Christian Faith: The Basics, Part 28

In the previous installment of this series we pointed out that the Bible insists that we needn't speculate about God or His nature. God has revealed this to us repeatedly and then, definitively, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Jewish writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews says:

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. (Hebrews 1:1-2)

"What if God was one of us?" singer Joan Osbourne asked in her one hit song. He has been one of us! But why?

There are lots of ways we could answer that question. I want to focus on one of the answers here.

In the Gospel of John, in the New Testament, there's a curious quote from John the Baptizer, a preacher of repentance whose ministry prepared his fellow Judeans for the revelation of Jesus as the world's God and Savior. "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29)

What was John talking about?

The first thing you must understand is that sin is the common condition of the human race. Sin, according to the Bible, is a distortion of the human character that is our common inheritance. It's a state of incomplete or marred relationship with God, others, and ourselves. "I was born guilty," King David says in Psalm 51:5, "a sinner when my mother conceived me."

As is true of all inherited conditions, the condition of sin has its consequences in our lives. Because we are sinners, we commit sins. Sins are those wrongs we do and those rights we fail to do that represent God's will for human beings. God's will for us is embodied in part in the Ten Commandments, which we discussed at the outset of this series.

Death is the appropriate punishment for human rebellion against the will of God for our lives. "The wages of sin is death," the apostle Paul reminds us in Romans 6:23.

But God loves us. He gave us life and He is unwilling to give up on us without a fight. And though it may seem strange to associate a creature as docile as a lamb with fighting, it's as a lamb that God fought for our lives.

In Old Testament times, God established a kind of protocol for the granting of forgiveness to His people, the Hebrews. Especially on Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement, a lamb without physical blemish or flaw was to be the stand-in for the people. (Atonement is an old English compound word, literally at-one-ment. Atonement is about being made one again with the God from Who our sins have alienated us.)

On the flawless lamb's shoulders was the burden of the people's sins from the previous year. This was important because it reflected a recognition of the deadly quality of sin. Our sins deserve death and in the sacrifice of the spotless lamb each year, the punishment was meted out, freeing the people for whom the lamb was killed to live in relationship with God and neighbor again.

Jesus came to be the spotless, sinless Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of all who entrust themselves to Him. As John explains it in the prologue to His Gospel:

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. (John 10:1-13)

More on Jesus, God the Son, in the next installment of this series.