Behold, The Lamb of God
You see that’s how Jesus, the Lamb of God takes away sin; not by pushing it aside or sweeping it under the rug, but by picking it up and carrying it, as if it were his very own, all the way up to the cross. Isaiah saw that day so clearly: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned-every one-to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said,
“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29)
Since 1980, the Make-A-Wish-Foundation has been making dreams come true for children suffering from critical illnesses. One of those children was Logan, who wished to meet Arnold Schwarzenegger. Well, you can imagine his excitement when a stretch limousine pulled up to his home. The driver drove Logan and his family outside the city, down a bumpy dirt road to a secret location in the California hills. When Logan stepped out, who should greet him but his lifelong hero, the Terminator. The boy was speechless as he fell into the goliath arms of the former Mr. Olympia. Then Arnold asked, “Which will it be? The hummer or the tank?” Logan spent the next hour barreling through the woods in a tank driven by his hero. Before parting ways, Arnold looked into Logans eyes and said, “Everything is possible, if you believe it” … which is a pretty bold thing to say to a child with a terminal illness.
John 1:29 records the day John met his hero; indeed, the long-expected hero of all Hebrews! As the last in a long line of faithful prophets, John alone enjoyed the privilege of proclaiming what his predecessors only dreamed of saying: “Behold, the Lamb of God…” Except John’s hero and ours, the Lord Jesus Christ, didn’t only come to offer momentary delight and distraction; he came to save his people from their terminal spiritual illness by atoning for their sins. But why is he called the Lamb of God? Can he really take my sins away? From this single verse, we see that Jesus Christ was sacrificed by God to atone for your sins.
First, we see that Jesus is the Lamb. The events of our passage take place on “the next day,” that is the 2nd day of the Jesus’ 1st week in John’s gospel; the day after the envoy from Jerusalem came to investigate John asking, “who are you” (John 1:19) and “why are you baptizing” (John 1:25). Now, we can see John in his camel hair cloak, sinched at the waist with a leather belt, standing in the shallows or along the banks of the Jordan River out in the wilderness. The shore is teeming with people who’ve come from all over to hear John’s preaching, repent of their sins, and be baptized when, John spotted a face in the crowd, the face of Jesus.
When I was a boy, we took a family trip to Yellowstone. To make it a bit more interesting my father, who is a wildlife fanatic, promised to reward animal sightings with cash. Different animals were worth different amounts: eagles-$1, otters-$5, bears-$20, wolves-$50 & so on. So, we’d be driving through the woods when one of us would point and yell “bear!” as my dad slammed on the breaks. Or we’d be sitting by the window in a restaurant and shout “eagle!”
Suddenly, in the midst of the throng, John cried, “Behold, the Lamb!” Now why would John call Jesus the Lamb? Because John knew his Bible. He knew Ezekiel 18:4, “the soul that sins shall die” because every sin constitutes an act of allegiance to Satan in rebellion against God whose holiness is infinite, eternal and unchangeable. But John knew that the Lord is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:4). John knew that God was a good God who had promised to atone for the sins of his people and that the entire sacrificial system of Israel served as theological training wheels to show them “without the shedding of blood there can be no remission of sin (Hebrews 9:22).” John knew that while the Hebrews were no less deserving of death than their Egyptian overlords, all whose door posts were smeared in the blood of a lamb were spared for, “where the paschal blood is poured death’s dark angel sheathes his sword.” John knew that every morning and evening, the bleating of lambs could be heard from the Temple from which flowed an endless river of blood that God’s people might know the cost of sin and their need for a substitute. You see, like the Wiseman who gave myrrh, a burial ointment, to a child, John recognized from the start of Jesus’ ministry, the heart of Jesus’ ministry was to save his people from their sins by dying for them as their lamb.
John called Jesus “the Lamb.” Jesus is not “a lamb,” “some lamb,” or “one of many lambs.” He is “the Lamb!” The “one and only Lamb.” As the Passover lamb had to be a male, without spot or blemish, so too, Jesus was perfect. His soul was spiritually spotless and clean without blemish or defilement. Even though the hounds of hell were unleashed by the Pharisees to sniff out any dirt on Jesus with which to prosecute him, Pilate was forced to conclude, “I find no guilt in this man” (Luke 23:4). Because he had none! He was “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners” (Hebrews 7:26).
Since Jesus was the only good man who ever lived, the only man to keep the entire law of our Holy God, he alone is qualified to be our sin bearer, our substitute, our champion. He is The Lamb and there is no other. No one comes to the Father but through him (John14:6) and “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Have you put your hope in another hero to rescue you or another lamb to save you? There is no other! Jesus is the first, last and only hope for sinners longing for salvation. And as he came towards John long ago, so he comes to you now, promising to save you from your sins if you would only receive and rest in him alone.
Yes, Jesus was the Lamb, but he was also God’s Lamb. “Behold,” John cried, “the Lamb, of God” (John 1:29). In the Old Testament, when someone sinned, they had to bring their own lamb bought with their own money or taken from their own flock to the priest who would sacrifice it and make atonement for the forgiveness of the guilty person. And if the guilty couldn’t afford a lamb, he would bring doves. If he couldn’t afford doves, he would bring flour. But had to pay for his own atonement. Have you ever incurred a debt you could not pay?
I was a senior in high school, and it was late on a Tuesday night. I was driving home from a varsity soccer game (spectator not player). The game was away so the drive was long, and I was tired. A half mile from home, I came to a stop sign. Seeing that the roads were empty, I rolled through the stop sign and continued on my way, when suddenly a police car burst from behind the bushes, sirens blaring, pulled me over, and wrote me a $180 ticket. Well, my father was not happy when I came home so late and even less happy when I showed him the ticket I could not afford. But my dad took the ticket and said, “I got it, son.” Though I was then guilty one, my faither paid my penalty for me.
$180 for rolling a stop sign seemed like a lot of money. How much to pay for the life you’ve lived? How much to pay for a lifetime of lies, lust, slander gossip, coveting, vanity, selfishness, drunkenness, faithlessness, apathy, anger, and pride? More than you or I can afford, friend! Psalm 49:7-9 helps us with the math, “Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit.”
God in justice demands a price for sin that you cannot pay. These high temperatures have made my local lap pool hot. The other morning, the pool was 90 degrees. Swimming laps in 90 degrees is like running summer sprints in a wetsuit. It’s miserable. You’re instantly exhausted. You can’t catch your breath. Time passes so slowly. In the midst of that discomfort, I thought of the incomparable, and unbearable agony of hell; of eternally drowning in the outer darkness of the lakes of fire, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. This is the just penalty for sin! But God in mercy pays the debt of sin we owe, just as Abraham told his son Isaac, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:8). You see, Abraham remembered the night when God appeared to him in a vision and ratified his gospel promise to save and bless Abraham by passing between the rows of torn animals, graciously swearing by Himself to keep both sides of the covenant. He would reward his own imputed righteousness in us, just like he promised in Ezekiel 16:62-63, “I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the LORD, that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I atone for you for all that you have done, declares the Lord GOD.”
Recognizing that the Lamb who saves us is God’s Lamb, ought to humble us to the dirt and inspire us to give God all the glory for our own salvation which belongs to the Lord. It should make us sing with fresh zeal:
Thy work alone, O Christ, Can ease this weight of sin;
Thy blood alone, O Lamb of God Can give me peace within.
Thy love to me, O God, Not mine, O Lord, to Thee,
Can rid me of this dark unrest, And set my spirit free.
I praise the God of grace; I trust His truth and might;
He calls me His, I call Him mine, My God, my joy, my light.
‘Tis He who saveth me, And freely pardon gives;
I love because He loveth me, I live because He lives.
Finally, we see Jesus is the sin-bearing Lamb. John cried, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” A few years ago, body camera footage from an Arizona police officer went viral when he and his partner responded to a call made by a frantic woman. Her husband was working on her Civic when the jack failed and the car came crashing down on top of him. He was being crushed from the waist up and losing consciousness. When the officers arrived they knew what they had to do to save the man’s life. The body camera footage shows the strain on the officers’ faces as they lifted the car for off the man so he could escape from beneath the awful load.
This is the picture John is painting. The verb behind “takes away” is actually, “to lift up” or “to bear,” or “to carry away.” You see that’s how Jesus, the Lamb of God takes away sin; not by pushing it aside or sweeping it under the rug, but by picking it up and carrying it, as if it were his very own, all the way up to the cross. Isaiah saw that day so clearly: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned-every one-to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, & he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth, like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, & like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth… Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt” (Is 53:6-7,10).
As John called upon those gathered on that day, so God calls us through his word and to “behold him!” “Behold” means so much more than to look at him. “Behold” means to see him with your soul; to gaze at him with your heart; to look upon him in faith, hope, love and fear and be saved.
Behold him: you hard-hearted unbeliever; you who have convinced yourself that sin is a small thing; you who have believed the lie that God is not so just and so holy that he cannot be pacified by your efforts. You’re going the wrong way that leads to hell! For God requires a righteousness that you cannot attain and He is bound by his own justice to punish your sins! Why would you bear your own sin and needlessly suffer the wrath of God forever when God himself has provided a Lamb for you? Repent of your arrogant pride and run to Jesus.
Behold him you who are being crushed beneath the awful load of sin you bear. When sacrifice was made in Israel, the guilty sinner would put his hand upon the head of the lamb, signifying the transfer of his sin to his substitute. Will you not reach out the hand of faith, and put it upon the head of Christ, and call upon him to lift your burden and carry it away! For he will.
Behold him you backslidden believer you’ve fallen away from the faith back into old sins. See the terrible price that God paid to save you for himself. When lambs were sacrificed in the Old Testament, the priests always treated them humanely. Their deaths were clean and quick. But the Lamb of God was mocked and tortured for you. Though he had the power to call down legions of angels upon his executioners and tormentors, though he could have dismounted the cross at any moment, he restrained his own omnipotence and suffered there for you until it was accomplished and your sins were atoned for. Jesus was not bound to that cross by Roman nails, but by the golden chain of his love for you. Would you then abandon him who would not abandon you to your sins? He loved you all the way to death and hell! Would you love him so little? He denied his own life for you. Would you not deny the fleeting pleasure of sin for him?
Behold him, you weary Christian longing for the assurance of your salvation. The Lamb of God has taken away your sins! Jesus has done it and he will not undo it! God is not like a man that he should change his mind. The blood that was shed for your sins cannot be un-shed. The gift of salvation cannot be returned. His forgiveness and favor once granted can never be revoked.
Jesus Christ was sacrificed by God to atone for your sins. Hallelujah!
It’s easy to see what David meant when he wrote in Psalm 139:6 “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.” That’s why such truths must be sung from the heart that has been touched by God’s grace: “Holy is the Lamb, the precious Lamb of God. Why You love me so, Lord I shall never know. The precious Lamb of God”
Jim McCarthy is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Pastor of Trinity PCA in Statesboro, Ga.
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Faithful Presence Where Your Feet Are
Both your joy and your endurance are embedded in a life that loudly declares, “I am not God.” And what he desires is for you to be attentive to the life you’ve been given, not the life you think you ought to have been given. To glorify God right where you are, not where you think you ought to be. To trade in the illusion of omnipresence, which belongs to him alone, for faithful presence here, where your own two feet are.
Have you ever considered that the perfect world of Eden was a roadless world? Roads are built to get us somewhere. While there was certainly a sense of expansion in God’s command to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28), the perfect life in a perfect world wasn’t found in getting somewhere but in abiding somewhere.
Genesis 1–2 is a story of place. God creates a universe of what we’d call “reality” and fills it with his creative beauty, declaring goodness over every part of it. In Genesis 1, place is universal. The entire created cosmos is in view. In that sense, place is something we can never escape. And whether it’s heaven, earth, or anywhere else, wherever we can point to and say “there,” that “there” is a place our omnipresent God hasn’t only created but inhabits.
But then in Genesis 2, something important happens as humanity comes onto the scene. Place becomes localized. Humanity inhabits a specific place—Eden, within the planet we call earth—and is entrusted with its care.
Then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being. The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he placed the man he had formed. . . . The LORD God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it. (Gen. 2:7–8, 15, CSB).
One of God’s attributes that he doesn’t permit us to share in is his omnipresence. We’re unipresent, only able to truly inhabit one place at a time. What if the limitations of your time and place were part of God’s grace to you? What if the ever-changing seasons we experience yet cannot possess and the spaces we inhabit that haunt us with a sense of “locatedness” are part of God’s plan for deepening our trust in him and for fruitfulness in life?
The world we live in has become increasingly mobile. It’s also increasingly rare for someone to remain in one place for his or her entire life. Take a moment to consider the place you’re presently in. I don’t know how long you’ve been there or how long you intend to stay. But for as long as you dwell there, God desires that your presence would bless that place. That you’d live out your heavenly citizenship, wherever you may be in this world. Your presence—your “whereness”—deeply matters to God.
First Question God Ever Asked
Have you ever thought about the fact that the first question God ever asked in the Bible was a question about location?
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The Day a Dutchman Broke My Brain
I’m glad a Dutchman broke my brain that day. He took me into a windowed room I’d never entered. And now the rest of the world is bathed in biblical light as I strive to stay low, worship well, and love deeply.
Learning new things is like opening doors to windowed rooms. We can enter another space we haven’t seen before, but that other space also lets light into the hallway of the present. All we had thought and experienced before is hit with new color. In some cases, that color change is so drastic that we question whether we really saw things before as we should have. Everything ripens for the thrill of reinterpretation. As we learn, we not only go to new places; we revisit all the old ones and see them as we never had.
Something like this happened to me some years ago when I was listening to an old lecture from the Dutch theologian Cornelius Van Til. The audio quality was poor (circa 1970s), and I struggled to make out all the words. I had no idea what sort of door was about to open. And then the handle turned.
We certainly cannot penetrate intellectually the mystery of the Trinity, but neither can we penetrate anything else intellectually because all other things depend on the mystery of the Trinity, and therefore all other things have exactly as much mystery in them as does the Trinity.[1]
Hmm, Amen…Wait—what? We can’t penetrate the mystery of the Trinity—sure, I’ve got that. Who would dare to disagree? But everything has as much mystery in it as the Trinity does? Who would dare to agree?
Is a yellow tulip as puzzling as the divine persons? Is grass as incomprehensible as the Godhead? Does a dog’s bone have divine depth? Van Til’s words drove me deeper into thought. I had always learned to link the doctrine of God to the doctrine of creation (the famous Creator-creature distinction). But now I had to think about how the nature of God has an effect on the nature of the world all around me.
Here’s what I believe Van Til meant, and how it’s revolutionized my approach to…well, everything.
Differentiation and Divine Threads
The Trinity is the source of all things. That much seems simple enough. But then Van Til goes deeper. In his Introduction to Systematic Theology, he wrote these cryptic words: “for a consistent Christian theology the principle of individuation lies within the Godhead.”[2] I’ll assume that sentence produces the same response in many readers that it did in me: huh? Individuation is the ability to identify and distinguish individual things amidst the panoply of creation. It’s how we can identify the significance of one yellow tulip picked from our front yard, which has many other things on it (including some forgotten kids’ toys). This is related to Van Til’s discussions about “the one and the many,” or universals and particulars, which is a whole other rabbit hole to fall into.
If this all sounds horribly abstract, just hold on; I promise there’s a point. If we want to actually identify and differentiate between the things around us—to see their significance amidst the multitude of created things—we have to go all the way back to the Trinity. In Van Til’s words, “There is a deep and rich differentiation in the personal relationship between the three persons of the Trinity.”[3] Put differently, in the Trinity, there is differentiation among the divine persons in the one essence of God. We can distinguish between the Father, Son, and Spirit without losing the unity and deep relationship in the Godhead. And so, because creation is an expression and revelation of this God, all of the myriad things in our universe are significant and meaningful because of who God is: three perfectly differentiated persons (Father, Son, and Spirit) in one perfect essence, a God who works many things at many moments all according to one plan.
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Lessons to Learn from Christianity and Liberalism a Century Later
This year marks the 100th anniversary of J. Gresham Machen’s famous, and probably one of the most important theological books of the past century, Christianity and Liberalism.[1] The book’s significance cannot be overstated and its larger impact on the modernist-fundamentalist debates, along with the rise of evangelicalism in the twentieth century is incalculable. Numerous reasons could be given for the book’s importance, but I will mention only three.
Three Reasons to Remember Christianity & Liberalism
First, in Christianity and Liberalism, Machen masterfully and correctly distinguishes true, orthodox Christianity from its counterfeit known as “classic liberal theology.” Due to the cultural, philosophical, and religious impact of the Enlightenment on society and the later embrace of the Darwinian theory of macroevolution, some within the church sought to recast Christianity to “fit” and “conform” to the current thought of the day. Convinced that Christianity could not survive unless it embraced the “spirit of the age,” which meant for these people that Christian theology had to reject its own starting points and authority structure grounded in God and his revelation. Thus, instead of starting with the triune God who is there and who has spoken infallibly and authoritatively in Scripture, theological liberalism continued to use the language of Scripture but divorced from its theological grounding. The result of this attempt to correlate the Bible with contemporary thought (which functioned as the authoritative grid by which we read Scripture) was not the “saving” of Christianity or even making it “relevant” to its cultured despisers, but its ultimate destruction. Instead, of faithfully expounding and applying Scripture to the present day, classic liberalism constructed a different religion of its own making that had no resemblance to historic Christianity. They continued to use biblical language, but they hollowed out its biblical meaning and significance. No doubt, Machen was not the first to sound the alarm that theological liberalism was not Christianity, but his book was certainly one of the most significant works to remind the Church of this crucial point.
Second, in Christianity and Liberalism, Machen reminds us that God’s glory and the truth of Scripture demands a loving confrontation of the church against all error that seeks to undermine the truth of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. There comes a time when people who claim to be Christians have so departed from the truth of God’s Word that separation and division is inevitable. We ought to seek the unity of the church, but not when the truth of Scripture and the gospel is at stake. We no longer have unity when biblical truth is either redefined, undermined, or rejected. Machen knew this well. As a result of his stand against the drift towards theological liberalism within the Presbyterian church, he was instrumental in founding a new seminary (Westminster Theological Seminary) and a new denomination (the Orthodox Presbyterian Church). None of these decisions were easy for him to make, but Machen knew that in order to honor God, his Word, and glory of Christ, truth required confrontation against error, and even separation from those who identified as Christians.
For the evangelical church today, this is a lesson we must learn from Machen. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the battle was over the authority of Scripture and the objective truth of historic Christianity over against classic liberalism. Classic liberalism rejected the supernatural triune God of Scripture, the pervasive nature of human sin and depravity, and the only saving hope for humans in the finished work of the divine Son who assumed our human nature in order to perfectly obey for us in his life, and by his death pay for our sins to secure our justification before God. In contrast to the theological liberalism of his day, Machen knew that Christianity was not simply about doing good for our fellow humans and thus seeing “kingdom” progress in this world. Instead, first and foremost, Christianity is about what the true and living God has done to take the initiative to save sinners in and through Christ alone. It is about what the triune God has done to establish his church, which no doubt impacts the world. But the first things of the gospel must come first so that Christianity is not turned into a liberal social program, and not what it truly is: what God has done to save sinners from their sin.
Of course, this raises the question of our day. The specific form of theological liberalism that Machen stood against may no longer be with us, but the need to stand against error and all that opposes the truth of Scripture is perennial. On every side, the evangelical church is floundering as it accommodates to the current Zeitgeist, whether regarding the present sexual revolution that demands we change our biblical convictions, or in our redefinitions of God, humans, sin, Christ, salvation, and so on. Even the issue related to female pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention is tied to larger issues of Scripture, interpretation, and biblical authority. What Machen teaches us, therefore, is that we must recognize today where the battle rages and to lovingly confront error based on the truth of God’s Word.
Third, in Christianity and Liberalism, Machen not only speaks against the error of his day but also positively expounds and defends the truth of Scripture and Christian theology. Machen’s rejection of theological liberalism meant that he had to put historic Christianity in its place, hence his concern for theological education and the establishment of faithful churches who would join to form a new denomination. Machen knew that it was not enough to reject error; he also knew that he had to ground the church in the truth of the whole counsel of God. This too is a lesson that the evangelical church must learn today. Poll after poll reminds us that those who identify with the evangelical church know less about Scripture and sound theology.
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