JOHN071 - Nobody Forgets the Gray Ghost

John 1:29-34

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

If you're one of those real fancy parties with the swirly drinks, then everybody's dressed up, they're very, very best. It's in like a big hall or something. There's a music live string quartet playing there or something. And then somebody walks in and they're they got they got like the puffy pants on and they have one of those banging sticks, like a spear where you hit the butt of the spear on the ground to get everybody's attention. They walk in and they bang the bangy stick and they're like, Your attention, please. May I introduce the lion of the north? You're like, What? There's somebody named the Lion of the North? Where would your head go? Immediately you'd be like, How does one get that nickname? I have a lot of opinions and ideas about lions. I wonder what this person did to be lion-like. You might forget that the guy's name is Gustavus Adolphus and that he was a Swedish king who factored significantly in the 30 Years War. But if you were in a room and he got introduced like that, you would definitely remember that nickname and you would have questions. If you were at some event and somebody you know walks up and there's a bunch of ladies with him, he's like, hey, real quick, I just want to introduce you to these ladies. They collectively go by the name the Night Witches. You'd be like, What? I'm probably not gonna remember any of y'all's name, but the Night Witches? How does one get that nickname? Because I got all kinds of ideas about nighttime and witches and things like that. And then you find out they were Soviet bomber pilots and they got that nickname during World War II from their enemies, the Germans. Maybe somebody walks up to you, you're at a coffee shop or something, they're like, hey, I just want to do a quick introduction. This is my friend, the gray ghost. What? I have ideas about grayness and ghosts. That's awesome. Yeah, his name's John Mosby. He was like a partisan fighter during the Civil War. He's a very, very interesting fellow. The Gray Ghost. You'd be like, dang. A good nickname really sets the hook. And John the Baptist in John chapter one, once again, gives Jesus a fantastic nickname. It's more than just giving a nickname, like you know, like we talked about. This is the fulfillment of prophecy. There's, but you know, it kind of serves the same purpose as a nickname and it's definitely catchy. This is how it goes. John 1 29. The next day, John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said, Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. It's brilliant. Can you call it marketing? Marketing kind of cheapens it, but it's brilliant as a mnemonic device, right? People are going to remember that. Lamb of God. Here's some things that I think John the Baptist is trying to accomplish with this nickname. One, obviously, he's doing theology here. And we started talking about that last time around when we looked at the story of Abraham and Isaac. And then we looked at some of the places where lambs are sacrificial objects in the Old Testament, particularly in Leviticus, and how the lamb was sacrificed under the terms of the old covenant in the Old Testament to satisfy the wrath of God. Kind of dark. Well, the phrase lamb of God would have conjured that and so much more that we'll talk about yet moving forward as well. So, one, I think John the Baptist is doing theology here, but I also think he's trying to pique people's curiosity. What does that mean? The phrase requires a little more explanation. I mean, I guess you get a little bit of it right away. But you hear that nickname, Lamb of God. And it makes somebody wonder well, you know, I want to pull on that thread more. What the heck does Lamb of God mean? And then third, I think it's meant to just be memorable. Like those other nicknames that I gave you were memorable. Who is the gray ghost? What's his real name? I just said it to you. Who has it? Probably not very many of you, because John Mosby isn't nearly as interesting as the gray ghost. I like what John's doing here on the front end of things. If we want to go cheap here and be a little crass about it, great branding, great marketing. If John the Baptist is the one who is supposed to point the way to Jesus and make people curious about Jesus and interested in Jesus, then I think he's doing a really good job. But also, John the Baptist is the last prophet of the Old Testament, under the terms of the Old Testament, and he's paying off a whole bunch of themes, many of which involve lambs, in the stuff that he's saying about Jesus. Maybe the most memorable image that you get from the Old Testament involving a lamb happens at about the quarter turn of the book of Exodus. This is at the very end of the story of the ten plagues God inflicts on Egypt. The wicked Pharaoh and the wicked Egyptians are oppressing God's chosen people, holding them in bondage, and God sends these plagues that are increasingly terrifying and high stakes with each one. And after each plague, you know, Pharaoh's like, nah, I'm not gonna let your people go. Um, that's now that didn't move the needle for me. And so they get more and more intense. Some of them feel kind of whimsical when you read them from a modern perspective, like the flies or the gnats or the frogs or things like that. But nobody's laughing by the time you get to the end, and the final plague is announced in Exodus 11. The plague is the death of the firstborn, uh, not even just for people, but for livestock and everything, especially in an ancient world context, this is a pronouncement of complete ruin on a people. And Pharaoh, he's still dug in. His heart is hard, he's not going to let God's people go. And so in chapter 11 of Exodus, the announcement that God is going to inflict this horrible judgment on Egypt comes down. And then in chapter 12, we get the solution. And this solution is where the practice of Passover is initiated. The people are told, and this is open to anybody who wants to do it, the people are told, take a lamb, sacrifice the lamb, put the blood of the lamb at the top of your door, on the sides of your door of the house that you want to be protected from God's judgment, and then prepare the lamb this very specific way and do a feast. I mean, what an odd thing to do on a night so bleak. And then, you know, everything goes exactly as God said it was going to go. That night of horrible judgment happens, it breaks the will and the spirit of the Egyptian people, it breaks Pharaoh, and he lets the people go. But there's an image in there that is very relevant to what we're talking about with this lamb of God. The lamb takes the hit for the firstborn sons, so to speak. And it's not just that the lamb is sacrificed, but also the lamb is used in this feast, this defining feast for this family of faith that God made out of the descendants of Abraham. So there's just a whole lot of stuff in Exodus 12 that centers around the lamb that points right back to Jesus. And I have to think a whole bunch of people in the original audience also would have been thinking about that. Not just Abraham and Isaac, not just the sacrificial lamb stuff from the law from Leviticus, but I think they would have been thinking about the Passover. Like, there's also references in like Isaiah 53 is a super famous one. I can turn over there real quick so you don't have to take my word for it. Isaiah 53 is about this prophesied, predicted man of sorrows who will suffer. This is pointing to Jesus, but listen to the language here in the middle. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hid their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows. Yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. I mean, already here. My goodness, that substitutionary language of this man of sorrows is going to be the one who is pierced and who is crushed and who endures all of this pain. He's stricken. Why is this all happening? Well, it's for us. He's crushed for our iniquities, and this punishment isn't meaningless, it buys us peace. So there's a lot of very important theology going on there. It continues. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. So there we get some of this lamb imagery and lamb language, but then the imagery in this vein gets much more vivid as we move forward into Isaiah 53, verse 7. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendants? For he was cut off from the land of the living. For the transgression of my people, he was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, I mean, you see all the layers here? My goodness. I know to you and me, when we thumb through the Bible, and like if we just separate Old Testament from New Testament here, we put it in our hand. That's that's how much that is. That is a lot of Bible right there. It feels to us like, man, that that's so much. Nobody probably would have known much of that. But you got to understand this original audience that John the Baptist is talking to, that John the Evangelist is writing to in John 1, they knew all this stuff, but they especially knew passages like that in Isaiah 53. Everybody would have known that. They would have written that stuff down, they would have saved those passages, kids would have memorized it, they would have been able to recite all of that. Passages like that were beloved bridge passages that connected the clearly didn't go that great story of the Old Testament with the hope that people felt about the arrival of the Messiah and what God might do in the future through that Messiah. The same impulse that would cause people reading John 1 to be like, oh, he took on flesh and tabernacled among us. This is God with us. Oh, I know that one. I know that from you know what we call the Old Testament. That same knowledge and conversance with the Old Testament would be on display here as well, with John employing this lamb of God language about Jesus. They would have thought of this Isaiah 53 stuff absolutely as well. There's a lot more levels to this lamb business in the Old Testament. I'll probably wait a while to look forward in terms of how the lamb imagery pays off in the New Testament, not just in the Gospels, but even into Revelation. I mean, that's the whole lamb of God thing completely pays off in the book of Revelation, but we'll get there as we go along. Point is this we took two days to look at this nickname of Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. As we went and looked at four of the most prominent places where that lamb imagery comes up in the Old Testament, that being the Levitical law, Abraham and Isaac, the tenth plague in Exodus, and Isaiah 53. As we went and looked at that, we didn't just see, like, oh, well, okay, they would have thought about lambs before, because that's in the story. We saw the imagery, we saw the idea. The lamb took the place of Isaac in the story of Abraham and Isaac. The lamb takes the place of those who both unintentionally, plausible, deniably, and absolutely intentionally sinned in the book of Leviticus. The lamb takes the place of the firstborn in the story of the Passover in Exodus, and the lamb is crushed with the full knowledge and willfulness of God. God takes uses that innocent, harmless language. Like what the lamb ever do? Why is this guy so scorned? And why does he have to take one for the team? Well, he does. And as we read further through John, we will see that it's a really good thing that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Because we got a sin problem. We've tried a lot of ways to fix it. None of it worked. So this is not just a great catchy nickname from John the Baptist, it's fulfillment of prophecy and it's uh the intonation of a promise from God, a promise that we'll unpack a whole bunch more as we go along. Great marketing from John the Baptist. This is good and memorable stuff. Speaking of which, what was the name of that Civil War era partisan fighter we talked about? Who had that great nickname from earlier? Do you remember it? That's right, you do. It's the great ghost. Nice job on that. But what was his real name again? I mean, we've covered it twice, probably said it four or five times already. And this I surely you remember, right? I definitely. Some of you do, but some of you don't. It's John Mosby, and I didn't do this to you to make you feel ashamed. I just did it to say, hey, you know, the nicknames, it makes an idea stick. It totally works. And we just proved it right there. The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. That's a good one. I'm glad that one stuck. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again too.