, and what that means, it's a law of logic, the law of non-contradiction, which says a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. What that means is, if this is true right now, it can't also be false at the same time. Objective truth is objective no matter what. That's simply it. I inherently understood this because the laws of logic ingrained in natural law and therefore they are ingrained in our capacity for natural reason. I was thankful that God and His grace allowed me that capacity to understand that. Because then I started pursuing truth. I knew that if my pastors were disagreeing with each other within the assemblies of God, something was wrong. Because left and right, the assemblies of God was splintering, as I'm being led by the Holy Spirit, God formed this church. And I never understood that. I never understood that because then I'd go there and pastor sounded different and he contradicted what pastor A said. So, and I don't want to get into the weeds of it. Whenever I do apologetics talks, I go into the exact doctrines that were some of the big problems. But this question of the blood of Jesus and the name of Jesus was a big thing for me. And so I somehow decided if my pastors couldn't be trusted and if their professors couldn't be trusted, I wanted to go back to as close to the epicenter of Christianity as possible, Christ and His apostles in the early church. That's what doomed me. For two straight years of almost no sleeping. Now, I don't want to get into the weeds of what careers I left so that I could faithfully perform my duties as a Christian, but I obviously left my rap career. There's no way that that was going to match up with living a faithful Christian life. Oh, the preacher is also a gangster rapper that doesn't match up. So I left that and God, I had another job. I don't want to talk about that, but I worked in Ferrari. It wasn't legal. My first job after that was in Ferrari. It was kind of lifestyle of the rich and famous and it wasn't congruent to living a gospel life. God blessed me with a job of being a legal editor. And so during that time, during the day I do my job and during lunch breaks and at home, I'd be devouring the writings of the fathers. Now, I also want to put this out there. Malaysia is a Muslim country predominantly. It does not allow for the import of good Catholic theological material and it's just hard to find. But if you have broadband and you know your way around a computer, you can get stuff and I was hungry. So I found the writings of the church fathers on numerous websites online and I just kept studying. And more and more I realized that the church fathers sounded Catholic and that surprised me and then it shocked me because they all sounded the same and then it made me mad because I wanted to be anything but Catholic. I was so vehemently anti-Catholic I couldn't begin to stress this. But one thing I want to highlight however is that all of them spoke about the blood of the covenant the blood of Jesus Christ in the exact same way. Every one of them referenced it in relation to the Eucharistic sacrifice on the altar. Every one of them to a man and we did not have that in the Pentecostal tradition if you can call it a tradition. So two years of assiduous studying I re-entered the church no fanfare I just had confession and I was received home. I spent the last 13 years diving into covenantal theology and I've been heavily influenced by in my Protestant years people like Michael Horton and Ligon Duncan, Peter Gentry. I'm throwing out these names if you're interested in picking up some of their books but when I became Catholic I discovered that the reigning pope at that time I entered the church in 2008. In 2005 the greatest biblical theologian in papal history was blessed to rise upon the seat of Peter Pope Benedict the 16th and we were so close to it that I think to this day we don't quite realize the magnificent treasure that this man was and still is to the church. I genuinely think that what the theology of the body was for John Paul II a covenantal biblical theology rooted in sacred tradition is the heritage of Pope Benedict the 16th. So I discovered Ratzinger's writings. I discovered the writings of a certain father, Donald Keefe and I realized the Catholics are talking about covenants but they're talking about it in a way that isn't surface level and they're also talking about it in a way that it's alive and active now, covenant and we're gonna go through this but covenant for the Catholic sphere is present, ever new. It's not an event that happened in the past that I can kind of be subsumed into that in book one chapter one of the Confessions of St. Augustine he writes about God being ever ancient and ever new. Well, that's exactly what the Catholic church teaches this re-presentation of the Eucharist and we're gonna get there. So I continued reading scripture from this lens and I learned from Pope Benedict the 16th this thing called reading in a hermeneutic of continuity. What that means is from the first page of Genesis all the way to the last page of the book of Revelation. The Bible narrates one key theme and the covenants is that theme that unlocks all of sacred scripture and I became more and more convinced that the role of blood sacrifice was indispensable to covenant reality. So a lot of what I'm saying right now most of you already know you hear Dr. Scott Hahn and Dr. John Berg's gonna talk about this a lot but I wanna put that out there right now that if the covenants are the overarching interpenetrating theme of all of sacred scripture blood sacrifice is how we are inducted into covenant and how our covenant life is constantly renewed until the end of time and I pause it even in eternity, we'll get there. Let's bow our heads in prayer. God our heavenly Father, we come before you as children hungry to be fed by your word. You have ordained that we become your own through covenants that bring us into kinship bonds with you. You call us children, you reveal yourself to us as Abba as intimately as you will us to be to you. We ask you right now to grant us a special outpouring of your grace and lighten our intellects to receive this truth and may it transform the way we live our covenantal lives not because we wanna get more intelligent but because we wanna be whole here. We want to be drawn into your love. You are love itself and we want to be perfected in the love that is you. One day when we enter the eternal Jerusalem O heavenly Father, may we be conformed fully into the image of your son. Saint Therese Lizzie pray for us. In the name of the Father, Son and of the Holy Spirit. Now, I'd like to begin by proposing to you that the entire divine economy would have looked very different before the fall but after the fall blood, blood sacrifice has become the means of entry into and constant renewal of covenant life and the question becomes why? And it forced to answer why we need to look no further than the word of God itself. So if you have your Bibles and I love that Catholics at this conference have their Bibles. When I came into Catholicism, the constant joke I make is that if you have your Bibles, oh wait, I'm at a Catholic event, it's okay. Share with the convert on your left or the revert on your right. Back in the Assemblies of God, we never had air conditioning indoors. We never needed it because the flipping was the air conditioning that we had. Leviticus chapter 17 verse 11 is going to be the linchpin upon which the rest of this talk hinges and Hebrews chapter 922 will bring it to its conclusion. For the life of the flesh is in the blood and I've given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls. For it is the blood that makes atonement by reason of the life. Some versions will read by reason of the soul. This premise is presented early on in Genesis chapter nine as well and this is in the ratification of the Noah hike covenant. So if you're looking at chapter nine, we're gonna go to about verse one, just about verse three and four. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. Only you shall not eat flesh with its life. That is its blood. For your life blood, I will surely require reckoning and it goes on. What's the principle here? Time and time again, as you and I go through sacred scripture, it becomes very clear that scripture equates life with blood. Blood is treated not just as the principle of life, it is equated with life itself. It's not like they are similar and united but distinct. This notion of life being in the blood is more than a biological reality. For the ancient Near East, and I argue for the Hebrew people as well, blood became this kind of theological symbol, we call it semiotics, the theological symbol of the life of God flowing in man. And this is tangential. I don't want to go too much into the weeds of this but that's precisely why whenever anyone in the society had an issue of blood, they were barred from society. It's not because they were unclean in our lexiconal sense today. It's because to be unclean means you can't show yourself in liturgical worship because you're so close to the life principle that belongs to God. We're afraid that if we touch you, we'll die. That's the mentality that's going on here. So life is in the blood. Blood has this philosophical theological weight and it isn't just in Christianity. J.M. Lucy in his work, the mass, the proper form of Christian worship, he writes this, it's certainly a wonderful circumstance that the entire world for 4,000 years worshiped God by blood sacrifice. It is true that the customs of savage and barbarous people should not be received as a standard for our present age but the opinion of the learned inclines to believe that every one of their prominent customs contains a kernel of truth. They are sacredly preserved. Now what does this mean? For 4,000 years, every major religious system in human history and anthropological history had some connotation of blood sacrifice. Now the question becomes, why are we such a bloody species? And by the way, where I come from, that's a bad word. I don't like saying that word. But why are we such a bloodthirsty species? It's because in our souls we inherently understand as natural law has been ingrained in us that there's something beyond the mere biological when it comes to the blood that flows through our veins. Natural law that has come from the divine mind into our souls tells us that when we sin against nature, against truth, against the law, we have violated a standard that is greater than ourselves. And the only debt that will make due for that violation is our death. And because of that, we know we ought to repay that debt with the shedding of our blood. The shedding of our blood then becomes the proper repayment for that debt. And I'm not making this up in a vacuum. St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae, you're gonna find this in the Secundus Gundapas question 85, article one, but then he talks about it again in article four, respondeo and following. And he says this, natural reason tells man that he is subject to a higher being. On account of the defects that man perceives in himself, he needs help and direction from one above him. This is God. Now, just as natural things that are lower are subject to the higher, natural reason is subject to theological revelation. The mode befitting man is that he should employ his senses and that which is sensible to make reparation to God. This is what we mean by sacrifice. And consequently, the offering of blood sacrifice is a matter of natural law. Now, there's a little lofty, let's pair it down. What does that mean? Even if the world did not have divine revelation through the Judeo-Christian narrative, inherently all mankind understands that there is something true about the offering of blood to God for the propitiation and expiation of our sins so that we can be in right relationship with him. Now, for every other religion and religious system in history, this has only been transactional. What do I mean by this? Pagan polytheistic religions offer sacrifices that they may get something in return. I give you this, gods, give me that. In Christianity, however, we already have the infinite blessing by means of the covenant that we enjoy in God. Blood sacrifice, then, is a restoration of the relationship that's been broken. And who broke it? Well, us, God doesn't move. God is unchanging, unyielding. He is ever benevolent. So Aquinas presupposes that all of us understand this means blood, blood sacrifice. And the word he employs here is sacrifichium. And sacrifichium in Latin doesn't just mean sacrifice in our kind of generic sense. What it actually means is deeper than that. It can mean a victim, a host, emulation, atonement, penance, and offering. We've always understood this. So I'm jumping ahead here. What I want to do is draw us back. Mekon Mathiason in his book, Sacrifice as Gift, he tells us why we have this desire to sacrifice to God. And if you have the book, it's on page 24 and following. And he says this, visible sacrifice is divinely instituted to meet the epistemological and psychological needs of fallen human creatures. Furthermore, the sensible aspect of the sacrifice is traced to the social nature of our worship. Our latria ought to bear the social impress of being manifest by external testimony. In short, given human sinfulness, the essentially social character of worship, sacrifice cannot exist without a visible external sign. Sacrifice is not an anostic exercise. The body and the soul must participate in it. They share in the fallen condition. Now, again, big words, right? Big words. What this simply means is this. Mathiason is basically saying this. There's no reality of being able to talk about sacrifice in an interior capacity if I don't also make a visible act of sacrifice in an exterior way. My interior sacrifices of my time or my talents, my interior sacrifices of penance will mean nothing if they are not joined to the exterior act of liturgical worship and covenant blood sacrifice that renews the bond I have with God. And again, we're gonna keep building this as we go. But I wanna posit to you that this system started in the Garden of Eden. If you have, again, turn with me to Genesis chapter three verses 20 to 24. This is the narrative of postfall and the effects of it. The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all those who live. And Yahweh God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them. Then Yahweh God said to them, now that the man has become like one of us in knowing good from evil, he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and pick from the tree of life too and eat forever. So Yahweh expelled him from the Garden of Eden to till the soil from which he had been taken. We've heard this text quite a lot of times. Something is strange in this text and it ought to stand out to us. Where the skins come from. I remember hearing this story when I was a kid. I remember seeing this in videos but never stopping to think where on earth did the animals come from? The skin wasn't lying around. It says animal skins to be sure. But the skin wasn't lying around. It's not like God picked up extra skin. Scripture gives us no evidence for that. Could God have made it out of thin air? Sure, he's God. But if he was gonna make something out of thin air, why make it animal skin? You could have just made it some kind of fabric and been done with it. The Hebrew word or for skin literally means skin. It means body or hide. But the brown driver breaks biblical concordance for a word study. Tells us that there's a special connotation for this word when it's used, especially in the Old Testament. It's always the skin of animals after sacrifice has been offered. Understanding this, when we go back to that narrative, is that too far of a leap? Well, I don't think so. Dr. Christine Van Horn in her book, The Lamb Eternal writes this. God sacrificed an animal in order to release the blood of that innocent animal to cover Adam and Eve's sin. Man was given his tunic lined with blood. It was not the skin that covered man's sin, it was the blood underneath the skin, the blood that made atonement for the couple's souls. Now, that might be a bit of a visual stretch, but just hear me out. Satan had lost, God had rescued man, and the way was made for man's covenant relationship to be restored. Blood sacrifice in liturgical worship brings about, it becomes instrumental in bringing about the restoration of a broken covenant bond. And this was the start of the entire history of covenant worship, even until Jesus comes along and even further than that. So again, keep tracking this with me, because far from a speculative leap, I put to you that this is the inner logic of the divine economy when it comes to covenantal renewal and establishment after the fall, but not because God is sadistic. It is because he understands that our violation has an eternal value, and our violation in sin connotes a necessity of death, and that death has to be paid. And animal sacrifices could only do that temporarily. If I may quote from my dissertation, and I'm not tooting my own hornets because I did the research and distilled it, it just reads better, so pardon me. One season Genesis 321, Yahweh God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them. In sacred scripture, and this is agreed by most scholars and patristic exegetes, this action of God is the first act of the shedding of blood in animal sacrifice in direct association with sin and the restoration of the dignity of man into covenant life once again. So what the biblical text is showing us is that fig leaves, which they used to cover themselves, insufficient. They tried, they failed. Yahweh shows them how to get back in right order. And how does he do this? He performs the first sacrifice of an animal and he does this to expiate their sins before him, but also as a pedagogical means to teach them how to do this in the future, to be restored again in right relationship with him. From this point on, all future forms of liturgical worship will involve blood sacrifice, because Yahweh not only ordained it so, he taught them how to do it. And you will notice that from this point on, all the way until Jesus' death, every single mode of the offering of blood sacrifice from the Abrahamic covenant to the Mosaic covenant to the Davidic temple to Jesus Christ's new and eternal liturgy, all of these will have stipulations that come from who, man? The covenant mediators made them up? No, they came directly from God by means of special revelation. So God made the first animal sacrifice. The first animal was needed to cover the sins of mankind. He performs this first act of expiation and by sacrificing an animal, he pioneers the liturgical order to follow from that point on. And that's the premise that I started with, which is that from the fall, blood sacrifice has been absolutely necessary for the restoration of covenant life. But it would not have been necessary if Adam and Eve had not sinned. And we're gonna talk about St. Athanasius on the incarnation in a little bit because there's a bit of theological mechanics to work out here. But I also wanna bring this up to you. We, especially here in Steubenville, we love the word covenant. And like I told you, I've been doing covenant theology for 15 years now and it was a joy to discover the works of Dr. Scott Hahn and Dr. John Berksma. And there's a kind of converging point in the way the three of us do covenant theology because I think we all come from disparate backgrounds in how we approach covenant theology. And the converging point is this. That entry into a covenant is not a mediocre affair. That's the first thing. But the second thing is this. The words to enter into covenant in Hebrew are Karat berid. Now I know Dr. John Berksma and Dr. Scott Hahn understand this because Dr. Hahn wrote about this in kinship by covenant and Dr. John Berksma wrote about this in Old Testament theology. Karat berid means, it doesn't mean to enter into covenant. It's not like man and God came up and shook hands and said, okay, now we're in covenant. Karat berid literally means to cut a covenant. If we translate the word Karat properly, it means to cut a covenant. This language comes from Near Eastern theology and it's not contained in a vacuum. This was presupposed. If you're gonna enter into covenant, you're gonna cut something and that something is going to bleed. And very often that something was you. So we'll talk about that in a little bit. Within the Old Testament, the word berid is always used for covenant. Its derivation is kind of inscrutable. Scholars differ. But here's the other thing. Even the word berid for covenant means cut if it comes from the Hebrew barah. The framework for this is that for the establishment of covenant, something of life must be cut and its blood must be poured out as a sign of the ratification of the covenant and the right of its renewal. There's this Dutch American reform theologian that I sometimes draw from. His name is Louis Burkhoff. He wrote in the mid to late 1800s. And he says this. The Hebrew word has a potential Assyrian root and he states that some prefer to think that it's derived from the Assyrian beridu and it means to bind. He says that the word for covenant doesn't just mean to cut, but that in cutting there's a binding quality to what's happening and you're gonna see how this plays out in a little bit. The concept of covenant being both cut and binding bears absolute significance when you realize this. Once a covenant was cut, you were bound to it till the point you breathe your last and your children and your children's children who have all been inducted into that same covenant are bound by the same ritual that you cut the covenant with in the beginning. I need you to think about this when we think about forming our children and our grandchildren in the life of the covenant. One of the greatest travesties in teaching high school, I taught high school for about six years prior to that I preached the gospel mostly adult formation across the world. And the heartbreak I'm realizing is that right now there's a generation being raised who are being told I will let you choose what faith you want to believe and I will not impose my faith upon you. And it's a very popular adage that Hollywood seems to be putting out. I hear these words and I think, well, first of all, if you claim to be Catholic and or Christian Protestant, you are in covenant and you are therefore violating the laws of the very covenant you profess. You should not have entered into this covenant if you had no desire to induct your family into this covenant as well. You have a moral and spiritual obligation to induct your whole family in this covenant and that's why when especially when a father enters into covenant, the whole family is meant to be subsumed into covenant identity. This isn't just something that I sit down and I teach my kid what to do. No, my son and my daughter see daddy living covenant life and they want to be a part of that. Now my son's only two. My daughter is turning one in three weeks at the time of this recording. And I have to tell you, I'm already seeing the signs of covenant life lived out. How? Well, one of the ways in which I exercise my priesthood in the family is when I wake up if my children are awake, if I haven't left for work and my children are awake, then we go to the family altar. We've established a family prayer corner. We pray together and then I have this vial of holy oil that I've gotten blessed and I bless them. There's a formula of blessing that I do every day and it's a very simple blessing. Well, my son has been receiving this since he was born for two years, almost every day now. And even if he doesn't receive the morning blessing from me, you can bet your bottom dollar he receives the night blessing from me. Except for the rare occasion when daddy's at, I don't know, the Applied Biblical Studies Conference. And my bride in my absence continues that for my children. When daddy is not there, she prays with the children in the formula that we've established, that I've established. And she blesses them in the formula that I've established. So my son now, his name is Benedict. He just turned two and he's speaking in full sentences and he's adorable and I have to be very careful what I say around him. Do you all know what that's like? It's also terrifying how much he reminds me of me. Both in wonderful ways and in not so wonderful ways. He's at the climbing phase right now, so pray for us. Now that being said, at night, there was one night this happened about a month and a half ago. My bride and I were under the weather and we were just waiting to put the kids to bed so that we ourselves could go to bed early. And so I picked up my son and my bride picked up my daughter and we were walking him to the bedroom and my son starts throwing a tantrum. And he goes, no, da, da, no. And I'm like, what, why? Because we have a whole bedtime ritual and he kind of enjoys it. I'm like, what, why? He said, pray to Jesus, bless with oil. And I'm sick at this point, yeah? I held this boy, I looked at him and I raised my voice because I was so excited. I went, you bet that's what we do in this family. Let's go pray to Jesus right now. And that showed me that the life of the covenant that I'm living is not just a witness that's in vain. This covenant that I've cut in my blood and the blood of my bride is now being lived out to the point where my children who are fruits of that covenant are coming to be subsumed in embracing the principles of that covenant. Why, so that they may only enjoy the joys of it? No, so that they can be covenantal people themselves and raise a covenantal tradition. Why? Because this and this alone is the way to salvation. Say amen. Sorry. Sorry, that's a Pentecostal side of me. So, now that word buried, as I mentioned earlier, it's gonna be translated into D'Atheche in the Greek and I want you, it's gonna be very important in a minute. So remember that word, D'Atheche. In the book, the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament, Jared T. Parker, he tells us this, the phrase to make a covenant is a bad translation of the words Karat Berid. It literally means to cut a covenant. Karat occurs 90 times in the Old Testament. In fact, there are some instances where the word Karat appears to cut without the word covenant. And it's only translated into to make a covenant because linguistically it doesn't make sense in the English. In other words, the Hebrew authors emphasize the cutting of a covenant more than the word covenant itself because they knew what to emphasize. And we as a culture, we as a tradition, but we as a church have become so biblically illiterate, we don't even know what a covenant is, let alone that we ought to cut to enter into it. And yet, if we realized that our life was being poured out in this blood sacrifice for the sake of this covenant, not only would we not take it for granted, we would revolve our entire lives around it. And so this is my exhortation to you. I was praying that this talk would not just be an object of academic exhortation and edification to you. I was hoping that this talk would transform your lives because at my core, I'm a preacher who cares about one thing, the salvation assault. I study all of this because this is saving my soul in the process, God is saving my soul. And I want to share this because this is leading people to heaven. Now, remember I mentioned Hebrews chapter nine? Well, we're going there right now. Hebrews chapter nine verse 16 to 22. If you read this in the English, not going to have a lot of connection to what we're talking about. But this is what's happening in the Greek. For where a, in the English it says, for where a will is involved. Well, that's not what the Greek says though. For where a diathake is involved. And what does diathake translate to again? A covenant. For where a covenant is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. All of you in covenant with Jesus Christ? My next question is, are all of you dead? We'll get there, we'll get there. The answer to that is yes, by the way, but we'll get there. For a covenant diathake takes effect only at death, since it is not enforced as long as the one who made it is alive. Hence even the first covenant was not ratified without blood. For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats with water and scarlet wool and hisop and sprinkled both the book and the people saying this is the blood of the covenant which God commanded you. And in the same way, he sprinkled the blood on the tent and all the vessels that were used in worship. Under the, this is the key here. Indeed, under the law, almost everything is purified with blood. And without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. I humbly ask you to realize that this is the price of our sin. We have taken for granted the reality of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls cheap grace. And cheap grace is the reception of God's benevolent gift of himself, his life, without being willing to pay the cost in the process. Now, there are a lot of arguments to how it permeated the entire culture. Paul Benedict XVI, there's a wonderful job of tracing this all the way back to the Protestant Reformation in his Regensburg address. I don't wanna go into the weeds of that today. What I do wanna highlight is this. When you and I believe that our sins are so trivial and so minimal that they really are nothing, we're in trouble in covenant life. Every sin is despicable, but we shouldn't live in strupulosity because the blood price has been paid by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But we ought to approach that with the reverence of knowing that my every sin has been paid for with nothing less than the body and blood and soul and divinity of the God, man, the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for you. And just because we are chronologically removed from the event, it doesn't mean that the event isn't present to us now. And the Catholic faith is the only faith that's able to make that present because it has the gift of that revelation to bring forth the substantiated presence of Jesus Christ on the altar so that this blood sacrifice continues from now for all eternity. As you can tell, this is how I'm like all the time, by the way, there's no switch off for me. Pray for my darling bride. I mean, I have to tell you as a Protestant and many years as a young Catholic, I remember asking, how did I miss this? I mean, it's literally in the Bible, it's in the book of Hebrews in the New Testament, but this is it, the entire history of covenant living is a bloody affair. Not where I come from, like I mentioned, that's a bad word, right? But gosh, thank God for the blood of the covenant. And as soon as I discovered this reality about covenant and blood sacrifice, I, gosh, I started diving into books as many as I could find. It was like I was out for blood. I'm sorry, that was a blood-curdling pun. You know, I love that you guys are laughing because sometimes when I make puns with my bride, it's like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Now, in this research, that's where I encountered, like I mentioned earlier, ancient Near Eastern texts, the details, the steps of cutting a covenant. Now, if you're taking notes, you're gonna wanna write this down because as I go through the rest of this talk, you're gonna see some of these steps play out, but if you know these steps, you're gonna start seeing them pop up in different parts of scripture. And like I mentioned earlier in my 30 second introduction, I am not gonna do this justice. These signs, these steps show up throughout scripture and I had to pick out two or three. The torture for me here is not what to say, it's what not to include. So if you're interested in books that can help you with this, there's a book by H.C. Trumbull, T-R-U-M-B-U-L-L. It was published in 1975. It's called The Blood Covenant. There's another book by Malcolm Smith. This was published in 2006 by Harrison House and it's also called The Blood Covenant. They approach it from slightly different perspectives, but they're really, really good resources for understanding the establishment of blood sacrifice and covenants. Now, let's go through the steps. There are 10 steps. Step one, in entering into covenant with each other, the first thing people do is they exchange coats and robes, the outerwear, they exchange coats and robes. Now, you might be looking at me thinking, well, that's good, Marcus. I don't wanna wear your jacket. It's probably not gonna fit me or a big guy and I really don't wanna wear it. But you need to understand, for the ancient Hebrews, clothing, especially near Eastern traditions, clothing wasn't just a match of social propriety, nor was it a status symbol. Clothing identified you with a family, a clan, and a tribe. The Levites, oh, not just the Levites. Every one of the tribes had specific patterns on their clothing. And then down to clans in the tribe, some of them had specific patterns on their clothing. And then how do you identify some people in families with some are wealthy and some are not? So sometimes, if you see a lavish-looking, say, Kohanite, who's of the Levite tribe from afar, and you see the quality of the coat, you can sometimes guess what family the person comes from. That's just how it was. And so when it came to cutting covenant, let's say a Levite was cutting a covenant with someone from the clan of Judah. The first thing they would do is swap garments. Why? Because now whatever was mine in my heritage as a Levite is now yours. You and I don't think of it this way, but on the day that I use marriage because I see in my marriage the 15 years of covenant theology I've been studying come alive every single day. On the day of our wedding, I didn't take off my tuxedo and give it to my bride that would have been ridiculous, but this is what we did do. We exchanged rings. It's not clothing per se, but she gave me a ring that she procured for me and I gave her a ring that I procured for her. From now on, all that I have is yours and not just all that I have, all that I am is yours and all that I will be is yours. My past, my present, my future, my darling bride is completely yours, so help me God. And my bride did the exact same thing, so help her God and mind you, pray for that grace for her every single day because she's married to me. Secondly, step two, you exchange your belt. Now the belt or girdle, we no longer do this or sometimes we do. Actually, honestly, no one does this anymore. You remember the time when cell phones used to be holstered on the belt? Yeah, this was very long ago, no one does that. I remember my father doing that. Back in the Israelite times, your belt was where you carried the tools that you needed, either for the day's trades or if you were going on a journey, whatever sustenance you need in terms of money, you needed in terms of money and the weapon that you needed to defend yourself. In other words, your belt was not only your toolkit, it was a representation of your resources and your strength. And so giving your belt to the other person simply meant my entire strength is yours. Now, what does this mean, right? Your enemies are now my enemies. Your battles are now my battles. I want you to keep thinking about this in terms of your covenant with Christ. Number three, the actual cutting of the covenant. An animal is killed. And if you're looking for a visual example of this, Dr. John Berg's Bible Basics for Catholics, especially when he talks about Genesis 15, he illustrates this. The animal is cut in half. The blood is led to run in the middle. And then at this stage of the cutting of the covenant, the two members entering into covenant would walk through and make a figure eight so that as they kept doing so, the blood would trace a symbol that was infinite. To signify the unbroken reality of the covenant, but it gets even deeper. If I violate this covenant that we are making in the sight of Almighty God, let what has happened to these animals happen to me. Number four, they raised their right arms. Now, the, sorry. Number three would be the cutting of the covenant, the animals. The second would be the belt. The first would be the exchange of garments. Number four, they raised their right arm, their dominant arm. And this part, the text is a little tricky to translate whether it means palm or wrist. There seems to be a kind of consensus that posits wrist, and I'll explain to you why I favor wrist as well. The wrist would be cut, and then blood would be mingled. And then in some cultures, it differed from culture to culture. An abrasive substance like dirt, or mur, or frankincense, whatever, an abrasive substance that would burn was rubbed into the open wound. Now, you can start cringing at that, but this is why. It's so that it would heal as a dark and ugly scar. And there's a reason why. So historians posited, historians who study near Eastern Covenant posited, we don't have actual evidence, but they posited that one of the origins of the wave is that when people met other people in public after covenanting themselves, they raised their right hand so that the scar was visible. And what the scarring would do would be to demonstrate, be careful how you deal with me. Because out there somewhere, I am covenanted to a person who will fight my battles if anything happens to me. What's mine is his and what's his is mine. We are literally two becoming one. Number five, the exchanged names with each other. Now, you see this happening in marriage. This is the origin of the practice of the exchange of names. And I think it's so beautiful that that bright, I know that there's a social convention of the bride taking on the groom, here in the groom's name here in the West. I truly think it's so beautiful because it's a greater connotation of the two becoming one. And it's a very fitting covenant representation. They exchanged names with each other. But I also want you to think about this from a biblical perspective. God was changing people's names left, right, and center. Why? Because he's got a thing for changing names. I remember when I was growing up and I said, okay, why does your God keep changing? They're like, oh, you know, the name connotes a mission. That's nice. That's fine. Until you realize that in covenant oath swearing, the exchange of names meant something even deeper. It means that in my name now, I have taken on the identity of the other person. And that's why Abraham is a classic example. In Hebrew, in Hebrew lettering, you've got the head and head for the letter H. There's a soft H and a hard H. Abraham receives the softer H, Avraham. And that sound is often associated with the breath of Yahweh found all the way in Genesis, the breath that was blown into Adam. In other words, when Avraham walked around saying, my name is no longer Avraham, I'm Avraham, people would go, oh, you've covenanted yourself. To who? Your name's Avraham. Oh, you've covenanted yourself with him. This was taken for granted that wherever Abraham walked around, people knew this. Number six, the terms of the covenant are presented. You fulfill this, you are called to fulfill this. These are the blessings. But in here also, there's this reality of a curse as well, which we'll talk about in a little bit. Everything I have is yours. Everything you have is mine. Something happens to you. I will see to it that your bride and children are taken care of. And this even included, mind you, the exchange of the firstborn. And I need you to remember this. This part, the step of the exchange of covenant, the terms of the covenant, often included, my firstborn is now yours. Your firstborn is now mine. That's how seriously they took covenant. Number eight, the pronounces of covenant, blessings and curses. If you uphold these terms, so help you God, you will be blessed. But if you, yes sir. Oh yeah, sorry, seven. Number seven. Number seven would be the blessings and curses. I apologize. Number eight, the eating of the memorial meal, a meal, the eating of the communion meal, the covenant meal. The notion of a loaf of bread and a glass of wine was typical in this. But the language that was used even in Assyrian covenants is going to sound familiar. This is my body, and I'm now giving it up for you. This is my blood, which is now your blood. This is the blood of the covenant. I mean, these words predate Christ. And finally, the covenant memorial. This is what we call in Latin, the liturgy. The covenant memorial was a ritual that was done to renew the covenant and in order to honor it, a pillar or an altar or a tree was constructed to that end so that there would be a visible representation of the covenant. Now, I'm gonna do a very bad job of illustrating all of this. So track this with me. In Genesis three after the fall, we see Yahweh making tunics for Adam and Eve. I have exchanged garments with you. But beyond that, not just the external representation of their identity, God has already cut a covenant. In Genesis chapter 15, God comes to Abram in a vision and says, fear not, I am your shield, your reward will be great. And so what happens? The Lord came to him, this man, Eliezer shall not be your heir, your own son shall be your heir. And there's this whole thing about asking Abraham to slice some animals. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And the Lord said to him, know of a surety that your descendants will be sojourners in the land that is not theirs and will be slaved there. They'll be oppressed for 400 years, but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve. And they will come out with great possessions and they will possess the land that I have given you. And on that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram. How a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. Now, when you read that text, as I mentioned earlier, who's supposed to walk through the pieces? Both members of the covenant, both members. But if you read that text, what happened to Abram? Not only did he not pass through, he fell asleep. Exactly. This is why that often happened in this regard. For two symbols of God to pass through, covenantists could often elect a representative. So Protestant speculative pastors posit that what happened was God was, this was kind of foreshadowing of Jesus being God's representative in taking on the curses. And this is why. Did Abram and his descendants faithfully keep the covenant until Christ? Absolutely not. The entire history of salvation, history is about Abram and his people messing up time and time again. Yes, sir. Yes. In fact, that's absolutely what I was going to say. What happens is because God knows of Abraham's impending failure, God knows that there's no way you're going to fulfill this. And yet this covenant is what you need for your salvation. I am going to take on the covenant curses upon myself so that when you fail, I will make sure that I pay the price that is owed for violating the covenant. Now, from there, we look at Galatians 3.13. Paul writes, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us, for it is written cursed be everyone who hangs upon a tree. We know that Christ took on that curse precisely for that reason. And so finally, and that's what it means. That's really what it means to say, Christ paid a debt he didn't owe because we owed a debt we couldn't pay. Now I want to go back to what I mentioned earlier, Saint Athanasius on the incarnation. He says this, for the price to have been paid by Christ, number one, the repayment had to have been done by the eternal God because the debt was eternal. Number two, the repayment had to be done on behalf of man because we owed the debt. Number three, the person paying that debt had to not have that debt himself. Simply put, the debt had to be paid by God, made man who was completely sinless. And that's why from all eternity, only one person could have done that. That's what it means to say that Christ bore our curses upon the cross. Now, Abraham actually does go through a kind of cutting himself in Genesis chapter 17. He, instead of on the wrist though, we know that it was the, it's a very uncomfortable cutting a circumcision and there's no way around it. And I actually praise God that the first council in Jerusalem did away with that as a prerequisite of conversion into Christianity because that means the work of evangelization is a lot easier. Believe in Jesus Christ and you will be saved. And oh, by the way, there's this one more thing you need to do. So why the male organ? It's not because God was being weird about it, right? The male organ is the principle of life according to Hebrew theology. Near Eastern tradition held that the blessing of children was the greatest blessing that God could give and barrenness was the greatest curse a couple couldn't do. Baring that sign upon his body would forever show Abraham that he is covenant to God and therefore, take it one step further, the marital embrace that he shares with his bride who's also covenant to God has a divine quality and he cannot ever take that for granted again. Now why is that crucial? Because in every one chapter earlier, what did he do? He slept with his bride's maid servant and I don't wanna get into the weeds of that. Then you think about the Arkadah of him. God tells Abram, oh Abram, sacrifice your only son, your only begotten son, because that makes sense. He waits almost 100 years for this child. Actually he waits exactly 100 years. For this child, Sarah was 90 and now God says sacrifice him. It's not going to make any sense until you realize the principle of the covenant. Remember the terms and conditions? The exchange of firstborn sons. In that moment, God was calling upon the debt of the firstborn son, but at the same time, God was also saying what? I'm gonna give you my firstborn son and what I've stopped you from doing and killing your firstborn son, I will see to the end when I fulfill all of covenant law. Now again, this goes on, the narrative goes on, but very simply put, our entire life in covenant is nothing more and nothing less than a response to the invitation to and reception of the outpouring of the love of God into our souls at every moment unto eternity. And this is done by means of constant participation in blood sacrifice in the covenants. Now, if we have time for this, years after the binding of Isaac, Abram and Isaac are enjoying a really good relationship with each other. Abram's computer no longer works. Yes, they're living at that time now. Abram's computer no longer works well. He's running on a Windows 7. He wants to upgrade it. Windows 10 is out right now. So he tells his son, look, I really need to get a software update. My computer's just fine. Just need a software update. Isaac looks at him and says, dad, there's no way you're going to be able to update your software because you need a lot more memory. You need a lot more RAM. And he said, son, don't worry about it. God will provide the RAM. We need to reclaim a sense of memory, a real sense of memory that Joe had a reason. The Hebrew word for memory and the Greek word for memory is zakar and anamnesis. Don't just mean a kind of fond sentimentality. I miss my bride dearly as I'm away from her and the kids. And so I have a kind of sentimental memory when I think fondly of the things that my bride and children do. But the kind of memory we have in covenant life is a lot deeper than just a fond remembering. In anamnesis and zakar, whenever you and I engage in liturgical worship, in blood sacrifice that renews our covenant, you and I are transported to the very event that initiated the covenant to begin with. I mean, forget, I don't know how many of your Dr. Who fans, but the Catholic Church actually allows you true time travel. This is the real wibbly, wobbly, timey, wimey stuff. And if you've got that reference, fantastic. Because at every single Eucharistic sacrifice, the Jews really believe there's about their Passover sacrifice. You read the Haggadah, the language is in the present, not in the past. The Eucharistic sacrifice doesn't just make present what Jesus did. There's a kind of reality where you and I are transported to the foot of the cross, receiving of Jesus' initial covenant blood sacrifice. But at the same time, we are also there at that mass, receiving of that particular Eucharistic sacrifice. And at the same time, that same Eucharistic sacrifice is a foreshadowing of the heavenly eternal Eucharistic banquet that we had to enjoy for all eternity when we enter the wedding of the Lamb in the book of Revelation and ultimately in the heavenly Jerusalem. And all of this is happening in an instant. And because that's so profound, Father's boring homily really doesn't matter. And I don't mean this to say that all priests preach boring homilies. I understand, I've only been Catholic for 13 years and I've zoned out at some homilies. I completely understand it. The point I'm trying to make, however, is that this is not about the minister, it is about Christ the High Priest who is at once our blood sacrifice. Praise God for that, because when I was a Pentecostal, the focus was entirely on the preacher. And if I fail that day, gosh, the service was awful because God didn't show up. I thank God, I thank God truly, that in the Eucharistic sacrifice, this constant liturgical blood renewal means that my covenant is atoned and renewed with my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, regardless of how I feel, whether or not I feel Him that day. So, from there, where do we go? By the time we get to Moses, we see that the covenant sacrifices have been enumerated. And in particularity, I want to highlight three sacrifices. You've got the Tamid sacrifice, which are the, you call it the Olat Ha Tamid, the eternal sacrifices. These were the sacrifices that were meant to bookend the day in the morning and in the evening. It started at about, I think, 6 a.m. and ended at 3 p.m. Every single day, one lamb was sacrificed in the morning, one lamb was sacrificed at night. No other sacrifices would take place until these two were started, and then the last one would be a Tamid sacrifice. So even the parcel of a sacrifice had to be bookended by the Tamid sacrifices. Now, this is crucial. By the time the Mosaic covenant comes about, this becomes the most prominent sacrifice. But then as covenant theology develops, we're gonna see that in the temple, for example, in the temple, the Solomonic temple will start seeing a shift into a greater focus on the Todah sacrifices. And Todah means Eucharist. Well, the word Hebrew word for Todah, Hebrew word Todah translates into the Greek Eucharistia. It literally means Thanksgiving. Why? Because there's a greater connotation of personal investment in the Todah sacrifice. And I'll prove this to you. During each act of sacrifice, when a person brought forth an animal to be sacrificed, they had this thing called the Semikah. And the Semikah was very simply this. It's a dedication of the owner of the animal, of the animal to the temple. Simply put, rabbinic authorities and certain church fathers interpret the Semikah as follows. The sacrifice by laying his hand upon the victim transferred his sins upon it. And imposed upon it, the punishment of death that should have been his for covenant violation. Now we have here the principle of what's known as penal substitution, the substitution of penalty. I want you to focus on that while we talk about this. Exodus 24, verse three to eight. Moses came and told all the people the words of the Lord. So he's read out all the covenant terms and all the people answered with one voice and said, all the words which the Lord has spoken, we will do. And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord and he arose early in the morning, built an altar at the foot of the mountain. You should be recognizing these signs at this point from the 10 steps. 12 pillars, according to 12 tribes of Israel. He sent the young men to the people of Israel. They offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord. And Moses took half of the blood and he put it in basins. And half of the blood he threw on the altar and the tradition holds that that blood smelted upon the writing of the laws. And then he took the book of the covenant, read it in the hearing of the people and the people said, all that the Lord has spoken, we will do and we will be obedient. And so what does Moses do in response? God bless you, go home, go forth and proclaim the gospel, uh-uh. And Moses took the blood and threw it upon the people and said, behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words. Now those words are crucial, but let's admit it, that's disgusting. Blood on you, literal blood on you, the blood of bulls on the entire assembly. Can you imagine Moses and the priests to the entire assembly of however many you wanna imagine the Israelites to be because scholars still dispute the full number, sprinkled with the literal blood. You've just said, I will be faithful to the covenant laws of God, so help me God. Okay, prove it, here's the blood of bulls. The notion of being covered in the blood of the covenant is not about just receiving the blood. In this event, the blood became the garment, the exchange of the garment. The blood became the cutting. If you rejected the covenant, if you, even if you said I accept the covenant but you didn't want the blood, you would die. If you didn't wanna be covered in the blood of the bulls, you would die. I mean, you could say the stakes were very high. Sorry, that was terrible, that was awful. I'm sorry, I butchered that joke. I'll move on now. Look, I'm just trying to milk this for all it's worth. So, now here's the thing, here's the thing. One could not say I don't want this and live. See, back in the Old Testament, just like the new, the rejection of covenant laws meant one thing. Receive this or die, that's basically it. Except that today we don't see people dying on the spot in the presence of the holy because Jesus has already paid that price. So what we don't see in this kind of magnificent display of divine justice we think is no longer happening. But what's actually happening is that people are dying. An interior life and the spiritual death because it is substantially deeper, kills in an eternal way in the way that bodily death can never. And that's why covenant fidelity is not about preference. Covenant fidelity is a life or death choice, so help you God. So, by the time Christ comes about, he is the eternal sacrifice, he's the Taman Ha'ola, but he's also the true Eucharistic Thanksgiving sacrifice, and he's also the Passover sacrifice whose blood is smeared upon the doorpost and lintel of the cross through which we walk into salvation and he is the high priest and the heavenly Jerusalem and the temple. He is at once the one offering and the one receiving the offering. We have so great a high priest. And so because of this, Cyril of Alexandria writes, Christ died to sin once, but in that he lives, he lives to God. We have undergone a death like his and have practically been buried with him. When Christ took upon human nature and when Christ died on the cross, vicarious atonement means this. We didn't just transfer our guilt to Christ. Christ took us with him on the cross. When you see the cross, you see yourself. When you see the cross, you understand, you have been crucified with Christ. And that's why whenever we go to Mass, we hear Father say the words, in baptism, they died with Christ. May they also share his resurrection. Unlike the blood of goats and bulls, Christ united us to his blood sacrifice on the cross and in union with him, we have paid that price and we continue to pay that price because he's the one who does the repayment. So how do we make up for what's lacking in the sufferings of Jesus as Paul writes? By suffering. Your every act of suffering is now redemptive, whether or not you realize it. We often tell, it's often heard, oh unite your sacrifice to Jesus on the cross. And that sounds wonderful, but we're already sacramentally united to Christ's bloody sacrifice at Calvary. So yes, we don't see the blood spilled out physically in the New Testament anymore. And thank God, because the old is what a prefigament of the new, but in the place of the physical, biological blood, we have sacramental blood in the waters of baptism and blessing. So now Father will not come to you and sprinkle the blood of oxen. Thank God for that. Peter would come after us. What Father will do is sprinkle you with holy water, which now has a sacramental participation in the blood of Jesus Christ. Transubstantiated, Eucharistic blood is now ours to truly receive every single day in our covenant renewal of blood sacrifice that's offered upon the altar now and across the world until the end of time. So help us God, because he has given us that assurance. In other words, is that a cop out from blood sacrifice? Absolutely not. Because what was physical blood in the Old Testament is now metaphysical blood in the New. What was gory in the Old is now glorious in the New and it's grace filled. What was disgusting in the Old is now divine and divinizing in the New. What was morbid in the Old is now mysterious and majestic and magnificent and also mystical. You and I are joined to the sacramental sacrificial reality through him, with him and in him from the moment of our baptism unto eternal life. And this, my friends, is our blood sacrifice of the New and eternal covenant. This is our heritage as Catholics that unfortunately without a sacramental Eucharistic understanding, no Christian will be able to participate in. And that's heartbreaking. And so I wanna return now to the conversation of scarring when you cut yourself in covenant. The purpose of the scar was so that until you died that scar would remain and people would visibly see it. Well, I wanna take this one step further. Christ has cut a covenant with us. He bears scars. There's this whole thing about marriage and I wanna talk to you about this just very briefly. In Genesis chapter two of us 21 onwards, for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the Lord God caused man to fall into a deep sleep and he took one of man's ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. And the Lord made a woman from the rib that he had taken out of man and he brought her two men. Now I also wanna say this just as a kind of sharing of what happened on the day that I proposed to my bride, I had been traveling the world as a missionary and I had a Bible with me that had come with me wherever I went and I took my bride's ring and I pasted it next to this verse in that Bible and I gave it to her as a gift after. This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman for she was taken out of man and that's why a man leaves his father and his mother and his united to his wife and they become one flesh. Now the rabbis and the fathers all comment on this to mean the exact same thing. Eve proceeded from Adam in a mystical way. The church holds this to be true. I wanna take it one step deeper. Adam was wounded in his side for Eve. Adam was cut for the covenant he had with Eve. I wanna take this one step deeper. Ephesians five verse 25 to 27. Husbands love your brides as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. That he might sanctify having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word. That he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish. Now Paul is pulling here from nuptial covenantal language. This whole thing of the cleansing by water with the blood. You take a look at say the writings of Gaius Victorinas. He wrote in the 400 ADs. This was the guy who was influential in St. Augustine's own conversion, Victorinas. And he writes this. The mystery of baptism is being rehearsed in this metaphor. On the other hand, if we refer to this to the endurance of the husband, and bridegrooms please listen to this. If we refer this to the endurance of the husband which entails his giving himself for the wife and bearing and suffering all that is hers, even sharing in all that she endures, she's being cleansed with water and the word. That is, she's being purified in the Lord's sight when he renders her pure by his endurance to make her ready to be sanctified by washing in the Word. Big words, what does that mean? Remember this whole thing I've been talking about about how we are joined into Christ's blood sacrifice? Well, what does blood sacrifice do? It brings about atonement, but thanks to Jesus' sacrifice, it takes us one step further. It sanctifies us. And because it sanctifies us, there's this reality that Paul is talking about even when I'm away from my bride. My faithfully doing this talk, my being faithful to the vocation I have as husband and father and evangelist is purifying my bride. This is my blood sacrifice. My waking up on Wednesday mornings to take out the trash before the garbage trucks get there because I don't wanna miss trash day is purifying her because that's my blood sacrifice. That's my being pierced for her. That's how I make up what's lacking in the sufferings of Christ. So when I faithfully wash the dishes, when I change our children's diapers and to be sure at this age that a lot of diapers to be changed. In fact, Father, if I may humbly recommend in marriage prep, please include a module on how much diapers will be involved in the rest of their life. No one told, we had an idea, but no one told us just how much. Every time I do this faithfully in small and great ways, my every act of covenant fidelity is an act of blood sacrifice that is purifying my bride and making her a saint and reciprocally making me a saint for her. What Paul is writing about and what Victorina is commenting on is very simply that because I am now one flesh with her by every act of covenant fidelity is an act of sainthood. Not just for me, but for her. And because she's being purified by what's in the word by my every act of fidelity, my children receive of that grace. Because I gotta tell you, there's no way I'm the best father on the planet. There's only one best father and that's God and I participate in that fatherhood in a small way. Father participates in that in a greater way. I receive that fatherhood from God and I strive to be holy in the covenant that I've received and my fidelity to it makes my children saints. It makes my bride a saint. And therefore, this is how we work out our salvation and fear and trebly. This is the applied part of the biblical theology. Your covenant life is not just an ethereal, speculative, theological understanding. It's a lived reality. Because on the day that I stood before God and the assembly to profess vows to my bride, I told the world, I will be true to you in good times, in health, for richer, till death do us part, right? If only it was that easy. In good times, and in bad, in health, and in sickness, for richer or for poorer, till death do us part. And so my participation in the sufferings of husbandhood and fatherhood, these minor, pinprick things of I barely slept last night but I know I gotta take out the trash because that's my responsibility or the bathtub isn't draining and I'm the only one who knows how to fix it and so I gotta go fix it. Even though I just had a long day at work, these tiny, pinprick, mundane, transient things now possess mystical, miraculous, graceful, sanctifying realities. Not just for me, but for my bride and therefore for my children. Never underestimate the power of a covenantal life lived wholly in witness. Never underestimate the life of being a faithful priest and a faithful husband and a faithful father. When I, Dr. Han and I met years ago and he knew I had such a hard, it carries him for evangelization and this is what I do, I travel and I proclaim the gospel and hope to bring about the salvation of souls by the proclamation of the word. And he told me this, Marcus, when you get married, you're gonna realize that you don't wanna travel and preach anymore. You're gonna realize that you will want to stay at home with your bride and children because he knew the kind of man I was. I looked at him like he had two heads. I didn't tell him this though, I had too much respect for him. So I was thinking, well, I love you, Dr. Han, but I think you're wrong, but thank you very much for that. I get married, we get children, my apostleate starts picking up, I get speaking engagements and now all I want to do is be near my bride and children. Now mind you, it's not because I'm an excellent husband, it's because I know that that's where the Lord has called me to. And I find the utmost happiness in living out that vocation. So in other words, you and I don't have to shed physical blood anymore. I don't have to go home and cut my wrist to prove I love my bride. Our baptism makes it so that every act of faithful endurance to our brides and to our parishes, to our flock to the church is an act of blood sacrifice, especially within a sacramental context of holy orders and marriage. So Christ is cut on his wrists and he bears that covenant mark at infinitum. And I'm gonna talk about this by quoting the book of Revelation later. Christ is pierced and cut on his feet, on his heels specifically. And that's a covenant mark. How do we know this? Genesis 3.15. You will bruise his heel, but he will crush your head. Who is the real enemy? Who is Satan really an enemy of? Well, primarily to us because he's powerless against God. Christ has taken on our enemy. Our battle is his battle. And finally Christ is not just pierced on his hands and feet. He's also pierced on his side. Just as the first Adam fell asleep and from his open side float fought the first Eve. Christ was pierced on his side. I wanna take this deeper though. Christ bears a covenant mark on his heart. How do I know this? Jeremiah 31.31. Behold the days are coming. I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant I made with their fathers in the past. This covenant which I will make with the house of Israel in those days, I'll put my law within them and I will write it upon their hearts and I will be their God and they shall be my people. This, my friends, is why circumcision no longer matters because now we have a mark upon the heart. This is the circumcision of the heart that Paul writes about in Romans 2.29. He is not a real Jew who is outwardly nor is true circumcision something external and physical. He is a Jew, one who is inwardly because real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal. His praise is not from men but from God. Christ bore the circumcision of the heart so that you and I may be circumcised in the heart metaphysically. So the wounds on the body of Christ are not accidental. In fact, they're not even incidentally there. They are blood sacrificial covenantal marks and Christ will forever bear them and he'll bear them as signs of the covenant that he's made and cut with us for all eternity. How do I know this? Revelation chapter five verse six. I mean, John takes a look at Jesus in the heavenlies. What does he say? And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a lamb standing as though it had been slain. The church fathers hold that even in his heavenly glory, Christ's body bears the marks of his crucifixion. Christ's covenant wounds and his blood sacrifice have a heavenly eternal reality and if you've been sacrificed with Christ on the cross, I can assure you right now, your covenant marks have a heavenly eternal reality. So yes, one day in heaven, people will remember that Marcus faithfully took out the trash with Stephanie. People will remember that Marcus endured the smell of the diapers as he took them down and I thank God for that because everything we do in covenant faithfulness is blood sacrifice. Christ is the true blood sacrifice and he bears those covenant marks and because we are joined to him, our entire life becomes blood sacrifice. So in that light, is there blood sacrifice in practical ways? Absolutely, and I'll prove this to you. When my bride and I got married and we don't have to talk about details in this regard, but when my bride and I got married and we prayed for the gift of children, as she was, and we had our firstborn Benedict, she was in labor for six straight hours, six straight hours of the final end of labor. She was just pushing because the baby was stuck and so I watched as this woman, whom I love so dearly and I could do nothing for that point. I watched as she laid down her body and she wasn't just doing it out of love for our child, she was doing it out of love for me too and out of the faithfulness of her covenant. And in the end, we had to have some medical intervention and Benedict was born, but I watched as my bride's body underwent a certain level of tearing. Don't tell me covenant relationships don't entail blood sacrifice. Now that's just on a biological level though. On a physical level, I bleed for this marriage too, constantly in my striving to work to provide, to protect, to nurture, to fix up the house and I'm a clutch, so believe me, I bleed a lot. And as I fulfill my husbandly and fatherly duties, but I also bleed especially for our marriage when I stop my toe badly because that's the same as what my bride goes through. All of you can agree that my sufferings pale in comparison to what my bride goes through. And so as I constantly live out daily faithfulness, those are the ways in which I participate in blood sacrifice because marriage involves the daily laying down of our bodies for each other. The marital embrace in its initial capacity, all of you know this, often entails a shedding of blood, birthing a child sheds blood, raising children can sometimes shed blood. A lot of you know this, the upkeep of house and home sheds blood, the providence and protection of bride and children shed blood. In fact, the question isn't where is the blood sacrifice, it's more of where it isn't. Blood sacrifice is a massive part of our entire life and that's why the laws of the covenant make what's biological, theological, it makes what's material, celestial, it makes the physical, metaphysical and it makes the tangible transcendent. It makes the natural supernatural and spiritual and sublime. So I want to close with these realities. The Hebrew word for blood is dam, D-A-M literally dam, but that word doesn't just translate into blood. If you take a look at the scriptures, it can also mean guilt, it can also mean victim, the sacrificial victim, it can mean holocaust, it can mean oblation and sacrifice and death, but contextually, dam is often used to mean being cut into covenant. So in other words, you and I have the life of dam that we may shed dam that through our dam we may be joined to the new and eternal dam because we have been cut in covenant through dam and if I've sufficiently confused you, praise the Lord. I want to end with a word on suffering. Catechism 15, 21, in a certain way, one who suffers is consecrated to bear fruit by configuration to the Savior's redemptive passion. Suffering now acquires a new meaning. It is a participation in the saving work of Jesus. I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, present your bodies as a living blood sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God because that is your spiritual covenantal worship. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Lord our God of heaven and earth, we thank you that you've ordained the gift of covenant. We thank you that you have called us to be in covenant with you by means of blood sacrifice and we thank you that we are participators in Christ's own redemptive sacrifice. We thank you that through that sacrifice, we are constantly being sanctified and purified and conformed into the image and likeness of your Son. We thank you for the gift of our covenant responsibilities, holy orders and matrimony, baptism and confirmation through which we live out our daily reality of pinprick blood sacrifice. We ask you right now for a special outpouring of your grace, that every time we approach the eternal sacrifice of Jesus upon the altar in the new and eternal covenant, we will come before it with a new found reverence that this blood is shed not just for our life but that we may be joined to Christ, conformed to Him, that we may make perfect what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ and ultimately, that we may be sanctified, that we may sanctify our loved ones and that we may all be drawn to the heavenly Jerusalem that is our covenantal family heritage. All you holy saints and angels pray for us to that end. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ by the shed blood of Jesus Christ at Calvary and on every altar in every Catholic church in the world. Amen. In the name of the Father, Son and of the Holy Spirit.