When you think of the mighty, fighting, victorious (insert mascot name here), you don’t think lambs. There are lions, tigers and bears. There are horses and dogs. Eagles and hogs, There are even frogs and swans. Rams, but no lambs.
Lambs are not mighty. They have no aggressive abilities or even any real self-defenses. They can bleat at you. They can jump up on you, but, seriously, nothing to write home about. So why would our Lord and Savior be known by those closest to Him as the Lamb of God?
I believe it is specifically for this reason that He chose this persona. In the first covenant of God, He made man in His image and gave him dominion over the earth. In the covenant of God that is the arrival of Jesus, He, God, took on the image of man and descendant to a place even lower than the angels to do what Adam could not – to live a life free of sin and die to pay the price of sin for all mankind.
He could have been known as the Ox of God or the Ram of God. But he chose the lamb, the sacrificial lamb of the passover, that was the sign of true and pure obedience to God even unto death.
My Answers:
6.
a.
JTB’s baptism, like the law, was an exterior cleansing of an interior sin. Jesus’ baptism of the spirit and an internal inhabitation of the Holy Spirit, that permeates from the spirit/soul through the body.
b.
I have the power of the Holy Spirit within me to do the will of God. With that power, there is nothing that cannot be accomplished which God ordains, not illness or suffering, not evil or darkness, not even death.
7.
a.
He is! The lamb was the ordained sacrifice for the cleansing/removal of sin in the law. As Isaiah prophesied, He would be led like a lamb to slaughter for us, the sheep that had gone astray, each turning to our own way
b.
A lamb is a completely defenseless creature, it doesn’t kick, bite, stab. It doesn’t growl or bark – it bleats. It gives its whole life (wool, milk), and gives fully of itself in death (meat). It represented the sin offering. By grace, Jesus, the Lion of Judah, the Son of God with a mighty arm, took on the persona of the lamb for our sins.
The Notes are Good 