“Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?”
Washed in the blood. I’ll
be frank: that’s kind of a grisly image, though a very popular one in late 19th
and 20th century hymnology. If some of our modern churchgoers cringe
at the mental picture it conjures, we can hardly blame them.
Elisha Hoffman’s lyric
presumably riffs on Revelation 7, where John sees an innumerable multitude
of worshipers in front of the throne of God and is told, “They have washed their
robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
In Revelation it is
the robes that are washed in the
blood, not the worshipers themselves. Hoffman probably understood this, though
his title is a bit too ambiguous for me.
What we do find much
more often in scripture is sprinkled
blood.
