Behold The Lamb of God PDF Print E-mail
Written by Candace Feister   
Thursday, 09 June 2011 09:31
I.    Let Me Paint a Picture for You
When you hear these words from John the Baptist, what comes to your mind?  What happens in your heart?  Have you ever considered the impact these words might have had on the people
living in John’s day?      How different that impact is today?

Let me paint a picture for you.  You are coming to church on Sunday morning.  You park your car in the parking lot and come up the stairs or maybe you enter the Lobby from the upper parking lot.  As soon as you enter the lobby, you realize, everything has changed.  The lobby isn’t a lobby anymore; it’s more like a courtyard.  There is no roof overhead and it’s much, much bigger.  Instead of carpet on the floor, there is just bare concrete.  I’m out there, with other members of the pastoral staff.  We are standing in front of an altar, a big brass fire place, 6 feet by 6 feet square, 3 feet high, with horns on each corner.  Smoke is rising from the altar. I am wearing one of these.

You walk up to me with your family.  Not your littlest children; you wouldn’t want them to see what we’re about to do.  But any son or daughter 13 years of age or older that is with you.  You carry in your arms a lamb.  You step forward and say to me, “Pastor, we have sinned against God.  We have done things we ought not to have done, and we have left undone things we should have done.”  I take the lamb from your arms.  I place my hand upon its head and pray,  “Holy Father, forgive this family.  Do not hold their sins against them.  Accept this offering on their behalf.”

Daniel Owen, our youth pastor, is standing next to me.  He holds the lamb in place before me, and before you, I take a sharp knife out of my scabbard.  Holding a brass bowl under its neck, I slit the lamb’s throat.    Blood spurts out, into the bowl and onto to my apron.  The little animal writhes and slumps, dying.  As Daniel takes the lamb away to be cut into pieces, I take the bowl of blood.  I dip my fingers into it and spread some of the blood on the horns of the altar.  I sprinkle some on the sides and some on the ground.  As I do I say to you, “You are forgiven.  Your sins are atoned for.  They have been covered by the blood of the lamb.”  Your whole family says in unison, “Thanks be to God.”

Imagine if that were your experience in church every week.  Before you heard a sermon; before you sang any songs, before you offered your gifts to God, you sacrificed an animal to atone for your sins.  Not in theory, not in your imagination, but right there in front of you.  The throat is slit, the blood spurts out, the animal dies.  Imagine that this is not your only experience of animal sacrifice.  No.  All your big holidays have a bloody sacrifice at the center of them as well.  Your 4th of July, for example, is called Passover.  On that day you celebrate the birth of your nation, its rescue from 400 years of slavery in Egypt only you do it through the sacrifice of a Passover Lamb.  As your family gathers for the evening meal, you hear the story of how it happened.  How the angel of death passed over the land of Egypt and the firstborn son in every family died.  But the sons of Israel were saved because they took the blood of that first Passover lamb and painted it on the lintel and the doorpost of their house.  If that were your holiday and your holy day experience, if that were the world in which you grew up, what impact do you think it would have upon you?  What would you learn from these things?

II.    Sin and Death
I think you might learn that sin is serious, that there is no approaching God without addressing the problem of human sin.  That sin is the elephant in the room, if you will; the elephant in every room because everyone is a sinner.  That’s the second thing you would learn from these bloody sacrifices.  No one was allowed to appear before God empty handed.  Everyone’s sin in the nation of Israel had to be atoned for even the sin of the priests who offered the sacrifices.  The third thing you might have learned from this repeated sacrifice of animals is that there is a connection, a connection between sin and death.  Think about how this ritual of sacrifice would work on the minds of children growing up in this world.

My sin, they would think, has caused this animal to die.  This lamb died because I sinned.  Some of them may have even wondered, What if there were no animals to sacrifice?  Would I have to die for my own sins?  As they grew older, perhaps they asked themselves, Why is there this connection between sin and death, anyway?  Could this be a picture?  A graphic picture of what sin leads to?  What it does to people? 

The wages of sin is death, Rabbi Paul argued.  It is what you will receive as payment for turning away from God or as he wrote earlier in Romans 5, death entered the world through sin, and death spread to all men because all have sinned.  By the repeated and graphic sacrifice of animals for my sin I am learning that sin leads to death.  That sin brings death into the world.  That sin will be punished by death.  I am also  learning that forgiveness is granted only by means of a substitution.  My sins are covered, atoned for, for that’s what atonement means, by the death of this lamb.  This lamb is suffering death for me, in my place.  I am being forgiven and allowed to live, because he died.

Have you happened to notice, yet, how drastically the times have changed?  It’s not just that we don’t sacrifice animals today.  It’s also that we don’t understand and believe what they understood and believed.  We don’t think of sin as quite that serious anymore.  We don’t see that sin leads to death and everything that smells of death in our lives.  We don’t really think something or someone has to die for our sins.  Die?  Die?  As the serpent of old said to Eve so long ago, You surely shall not die.  That is what our modern age believes.  That is what our modern age reinforces.  That is the message repeated over and over again in our TVs and movies and in our books.  That there is no serious consequence for sin, and certainly not eternal death.

Why?  Why do people in our day find it so hard to believe that sin leads to death and forgiveness requires the death of an atoning sacrifice?  Could it be because we have lost any real sense of the holiness of God?  Could it be that we don’t understand what it means to be in the presence of a God who dwells in light unapproachable and full of glory?  Could it be that we have never been where Isaiah was?

III.    Sinners in the Presence of a Holy God
Isaiah, chapter Six.  In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple.      Above him were seraphs; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces (not daring to look upon the face of God); with two they covered their feet (not daring to be exposed in the presence of God); and with two they flew.  They were calling out to one another, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord Almighty; The whole earth is full of his glory.  At the sound of their voices the doorposts and threshold shook and the temple was filled with smoke.  “Woe is me!” I cried.  “I am ruined!”  For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”

Now, what’s happening here?  Apparently, Isaiah, whether in body or out of body, we don’t know, is experiencing the Holiness of God.  Everything in this scene, every word Isaiah writes, every object his eyes see, every feeling he feels, is meant to communicate one thing.  Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.  But what is holiness?  Do you know?  It turns out that holy is a rather difficult word to define.  In fact the closest the Bible seems to come to a definition is a picture, a picture of a bush burning but not consumed, a picture of Mount Sinai enveloped in a cloud of fire and lightning, thunder and smoke, a picture of the resurrected Jesus Christ, eyes blazing, feet burning like bronze and his face shining like the sun.  The picture of a God who dwells in light unapproachable and full of glory.

The picture of God is so awesome, so exalted, so utterly and absolutely pure that to look upon Him is like looking into the face of the sun and to enter His presence is as unnerving and life-threatening as walking into a blast furnace.  You see, holiness is difficult to define because holy is what God is.  What God is, is beyond our verbal definitions.  In fact, what God is, is beyond the furthest reaches of our imagining.  So when Isaiah “sees” the Lord, the Holy One, all he really sees is God’s throne, the symbol of his sovereign power, high & lifted up, disappearing, if you will, from his sight.  All he sees is the train of God’s robe filling the temple.  All Isaiah hears are fiery seraphim crying Holy, Holy, Holy.  At those words the temple fills with smoke and begins to shake.  At those words Isaiah falls down and begins to moan.  Woe is me.  Woe is me.  I am ruined.   For I am unclean. 

Have you noticed how often, in the presence of God, people fall on their knees and fear for their lives? Moses before the burning bush.  The people of Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai.  The Apostle John at the foot of the resurrected Jesus Christ.  He fell at his feet like a dead man, the Bible says.  Jesus has to put his hand upon him and say, do not be afraid.  And then there was Peter in a fishing boat.  Do you remember the scene?  It’s in Luke 5.  The disciples had been out all night fishing and hadn’t caught a thing.  So they were on the shore, cleaning their nets, listening to Jesus teach.  After he finished teaching, Jesus turns to Peter and says, cast out your nets.  Peter must have thought, “Lord, are you crazy?”  This isn’t the time to catch fish.  Our nets, our nets are clean and put away.  But he didn’t say any of that.  Peter simply said, Master, we have been fishing all night.  But if you say so, we will.  As soon as they threw their nets in the water they were full of fish, so many fish that their nets began to break. So many fish that they filled two boats full.  What did Peter do? What would you do?  Get all excited at the miracle and shout, “Praise God!”  “Thank you, Jesus!  It’s so good to have God on our side!”
   

How about…Lord, I have this great idea?  You do this every morning, you point; we’ll drop the nets.  We won’t have to fish at night ever again.  We can sell what we catch and finance your preaching tours.

No.  Peter fell on his knees before Jesus and said, Lord, depart from me for I am a sinful man.
The same thing happened to Peter that happened to Isaiah in the temple.  In the presence of a Holy God he became intensely aware of his Sin.  In the light of God’s burning moral purity, Peter was shaken to the core of his being.  He was overwhelmed by His unworthiness in the presence of God’s holiness.  Peter got just a glimpse.
         
IV.    Behold the Lamb!
But that’s not the end of the story.  Because Jesus said to Peter, Do not be afraid.  From now on you will catch men not fish.  A similar thing happened to Isaiah.  Chapter six, verse six.  Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar.  With it he touched my mouth, tsss, and said, Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. 

The experience of God’s holiness begins with a penetrating and pervasive sense of sin and unworthiness.  I know, at the core of my being, that I am guilty.  I have sinned.  I honestly don’t know whether I will survive.  I feel like I might die.  That’s how the experience of holiness begins.  But that’s not how it ends.  The amazing thing about the experience of Peter and Isaiah in the presence of God is that they did not die and they did not have to run away.   They were not consumed by the burning fire of God’s moral purity.  They were forgiven.  Their guilt was taken away.      They were given a new life as prophet of God and apostle of Jesus.  But first their sins had to be atoned for so that fiery seraph took a coal from the altar.      The altar of incense that stood right in front of the veil, the closest piece of furniture to the ark of God.  On that altar blood was shed. It happened on the Day of Atonement.  The one day of the year when the High Priest entered into the very holy of holies and sprinkled the blood of a sacrificial animal on the mercy seat, the place on the top of the ark, between the cherubim, where atonement was made for the sins of the people as they waited outside.  But before the priest sprinkled that blood on the mercy seat, He would put some on the altar of incense.  So when that fiery seraph took a coal from the altar and touched the lips that confessed Isaiah’s sin, it was a coal from an altar that had been smeared with the blood of sacrifice on the Day of Atonement.  That is why the angel could say, “Behold this has touched your lips.  Your guilt is taken away.  Your sin is atoned for.”

But what about Peter, kneeling before Jesus?  No seraphim, no altar of incense, no Day of Atonement.  Well, Peter had something even better than the blood of bulls and goats.  He was kneeling before the Lamb of God who had come to take away the sin of the world.  Please understand.  The sacrifice of lambs and goat and bulls in Old Testament times was a sign and symbol of something yet to come.  In and of itself the sacrifice of animals cannot pay for the sin of human beings.  The equation simply does not add up.  The life of an animal cannot be given in exchange for a man.  But God accepted the blood of a lamb in those days, Paul says in Romans chapter three, because He looked into the future and he saw the day when He Himself would provide the ultimate and acceptable sacrifice.  God saw the day when he Himself would become a man and offer himself as the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world.  Do you understand what happened on the cross 2000 years ago?  Jesus became our sacrificial Lamb.  The eternal son of God entered time and space and became a man.  He took on human flesh and blood.  He became like one of us except in one very important sense.  He was without sin.  Jesus was the one man in all of human history who could stand in the presence of a Holy God and experience no guilt.  The one man who need not cry Woe is me!  Woe is me! in God’s presence.  Jesus was holy as God is holy.  Because he was holy Jesus could make the exchange.  He could be the substitute.  He could take our place.  He could die for our sins.  He could make atonement.  That’s what he did.
   
Luther called it The Blessed Exchange.  Jesus took our sins upon himself and he died our death;
We, in exchange, received his righteousness and his life.  Our God is a Holy God, a consuming fire of blazing moral purity.  He dwells in light unapproachable and full of glory.  We are sinners.  We are not holy.  Even our righteousness is tainted with selfishness and pride.  It’s like dirty rags, Isaiah once said.  When we come into God’s presence there is a problem, a deep and desperate problem.  We are unworthy.  We are guilty.  We deserve His judgment.  Our conscience is not clear.

But our God is not just Holy, Holy, Holy.  He is a God of Holy Love.  He has made a way for us to live and move and have our being in his presence.  He has made a way for us to dwell with him in all his glory.  That way is Jesus.  Jesus has become our savior, the lamb who bears our sins in his body on the cross.  The One who brings us into God’s presence forever and ever and ever.

So here is the question:  Have you repented and believed?  Have you said, in the presence of God, the Holy Father, I have sinned, I cannot pay for my sins, I cannot cover my sins, I cannot atone for my sins.  If I am not forgiven I cannot live in your presence.  Lord have mercy on me, a sinner. Forgive me in Jesus’ name.  Accept his sacrifice on the cross for me.  If you have not prayed this prayer, and meant it in your heart of hearts, now is the time.  Here is the place.  If you have prayed that prayer and if that prayer is the subtle conviction that shapes your life, then now is a time to repent afresh, and thank him anew, and to receive the bread and the cup of this table in faith.