James Nisbet Commentary - John 1:29 - 1:29

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James Nisbet Commentary - John 1:29 - 1:29


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THE LAMB OF GOD

‘The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, Which taketh away the sin of the world.’

Joh_1:29

John stands before the ministry in the same attitude as that in which the herald angel stands before the infancy, both the one and the other appealing to us to join our song with theirs—‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ What, then, did John see as the sun’s rays smote upon him, and caused him to utter this voice?

I. He saw a revelation of goodness; he saw a sight which he had never seen before, not even when he thought of his good old father and his blameless mother—a sight which he had never seen in Pharisee or religious Israelite as they flocked out to hear him, and to be baptized; he saw a good Man, a perfect Man, a Man such as man was meant to be; Whom he called a Lamb, in all that was symbolised in that title, of freedom from blemish or taint of ill, even from those faults of good men which so often cause their good to be evil spoken of.

II. ‘Behold the Lamb of God.’—John saw more than an image, an ideal of spotless purity and blameless life; Christ to him was not only his Master and his Pattern; He was his Saviour; while he speaks of the Lamb of God, the Lamb which God Himself provided for the sacrifice, as of old He provided the sacrifice for Abraham. The Lamb, which might be spoken of as ‘of God,’ in its Divine and unblemished nature, this Lamb recalls to him the smoking altar of the daily morning and evening sacrifice in the Temple, the paschal victims which, perhaps, were even then passing him in flocks, being driven up to Jerusalem for the feast—just as the shepherds at Bethlehem also, who, on Jewish testimony, are said to have been guarding the flocks used in sacrifice, would have heard with wonder of a Saviour, of a salvation mightier than any which the blood of sacrifice was able to procure.

III. ‘Which taketh away the sin of the world.’—Here is the last and strongest appeal of Christmas. ‘For this purpose the Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil.’ ‘The sin of the world.’ This is something more than the individual sins of human beings, the corruption of humanity, the blight of failure, and the curse of frustrated purpose known as sin. That is one of the saddest and most ironical sides of our modern Christmas rejoicing—that sin should be regarded as an appropriate exhibition of joy at its extinction. But the joy of this mighty deliverance wrought is a great one. It almost staggers the imagination to think of a world without sin, to think of London without sin, a golden city of fair streams and unpolluted life; and yet the possibility is there, the victory is won. There is only one line of fortresses which holds out, and that is human free-will. And the free-will which I know most about is my own. Strange it is that that which, on the testimony of all experience and of all language, is our greatest bane, should still hold its ground by the free-will of man. Yet so it is, and nothing but the surrender of man’s free-will to God is going to alter it. No civilisation, no education, no change of circumstance, no knowledge of life and its conditions, is going to alter it. It must be the surrender of the free-will of man to God, which is to put into motion this purchased deliverance.

Rev. Canon Newbolt.

Illustration

‘In some parts of England the old custom still lingers of ringing on Christmas Eve the devil’s knell. As the bell peals out at midnight this is to symbolise in the poetry of religion that the power of the devil was crippled by the Virgin Birth on Christmas Day.’