Status Updates From A Layman Looks at the Lamb ...

“Under the protection of God’s divine forgetfulness, we can in turn forgive and accept others; and we can even forgive ourselves. We then know what it is to walk in the light, the wonderful brightness of His presence. Our days have meaning. Our years have purpose. Our despair has turned into the laughter of a joyous love - love for God; love for other followers. Of the Lamb; love for the lost”

“Only the laid-down life of God, the poured-out love of God, the pure and holy righteousness of God wrapped around our mortal souls could ever, ever atone for our dreadful behavior”

Note Deuteronomy 21:22-23

~ Forgiveness, whether between man and man; man and woman; man and God, entails immeasurable cost. One must pay the price of personal humiliation.

This God has done, always does, ever will do in His loving, caring dealings with us.

~ Himself He would not save. If He had, all the rest of us would have perished. Yes, He was willing to be made captive, willing to be condemned, willing to be crucified in order that you and I could be set free, pardoned, and given eternal life.

~ But that did not happen! Despite the most concerted attempts of human society, human philosophy, human governments and human ignorance to obliterate His presence and power, He has become the dearest person in all of life to a hundred million hearts past to the present. His deity goes unchallenged by those who know Him as Saviour and Redeemer.

~ If Jesus were not the Christ of God, He would long ago have been lost in the hazy mists of man's memory. Like false pretenders and crafty imposters across the ages, His record would have blown away in the winds of time.

~ Most of the men and women who turn their backs upon God, who ignore the call of Christ, who spurn the gentle overtures of His Spirit, do not realize the remorse and anguish they bring upon Him. In despising and rejecting Him, not only do they rupture their relationship with Him but also go on to ruin their own lives.

To turn to one's own way is really nothing less than to repudiate God.

~ Yet in the realm of human conduct and personal behavior, men strongly resist any thought of a final absolute standard for their welfare and life. "Tolerance" is the watchword. It is believed that a person should be perfectly free to indulge any chosen lifestyle. The secularists claim that it is our inherent privilege to play life's little game by any set of rules we may devise or design.

~ In our western culture, most people blithely assume that sheep are sweet, soft, white, innocent, harmless creatures dotting far-off hillsides, looking so inviting and cuddly in their woolly coats.

How far from reality! The harsh, unhappy truth is that sheep just aren't that beautiful—except at a distance and in the poetic imagery of the viewer's imagination.

~ Christ fulfilled all the parts of this ceremony when He died on the cross—He himself is the great High Priest, the sacrificial Lamb, the "fit Man" and the Scapegoat bearing away our sins into the immensity of God's generous forgetfulness!

~ The human mind rejects the implications of God himself suffering for our salvation; yet if God suffers, how can puny man escape it?

~ And yet, the human condition, despite all our fancy pretense at success and splendor, is shot through with pathos and pain. Life itself, as C.S. Lewis so provocatively points out, carries much more pain than pleasure. The tapestry of our days is colored more strongly with stress than with singing, it is woven through with dark threads of despair and grief more than with strands of glory and light.

~ This powerful portrait of the sacrificial lamb is not one which appeals to our human vanity and pride. Mankind shuns suffering. We abhor humiliation. We flee from sorrow of any sort. Degradation and despair are conditions we resist.

~ So, once more, in simple language and unmistakable symbolism, the lamb slain in Israeli homes in Egypt at that first Passover feast portrayed The Lamb of God, slain from the foundation of the world—the One who 1,500 years later would be offered in death at the Passover feast in Jerusalem.

~ This indeed the Lord had done—He himself was that Lamb.

This indeed Abraham believed—he took and trusted.

This indeed was counted to him for righteousness—he accepted God's substitute for his son.

~ And so The Lamb of God, the Lord of glory, accepted the substitute lamb as a proper and adequate provision for both the patriarch and his son. The ram lamb caught in the thicket at the right time, in the right place, for the right believers was a superb foreshadowing of the perfect provision of God's own suffering for His people.

~ As the need for redemption is clearly seen in the story of Cain's parents, so the fact that there is no substitute for Christ's redemption is seen clearly in Cain's story.

~ Everything about Cain's offering spoke of self-effort, self-interest, self-reliance. Nothing there even remotely portrayed the sacrifice of love poured out by God in His own self-giving for lost men as The Lamb slain.

~ Forgiveness, acceptance, acquittal, reconciliation between God and man could never be achieved by man's strivings, by man's manipulation.

~ Abel depended on God's generosity, not on his own good conduct. Here was the pattern for proper reparation for all men for all time. Their total dependence must be upon divine intervention, not on their own human effort.

~ This is the first record of a human being's deliberate choice of God's appointed way for making appropriate atonement between himself and his God. It was not the slaying of the lamb which somehow earned God's favor, but it was the One whom that slain lamb represented which made this an action of implicit faith.

~ It was only, always, and ever will be what God has done that can suffice to pay the price. Only the laid-down life of God, the poured-out love of God, the pure and holy righteousness of God wrapped around our mortal souls could ever, ever atone for our dreadful behavior.

~ When Adam and Eve deliberately, flagrantly asserted their own selfish desires to oppose God's best wish, His best will for them, He was pierced through with a thousand pains.

~ Every step God took to bring sons and daughters to glory was strewn with the sharp stones of His own suffering, the cutting wounds of His own great grief. We simply must see somehow, sometime, that God has suffered, suffered, SUFFERED, for us sinning people. This suffering has never diminished, either before or after Calvary.

~ He is the same eternal, unchanging, constant, compassionate Christ who from everlasting to everlasting lays himself out that man might live. And the few bright but painful years of His human sojourn are but a glimpse of His eternal performance in the unseen realm.