“And Isaac said to his father Abraham, ’My father!’ And he said ‘Here am I, my son.’ He said, ‘Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for burnt offering?’ Abraham said, God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’ So they went both of them together.”
“Behold, the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
A few weeks ago we visited heaven through the eyes of John. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world was there! The Lamb’s Book of Life is also there with the names of believers who will be with Christ in heaven. The curious thing is this Book was written before the people in it were born. In fact, it was written before the foundation of the earth was even in place.
How do we bring together this pre-creation reality with the vision of the Lamb of God we see in Revelation? How does what existed before time extend into a place not yet in history and how can it have relevance for you and me? That is the beauty of it all. It IS about us!
The Bible is very comprehensive. It is not just a collection of religious stories. It is God’s communiqué of reality to creatures He created. God prepared the Bible to reveal His supernatural unseen contemporary plan. It is a map showing how Jesus Christ is the portal through which we can actually step into the eternity existing before and after our present temporal experience. It sounds mystic but it is, in fact, NOT.
There are a myriad ways of reading the Bible, studying it, preaching it and trying to understand it in meaningful ways. To get there from here requires walking on stepping stones called faith. These faith stones themselves are divinely placed leading us to the portal of Jesus Christ. It is up to us to choose the steps we follow and it is also up to us to step into eternity through Christ.
This seems straight forward but, as you may suspect for anything of this magnitude, there is a fly in the ointment. There is an unseen foe in this eternal non-space who has stepped into our vortex of time. Wouldn’t you know it, we are targets of evil but this is itself part of the divine plan.
Enter the Beauty and the Beast. The beauty and the beast is love. Love requires not only choice, but endurance and faithfulness. As we all know, faithfulness requires multiple, on-going choices which, in turn, deepens and purifies love. And LOVE is what God is all about! God has already set the standard by becoming flesh and suffering a gargantuan death. He has proved His love. Now it is our turn to make the right choices proving our love in Him by faith.
The beast is in the world working against us. His weapons are spiritual and inflict us with self-serving effectiveness. Our responses quite naturally are at the level of the attacks, self. Even our churches and evangelical ministries challenge us at the self level offering ways to overcome and align our thinking. We are counseled and encouraged to find our own stepping stones of faith. Our created faith stones are usually adapted to human comfort.
While we are busy trying to fix our circumstances, the unseen beast is deceiving, distracting, alluring us into pride, self-assurance and self-control.
We tend to forget we live in God’s House. God owns the universe and earth we walk on. He not only owns it, He maintains ultimate control and authority. When we are in His house (the only one we got) we best mind His rules (my grandmother comes to mind) because, for sure, we are getting His outcome.
The Bible contains many plots, subplots and themes. We tend to read these scenarios from our human condition. We look for personal solutions to personal circumstances. Taking this approach quite naturally leads into all kinds of faith stones of different shapes and sizes.
Twenty plus years ago I was teaching a Sunday School class when a contractor from the class introduced me to the Sermon on the Mount by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and then gave me his copy. I shared it with two other men and for the next two years, the three of us met every Saturday morning at a local restaurant going through the book chapter by chapter.
The unique thing about Lloyd-Jones is his ability to see whole picture. He explains in his introduction to the Sermon on the Mount the logic for reasoning down to details from general principles rather than, as we typically do, taking our particular detail or circumstance and reason up to some hopeful conclusion. I now have a full library of Lloyd-Jones!
This is how we should approach our Bible, from God’s point of view and reason down to our details. God is the author of the Bible. He is letting us in on what life is really about. Is there any person whom we can trust more or any other who is in a better place to know what is true? To understand anything about anyone we first have to enter into who they are and judge their content by their ability to know what they are talking about. One of our primary tasks in life should be getting to know God.
We are deceived into thinking our unseen God is unknowable. But consider our amazing design. Isn’t it reasonable for Him to reveal Himself to us whom He made? Why wouldn’t He reveal Himself to us at the same level as is His creation?
God does reveals Himself to us through the relationship He provides to those who have trusted Him personally, Romans 8:16. God also characterizes our relationship with Him through scripture images common to our natural experiences. One of these scriptural images is the lamb.
The lamb was used as a burnt offering in the Temple and the entrance to the “tent of meeting” for the tabernacle. A lamb was offered in the morning and another in the evening. This was to make holy the place where God would meet His people. The lamb was used for other sacrifices also but the one we are most familiar is the Passover lamb.
The Passover meal celebrates God’s deliverance of Israel from their slavery of 430 years in Egypt. The Passover lamb was killed and its blood placed on the door posts and lintel (the beam above the door) of each Israeli house. The Lord passed over all the houses and killed the first born of the Egyptians and their livestock but those who had their door posts and lintel marked with the blood of the Lamb were saved.
The lambs chosen for sacrifice were pure and unblemished. They are a type of Christ. It is interesting that Jesus was anointed in Bethany at the same time the Passover lambs were being selected. The day Jesus was presented to the crowd by Pilot, hung on the cross and delivered to the tomb was the “day of Preparation” for the Temple Passover lamb, John 19:14ff. According to John, Jesus was crucified at exactly the same time as the Passover lamb was being killed in the Temple.
This is a profound message. We can take any of several general principals like love, grace, redemption, reconciliation or righteousness and faith to catch a glimpse of God’s point of view about us through our relationship with Him.
Jesus made our salvation perfect by taking the form of human flesh becoming the Son of Man as well as the Son of God. He became man so that He might deliver us from the frailty of humanity. He took an element of humanity into eternity giving us the hope of being like Him in a resurrection body like His. Remember, how He showed Thomas His wounds, and ate with the disciples in His resurrection body.
Leaving His place in eternity and becoming the creature He created is the ultimate demonstration of His love. He made us a triune being like Himself. We have a soul and body but He also breathed into us our spirit which separates us from the animal kingdom. It is our spirit that becomes joined to His Spirit when He creates us new in Him.
God had omniscience knowledge, but through experiencing human suffering He became obedient unto death, even the death of a cross. He came down to our level out of His absolute purity and righteousness to become human.
“Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him”
– Hebrews 5:8-9
Grace defines what He does for us quite apart from anything we can do. Grace is the result of His love and is demonstrated by Him becoming the “Lamb of God”, or the pure sacrifice required to make us righteous like Him. When He died He reconciled the whole world back to Himself. Every sinner has been reconciled back to God through the death and resurrection of the Lamb of God. He has purchased us with His own blood so that we can be set free from the rope of sin that binds us. Sin made us spiritually dead, but His death and resurrection can make us spiritually alive.
We must accept by faith the reconciliation already provided to all mankind. God has stepped out of eternity into time and become flesh like us. He took upon Himself our sin so that we can take within us His life of righteousness. This is His gift to us if we will make the choice to accept and believe He is who He says He is.
God has a divine plan. It is in process and we participate to the level of our choice. The obstacles are severe but never greater than God’s grace which is inexhaustible. Let me paraphrase what Paul says in Romans 5:10-11. If God, by the death of His own Son, brought us back into fellowship with Him while we were still in sin, will He not then also keep us in His living Son?
We can deepen our salvation through obedience, applying absolute truth in our temporal circumstances. Abraham could take Isaac on the mountain fully intending to sacrifice him on the constructed alter and know they would both return home together after the sacrifice. Understanding this contradiction in reality is only possible through spiritual training through experience. God is not constrained by the physical laws that govern our temporal time.
Abraham had left his family for a place he did not know and brought him into his land. God told him he would have Isaac when Sarah was unable to conceive a child. Now He told Abraham to sacrifice this same son who was to be the father of a great nation. Abraham was able to act on the expectation that God’s word was true even when it was contrary to circumstances. This is the essence of faith.
Jesus, the Lamb of God, is the element that brings together our eternal Father and created temporal people like Adam, Abraham, you and me into a unity of fellowship. The reconciliation of man to God has taken place. God’s abundant grace is in place, the righteousness of Jesus Christ is abundantly available. The missing link is mankind’s faith in God. All of God’s provisions are in the ready waiting for mankind to cash in God’s promises. God is not reconciled to man until man by faith gives himself to God.
The New Covenant is in place when the believer is created new in Christ. Now the believer is able to explore the riches of grace in Christ Jesus. Now the believer will be tested and exposed to suffering at different levels. These are spiritual growth opportunities mentored by the Holy Spirit Himself.
There is so much for us to learn by applying scripture, that it actually draws us into living intimacy with our living Lord. It is one thing to know in our heart and mind Biblical truth, it is another to have wisdom from truth tested and applied. Even Jesus did only those things that came from His Father. He became obedient unto death, even the death of a cross, Philippians 2:8
This is when the Lamb becomes the Shepherd, ….. to be continued.