One sentence at the Jordan, the four lambs a hearer could have heard in it, and the road this series walks from an altar in Genesis to a throne in Revelation
Behold the Lamb
John the Baptist looked at a man walking past and said a sentence that the church has said at every communion since. It is five words in Greek. Every one of them had a history before he spoke it, in the rituals Israel had kept for a thousand years and the prophets who told Israel what the rituals meant. This series follows the lamb through both, to the cross, and then to the question the lamb was always raising: how a person is made right with God.
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Lesson 1 of 12 · The sentence
Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. The Baptist said it twice in two days, and the Gospel that records it never explains it, because it did not need to: every Jew at the Jordan had eaten a lamb at Passover, seen the smoke of the lamb offered morning and evening in the temple, heard Isaiah’s servant led like a lamb to the slaughter, and known the story of the boy who asked his father where the lamb was. The sentence gathers all four and points them at one man. This series walks the same road in order: the lamb God provides on Abraham’s mountain, the lamb whose blood turns judgment aside at the Passover door, the lamb offered every day and the goats offered once a year, the servant of Isaiah and the pierced one of the psalms and Zechariah, and then the cross, where John says the lambs were being killed as he died. And then the question the whole road was leading to. A lamb dying instead of a person means that the person did not do the thing that made them right; someone else did, and they received it. That is what the Reformation called righteousness by faith alone, and the last four lessons show that it was in the Passover door before it was in Paul.
The sentence
John has been baptizing for repentance and telling the crowds that someone greater is coming. Then the someone walks past.
The next day, he saw Jesus coming to him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! — John 1:29 · WEB
Read the comment on Behold, the Lamb of God
Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Not a lamb: the Lamb of God, God’s lamb, which is the phrase Abraham used on the mountain, God will provide himself the lamb. Not sins: the sin of the world, singular, as if the whole of it were one weight. And the verb is to lift and carry off, the verb used of taking up a burden or removing a stone. The next day John says the sentence again, shorter, to two of his own disciples, and they leave him and follow Jesus (John 1:35-36). The first two followers of Jesus in the fourth Gospel were sent by a sentence about a lamb.
ἀμνός amnós G286
apparently a primary word; a lamb:--lamb.
A lamb — the ordinary Greek word for a young sheep, and in the Greek Old Testament the word for the lamb offered at Passover and the two lambs offered every day. It occurs only four times in the New Testament, and every one of the four is about sacrifice: the Baptist’s sentence twice, Philip reading Isaiah 53 to the Ethiopian, and Peter’s "precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish or spot." Revelation uses a different word, a diminutive, for the Lamb on the throne, and that word has the eleventh lesson to itself. This one is the word of the altar.
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Four lambs in one word
A hearer at the Jordan had four lambs in memory, and the sentence does not choose among them.
“Abraham said, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they both went together.” Genesis 22:8 · WEB
God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son: Abraham’s answer to Isaac on the way up the mountain, the first time God and a lamb stand in one sentence.
“Your lamb shall be without defect, a male a year old. You shall take it from the sheep or from the goats.” Exodus 12:5 · WEB
Your lamb shall be without defect, a male a year old: the Passover lamb, chosen by every household, whose blood on the door turned the destroyer aside.
“The one lamb you shall offer in the morning; and the other lamb you shall offer at evening;” Exodus 29:39 · WEB
The one lamb you shall offer in the morning, and the other lamb you shall offer at evening: the daily offering, burning on the altar every day of Israel’s history from Sinai to the Romans.
“He was oppressed, yet when he was afflicted he didn’t open his mouth. As a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he didn’t open his mouth.” Isaiah 53:7 · WEB
As a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he didn’t open his mouth: the servant who bore the sin of many, in the chapter the Ethiopian was reading.
Readers have argued which of the four John meant, and some have added a fifth, the conquering lamb of the Jewish apocalypses, since the Baptist was expecting judgment. The Gospel that records the sentence answers by how it ends: Jesus dies on the afternoon the Passover lambs are killed, with a bunch of hyssop at his mouth and not one bone broken, and John quotes the Passover rule to say so. The series takes all four lambs as meant, in order, because the New Testament uses all four.
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The sin of the world
Every lamb in the Old Testament took away something for someone: the Passover lamb spared a house, the daily lamb covered a nation for a day, the Day of Atonement goats cleansed the sanctuary for a year. The Baptist’s lamb takes away the sin of the world, and the letter to the Hebrews says why the others could not.
For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins. — Hebrews 10:4 · WEB
Read the comment on A Body You Prepared for Me
It is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins. The sacrifices were not a mistake and not a fraud; the same letter says God commanded them and calls them a shadow of the good to come. A shadow is thrown by something real. The animals could not take away sin, and were never asked to; they were asked to point, every morning and evening for fifteen centuries, at the one who could. Hebrews says that plainly, and the Old Testament says it in its own way, when the prophets tell Israel that God does not delight in the blood of bulls or lambs and wants a broken spirit instead. The lamb was a sign. What it signified is the subject of this series.
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The road this series walks
Lessons two to five are the rituals: Abraham’s mountain, the Passover door, the daily lamb and the sin offering, the Day of Atonement. Lessons six and seven are the prophecies: Isaiah’s servant, and the pierced one of Psalm 22 and Zechariah. Lesson eight is the cross, told as John tells it, at the hour of the lambs. Lessons nine to twelve are the question the lamb raises and the New Testament’s answer: righteousness credited to a person who believes, faith alone and the works that follow it, the Lamb on the throne, and the clean garments a justified person wears. At each step the lesson asks what the ritual or the prophecy said on its own ground, and then what the New Testament did with it. Where a reading is contested, it is marked: Isaiah’s servant, Daniel’s weeks, the scapegoat, James and Paul.
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What the sentence asks
It asks the reader to look. Behold is an order, and the Baptist gave it to people who were looking at him. Everything the series will show, the altars and the prophets and the arguments about faith, is there so that a reader can do what the two disciples did at the Jordan: hear the sentence, and turn and follow the one it pointed at.
Read John 1:29-37 and then Genesis 22:1-8. Write down which of the four lambs you hear first in the Baptist’s sentence, and why that one; then write what the two disciples did with the sentence, in a line.
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