Day 40 ~ Lamb of God (John 1:29)

One day Napoleon Bonaparte gathered all his top officers together around a table. Laid across that table was a large map. He pointed to a small red spot on the map. He pounded his fist on the table, and raged: "If it weren't for that red spot, I could conquer the world!" That spot was Great Britain. It is not hard to imagine Satan gathering his top generals around him to strategize. He surveys the giant map before them. Then he points at a red spot on the map and rages, "If it weren't for that red spot, I could conquer the world!" If we could move in we would see that the red spot is Jerusalem, and specifically, Gethsemane and Calvary. And red is the right color. Red is the color of blood.

God had made a covenant with Israel. He had sworn that the wages of sin was death. Spiritual death separates one from God. And yet God desired to make Israel His people and to commune with them, and to dwell in their presence. Therefore, God decreed that Israel should sacrifice by shedding blood. The sacrifice represented the sinner before God, and its blood was shed as the penalty for sin. Animals were the substitute for man. In Egypt, when the Angel of Death passed over the Hebrews the lamb was firmly established as the symbol of the sin-offering before God. The lamb was a symbol of God's mercy toward Israel. Every year at Passover the temple nearly burst with activity as the priests sacrificed thousands of lambs for the sin-offering. This blood only temporarily covered the sin of Israel. It was to be repeated yearly. But God had prepared a lamb from before the foundations of the world. The Lamb would be a permanent, eternal and infinite sacrifice. This Lamb would be God's own Son.

When Jesus came to Bethabara to be baptized, John saw Him coming and declared "Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29) Noted scholar Geza Vermes of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies pointed out that the title Lamb of God does not necessarily always refer to the sacrificial animal. In the Aramaic of Galilee the word talya, literally "lamb," had the common colloquial meaning of "male child". Even in English, we will use the word "kid" to mean "child." Anciently the same was common. When Jesus came to Jairus' house and raised his dead daughter, he looked upon her and said "Talitha cumi" or little lamb, arise (Mark 5:41). The female equivalent of Talya is Talitha, literally "ewe lamb" and figuratively "girl." Thus, John the Baptist or even the Galilean disciples who followed Jesus would have recognized in the title "Lamb of God" the same thing as saying "God's Kid" or the "Son of God."

Jesus was born in Bethlehem while shepherds kept watch over their flocks by night, probably during the lambing season. He may have been born in one of the very grottos which the shepherds used as protection in the night. The sheep they watched were the flocks which would be taken the few miles to Jerusalem and sacrificed in the temple. They were closely watched for they needed to be without spot or blemish. Jesus walked free of sin. He was without spot or blemish before God. As such He could die a substitute for another, because He had no sins of His own to pay.

At about 3 o'clock on the day of Passover, the temple gates were opened and the men of Israel poured into the court with the lambs which they would sacrifice before God. A knife was drawn across the lamb's carotid artery and the blood drained into a cup. The cup was passed from priest to priest, who stood in a line, and poured (or sprinkled) the blood upon the temple altar. God's altar ran red as the blood came before Him as the price for sin. When Jesus died upon the cross and gave up the ghost it was 3 o'clock. The Lamb of God died, his blood sacrificed before God and spilt on Moriah's hill, even as the temple lambs died. Where the blood fell was the red spot on the map, where Satan could not conquer, and where he lost the world.

"Ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, [as] silver and gold…But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot" (1 Peter 1:18-19).