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John 1:29-36
I want to draw our attention tonight to the second half of verse 29: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” This is a very familiar verse to most of us I’m sure, but I wonder if our familiarity with it has deadened our sense of the greatness of these words. What kind of an effect must they have had on those who first heard them? Here was John the Baptist declaring that this carpenter from Nazareth was someone of worldwide and infinite significance. John the Baptist was declaring that all the prophecies and revelations of the Old Testament that looked forward to a Saviour and a deliverer had finally been fulfilled in this Jesus of Nazareth—the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.
What did John the Baptist mean by calling Him the LAMB of God? Was he talking about His gentle, meek disposition? Was he referring to the fact that He was innocent and pure? Not primarily. Yes, Jesus IS meek and gentle, but John’s reason for calling Him the Lamb of God goes much deeper than a mere description of His disposition.
What would be the first thing to jump into the mind of Jew if someone began talking about the Lamb of God? Wouldn’t it be the lamb of the daily offering in the temple? In Numbers 28 the children of Israel were commanded to offer two sacrificial lambs every day—one in the morning and one in the evening. Day after day, day after day, for weeks and months and years and even centuries the daily sacrifice had been slain and offered as a sacrifice.
Or if was not the daily sacrificial lamb that those standing by thought of, then possibly they thought of the Passover lamb—that lamb which was slain and whose blood was sprinkled over the lintel and doorposts as a pledge of deliverance from the destroying angel. Every year at the Passover feast there would be a re-enactment of this ritual of the slain lamb to remind of their deliverance from the destroying angel.
So these words of John the Baptist, “the Lamb of God,” would bring to mind these sacrificial offerings which were associated with expiation for sin and deliverance from destruction.
Other thoughts that might come into their minds would be those very familiar words from the prophecy of Isaiah: “He was led as a Lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He opened not His mouth.” And these further words from the same 53rd chapter of Isaiah: “The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all… By His knowledge shall He justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities.”
Or how about the story of Abraham offering up His only son Isaac? You remember that when Abraham took that very difficult journey to Mount Moriah to offer his son to God as a burnt offering, the boy asked his father, “Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” What was Abraham’s answer? “My son, God will provide Himself a lamb for a burnt offering.” John the Baptist now says, “Behold, here He is—here’s the Lamb that God has provided, the Sacrifice, on whom is laid the world’s sins, and who bears them away.”
These simple words bring before us the very foundation of the Gospel: that on Jesus Christ were laid the guilt and the consequences of a world’s sin. I don’t think we can ever fully understand how it happened. We have our ideas and our theories about the atonement, but I think until we leave this world of shadows and see things more clearly in the dazzling light of heaven, we may never fully understand how our sins could be transferred to another; how our debt could be cleared by the suffering of an innocent victim; how someone else could be punished for our sins and we could go free as if we had never committed any sin. But even if we don’t fully understand it, we can believe it and trust in it. We can stand firmly on the authority of God’s Word and say, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away MY SIN.”
That word “taketh” away has a double meaning. The first meaning is to BEAR or carry, and the second meaning is to TAKE AWAY. Our Lord Jesus Christ did both: he both took our sin AND took it away. Think for a moment on this first fact—that sin was actually laid on Christ. Isaiah tells us that the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Peter says that He “bare our sins in His own body on the tree.” Our sin was laid on Him as a heavy burden. The heaviest thing in the universe is sin. Neither angels nor men can stand under the load of sin—it sinks them lower than the lowest hell. When sin was laid upon the Son of God, He bore it, but He sweat as it were great drops of blood, and He was exceeding sorrowful even unto death. To have born up the WEIGHT of the world would have been nothing compared with bearing THE SIN of the world.
But even better than Christ bearing our sin is the news that he bears it AWAY. He “taketh away the sin of the world.” The sin which was laid upon Christ didn’t remain there—He took it away—it remains no more. We read in Scripture many things about sin, such as God forgives it, blots it out, forgets it, casts it into the sea, puts it behind His back and a lot of other expressions, but in some ways this is the best of them: He takes it away! If we are Christians tonight we don’t need to ask where our sin is, because Jesus took it away. It’s gone, gone forever, completely abolished.
The Old Testament furnishes a wonderful picture of this truth that Christ not only bears our sin but bears it away. In Leviticus 16 we find God’s instructions to Moses concerning the scapegoat. They were to take two goats. The first goat was to be slain for a sin offering. The second goat was to remain alive and they were to confess over it all the sins of the children of Israel and then they were to take the goat into the wilderness and let it run away. This is a picture of our sins being taken away and forgotten—sent into oblivion.
Behold the Lamb of God, which not only taketh, but TAKETH AWAY the sin of the world.
The Lamb of God has taken YOUR sin away and you can be free from the guilt and condemnation of sin if you will put your trust in Him tonight.
God bless each one of you.
Amen.