Behold the Lamb of God. Russ Ramsey. 2011. 160 pages. [Source: Bought]
God’s promised Messiah was a merciful gift of love to a people who needed both mercy and love. He would come to them in all their pain, brokenness, and struggle, and make everything new.
They were to worship the Lord, and they were to understand why they should. The call to worship wasn’t a detached decree to render affection to an unknown deity—the God who called them was anything but detached. This command was a call to remember. They were to rehearse in their minds and hearts and homes this story—their story—the story of how the Maker of heaven and earth had called their people to himself and bound himself to them as their God. In their creativity and in their learning, in their working and in their resting, in their building up and in their tearing down, they were to love him. They were to love him as whole people, in all their weakness and in all their strength. On their best days and on their worst, in the darkest hours of their loneliest nights, and at the tables of their most abundant feasts, they were to love him. This was the heart of Israel’s religion: love. Only divine love made sense of the world. This love went beyond a mere feeling. This love was doctrine. Israel’s story was a story of being kept, and the only reasonable response was to love the Keeper.They were never to depart from this harmony of story and statute. It was to be their life. They were to teach it to their families. They were to recount the wondrous deeds of their almighty God, never stopping until the story was so ingrained in their children that those little ones not only understood that this story was, in fact, their story, but also that they would be able to tell it well when they had children of their own.It was a religion of relationship, but this relational response of love to a singular, omnipotent God was so gloriously uncommon in those days that it must have sounded to many like a tall tale. And it is. But a true one.Woven throughout the story are all of humanity’s wrath and greed and lust and gluttony and sloth and envy and pride—together in force with all of their consequences. But through that darkness shine the bright rays of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. (Gal 5:22) It is the story of evil against good, of darkness locked in an epic struggle to snuff out the light forever. Will the darkness prevail in the end, or will the light overcome the darkness? (Jn 1:5)This, ultimately, is what the story is about. It is a tale filled with people in trouble, all living somewhere between wandering and homecoming, between devastation and restoration, between transgression and grace. Every mortal character in the story needs rescue, but they have all turned aside, and together they have become corrupt. There is no one who does good, not even one. (Psalm 14:3)
Since the beginning, this story has had an end—a glorious end. God’s call on the lives of his people, ultimately, is to himself—though it would come at a greater cost than anyone could imagine. The story ends with the maker and lover of the souls of men drawing his people to himself—purchasing their redemption through the lifeblood of his own Son. God did not spare his Son but gave him for us all. And if this is true, how will he not also, through his son, graciously give us all things? (Rom 8:32) The tale is a tall one, but it’s true.
There lay a chasm between God and his people that ran as deep as the sin in the hearts of men. It was one thing if their holy God deigned to grace them with his presence, but it was another thing entirely for one of his people to presume that they held the right to ascend to his holy throne. Saul thought he could bend the providence of God around the persuasion of his sacrifices, even though he had never been anointed to act as his people’s priest. Saul’s presumption was a foreshadowing of how he would become everything the Lord warned his people about. Any king who thinks he commands the God who appointed him to rule will come to regard himself as the Lord over his people, as though they belong to him.
The great king was a great sinner, but God would never leave him. As it had been since the days of Adam, God’s promises didn’t depend on anyone but himself to keep them.
So tell them, Isaiah. Even as the sparks of Assyrian exile are fanning into flame, tell them God will send his Messiah. Tell them he hasn’t forgotten his promise to Abraham, that he hasn’t forgotten them. Tell those living under the blood red sky of the purifying fires that a new light is about to dawn. (Isa 9:2) Tell them that God’s rescue is coming. Isaiah did. But from as far back as anyone could remember, there remained this irrefutable fact: God cannot be hurried. To be helped by God, it seemed, was to wait on him. With Assyria poised to have their way, the people of Judah didn’t think they had the luxury of time. They needed to be rescued, redeemed, saved.
What else could they do? They could pray. They could pray with all their hearts. Come. Messiah, come! And they could fast so that their thoughts and consciences might be clear. Come. Messiah, come! They could study God’s word so that their lives might better prepare a place for him, that they might usher in his advent. They could sing songs in the night over their children and over their beloved spouses. Come. Messiah, come! They could bid him come in the midst of their mourning, even with their cheeks still wet with the grief of death. Come. Messiah, come! Oh, that their Redeemer would come! But how, Isaiah wondered, could this be? How would his people even know the Messiah if they saw him? What glorious implications! God was at work in his world, responding perfectly in the fullness of time to every need, every wound, and every desire. Someday, in a stable outside of Bethlehem, a child would be born. A son would be given. He would be wounded for his people’s transgressions. He would be crushed for their iniquities. Upon him would be the chastisement that would bring them peace, and with his stripes we would be healed.
To worship God is to dwell on who he is, to consider his handiwork. (Job 37:14) Often worship requires stillness. Stillness allows a mind to hold complicated thoughts without losing them. Silence was a gift God gave to Zechariah, and the old man put it to work.
The old priest would be among the last of his kind. When the Lord loosed Zechariah’s tongue, everyone present felt the weight of John’s divine purpose. What would this child become? This question gave rise to so many others. “If the Messiah is coming and his people are called to bear witness to him, what then will our lives be? What will our sons’ lives be? What will our daughters’ lives be?”
Zechariah understood that though his life’s work as a priest was insufficient and thus unending, if God were to preside as the priest over his people, and if he were to select the atoning sacrifice his people needed, that sacrifice would be sufficient. It would be perfect. And the river of blood would cease to flow from the heart of the Holy Place where God’s presence dwelt.
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