The Lamb of God

The first time I ever understood what the "Lamb of God" meant, I was entering our summer chapel at the Bible camp I attended each year.

The chapel itself was merely a shell of a building: windows, plywood, and visible rafters housing bats that swooped down during our singing.  But everyone knew this was where you had to behave and listen to important things.  In my last years at Bible Camp, I would be at the front, playing my guitar and leading campers in those same songs I sang on the donated pews.

So, this one particular week, as a counsellor, I walked into the chapel to see the guest speaker hanging homemade banners across the front.  Drawn on them with perfect cartoony strokes (he must've been quite the artist in his spare time) were pictures of lambs.  In black marker he'd outlined, in chronological order, various stories from the Bible in which a lamb was used to seek forgiveness of sins.

There was a lamb to represent the clothing Adam and Eve wore as they were cast out the garden.  There was the lamb Abraham sacrificed instead of his son Isaac.  There was the lamb that Jesus carried as the Good Shepherd, and so on...until the very end, the last lamb picture.  The ultimate lamb sacrifice:  Jesus as the Lamb of God.  He sacrificed himself for the forgiveness of our sins, and that morning in a dusty, bat-filled chapel, I fully understood.

Perhaps, like me, you feel uncomfortable with the idea that some living thing needed to be sacrificed for sins in our biblical history, or that it is still the description included in the Easter story.  But for one moment, it all made sense to me, and I relive it each Easter morning.

I pray, whether you are attending your home church with your parents, visiting a church with neighbours, or sitting at home with a bad cold (like me), that you would somehow be hit with the reality of what Easter really is, and that He is truly the Ultimate Lamb, sacrificed for you and your sins of the past, the present and the future.

Be blessed, for He is risen :)