Sometimes, we have experiences that are so
meaningful that just one word brings back a host of memories. Let me give a couple of examples – graduation. Vacation. April 15th. Christmas. Lamb.
We need a little help with this word, because we don’t celebrate Passover, the day when the Jews were captive in Egypt and saved their lives by killing a lamb and sprinkling blood from the lamb on the doors of their homes.
This is such an odd custom and it involved finding a perfect lamb and killing it on Passover night, eating the whole lamb together as a family in a hurry, with the blood painted on the doorsteps. On the first Passover, this custom literally saved their lives.
If you have ever been in a serious accident or been with a loved one who was very sick, you may remember even small details as clearly as though it were yesterday. When I was small, my family knew someone who was very ill and wrote a poem before she died called ‘From the window of Room 405’ That was her room at the hospital and now I am able to still remember it 40 years later.
That’s the same idea with Passover and the Lamb. The lambs used that first time saved their lives from God’s judgment and so they started an annual celebration. Since evil came into the world, all the world’s great faiths and philosophers have tried to figure out what to do to reclaim lives. Most of those answers come down to the point, we must pay for our sins.
The Christian answer has always been that God will not accept our own payments because only pure offerings are accepted. The Lamb was the symbol of purity for the Jews and even for us, we have very positive feelings about a lamb and its innocence.
Killing the lamb and painting the door seems grotesque. As we are forced to wonder why a good God would have ordered this destruction, we suddenly see our sin from God’s perspective. God cannot stand to be in our presence with our sins and issues unless there has been a pure sacrifice to cover our sin and hide it from God’s eyes.
We’re shocked because we generally see ourselves as nice people. A few Sundays ago, we talked about how God helps us see ourselves more fearlessly and honestly. Paul says, my righteousness is like filthy rags after cleaning the car. God keeps giving us pictures that what we think of as small issues in life are deadly sins. A sacrificial offering is needed.
And we’re shocked because the sacrifice of the lamb makes us so welcome and accepted in God’s presence. We all have some secret deficiency that we fear disqualifies us from really being accepted by God. We hate to think about it, perhaps haven’t told our families, perhaps try to deny to ourselves that it is even an issue.
You know what? In God’s eyes, it doesn’t cause shame if the sacrificial offering is also there. The lamb was not for Jews who were already better than anyone else. The lamb was for people who had their issues, but they knew that God’s justice required more than their feeble efforts. There had to be an idea of sacrifice of something pure and God received that offering as though they had cleaned up their lives.
I take great comfort from the life of David. He was the greatest of all Jewish heroes and one of Jesus titles is Thou Son of David. But David also had a secret. He had lust for an affair as a married man. If your secret deficiency is lust or an affair, I hope you see immediately how wonderful God’s plan is. There is still hope for you to get the title of God’s hero. And David’s story goes further because he orders the woman’s husband to be placed into the fighting and then troops around him withdrawn so that he is overwhelmed by the enemy and killed.
God accepted David because he returned to Lord with sorrow and an offering for guilt. What a wonderful picture even if your secret deficiency is murderous rage.
The lambs were only a picture of the sacrifice that was needed. Jewish religion evolved and soon a lamb was sacrificed each morning and each evening at the temple for the nation. One of the public works projects in Jesus’ time was for more water at the temple, because the blood of the sacrifices overwhelmed sanitation at the temple in Jerusalem.
And so, in time came Jesus, Lamb of God. Hear words in the Bible from Peter, 1 Peter 1:18-21; “knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.’ Jesus offers himself as a perfect sacrifice so that with all our secret deficiencies, we get acceptance from God.
We are building a community of God at this church. I hope it is a place where shame is dropped and we can be honest and supportive as we help each other to new life. And if you came today, perhaps drawn by the season, and you are dealing with secret deficiencies, then I invite you to receive Jesus as an offering for those things which trouble you and I invite you to receive this group of Christians as a place of encouragement as you journey in life.
Jesus is the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sin of the world. Let us receive the Christ.
