Marisa’s Reviews > A Shepherd Looks at the Lamb of God > Status Update

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.

~ 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.