We have seen his glory
We have seen his glory
The PERFECTION of Jesus as the LAMB of God whose precious blood, can take away all sins of all people.
This lesson comes to the heart of this GLORY series. At the heart of the gospel of Christ, we find the cross of Christ —or rather the death which God's Son suffered upon that cross as a sacrifice for all humankind.
Going back to John chapter one, the chapter from which each of our GLORY lessons are drawn, we read in verse 29 the statement of John the baptizer:
"Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world."
The outline (See Chart) for this series of lessons is an acrostic on the word GLORY (from the statement in John 1:14, "We have seen his glory"). In John the baptizer’s description of Jesus as God’s "Lamb", we find the L in GLORY.
Peter reminds us that we have been redeemed "with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot... foreordained before the foundation of the world" (1Pe 1:18-20) .
The term "Lamb" is of course a metaphor, referring to Christ as a sacrificial offering for sins. We understand that Jesus is not only the "Lamb", but also Shepherd and High Priest.
In the Jewish religion, various animals, including lambs, were killed and offered by priests as sacrifices for the sins of the priests and all the people.
But these sacrifices could not really, by themselves, take away sins. Sins were forgiven through those sacrifices only because they were prophetic symbols of the true Lamb of God. It is He who really takes away sins.
In thinking about Jesus as the Lamb, we can consider four aspects, and you will notice each of these mentioned in the passages quoted above.
These four aspects are our lesson points...
God accepted Christ's sacrifice because Christ was perfect and without spot or blemish of sin. But Christ was the dearly beloved Son of God —what could be more precious to God than the blood of his only Son? Yet God loved us so much that he preordained that his Son would die for us before we ever came into existence. The power of that blood to take away sin is unlimited, for whosoever will may come to God for forgiveness through the Lamb.
We look at these four points in Part 2 of this lesson.