When the Blood Itself Is Made New

In 1956, Dr. E. Donnall Thomas performed the first successful bone marrow transplant, a procedure so radical that the medical establishment dismissed it for years. What happens in that transplant is nothing short of astonishing. The patient's own diseased marrow — the very factory where blood is made — is destroyed. Then healthy stem cells from a donor are infused into the bloodstream. Those transplanted cells find their way into the hollows of the bones and begin to build an entirely new blood system from scratch.

Here is the detail that still staggers physicians: after a successful transplant, the patient's blood type can actually change. Someone who walked into the hospital as Type A can walk out as Type O. The blood running through their veins is, at the cellular level, no longer their own. It belongs to another.

The Apostle Paul wrote that anyone who is in Christ is a new creation — the old has gone, the new has come. That is not poetry alone. It is the spiritual reality that medicine has, in its own way, stumbled upon. God does not merely treat our symptoms or manage our condition. He replaces what is broken at the source. He gives us a new identity that runs deeper than anything we carried before.

Whatever diagnosis the world has given you, the Great Physician is not finished. He makes all things new — even the blood.