What do you believe about Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins?
You know, there are people today who don’t even believe that sin is a problem; maybe even, that there is no such thing as sin at all! In fact, what we know as sin, many people call “having a good time”, or “being a party animal”, or maybe just, “doing what comes naturally”. Well in truth, that’s exactly what sin is…living our lives in the natural way; natural that is, as described in Romans 1.28 which states that, “man refused to retain God in his knowledge, so that He gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient”…that is, the natural man, doing the natural thing…living according to his natural instincts rather than according to the Spirit of God and the ways and will of God. But as I’ve said, although sin is not a problem for the most of mankind, it sure is for God, from before the universe began! So God chose a Lamb, to deal once and for all with the problem of sin; and from our narrow, short-sighted, time-limited perspective, that created another problem, because that Lamb was going to have to die! But for God, that wasn’t a problem at all, because His Lamb would be resurrected from death to life, making that same resurrection power available to us, when we choose to believe and receive!
Now just a little bit of history… back in the original garden, very shortly after God had put His sin-solving plan into action, even before Adam had been banished from Eden, God had provided the skin of an animal to cover his and Eve’s nakedness; and later on, the sons of Adam and Eve are recorded as offering sacrifices in worship of God, the animal sacrifice being the acceptable one. And later still, we have the record of Abraham offering a ram in sacrifice to God in place of his son, Isaac; and finally, the procedure was firmly established by God as recorded in Exodus 12, when the children of Israel were led out of slavery in Egypt, and were commanded to kill a lamb and paint their door posts with its’ blood, in order to escape the killing spree of the death angel of all their first born males as he swept across the Egyptian landscape! You see, there could only be one cure for the sickness of sin…the shedding of blood, and all throughout the record of scripture, many lambs died, but none of them were able to accomplish the eternal purposes of God, until Jesus, God’s Perfect Lamb as John the Baptist said, “…Who taketh away the sin of the world.” That is exactly the reason, as Jn. 1.14 says, “…the Word became flesh…”.
That really is, the basis of John’s gospel account. The Word became flesh…so that for one thing, He could relate to us and to our beings and doings on our own level; for another, so that we would have an example to live by throughout our earthly journey; and most importantly of all, so that He could die! Without His timely death, we could never experience for ourselves, His timely resurrection; we would only experience “the just recompense of our error”, as Ro. 1.27 says. And God has testified of the facts, so lets look first of all, at…
1. The witness of God, Jn. 1.14, 16-18
This is mind-bending truth. We have seen that God spoke the worlds into existence; now we read that God spoke, and His Word became flesh. How high and how deep is that?! The Word became flesh and dwelt among us; and not in royal comfort among us, but in the same rough and painful and temporary existence as the rest of us. And, as the Perfect Lamb of God, we behold His glory; that is, God’s glory, having always been present and at work in creation, but now, visible for all to see and to know, being ”full of grace and truth”, because He chose to give Himself up to us, in the very Person of His Son, Jesus (note Exodus 34.5-7a). That is exactly Jesus; and do you know, John does not use the word “grace” again in his entire gospel? You might say that “grace” is the final word. It’s all of grace, and it’s all of God; just as we saw in the last lesson in 1.16, even grace on top of grace! It’s inexhaustible, and it’s available to everyone, only limited as v. 12 says, to those who believe and receive.
And so ”the Father hath declared Him”! (vs. 18)
Cont’d in Lesson 2, Part 2…
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