JOHN070 - Lamb of God is a Killer Nickname

John 1:29-34

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And if you dig around through history, there's some people who've got some pretty wicked, awesome nicknames, but I like the nicknames that aren't quite on the nose. I like the nicknames that make you think a little bit about what's going on. For example, and let me just be uh unbelievably clear here when it comes to World War II, I'm really solidly team allies on that one. But there is one Nazi who's got a super cool nickname, Erwin Rommel. Do you remember his nickname? It's the Desert Fox. When you hear that nickname, you're like, well, one, that's cool, but two, what does it mean? Like that says something about you. And you go and you look at the story of Rommel, you're like, well, he was just he was clever, he was deceptive, he was a tactical genius, and where did he operate? North Africa. The desert fox. Cool. Sometimes even even the bad guys get a cool nickname. How about the Sun King? Louis XIV? Remember that one? I mean, why would you give yourself the name the Sun King? Well, because you built the biggest buildings and you had the most money and you wear the fanciest leotards and wigs. You are the reflection of the glory of the cosmos. You are the Sun King. That's a pretty good one. The Iron Lady? That's a pretty good nickname. That's uh Margaret Thatcher, right? Like I grew up hearing about the Iron Lady. Like there's um you know, there's a juxtaposition there, right? Like as a lady, she's elegant and refined, but she's made of metal. What? That's pretty cool. How about the winter king, Frederick V? He was in charge of Bohemia, but only for just the one winter. The winter king. It's elegant. It sounds like something that would be on a long-form HBO dramatic medieval fantasy story or that sort of thing. Here's another one. The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Ooh. That's a good one, right? Like the best nicknames all beg questions. They all make you go, well, okay, you have my attention. What does that mean exactly? And yesterday we started trying to unpack what this nickname for Jesus, and I understand nickname, maybe that sells it a little short because John the Baptist is like the greatest and last of the Old Testament prophets, and he's doing more than nicknaming here. He's prophesying over who Jesus is. But play along with me. I'm calling it a nickname for today. The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Well, we started exploring that yesterday, and I think there are at least three or four defensible levels of meaning to that. But the most obvious one that we started on yesterday, that that nickname, that prophecy points us toward, is the idea of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb. And I alluded yesterday to the Old Testament stuff about the sacrificial system. And I want to go and dig into it a bit more. So we're gonna, I'm gonna flip over here in a minute to Leviticus 4 and Leviticus 5. This is where a lot of the lamb and sacrificial imagery comes from and really gets started in the Bible. But as we're on our way over there, we've discussed many times over the course of our interneting together on the YouTube channel and on the podcast that the sacrificial system is a multifaceted thing, right? The easy and obvious thing to picture with the sacrificial system is you do something bad, you do a sacrifice, and then it goes away. But as we've discussed, the sacrificial system has a whole bunch of elements to it. It deals with things that don't even necessarily involve like overt naughtiness or bad behavior. In fact, the passage right before the one we're going to look at starts with when a leader sins unintentionally. Oh. So it covers like accident stuff. The sacrificial system has specific sacrifices that cover things you didn't even know you got wrong, just to kind of, you know, cover all your bases. It covers stuff that has nothing to do with guilt at times, like just the normal rhythms of the body. Well, that's not sin. It's just kind of what we are. But what we see from the sacrificial system, as well as from the legal system of the old testament, is that it is comprehensive. It's dealing with all the aspects of life in the community, for the individual, for the individual, what am I trying to say? The invisible life of the mind and the soul and all the aspects of relationship with God corporately and individually. This is a holistic thing. We've got separation of church and state now. So you kind of got your church stuff and you got your invisible life stuff over here. And now we also have the invisible life of our relationship with our phones. That's a whole other evolution and the life of the mind and the heart of the human being. And then you've got your relationship with the state and with your neighbors. And but back in the day, when the law of the Old Testament and the sacrificial system is being laid out, it's all one thing. So it shouldn't be surprising that it's comprehensive. However, within that one big thing, we do get some stuff that is just overtly about if you do something wrong and you just sin and there's no qualifier on it, like you know, you didn't mean to or you forgot, you just sinned. This is what you need to do. And this is where we get a lot of the language about lamb sacrifice coming in. Leviticus 4, starting in verse 27. You know what? No, I'm gonna give you a little bit about the unintentional sin first and then the intentional sin. If a member of the community sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord's commands, he is guilty. That's an interesting theological pronouncement right there, isn't it? Like ignorance is no excuse. Like uh you did something wrong, whether you meant to or not. Well, you're guilty. When he is made aware of the sin he committed, he must bring as his offering for the sin he committed a female goat without defect. And then he lay his hand on the goat, and the which is the sin offering and slaughtering and stabbing, and blood ends up in places on the altar here, and then all of that happens, and it is a burnt offering, and it is an aroma pleasing to the Lord in this way. The priest will make atonement for him, and he will be forgiven. Boom, boom, boom. The whole explanation of what to do when a member of the community sins unintentionally is like four verses long. But that's a goat. Now we get into the lamb stuff in the next verse, verse 32. If he brings a lamb as his sin offering, he is to bring a female without defect. He is to lay his hand on the head and slaughter it for a sin offering at the place where the burnt offering is slaughtered. And there's stuff about how the blood is positioned, all the different steps that the priest is supposed to go through. And in this way, the priest will make atonement for him for the sin he has committed and he will be forgiven. And then in the next section, moving into chapter five, we go from stuff that was definitely unintentional to stuff where maybe you have plausible deniability. It's hard to tell from the outside looking in whether it was intentional or unintentional. These are sins of omission or carelessness or pretending like you didn't know, but you did know. So we get language here about doing stuff that would make you ceremonially unclean, but then still like kind of trying to be involved in ceremonial stuff. We get stuff like not telling the truth by omission, staying quiet when what you knew would have mattered in a testimony in a legal hearing that affects other people, sloppy oaths, things like this, where you could be like, oh, I didn't really mean to. What the passage is saying is that once you find out about it, you're guilty. It doesn't matter if you have plausible deniability or not. And verse five of Leviticus 5 says, When anyone is guilty in any of these ways, he must confess in what way he has sinned, and as a penalty for the sin he has committed, he must bring to the Lord a female lamb or goat from the flock as a sin offering. And then there's a description of how you do all that. And then it says, the priest shall then offer the other as a burnt offering in the prescribed way and make atonement for him for the sin he has committed, and he will be forgiven. And then as you move further into chapter five and six and seven, you get a lot more details about like overt sin. You did, you knew what you were doing, you did stuff wrong. And here's what those sacrifices need to look like. Now, some things that get sacrificed for moving forward in this section of Leviticus are like there's grain offerings, so there's different stuff. Sometimes it's livestock, sometimes it's stuff like this. But but sin in the Old Testament sacrificial system, whether unintentional, maybe intentional or intentional, it requires satisfaction before God. It sounds very foreign to us because we live under the new covenant. And so these things, like by the work of God, the same God who put these in place has made these things by his work and redemption over time through Christ. He's made these things to feel foreign. So they should feel foreign. And rather than criticizing God for how foreign they feel, gratitude toward God for these feeling foreign because of his work is what makes sense. But the point for our conversation is this there's a quick glance at what the blood sacrifice thing, the sacrifice of a lamb thing, looks like. Now, there's a story that comes before Leviticus that is much more famous in the passage we just looked at. And that's the one where Abraham finally has a son, and then he's instructed by God in Genesis 22 to go and sacrifice his son. And Isaac isn't doing the math on what's going on. This doesn't feel like a normal sacrifice the way it's setting up. Isaac's like, the fire and wood are here, but where's the lamb for the burnt offering? And then Abraham answered, God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son. And the two of them went on together. And then it's just a crazy scene. But Abraham goes to obey God, but God's like, No, I was never going to have you do that. And he stays Abraham's hand, and Isaac is not sacrificed. And then God does provide a lamb, a ram, that's right there caught in a thicket, and uh, you know, Abraham passes the test of faith. That's kind of Abraham's superpower. He believes God and it's credited to him as righteousness. So this very famous example of the sacrificial lamb, the idea of God providing the very sacrifice he requires, it's it would have been in everybody's mind when John the Baptist is saying, look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, that would have been the first story that came to mind. The next thing that would have come to mind would have been that sacrificial language and that clarification and expansion of what these sacrifices were about that we get through the book of Leviticus. And next time around, as we're continuing to explore this very interesting nickname or prophetic proclamation, the Lamb of God, what we're going to look at next time around as we're exploring that further, is how this theme pays off later in the New Testament and why we can say with clarity and with certainty that no, definitely Jesus as the sacrificial Lamb of God is at least part of what John means in bestowing upon Jesus this nickname. A lot of weird blood stuff today, maybe a little more weird blood stuff next time around, but it's important and it's in there for a reason, and we'll connect the dots between stuff that seems strange from the Old Testament and stuff that pays it off in the New Testament in Christ next time around. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.