Jesus is the Perfect Lamb

Good morning, Salt Church. How's everybody doing? So, I was just thinking while we were singing that song, another thing we can put in here is, Jesus is worthy. So, this morning, we're going to continue on with our Jesus is series. And we're going through this series because it's very important that we know who Jesus is.

Because in the world today, we can make up our own Jesus. We can, you know, well, you know, I think Jesus is okay with me doing this, he's okay with me doing that. But it's so important that we have the right understanding of who he is from the Bible, from Scripture. And this is why we're doing this. So, many people today have a flawed view of who Jesus is.

They think that he was just an angel that came down from heaven. You know, they don't think that he was either fully God or fully man. And you have to have, you need to have both of those because he was both. You know, Jesus lived for 30 years on the earth, you know, with a family. He was raised as, you know, as Miss Miranda was saying.

You know, he had a family. He lived. He was born. He was born as one of us. So, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, verse 1 through 2, it says, You'll remember, friends, that when I came to you, I didn't try to impress you with polished speeches and the latest philosophy.

I deliberately kept it plain and simple. First Jesus and who he is. And then Jesus and what he did. Jesus crucified. So, we can really, when we take the Bible at its word, we can really keep things simple.

So, as Paul said, all we want to do is preach Jesus and what he did and Jesus crucified. So, this morning, we're going to look at Jesus as the perfect Lamb of God and what he did on the cross when he came to earth. So, John says in John 1, 29, the next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And this is actually very, very important because John knew already who Jesus was. God sent John ahead, John the Baptist, ahead of Jesus to prepare the way for him.

And so, when he said that, the Lamb of God, that term is mentioned over 104 times in Scripture. So, you can tell it's an important thing that God wants us to know. And 25% of that phrase is actually found in the book of Revelation. If you go and read later on, it talks about the Lamb of God in Revelation. So, in order for us to understand who Christ is and what he did, we need to go back to the Old Testament and figure out things that God did in the Old Testament that point the way to who Jesus Christ is.

So, if we go into the book of Exodus... We can see the story of Passover, and Passover is when the Jewish people were in the land of Egypt and they were slaves to Pharaoh, and so the Jewish people, when John said, this is the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, the Jewish people that were around him would have immediately understood who he was talking about and what their minds would have automatically gone straight back to the Passover and the Exodus, because it's something that they've done from the first night that they left, you know, when the Passover actually happened, till now. Jewish people today still celebrate Passover. So in the Old Testament, we can see this in Exodus 11, 4 through 5, which says, So Moses said, this is what the Lord says. About midnight I will go throughout Egypt.

Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the female slave, who is at her hand mill, and the firstborn of the cattle, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. So you can see that God spared nobody in this plague. The firstborn of Pharaoh died, and even the firstborn of the handmaids died, and even the animals. So even the animals were under this last plague. So this is actually the last plague that God sent through Egypt, right before the Israelites were delivered by God out of Egypt.

During the plague, God told the Israelites, He told Moses to tell them to take a perfect lamb that they found, sacrifice the lamb, and then they were to take the blood from the lamb, and they put it on the doorposts of their house, on the sides. They put it on the top of the doorframe, and then God said, when the death angel passes over, he won't, nothing in your house, no one in your house will die. You'll be protected. And this is read in the Old Testament in Exodus 12, verse 13. It says, The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you.

No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt. So that's where we get Passover, is God passed over them so that nobody in their house would die, and they would be delivered from bondage. So they were actually delivered from death first, and then they were delivered from bondage when they left Egypt. So the celebration of the Passover, as I said earlier, is still something that Jewish people do today. They actually have a meal that they prepare on Passover on a cedar plate, and everything that they have on the plate is symbolic and committed.

Memorates the day, or the night, or whenever Passover happened, so they would remember it forever. Easter week is also actually always on the same week as Passover, so that's why every year you're like, wait, when is Easter at? I'm not sure, is it in March, or is it in April? So God wanted to keep us on our toes, and He's like, okay, I'm going to use the Jewish Passover, so you never know, it's never going to be on the same day. So the Jewish calendar is a little different than our calendar, so it's on, so Passover is on the same day every year for the Jewish calendar, but Easter is a different day every year because of that.

So today we actually celebrate Palm Sunday, and this is the day when Jesus entered into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, and they took palm branches, the people took palm branches, they cut them off, and they actually laid them at His feet as He was passing by. And when we read in Matthew, Matthew says, a very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of Him and those that followed shouted, Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven.

So that day they celebrated Jesus coming into Jerusalem, you know, as a triumphant king, and then just not even a couple days later, He was brought before Pontius Pilate and then crucified. So coming up this next week, Jesus was actually crucified on Good Friday, which is this Friday, Passover day. And so during the Passover time frame on that day, on Passover day, the Jewish people would actually be taking their Passover lamb that God had instructed them to kill and sacrifice back, you know, in the Old Testament. And so in the morning around 9 a.m.

, they would all be taking the lamb, you know, and you know, this wouldn't just be one, this would be hundreds of lambs. So these lambs were sacrificed at the same exact time, excuse me, that Jesus was being crucified on the cross. So just think about that picture in your mind, you know, Jesus, the Lamb of God, is on the cross dying for us. And at the same time, all these lambs are being sacrificed by these, you know, by the Jewish people. And then later on during the day, after Jesus had died and they put him in the tomb, that was the same time that the Jewish people would have taken the lambs that they would have sacrificed, that they sacrificed, and they were instructed to roast it in the oven.

So they were putting their lambs in to the oven and roasting them at the same time that Jesus was put inside the tomb and he was buried. So all these things are, are pictures for us, you know, of what, of what God did. Not did in the Old Testament. All these things point the way to Jesus Christ. And Paul says in 1 Corinthians, excuse me, sorry.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians, for Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. So even Paul puts application to the book of Exodus and lets us know that he links the lamb from the Passover in Exodus to Jesus Christ. So there are actually three similarities that teach us some things about Jesus as the lamb. And the first one is that the lamb was perfect. Exodus 12 and 5 says, The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats.

So God instructed them to take a lamb that was perfect, without blemish. It couldn't be lame. It couldn't be halt. You know, any of those things. They had to find a perfect lamb to choose for their sacrifice.

And this is a perfect picture of who Jesus is and who he was while he was on earth because Jesus was completely sinless. And he was still, he still went to the cross to take our punishment. So, and also the Passover feast, for a couple days before, God instructed them to take the lamb on, I think, the 10th day of the month. And they were to take it and pick one out. So they had to pick the lamb out, the one that was perfect, that was spotless with no blemishes or anything like that.

And they kept it until the 14th day of the month. And this was to kind of inspect it, to make sure, absolutely sure that there was no, there were no imperfections with the lamb. And similarly, Jesus was also inspected in a similar fashion. He went before Pontius Pilate. You know, Pontius Pilate said, I find no fault in him and take him to Herod.

He goes to Herod, stands before him and doesn't say a word. And then he goes back before Pontius Pilate. So he was inspected from, you know, by all of these people really to find out what his crime was because he committed no crime. There was nothing that he did to deserve the punishment that he bore. Jesus also, another thought that comes to mind as I was writing this was, Jesus was in the temple when he turned over all the money changers' tables.

He was so upset. And this kind of ties into Passover because the people that were in the temple that were there, they were selling animals, basically. So people would come to the Passover, the Passover feast to sacrifice their animals. And they would say, oh, no, no, no, this, you have to look at your animal. Your animal has, you know, it's lame.

Their back leg is lame. So they'd take their animal and then they would sell them. They would sell them another lamb that they said was perfect. And so this got Jesus so upset because... They were taking something that God had made for a reason and they were playing on the importance of this to the people so that they could make money off of them.

So all this, why is it important for the Lamb to be perfect? Jesus was completely sinless so that his sacrifice would be complete and permanent for all time. He doesn't have to do it over and over again. He did it one time for all of time. Hebrews says it like this, Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins and then for the sins of the people.

He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself. So think about that for just a minute. When I think about that, so many things come to mind. Back in the Old Testament, there were sacrifices going on continually. Continually there were sacrifices being made from animals.

So they would sacrifice animals and I stop and I think, what did that smell like? You know, what did that smell like? Somebody I talked to, they're like, it must have just been like there was a barbecue. Like a barbecue the whole time that's going on. So yeah, so it was a barbecue, but the smell and think about the work, everything that took place for that to happen.

All the work that the priests had to do and everything. Those sacrifices never took away sin. They never took away sin. That's why it had to be done continually over and over and over. Because the blood of animals can never take away sin.

They're just a covering for the sin. But thanks be to God that Jesus came on the cross and died for us for one time. It's not just for today. It's for the days before in the past. The days, the things that you've done in the past, it's for today and it's for the future.

It's for anything that you'll do in the future as well. You can't atone for your sins if you need atoning. That's why the priests, even the high priests that were separated and consecrated to God, they lived lives that were separated. They still had to go in before they even went into the temple. They had to stop and they had to do a sacrifice for themselves.

They had to do a sacrifice with the blood of an animal so that they would be covered. Because then if they went into the temple, into the presence of God, on the behalf of the people, they would die. If they had sin, if they had sin and they were not covered, they would die when they went into the temple. They would not make it out. So the imperfect can only be redeemed by the perfect.

By Jesus' perfect sacrifice. So I also think about those sacrifices that they made. And sometimes today, we, you know, people today, even Christians, we still think that it's what we do versus the good we do versus the bad that we do that's going to earn our way into heaven. It's what we are behind the scenes. M& And that's not the case anymore.

There's nothing that you can do for God's scale to balance out in your favor, except to have the blood of Jesus Christ applied to your life. If you have all the good deeds in the world, you spent your entire life doing all of these things, and you have one thing that you've done, and you think your scale is over here with good, and it's like this, it's like this to God. So the only way that the scales balance out is with the precious blood of Jesus Christ. Peter says it like this in Peter 1, 18-19, You were redeemed with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. So here we can see again that Peter is also looking back to the Old Testament, because really when you think about it, Peter and the Apostle Paul and John, you know, all the New Testament people from the New Testament, the only Bible they really had was the Old Testament.

That's all they had. So when they quoted Scripture in the Bible, they were quoting, a lot of times they were quoting the Old Testament. So another aspect is that the lamb was sacrificed. Exodus 12 and 6 says it like this, So here we can see God told them on the 10th day of the month to take a lamb from the flock, a sheep or a goat, so they would have it on the 10th, and then on the 14th day of the month, that's when they would take it and they would slaughter the lamb, sacrifice the lamb. So when you think about that word, sacrifice, what comes to mind?

I know it comes to mind for me, and I see pictures and images, you know, of famous artists and, you know, on television, all these things of Jesus on the cross with just, you know, a trickle of blood on his forehead. And that was not the way that it was. Jesus was slaughtered. Isaiah 52, 14 says it like this, Just as there were many who were appalled at him, Sorry. Just as there were many who were appalled at him, his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being, and his form marred beyond human likeness, so he will sprinkle many nations.

I don't know if anybody in here has seen the passion of the Christ, but that is an accurate representation of what happened. The Roman soldiers, they scourged him with something that was called a flagrum. And that's this thing right here. So it has the leather tails. It has bone and metal shards in it.

So when they would use it, it wouldn't just whip their skin. It would dig into the skin and pull out as they pulled it back. And he was hitting with this, I think, 40 times minus one. And she was going to banish with this. And the της corps is a black woman, He didn't just die on the cross.

He was unrecognizable. Exodus 29, 38-39 says also this is what you are to offer on the altar regularly each day. Two lambs a year old offer one in the morning and the other at twilight. So like we said earlier, it's every day, twice a day, all the time. Hebrews also says it like this, and he entered once and forever into the holiest sanctuary of all, not with the blood of animal sacrifices, but the sacred blood of his own sacrifice.

And he alone has made our salvation secure forever. So, so we can see that his sacrifice was so much better because, one, it was God himself that came down from heaven and lived on earth. He lived a sinless life and then he wasn't guilty of anything. He was completely innocent and completely pure and undefiled. So he entered into the Holy of Holies for our redemption.

It wasn't like, it wasn't that he entered into the temple on earth because that was just a picture and a shadow of what was in heaven. He actually went to heaven and went there to the actual temple of God in heaven and applied his blood there. The lamb was also shared. So the Passover meal in Exodus, it wasn't like they could, a family could just cook the lamb and then they had two or three people in the, in their family and they ate and they're like, oh, there's some leftover. We'll save it for tomorrow.

You had to, everything had to be consumed that night. So if you had a small family and you had a lamb and nothing was nothing, not all of it was finished. Um, you had to share it with your neighbors. God actually instructed them to share it. And Exodus 12, four says, if any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor.

Um, Jesus is the Passover lamb and we have to share him with other people. Um, the sacrifice that he made on, on the cross. It's too good for us. It's too good for us to keep to ourselves. It's, it's not enough.

It's not enough. We, we invite people. We invite people to Easter service. We invite people to church on Sunday. But to do that, we have to go out to where the people are during our day.

When we're in the drive-thru, when we're in the store, when we're at work, wherever we are, we need to share, share Jesus with people because they need to know, they need to know him. They need to know him. Um, he didn't come and die on the cross and go through all that. So while we're at war, if we're at war, we're at war, we're at war. Um, we're at war.

Everything is definitely going to If you wonder if Jesus loves you, all you have to do is think about this. If there's any ever question in your mind of if God loves you or not, just read this. Just read about the crucifixion. Read about what he went through. The only thing that could have been going through his mind is love.

Is you. Because I don't know any way anybody else could go through all that. Willingly. Willingly go through that. They didn't capture Jesus by surprise like, aha, we got you.

He laid his life down for us. He did this willingly with you on his mind every second of the time. Every second of what he was going through. And we have to remember that Jesus is not just a small lamb anymore. He's a lamb that can fulfill anybody.

And there's enough of him to go around. So Paul says it like this also in 2nd Corinthians 5 19. God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. So God entrusted us with the message of telling others about him.

So the greatest commandment is when God told us to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit. So and that's just not that's not just for pastors. That's for everybody to go and do to tell the good news to people that need to hear it. Because some people may never step inside of a church. Some people, Jesus, they may only see Jesus through you as you're talking to them.

So as we go into Easter through this week and into next week, we need you to do a couple of things. The first one is we need you to pray. And even if you can carve out some time this week, maybe and do a small fast, maybe if it's even just like a one day or, you know, part of the day fast and pray and ask God to use this time that we have during Easter to bring people to him. Pray that barriers are going to be broken down between people and him. First Corinthians 4.

4 says the God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. So pray that those scales would fall off their eyes and they could see clearly who Jesus is, that the Holy Spirit would have an inroads into their hearts and their minds. And also invite people, invite people to church, invite them to know Christ. Christ. Christ.

Christ. Christ. You'd be surprised sometimes at just what a kind word, you know, and just treating people with kindness will do, and inviting people to church, you never know what God can do in somebody's heart. Romans 10.13 says, Anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, but who can ask them to save them unless they believe in Him?

And how can they believe in Him if they have never heard about Him? And how can they hear about Him unless someone tells Him? So just think about this. You can be the one that tells them. And three, we can participate.

So if you invite somebody through the week, come early, or at the very least, come on time. Because if you invite somebody they've never been to church before, you know, they're going to be nervous. And just seeing a friendly face, the person that they talk to at the store, wherever it is, and you're here to welcome them, that can make all the difference in the world. And let's also, let's bring it up a notch. Let's bring our praise up a notch.

Let's bring our prayer up a notch. Let's bring our witnessing up a notch. Let's just bring everything up a notch, not just this week, but every week, every day. Because I really believe that God is doing something throughout this time of restoration and revival in people's hearts. And there are so many things going on in the world today.

So many things with uncertainty and subjectivity when it comes to different things in our culture. And this really is just a cry for people to know who Jesus is and know who they are in Him. So in conclusion, I'd just like to say that if there's anybody here that doesn't know Jesus as your Savior, today is the day of salvation. If there's anybody watching online, it's not tomorrow, because tomorrow may not be here. Tomorrow may not be given.

So today is the day of salvation. So if you don't know the Lord, today is the day that you can know Him. Isaiah 55 and 6 says, Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call on Him while He is near. So if you feel the Holy Spirit today speaking to you, don't wait.

Don't wait, because while God is near is the time that you need to call on Him. Because one day, it may be too late. So in closing, I'd just like us to say a prayer. And with all heads bowed and eyes closed. Jesus, we thank you today for the sacrifice that you made on the cross when you died for us, Lord.

We thank you for dying for us on the cross and taking our place, Lord. We ask that you would be with each one of us here today. Lord, we pray that if there is someone here that doesn't know you today, that today might be the day of their salvation. Lord, that today would be the day that... They might come to know you.

We pray, Lord, that you would convict people of their sins, Lord, and we ask that if there's somebody here today that feels far from you, Lord, that they would just draw near to you, that they would feel your Holy Spirit speaking to them, Lord, and that they would know that they can have restoration and forgiveness through your blood today, that it's available today, and it's available every day for each and every one of us, Lord God. And we thank you so much for all these things, Lord. We look forward with anticipation to next week that you will do something great in our midst, Lord, and we thank you for all these things. And it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.