Yes! There is Good News! 5.27.17

A few thousand years ago, an elderly father and his teenage son were walking up the side of a mountain, carrying only some wood, an ember to start a fire and a knife. The father told his servants that he and his son were going on ahead in order to worship God and would return soon. This worship would involve a sacrifice.

As they traveled up the path the boy turned to his father and said, “Father?” “Yes, my son?” the father replied. “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Father Abraham must have had a hard time controlling his emotions at this point for he knew what God had told him to do. “And God said, ‘Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.’”

With measured words and breath, (for this trek up the mountain was not easy for a man over a hundred years old) Abraham answered his son, “God will provide Himself a lamb for the burnt offering my son.”

This section of scripture, Genesis 22:1-14, is indeed a very difficult section to read. As a father myself, I can not imagine what must have been going through Abraham’s mind. Abraham was later called the “father of the faithful” and I guess we can see why. His faith was manifested in his obedience to God’s commands. (See James 2:20-24)

Let us fast forward some 2080 years and come to the banks of the Jordan River. We see a rough hewn, rugged man waist deep in the water and he is baptizing those who are coming to him from the surrounding area. All of a sudden he looks up and, motioning to a couple of his disciples, says, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Is there a connection here? Jesus had already been baptized by John when this event took place and at His baptism there came a voice from Heaven, “This is my Son, whom I love; with Him I am well pleased.” May I add that this was God’s Son, His only begotten Son? The parallels here are quite unmistakable.

The question I must ask at this time is: Why a Lamb?

Let us take a look at another unmistakable parallel. Some several hundred years after the episode with Abraham and Isaac, God told another man, Moses, to have the Israelites, who were in bondage to Pharaoh in Egypt, take a lamb and sacrifice it. This time they were to use the blood of the lamb and apply it to the door posts and lintels of the houses as a protection for the firstborn children. The Israelites were to take a lamb that was without defect, cook it over a fire and eat it, “Eat it in haste it is the Lord's Passover” (see Exodus 12 for this story).

The use of a “lamb” is one of the greatest themes in the scripture and we’ll take a closer look at this in our next article.