[Machine transcription]
John says,
Behold the Lamb of God,
who takes away the sin of the world.
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints,
After Jesus was baptized by John,
He was sent away by the Holy Spirit
into the wilderness
to be tempted for forty days.
And then,
after His time in the wilderness,
He came back down to the Jordan River
And that’s when the text that we have occurred.
John sees Jesus coming and he points to him and he says,
Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
And the next day, the same sermon, the same five words,
Behold the Lamb of God.
In fact, so impressive was that sermon that two of John’s disciples
leave John to follow Jesus.
Those two are John and Andrew.
Now, this sermon, this impressive sermon, has shown its importance throughout the history
of the church.
In fact, it’s everywhere.
We have three windows, I think, that capture this particular sermon.
We have the John the Baptist window there, which you see the hand of John pointing to
Jesus as he holds the flag, and then the words of this sermon written in Latin,
Behold the Lamb of Eko Agnus Dei, behold the Lamb of God.
And then this one, which you can hardly see, has a lamb above the Bible, Old Testament
and New Testament, and the lamb also on the scripture with the flag in the chapel.
This picture of Jesus as the Lamb of God comes up every Sunday, twice in the liturgy.
When we sing in the Gloria, Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God,
Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, have mercy on us, and then in its
own hymn, which is perhaps at the most holy and sanctified time in the
whole service, after the words of institution, we sing three times, O Lamb
of God, you take away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.”
I was particularly impressed, by the way, and you guys can correct me on this if I’m
wrong, so I’m looking at Kyle and Aaron on this, that as I’m learning sign language,
one of the ways to indicate in your prayers who you’re praying to, if you’re praying
to God the Father or God the Son or God the Holy Spirit, is the direction that you look
or sign in your prayers.
So, God the Father is up and to the left, and God the Son is up and to the right, and
God the Holy Spirit is straight ahead and up like this.
And so when you’re praying, you can indicate the person to whom you’re praying by that
direction that you face, but when you’re signing the liturgy, when you’re singing the
Agnus Dei, you’re there at the altar, and instead of saying, Oh Lamb, Lamb of God that
takes away the sin of the world. Instead of praying that this direction, you’re
praying it actually at the altar. Oh, oh Lamb of God that takes away the sin of
the world. So that Jesus is there, the Lamb of God is here and we’re praying
straight to Him. Now this is stunning that this sermon is so important that we
are praying it over and over in our lives and we are thinking of Jesus as the Lamb
of God.
Now, that’s what we want to dig in today.
What does that mean that Jesus is the Lamb of God?
And I want to take it up three different ways.
I want to think about it historically, and I want to think about it theologically, and
then I want to think about it imaginatively.
First, the history of this sermon.
When you are a new student of the Bible, and you start studying the Old Testament, one
of the things that you notice right away is that there is a lot of death in the Bible.
There’s a lot of things that are dying, and it’s not just people, in fact there’s a lot
of animals that are dying.
When you start to read through Exodus and Leviticus, you start to realize that not only
is there just now and then a sacrifice, but there’s dozens, maybe even hundreds or thousands
of animals that are being brought to be sacrificed on the altar.
There’s a reason that the old Bibles have the edges of their page painted red.
I mean, the Bible is a bloody book.
So as soon as Noah is off the ark, what happens?
He makes an altar and presents a sacrifice.
Or whenever Abraham would move somewhere new, he would build an altar and offer a sacrifice.
And especially when the Lord rescues His people from Egypt, He gives them instruction for
worship, and there’s all sorts of sacrifices being offered every day, a lamb in the morning,
a lamb in the evening, a lamb for sin, a lamb for thanksgiving, and all of the different
various feasts.
Now here’s the basic theology of the sacrifice, which we want to remember whenever we’re reading
the Bible.
You have to imagine an Israelite who’s either participating in the sacrifice or watching
the sacrifice has to notice this, that there’s a lamb there or a goat or a dove or an ox
that didn’t do anything wrong.
After all, I’m the one that sinned, right?
I’m the one that broke God’s law.
I’m the one that deserves God’s punishment and yet I’m bringing a lamb there and I see
that lamb bleed and I see that lamb die and I see that lamb put on the altar and I see
that lamb burned, and I know that God is accepting the death of another in my place.
That God is pouring out His wrath not on me, but on the sacrifice.
Now there’s two very specific examples of this in the Old Testament.
The first is the Passover, remember?
The tenth plague when the people were being rescued from Egypt and the Lord was going
to come through and kill all of the firstborn, and to protect His people, He said, take a
lamb without spot, without blemish, and kill it, and take the blood, and wipe the blood
on the doorpost and the lentil, so that when the angel of death comes, it will see the
blood and pass over.
It sees the blood of the lamb, and you are delivered from death.
Or remember the Day of Atonement, the most holy day in the Old Testament Church here,
which was very involved.
I mean, there’s a lot of complex and meaningful actions that are happening, but perhaps most
pertinent is this.
There was two lambs, and they were chosen, and one was chosen for sacrifice, and the
other was chosen as the scapegoat.
It was a goat that the high priest would take it, and he would put his hands on its head,
And he would confess the sins of the people and his own sins on the head of the goat, and
then that goat would be driven out of the camp to die in the wilderness.
So that that goat would take the sin of the people and carry it away from them.
Now all of these sacrifices, all of them in the Old Testament, every single one of them,
and especially these two, the sacrifice of the Passover and the Day of Atonement, they
were pointing to the coming sacrifice of the Son of God.
I want you to hear Isaiah 53, as it describes the suffering servant.
This is Isaiah chapter 53, verses 6 and 7.
Isaiah preaches this, “‘We all, like sheep, have gone astray.
We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him, no not on us, not
on you, 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, and like a sheep before its shearers is silent,
right, so He opened not His mouth.”
The Messiah, the Promised One, the Christ, would be the Lamb of God to take away the
sin of the world.
So that John the Baptist, when he sees Jesus with this little five-word sermon, he takes
He is all of this, every sacrifice, every Passover lamb, every bit of blood that is
shed in the temple, and all the ashes from all of the sacrifices ever made before God.
John, with his sermon, gathers all of these up and dumps them on Jesus.
He is the one.
He is the Lamb of God.
He is the sacrifice to which all the other sacrifices pointed.
He is the sacrifice which all the other sacrifices preached, and He, by His death, forgives the
sin of the world.
Now that’s the history, and we want to talk about it theologically as well.
In fact, I think this is really kind of crucial.
Now this might be slightly, you know, when the pastor brings his volume two of his dogmatics
to the pulpit, you know, it might be a little bit of trouble.
But I think it’s important for us to get the theological language of the death of Jesus
right on this, so that the theological language that we use to describe this is either the
substitutionary atonement or the vicarious satisfaction, the vicarious satisfaction.
That means that Jesus is making satisfaction for our sins in our place.
Now here’s how this is described by Francis Pieper.
He was the champion of this doctrine, which is why I want him to preach to us this morning
as well.
The term vicarious satisfaction brings out the scriptural truth that God laid upon Christ
and that Christ willingly accepted the obligation in man’s stead both to keep the law and to
bear the punishment that the law exacts of the transgressors.
Christ fulfilled the law in the stead of man, for Scripture declares, God sent forth His
Son made of a woman made under the law to redeem them who were under the law, Galatians
4.
And Christ vicariously suffered the punishment which men had incurred by their transgression
of the law, as Scripture declares, Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law,
being made a curse for us, Galatians 3. One died for all, 2nd Corinthians 5.
Christ suffered for sin, the just for the unjust, 1st Peter 3.8. It was not for
our benefit only that Christ died, but also in our stead. In other words, dear
And Jesus was suffering in our place.
It’s a swap.
He’s paying the debt that we owe.
Can you imagine that you were out vandalizing cars one day and you’re caught and arrested
by the police and you’re brought into court and the judge says that you’re guilty and
now you have to pay a fine for your crime, but you can’t pay it so you’ve got to go sit
in jail until you can pay it off.
And as you’re being dragged off to prison, someone comes and pays the fine that you owe,
so that you can go free.
Imagine that, and imagine that the one who paid the crime for you is the person whose
car you were caught vandalizing.
This is what is happening on the cross.
Jesus is paying the debt that you owe.
He’s suffering the wrath of God that you deserve, so that if you wonder what you do
deserve from God, you only need to look at the suffering of Jesus and you’ll see it.
That rejection on the cross, that affliction, that darkness, all of that, that shame, that
should be yours, but Jesus suffers in your place vicariously as your substitute.
His blood is the price that’s paid to ransom you, to set you free, to declare you to be
innocent.
Now, this we know is the heart of the gospel, but, and this isâ¦
I want us to not miss this, but this doctrine is often rejected, and so it’s hard for
us to imagine it, you know, Lutheran sitting here reading the Bible and hearing the preaching
of the gospel all the time, it’s hard for us to imagine that not everyone believes this,
but even in the Christian church, this doctrine of the vicarious satisfaction is rarely preached
and even more rarely believed.
I’m going to read some more paper for you,
one, two more paragraphs,
but this is really quite stunning.
Because he’s going to address all of the objections
to this doctrine, listen to what he says.
We are now about to discuss the saddest chapter
in the whole history of mankind.
Think of it.
Man is unable to bring about his own reconciliation with God,
so God himself has accomplished it
by surrendering his own son
and placing Him under the obligation and curse of the law.
God has thus graciously prepared the way for men
to exalt that they are now justified by His blood,
the blood of Jesus Christ,
and are reconciled to God by the death of His Son.
Romans 5.
Yea, through Jesus Christ,
by whom they have now received the reconciliation,
they are to rejoice in God Himself
as their gracious God
and in the hope of the glory of God.
But, instead of praising the compassion and the love of God, man has criticized and keeps
on criticizing the divine method of reconciliation as unnecessary, as unworthy of God, as self-contradictory,
as unjust, as utterly superficial, as too juridical or too court-like, legalistic.
We have already touched upon these objections, we repeat them again.
Can you imagine it?
Pieper says the Lord has determined to rescue us, to deliver us, to call us to be His own
Son, to die in our place, and theologians sit about and say it can’t be so.
It’s not true.
The cross must be something else.
Now we must cling to this doctrine, and I’ll give you one more paragraph from Pieper here.
Because it’s only in this doctrine, the vicarious satisfaction, the preaching that
Christ is the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, it’s only in this preaching
and in this faith that the Lord comes to deliver us and give us peace.
So one more paragraph from Pieper.
We repeat, only faith in the vicarious satisfaction can remove man’s consciousness of guilt.
The sense of guilt in man’s heart is a frightful reality.
Back of it is the full weight of divine justice and holiness.
You shall be holy for I the Lord am holy.
Cursed is everyone that continues not in all the things written in the book of the law
to do them.
No human argumentation can dissolve this stern indictment, as the Rocky Mountains and the
skill, and ingenuity of any human engineer, so no human endeavor will ever invalidate
the handwriting written against us, the voice of our own accusing conscience being the voice
of the legislative and retributive justice of God.
Our sense of guilt can be removed only by faith in Christ, who nailed the handwriting
of our guilt to the cross.
By creating faith in the vicarious satisfaction of Christ, the Holy Ghost replaces the divine
verdict of condemnation in our hearts with the divine verdict of pardon, declaring the
condemnatory verdict of the conscience to be illusory or by attempting to quiet it by
calling on man to perform himself, to permit himself to be engrafted into Christ by sanctification
or anything else is theological purility, and men are thereby deceiving themselves and
the world.
The only thing, the only thing, dear saints, that can cleanse the heart, the only thing
that can calm the conscience, the only thing that can give us the absolute confidence that
God is not our enemy but rather our friend, is this preaching, behold the Lamb of God
who takes away the sin of the world.
We must hold to it and cling to it as if and because our life depends on it.
So let’s imagine it and we’ll end with this because we want to ask this question,
what does this preaching look like for us?
Now I think the best way to get there, the best way to get this preaching into our own
imagination is through the lyrics of this great old hymn by Isaac Watts called Not All
the Blood of Beasts.
It’s a Lenten hymn.
You remember it.
It’s kind of a haunting tune, but it starts like this.
Not all the blood of beasts on Jewish altars slain could give the guilty conscience peace
or wash away the stain.
But Christ, the heavenly Lamb, takes all our sins away, a sacrifice of nobler name and
richer blood than they.
My faith would lay your hand.
Okay, now here’s where I need you to use your imagination.
I want you to imagine that you are the high priest in Jerusalem.
You’ve got all the high priestly garb on, the golden crown and all of the robes and
the linen and everything else.
You are dressed, and you are there on the Day of Atonement, and the goat has been brought
before you.
I want you to imagine this.
And the goat is brought before you, and so you take your hands, and you place your hands
on the head of that goat.
And your job is there to confess sin.
So you start confessing the sin of Israel, how they’ve been rebellious and unfaithful
and so forth.
And as you confess the sin of Israel, you start to confess your own sin.
You close your eyes and now all of a sudden your own conscience is pouring out all the things that you’ve done wrong
all the things that you’ve said wrong all of the things that you’ve thought wrong all of the things that you’ve felt wrong all of
The good that you’ve failed to do all of the trouble
all of the affliction all of the pain the pain that you’ve felt and the pain that you’ve caused and all you are confessing all
of it and
It’s spilling out from your mouth
Now, on to the hand, through your hands and on to the head of this goat.
But then you open your eyes and you see now it’s no longer the head of a goat, but in
fact Jesus is kneeling there, Jesus.
And as you finish confessing your sin, He looks up at you with sadness and peace in
His face.
Listen to how it says it in the hymn.
But my faith would lay her hand on that dear head of thine, and like a penitent I stand,
and there confess my sin.”
And Jesus looks at you with love and sorrow in His face, and He stands up and He turns
around and He walks down the road straight towards the cross, carrying your sin.
My soul looks back to see the burden thou didst bear when hanging on the
cursed tree and knows her guilt is there. Believing, we rejoice. To see the
curse removed, we bless the Lamb with cheerful voice and sing His bleeding
love. Dear Saints, this is Christ for you, the Lamb of God who takes away your sin.
This preaching of John the Baptist is for you. Listen. Behold, the Lamb of God who
takes away the sin of the world.
Amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding,
guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.
