Christology Through Figures
By Jerry Batson, Th.D.
Special to The Alabama Baptist
The biblical figure of a lamb can be a window through which we see truths related both to the person of Christ and His work. The nature of a lamb makes it an instructive figure for several aspects of the person of Christ: meekness and innocence leap immediately to mind. People have often used the expressions “meek as a lamb” and “innocent as a lamb” as ways of communicating these characteristics. To be sure, the two qualities find their height of demonstration in Christ — He walked in this world totally without self-seeking ambitions or moral blemishes.
Unblemished
When God gave His chosen people instructions about the Passover feast, He specified that it should feature a sacrificial lamb, and He was quite clear: “Your lamb shall be without blemish” (Ex. 12:5).
The unblemished lamb prefigured the unblemished or sinless Son of God. First Peter 1:18–19 reminds us that our spiritual redemption comes by means of “the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.”
God chose John the Baptist to be the forerunner of His incarnate Son at the outset of His earthly mission. In faithfulness to his God-assigned task, John chose to introduce Christ as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The figure of a sacrificial lamb became one of the earliest by which people were called to understand the Messiah’s mission. Hebrews 9:28 puts it succinctly: “Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many.”
Centuries before He came, the prophet Isaiah painted a word picture of what happened to Christ at the cross: “He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth” (53:7).
God’s eternal plan
The climactic book of the Bible uses the figure of a lamb to illumine God’s eternal plan for saving sinners, in which He gave His only begotten Son, declaring Him to be “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8).
Before Jesus was born and even before the world was created, God envisioned the time when His Lamb would need to come into the world to die for the world.
The person and work of Christ were not a last-minute emergency plan necessitated by human sin but were integral to God’s eternal plan.
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