Does the Bible really support the teaching that God disapproves of blood transfusions?
How Blood Can Save Your Life? p.7 says "You owe it to yourself to get the facts in order to make an informed choice about blood."
- The Jews were instructed to pour out the blood of the animal because that represented the animal's life. This was fitting because that animal had relinquished its life. When a person receives a blood transfusion, it is from another live person whose lifeblood is still flowing and will be poured out at a future date upon death.
- Transfusing blood into your veins is not the equivalent of injecting food into them. If you are starving and you receive a blood transfusion, you will still die of starvation.
- If consuming blood was a capitol offense, why were Saul's men not executed when they fell to eating blood along with the meat? (1 Sam. 14:31-35)
- Deuteronomy 14:21:"You must not eat any body [already] dead. To the alien resident who is inside your gates you may give it, and he must eat it; or there may be a selling of it to a foreigner, because you are a holy people to Jehovah your God."
o W 04 6/15 pp. 14-15After the Flood, mankind started anew with just eight souls. In a declaration applying to all humans, God . . . said that humans could eat animal flesh, but he set this restriction: "Every moving animal that is alive may serve as food for you. As in the case of green vegetation, I do give it all to you. Only flesh with its soul-its blood-you must not eat."
ยง Why would the Watchtower Society try to apply this to all of humanity when it is clear from the above quote in Deuteronomy that God later applied it only to Israelites under the Mosaic law, which has since been done away with?
o Israel was in a covenant relationship with God, foreigners were not. The Watchtower teaches that the Great Crowd is not in a covenant relationship with Jehovah. That being the case it would seem that only the anointed should be required to abstain from blood.
- Most meats still contain trace elements of blood. If abstaining from blood is so important, why don't Witnesses eat only meat that has been slaughtered in the Kosher method of the Jews? (Side point: Jews will accept blood transfusions.)
- Acts 15:28-29 "For the holy spirit and we ourselves have favored adding no further burden to you, except these necessary things, to keep abstaining from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication. If you carefully keep yourselves from these things, you will prosper. Good health to you!"
o Notice that along with abstaining from blood, we also hear the command to abstain from "things sacrificed to idols." At 1 Corinthians 8:4-8 Paul helps the reader to see that the "eating of food sacrificed to idols" was really a conscience matter. This decision was rendered so that the newer "Gentile" Christians would be conscious not to stumble the more traditional Jewish Christians, many of which were still rooted in Mosaic Law.
o Of these four, only fornication is later absolutely prohibited for Christians.
o Christians today do not question whether the animals whose meat they eat have been strangled. Oftentimes they have.
- Now various blood fractions are considered a conscience matter. Some of these "fractions" take far more blood and donors to make them, than accepting whole unaltered blood. If blood is so sacred that it can not be stored for a transfusion then the storing of blood and processing it into fractions should also be disallowed. If stealing and reselling a car is a crime, would it be any less of a crime if the thief took the car apart and sold only components of it?
o How can we say that Jehovah's Witnesses "abstain from blood", since all of these fractions that Watchtower Society now permits clearly tap into the world's blood supply and can be (and are) used by Jehovah's Witnesses today?
o If then, Jehovah's Witnesses can with a clear conscience now use these fractions that come from the blood supply, why are they forbidden from donating to this same blood supply? And, why are they still not allowed to store their own blood?
o If it is wrong for a Witness to donate blood, who do the blood fractions they use come from?
o If blood must be poured on the ground, where are the blood fractions they use derived from?
o If blood fractions were always acceptable to Jehovah, who is responsible for the Witnesses that died refusing them, due to previous Watchtower policy?
Would Jesus have made an exception to what was then a dietary rule in order to save someone's life?
- Jesus performed many miraculous works on the Sabbath. Yet to work on the Sabbath was to bring the death penalty upon oneself.
- Mathew 12:11, 12 "So they asked him "Is it lawful to cure on the Sabbath?" that they might get an accusation against him. He said to them: "Who will be the man among you that has one sheep and, if this falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not get hold of it and lift it out? All considered, of how much more worth is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do a fine thing on the Sabbath."
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- Of how much more worth is a man's life who will die without receiving a blood transfusion?
- Matthew 12:7 "However, if you had understood what this means, 'I want mercy, and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless ones."
"The blood in any person is in reality the person himself. ... poisons due to personal living, eating and drinking habits ... The poisons that produce the impulse to commit suicide, murder, or steal are in the blood. Moral insanity, sexual perversions, repression, inferiority complexes, petty crimes - these often follow in the wake of blood transfusion." (Watchtower, Sept. 1, 1961 page 564)
In light of the evidence, does it appear that Jehovah is directing the Society in issuing medical directives? If Jehovah did not intend for people to die for the sake of a symbol of life, if the Watchtower Society has clung to this policy against all Biblical evidence, are they not blood-guilty on behalf of the many that have died by refusing blood transfusions? Jehovah has the power to resurrect, but does he not hold accountable those who are responsible for untimely deaths?
