"The Lamb God Provided"
Genesis 22:1-14
August 17, 1997

The Bible prophesies the future in many different ways. There are, of course, passages in which a prophet or an apostle or the Lord himself tells his contemporaries what will transpire in days to come. We have encountered that kind of prophetic teaching already in Genesis. For example, God told Abraham that he would make him into a great nation and that all the world would be blessed through him, but also that before his descendants would take possession of the Promised Land, they would have a four hundred year sojourn in Egypt.

But, God in his genius, did not provide his people with knowledge of things to come only in this one way. So central to his people's true faith was the unfolding of his plan of salvation in history, so crucial to their faith in him was their understanding of that plan, that God wove into their own history many anticipations of those developments that were still future for them, especially the incarnation, suffering, death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, the seed of Abraham. This is what for ages has been referred to as typology, prophecy in the form of persons, places, things, and events.

A type in this sense is a person, thing, or event that represents or symbolizes another, especially another person, thing, or event that is still to come. For example, Israel's deliverance from Egypt, her wandering in the wilderness for forty years, and her eventual entrance into the promised land is, in the Bible and was for the ancient people of God a type, a symbolic representation of the life of faith. A man or a woman is delivered by the grace and power of God from bondage to his or her sin and death -- that is the passover and the exodus --, makes a pilgrimage through the desert of this world, and then, finally, enters heaven, the promised land. Black spirituals, as you know, made a great deal of this typology: "I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, coming for to carry me home..."

The offices God appointed for the Old Testament kingdom and church were types, or symbolic representations of the coming one who would be the Savior of his people. God appointed prophets and priests and kings to rule and to protect and to save his people, and we are not surprised to find that, in the NT, Jesus is represented as a prophet, a priest, and a king, indeed, the prophet, the priest, and the King of Kings.

It is the Lord's sovereign rule of history and his infinitely exact knowledge of the future that makes typology possible. He knows what is to come, what person and what events lie at the center of human history and of the salvation of mankind, and so he is able to weave into the life of mankind and, especially, the life of his people, all manner of anticipations, enacted prophesies of what is to come and in this way teach his people what his promises mean long before they come to pass. They also help to a fuller understanding and appreciation of the history of our salvation those of us for whom the great events of that history now lie in the past.

We have such a type before us in the account of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. The symbolism is so obvious that no one who believes the Scripture to be the Word of God has ever doubted that we have in this account of Abraham sacrificing Isaac an enacted prophesy of the death of Jesus Christ, the true seed of Abraham. Think of the precise parallels, almost all of which the Bible either explicitly or implicitly calls our attention to at some point.

The offering was to be Abraham's son, his own seed, Isaac, the child of the promise; but, as it happened, it was Abraham's promised son, his Son of all sons, Jesus Christ, the Seed of Abraham, as Paul calls him. But, that Son, was not only Abraham's descendant, he was God's Son, God the Son. If God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac for him, it was only because he was in due time to sacrifice his own Son for Abraham.

And, then, notice the place of the sacrifice, Moriah, the Mount of God, the place where the Temple would eventually be built and the sacrifices of the temple worship offered to God day and night, the place, not far from which, the great sacrifice, of which all these other sacrifices were but pictures and anticipations and prophecies would finally be offered.

And then, consider that Abraham was required to sacrifice Isaac, until God stopped him. What is such a sacrifice? It was already a part of the religious life of God's people, it was to become more and more a part of their lives as sacrifice was enshrined in the law of Moses as the central act of worship for the people of God; but what did it mean? Well, take the teaching of the Pentateuch together -- the first five books of the Bible together -- and it is perfectly clear what such sacrifices portrayed. They were a symbolic representation of the deliverance of the worshipper from the guilt of his sin by means of the death, the execution really, of a substitute. It was a lamb or goat or bull, but always and only as a symbol. Believers in those days understood that perfectly. The blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin. But, such sacrifices pointed to the sacrifice of someone whose blood could take away sin, whose punishment in our place, could remove our guilt and make us, sinful and guilty as we are in ourselves, forever righteous in God's sight. OT sacrifice is a picture of what theologians call "penal substitutionary atonement," that is, a making of sinners acceptable to a holy God by means of a substitute upon whom falls the guilt and therefore the punishment of their sins. The substitute is punished in the sinner's place and God's holiness is satisfied for his sin and God is free, in keeping with his perfect justice, to treat him as righteous and bless and reward him accordingly.

It is this idea of sacrifice, this theory of atonement, of reconciliation, of ransom, of redemption -- of our salvation through the price paid by another in our place -- that lies beneath so many of the Bible's most famous summaries of the gospel, of its message of salvation.

"...he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all."

"...God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us....when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son..."

"God made him -- that is Christ -- who had no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him."

"The Son of God came not to be ministered to, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many."

"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us."

"Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world."

"But now Christ has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as man is destined to die once, and after that the judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people..."

"...when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. Since that time he waits for his enemies to made his footstool, because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy."

Christ is the Lamb that God provided to make sacrifice for his people, to come in their place and take upon himself the punishment their sins deserved and required from the hand of a just and holy God.

And, still more, here in Genesis 22 it was God who provided that Lamb. Abraham did not provide it-- he had only his son to offer, who could have made no one right with God for Isaac was a sinner himself. God provided the Ram there on the mountain and God provided the Lamb of God for the salvation of his people, and that Lamb was God's own Son. "For God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life." "So loved... As hard as it was for Abraham to contemplate sacrificing Isaac, it was infinitely harder for the Father actually to sacrifice his Son! And when Jesus began his work and when he was about to end it, God spoke from heaven and said, "This is my Son in whom I am well-pleased." And Paul says that "God -- that is, God the Father -- presented Him -- that is, Jesus -- as a sacrifice of atonement..." And, in a passage that certainly harks back to this passage in Genesis 22, Paul later says, "He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all -- how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things." This does not exhaust the parallels between this scene and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, of course. Do you not think, for example, that at some point Abraham said to God in heaven, and perhaps even Isaac to his father, Father, take this cup from me, but not my will, but thine be done.

Once, in a conversation with a group of religious leaders, the Lord Jesus told them, "Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and as glad." Now, when did Abraham see Christ's day? On what occasion did Abraham see, as it were, the coming of Christ, his promised seed, that coming that would be the salvation of the world? Upon what occasion in Abraham's life history could we fix more probably than just this occasion -- when God provided a ram in the place of Isaac for a sacrifice. The Lord seems to say that Abraham had rejoiced at the thought of seeing his day and that then he did see it. Was this the sight of Christ that Abraham had -- there on Mount Moriah, in the lamb provided for sacrifice? We cannot say for sure, but I don't doubt that Abraham did understand very well the larger significance of what God had done.

Christ for us, his death our punishment taken in our place. There is the exact center of our Christian faith with all of its other doctrines radiating out from that center. And all of that already here in anticipation, in an enacted prophecy, 2,000 years before Christ came into the world.

But, you know that people object to this entire notion of Christ suffering and dying in our place as the sacrificial Lamb of God. They always have -- they did when the gospel was first preached to the world and they do for the same reasons today. They don't like what is implied in that entire doctrine about the holiness of God which threatens them or about their own sinfulness and guilt which offends their pride. Nor do they like what is here suggested about our complete dependence upon Christ and his work for our salvation.

And, sad to say, much of that opposition has always come from within the church and does today. Whether it is the popular Christian writer Madeleine L'Engle complaining about all the blood and the sacrificial death that lies in the middle of historic Christianity or a seminary professor at an erstwhile evangelical divinity school suggesting that the notion of God sending his Son to be a sacrifice for sin contributes to child abuse, there is always abroad a visceral objection to this central affirmation of our faith, that Christ was the sacrifice for our sins.

Or nowadays you have the popular objection to any Christianity that sets forth Jesus Christ as the only Savior of sinners, his death as the only conceivable solution to man's estrangement from God, and faith in him and no other as the one thing absolutely necessary for any human being if he or she would be saved.

Did you notice a recent article in the local paper on the Compline Service every Sunday night at St. Mark's in Seattle. Its founder suggested that its popularity -- hundreds of people, many of them young adults attend that service and it has been that popular for years now -- has a lot to do with the popularity of Eastern philosophy. "Its pretty much a service for meditation, and that was very consistent with the stuff Alan Watts, the Zen scholar, and Timothy Leary, the counter-culture figure were saying," says the choir director. "Kesha Young, 22, likes the service because it is not preachy. 'It's for thinking and being mindful of what you're doing, thinking without having anything forced on you.'" [TNT, 3-16-97] How fast do you suppose they would empty that church if some minister took five minutes in that service to remind the assembled congregation that God is holy, but he is also love, and in his holy love has made a way for them to be reconciled to him, sinners that they are. That he sent his only Son, Christ Jesus, to be a sacrifice for their sins. If he took just a minute to urge on them faith in Jesus Christ for their salvation and eternal life? You can sing that message in Latin to a dark church and folk love it. Say it in plain English and they are not so pleased!

But, Christianity without this at the center, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, is a denatured and despoiled Christianity. Here is B. B. Warfield:

The study of the great Greek and Roman moralists of the Empire, he tells us, leaves upon my own mind a strong conviction that the fundamental difference between heathenism of all shades and Christianity is to be discovered in the doctrine of Vicarious Sacrifice, that is to say, in the Passion of our Lord. This is as much to say that not only is the doctrine of the sacrificial death of Christ embodied in Christianity as an essential element of the system, but in a very real sense it constitutes Christianity. It is this which differentiates Christianity from other religions. Christianity did not come into the world to proclaim a new morality and, sweeping away all the supernatural props by which men were wont to support their trembling, guilt-stricken souls, to throw them back on their own right arms to conquer a standing before God for themselves. It came to proclaim the real sacrifice for sin which God had provided in order to supersede all the poor fumbling efforts which men had made and were making to provide a sacrifice for sin for themselves; and, planting men's feet on this, to bid them go forward. It was in this sign that Christianity conquered, and it is in this sign alone that it continues to conquer. We may think what we will of such a religion. What cannot be denied is that Christianity is such a religion. [B. B. Warfield, Person and Work of Jesus Christ, pp. 425-426]

Another wise man once wrote:

Any reaction of ours from a too exacting God which leaves us with but a kindly God, a patient and a pitiful, is a reaction which sends us over the edge of the moral world. [Such a form of Christianity] has no due sense of the human tragedy, the moral tragedy of the race. It lacks the note of doom and the searching realism of the greatest moral seers. It is no more true to Shakespeare than to the Bible, to Dante than to Paul. It robs faith of its energy, its virility, its command, its compass, and its solemnity. The temperature of religion falls. The horizon of the soul contracts. Piety becomes prosaic, action conventional, goodness domestic, and mercy but kind. We have churches of the nicest, kindest people, who have nothing apostolic or missionary, who never knew the soul's despair or its breathless gratitude. God becomes either an...inert God, or a God who acts amiably...without the consuming fire and the great white throne. He is not dramatic in the great sense of the word. He is not adequate to history. He is not on the scale of the race.... We tend then to a Christianity without force, passion, or effect; a suburban piety...unfit to cope with the actual moral case of the world, its giant souls and hearty sinners. We cannot deal to any purpose with the...exceeding sinfulness and deep damnation of the race. [P.T. Forsyth, Positive Preaching & the Modern Mind, pp. 354-356]

Truer words were never spoken! And it is true not only of that form of Christianity that dismisses or relegates to the periphery Christ's terrible sin-bearing for us, his death as the lamb of God, it is true of you and me, day by day. The more his sacrifice is the animating principle of our lives -- with the divine holiness and the enormity of our sin and the immensity of divine love, -- both Father and Son so willing to bear the price of our sin and our salvation themselves -- that circle round that sacrifice -- the more we think and feel and live as real, authentic Christians. The less that sacrifice consumes us, the more banal and spiritless our Christianity becomes, however committed we may be to theory of our faith and however well others may continue to think of us.

It is when we say with Paul, "God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ" -- say it and mean it and feel it -- that everything else comes good in our walk with God, by which I mean that a way is made for the full measure of love, thanksgiving, devotion, fear and the sense of duty from which a great life of Christian holiness, and joy and Christian fruitfulness alone can come.

And so, take up now into your heart, this history from Genesis 22 -- with all of its pathos and deep emotion, with all of its purest and profoundest Christian theology, with all of its concentrated emphasis upon the Lamb that God himself provided, take it up, now, into your heart. And then, consider this.

If, in fact, this is our entire faith in a magnificent picture, if this is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, if this is the difference between life and death and heaven and hell for sinners such as we are and such as all men are, if this sacrifice is all that stands between us and the wrath of God which we so much deserve, if this is the open window through which we are given to see both the holiness and the tender mercy of the living God, and if this -- Christ for us, Christ in our place, as the Lamb of God -- is the fountain of all that is pure and good and beautiful in a Christian life, then surely it is our duty -- as the Bible and all wise Christians through the ages tell us it is -- to make his sacrifice for us the animating principle of our daily lives. It is not enough to give it the center place in our Christian theology -- if it belongs there, then it belongs as well -- for our theology is truth designed to be lived -- in the center place of our hearts and minds every day.

McCheyne said in one of his sermons: "Often the doctrine of Christ for me appears common, well-known, having nothing new in it; and I am tempted to pass it by and go to some scripture more [interesting]. This is the devil again -- a red-hot lie. Christ for us is ever new, ever glorious." [In Bonar, p. 176; 'Personal Reformation I] When I first read that, 20 years ago, I immediately wrote it down because it seemed to me so perfectly to express and unmask my own tendency. I am always thinking that I already know all about Christ and his sacrifice and that other subjects are now more interesting to me. How wrong; how foolish! I need nothing so much as the knowledge of Christ for me and I have hardly begun to explore the depths of that truth.

Or, hear Richard Hooker, in his immortal sermon on justification by faith alone. "Let it be counted folly, or phrenzy, or fury, or whatsoever, it is our wisdom and our comfort. We care for no other knowledge in the world but this: that man hath sinned and God hath suffered: that God hath made himself the sin of men, and that men are made the righteousness of God."

Now, you and I must take that lesson to heart. Christ made a righteousness for us as our sacrifice, and every day and every hour we are to put that righteousness on, like a robe -- another of the figures the Scripture uses to teach us how we stand before God not in our own righteousness -- for we had none -- but in Christ's, which is reckoned to us as if it belonged to us because he made it for us in our place.

Put on that robe you had nothing to do with weaving and sewing; put it on for your righteousness and your acceptance with God. Every morning put on that robe and every night lie down in it. Go out to work in that robe and come home again wearing it. Sit down with your children in that robe and let them see you wearing it always. Be married in that robe and love your husband or wife in that robe, and raise your children in that robe, grow old and then sick in that same robe then, finally, carry it with you into your grave with you when your life is done.

And, if you do, you will not only live with the delicious sense of being loved by God and with peace in your heart and with humility before others, you will not only strive and struggle to live a life worthy of the grace you have received and the Savior you have got in the Lamb of God, but when it is all done you will awake and go up to the great white throne dressed in that same robe and stand before God in that robe and, because you are wearing it, he will bid you enter heaven shining like the sun in that glorious robe of righteousness that Christ, the Lamb of God, wove for you when the Father sent him into the world and he became your sacrifice for sin.

O great Absolver! Grant my soul may wear
The lowliest garb of penitence and prayer,
Till, in the Father's courts, my glorious dress
Shall be the garment of Thy righteousness.

And,

When I stand before the throne
Dressed in beauty not my own;
When I see Thee as Thou art,
Love Thee with unsinning heart:
Then, Lord, shall I fully know,
Not till then, how much I owe.

And, until then,

Here is my robe, my refuge, and my peace,
Thy blood, Thy righteousness, O Lord! my God!

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