Behold The Lamb
On August 16, 1987, Northwest Airlines flight 225 crashed just after taking off from the Detroit Airport, killing 154 people. Only one person survived—a four-year-old girl from Tempe, Arizona named Cecelia. Rescuers stated that whereas the bodies of the other 154 passengers were charred in the fire that resulted from the crash, Cecelia wasn’t burned or even tinged by the flames burning all around her. In fact, she wasn’t even hurt in the crash. This was a great relief to them because when they first heard her crying and discovered her underneath the body of an unrecognizable woman, Cecelia was covered in blood.
Crash Investigators later discovered that the dead woman that was on top of Cecelia was her mother and that when the plane began to go down, she placed Cecelia on the floor of the plane and then wrapped her arms around her and covered her with her own body to protect her from the crash and to shield her from the flames. And in doing so—Cecelia’s mother died but Cecelia was spared. Investigators also determined that the blood that covered Cecelia was not her own—it was her mother’s who had given her life to save her.
What a tremendous picture of what Christ did for us who were His enemies and wanted nothing to do with Him. You see, we who have believed in Christ for salvation have been spared from an eternity in hell paying for our own sins because Christ died in our place. His blood was shed so that we might be saved—and the fact of the matter is that just like Cecelia—we too have been covered by blood that is not our own—but rather the blood of the precious Lamb of God.
Last week we saw that God is able to forgive and justify sinners who will place faith in Christ, regardless of the gravity and seriousness of their sins because He sent Jesus to earth in order to send Him to the cross in order to satisfy His righteous wrath against them and their sins. But not only did Jesus have to suffer on the cross as our propitiation—He had to also die on that cross by shedding His blood for our sins.
Apart from the shedding of Christ’s blood and ultimately His death on the cross there could be and would be no salvation for anyone. That is why, Paul states in Romans 3:25, that God put forth Jesus publicly as the propitiation “by His blood”. In other words, the means by which Jesus propitiated or satisfied God’s wrath toward us and our sins was by the shedding of His blood and dying on the cross of Calvary. In essence, Jesus Christ was the sacrificial lamb of God that gave His life by the shedding of His blood so as to pay for the sins of every single person who would embrace Him and His sacrifice for their salvation from the wrath of God.
Therefore, when you really get right down to it, Christmas is the celebration of God bringing into the world through the miracle of the incarnation His Son the Lord Jesus Christ Whose primary purpose in being born was to glorify His Father by becoming our sacrificial lamb. Which is why, when John the Baptist was baptizing in the Jordan River and saw Jesus—he identified Him twice as “the lamb of God” (John 1:29, 36). And what is interesting is that in each instance, that John the Baptist identified Jesus as such, he did so by exclaiming, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” In reality, the exclamation was really a command, an aorist imperative, that we could very easily translate as: “Hey, heads up—there He is—the Lamb of God”, or “Open your eyes—there’s the lamb of God.” It was almost as though, John sees Jesus and realizing Who he is and why He has come—takes every opportunity he has to make sure people know that He is the One—He is the Lamb of God that they as a nation have been waiting for—that He has been preaching about and paving the way for.
We must keep in mind that this was not a customary way of identifying someone. I greatly doubt that those listening to John the Baptist identify Jesus as the Lamb of God—had ever heard anyone else identified as such. So they would have taken notice and their minds would have probably begun to think about the One that every morning and evening sacrifice in the Temple pointed to. Perhaps they would have remembered that Isaiah had prophesied that One was coming Who like a lamb would be led to slaughter to bear the sins of many (Is. 53). They would have thought about the Exodus and the Passover and of course all the lambs that were slaughtered every year in the Temple on the Day of Passover. Finally, they would have remembered the story of Abraham and Isaac when the very words John used to identify Jesus were uttered on a very lonely Mountain called Moriah.
In fact, go with me to that story because I think it will shed great light on what the people were thinking when they heard John the Baptist call Jesus, “The Lamb of God”. As you are turning to Genesis 22, let me explain something about how the Apostle John recorded John the Baptist’s words identifying Jesus. He uses either the Genitive Case or the Ablative Case and since the forms are identical its hard to tell which he has in mind. If he is using the Genitive then the phrase would be translated as we have in our English Bibles: “Behold, the Lamb of God”. However, if he is using the ablative case it would be understood as: “Behold, the Lamb from God” or “Behold the Lamb God provides”. I think he was using the ablative case because I think John is answering a question that is raised in the story of Abraham and Isaac and which had been asked for hundreds and hundreds of years since then. And that question was:
”Where is the Lamb God will provide?”
With that in mind, lets look at the story of Abraham and Isaac and let’s begin in Genesis 22:1. Notice that God tells Abraham to take his only son, Isaac, and travel to the Land of Moriah to offer him there as a sacrifice on one of the mountains which God would point out to him once he got there. And we know from verse 4, that it took Abraham and Isaac three days to get from Beersheba to this land of Moriah and the mountain where he was to sacrifice Isaac.
Now, at this time in which Abraham and Isaac are traveling to Moriah, there was nothing very significant about it. It was a deserted, barren piece of real estate with no city or town or even nomads. But it would become a place of great and eternal significance. You see, the mountain in the land of Moriah that Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac on was know as Mt. Moriah and if you turn to 2 Chronicles 3:1, you’ll see that Mt. Moriah was where Jerusalem and the Temple were eventually built. Therefore, God is telling Abraham to take his only son Isaac, the son that he loves with all his heart and travel three days to the place where he would be offered as a sacrifice to God—the same place where one day God would offer His own son Jesus—His only Son—the Son that He loved as a sacrifice for our sin.
Now most of you know the rest of the story. Once Abraham and Isaac get to that place on the mountain where Isaac was to be sacrificed, Isaac asks Abraham “where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” To which Abraham responds, “God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” Well, as Abraham proceeded with tying Isaac to the altar and was about to kill him, the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and stopped Abraham from killing Isaac. And then when Abraham raised his head and cleared his eyes of the tears that must have been streaming down his face—he saw a ram caught in a thicket, which he offered as the burnt offering instead of his son. When we read that we all rejoice because indeed God did provide for Himself a lamb. But there is only one problem with that and it is simply that a ram is not a lamb. You see the Hebrew word for lamb which is(seh), and it means a lamb as in a baby sheep. Whereas, the Hebrew word for “ram” is(ayil), which means an adult male sheep or goat.
Thus, God, while indeed sparing Isaac and providing a ram to be sacrificed in his place—did not provide the lamb Abraham prophecied he would. In fact, look closely at verse 14. This is Moses’ editorial comment on the incident. Look at what he says. “Abraham called the name of that place, “The LORD will provide” (Yahweh-Jireh) as it is said to this day, “In the Mount of the LORD it will be provided.” Now note that in Moses’ editorial comment, he makes the point of saying that Abraham’s name for Mount Moriah, “Yahweh or Jehova Jireh” was the same name for the place in Moses’ day but with a slight twist.
In Moses’ day, the name had taken on the connotation of: “In the Mount of the LORD it will be provided” or “On this mountain the Lord will provide it.”
Now, what is the “it” referring to? The Lamb God was to provide, of course.
And note that the tense of “provide” is future in Moses’ day—thus God did not provide the Lamb in Abraham’s day or in Moses’ day—it was still to be provided.
In fact as late as the prophet Isaiah some 13 to 1400 years after Abraham—God still had not provided for Himself the Lamb. But, through the prophet Isaiah, God continued to promise that He would do this in the future and when He did the Lamb that He would provide would be slaughtered for the sins of God’s people (Is. 53:7-8). And finally 700 years after Isaiah’s prophecy concerning the Lamb—He finally shows up and is identified by John the Baptist and He is none other than Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God.
So for about 2100 years from the time of Abraham to the time which Paul in Galatians 4:4 called “The Fullness of Time” when God sent forth His Son, those who loved God and feared God and believed God were asking and wondering the same question that Isaac asked his father Abraham—“Where is the Lamb that God will provide?” And thus the reason why when John the Baptist saw Jesus and the Holy Spirit whispered into his ear that He was the Lamb of God as well as the Son of God he exclaimed: “BEHOLD, the Lamb of God.”
When Jesus made His appearance to John the Baptist—he did so while John was baptizing just outside of Jerusalem in the Jordan River. Remember, what Genesis 22:14 stated. It said that, “In the Mount or on the Mount of the LORD, which is Jerusalem the lamb would be provided.” But even though recognized as the Lamb of God near Jerusalem—He still had a little less than three years to go before He would be the Lamb of God that was provided by God on the mountain for our sins.
The interesting thing about the Greek word, “lamb” that John uses is that it is the Greek word (amnos), which is the equivalent to the Hebrew word for the Passover Lamb, whose blood was applied to the doorposts of the Israelites in Egypt in order to deliver their firstborn from the angel of death.
In fact, it was the word that was used for the lambs that were specifically being raised to be sacrificial lambs sacrificed in the Temple and especially at Passover. Interestingly enough many Bible Scholars believe these were the kinds of lambs that the shepherds who were given the angelic announcement of Jesus’ birth were tending and feeding—“sacrificial Passover lambs”. And, it is very possible that when John sees Jesus it is against the backdrop of thousands of Passover lambs being herded to Jerusalem and that is why he identified Him as the Lamb which God provides. But whether or not John saw lambs being driven to Jerusalem on this day what is even more intriguing I think is that three years later on the day when Jesus made His entry into Jerusalem just a few days before His crucifixion, Jesus was sharing the path with hundreds of thousands of Passover Lambs. You see, this was the same day shepherds from all over Israel were herding their Passover Lambs into Jerusalem to be sold, sacrificed and then eaten at Passover. This was the Sunday we know as Palm Sunday.
To give you an idea of how many lambs were being herded into Jerusalem on this day which was the 10th day of Nisan, the Jewish historian, Josephus, recorded that one year the number of lambs herded into Jerusalem was 256,500 lambs. What this means is that with that many lambs being driven into the city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Jesus was surrounded not only by people but by thousands of sacrificial lambs. Thus, Jesus was not as so many Bible scholars indicate merely offering Himself as the rightful King of Israel but rather He was also presenting Himself as the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of those who would place faith in Him. And then on the afternoon of the crucifixion when Jesus was offering Himself as the Lamb of God which God Himself provided to take care of the sins of everyone in the world who would believe in Him—those 250,000 plus sacrificial lambs were also slaughtered for Passover. But only One was necessary and only One really mattered because only One—The Lamb which God Himself provided was able to cleanse us and everyone else who places faith in Christ from their sins.
CONCLUSION
One day when Jesus was arguing with a multitude of people whom He had offended through His teaching the topic of Abraham came up.
And Jesus made the comment: “Your Father Abraham rejoiced to see my day and he saw it and was glad.” I believe that Jesus was referring to the fact that on Mt. Moriah, 2100 years before He actually appeared on the earth—God gave Abraham a promise and a picture--
A promise and a picture that God Himself would provide an atoning sacrifice that would indeed put an end to all sacrifices and be the culmination of all sacrifices—a sacrifice which would be the payment for the sins of everyone in the world who would embrace Jesus Christ, the Lamb God Provided, as their Lord and Savior. So, Abraham saw Jesus’ as the Lamb of God, who would shed His blood on the behalf of sinners as the propitiation for their sins, from afar and rejoiced and was glad.
Let me ask you this question, Have you come to see that Jesus is the only Lamb Whom God Himself provided as the payment for sins? If so, have you embraced Him as your only Lord and Savior? If you have then you have every reason, just like Abraham, to rejoice and be glad. If you haven’t then you need to or else you will die in your sins and instead of seeing the Lamb of God—you will see the Lion of Judah and He Who could have saved you and would have saved you had you come to Him—will be your judge and condemn you because you didn’t.
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