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The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”1
Every year I struggle to put into words the birth and death of Jesus. I feel like it is beyond my ability to describe the weight of God’s love that He expressed through His Son. It is one thing for someone to tell you how much they love you, but it is another when they show you.
God wrote a story from the beginning not only to tell us that He loves us but to put it on display. He used the scourging, beating, and humiliating crucifixion of His Son as an eternal picture of His love. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.2
There is no greater love than someone dying for someone else. Jesus knew what He was coming to do. He knew He was coming to die. There was no greater way for Him to show us His love.
Jesus was the slain Lamb from before the foundation of the world3 and He is the slain Lamb for eternity4. Even in His resurrected body, He forever has holes in His hands and a wound in His side. When that awaited day comes and we see Him face to face, we will still be looking at the slain Lamb.
For all of eternity, every time we look at Jesus, we will remember when He died for us when we were filthy sinners. We will remember how we were separated from our Maker, sentenced to hell, but then ransomed by the blood of an innocent, perfect Lamb.
When we should have been hung on that cross, we now get to behold it. We are like those who ministered to Jesus to Golgotha, beholding the gruesome sight of extravagant love.5 It is beauty that we hardly know. It is beauty that belongs to a kingdom not of this world.
Faith is not a feeling. The cross is foolish to our human minds but it is the power of God that saves. As words fail us, we look. We read. We seek. We behold. We believe.
Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!6
John 1:29
John 15:13
Revelation 13:8
Revelation 5:6, John 20:27
Matthew 27:55-56
Revelation 5:12