The Lamb of God

 

The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”  John 1:29

 God knew that sin would be a problem for us before He even created the world, and that’s why He had a plan to take care of it, but He had to bring us along with Him. If God had shown up in the garden of Eden one evening for His walk with Adam and Even and told them, “There’s going to be this issue called sin, but I’ll take care of it,” they never would have understood the weight or importance of it all. Instead, they had to experience personally what the cost of sin would be, most directly their separation from God. I’ve got to figure that throughout all of human history, Adam, Eve and Jesus are the only ones who fully comprehend this as they experienced perfect communion with the Father and then lost it. This is a real problem, but we had to experience it to realize that.

 Over the course of time, God has patiently held humanity’s hand and walked us through the situation. He showed us a picture of Jesus’ blood covering us as He had the Israelites kill a lamb and paint its blood on their doorpost in order to protect them from the Angel of Death that swept through Egypt. He taught us what sin looked like by giving us the ten commandments. We learned that the penalty for our sin is death, and God gave us the option to have that cost paid for by lambs. But the lambs, themselves, had to be perfect, without blemish or spot. The problem came in when people would sacrifice a lamb to pay the cost of their sin, and then they would sin again. Then another lamb gets sacrificed, then they sin again. The cycle ended up being endless. Eventually, people longed for a cleansing, a forgiveness that lasted.

 And so, we have Jesus, the Lamb of God. Jesus was the perfect Lamb, the only one completely without blemish or spot as He never sinned. He was also the only One able to offer Himself as a sacrifice by choice. Lambs weren’t given an option about their role in the sacrificial system, and their substitution for us was decided by us, not them. Jesus, on the other hand, willingly gave His life up for us. He was perfectly capable of avoiding their attempts to kill Him, as he demonstrated multiple times during His ministry on earth. But when the time came, Jesus painfully recognized what was needed and submitted to the will of the Father in surrendering His life for us. This sacrifice that Jesus made on our behalf was perfect, so it only needed to be done once. In one tragic, blessed moment all of the sins of humanity, both past, present and future, were placed on Jesus and He died for all of them, for all of us, for me and for you. And that is why John called Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Here's the Thing: Humanity couldn’t fully grasp its need for a Savior until it experienced and understood its inability to provide for themselves. We had to learn that we could neither avoid sinning, nor pay the penalty for our sins on our own. Praise God for sending Jesus so that we can be forgiven and made clean!

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