Behold your King!

Transcript on the segment The Acceptable Sacrifice"

No sin, no death. And if Jesus had been a sinner, he would have had to die for his own sins. But because Jesus is not a sinner, because he is innocent, but because he is sinless, he can step in as our representative man. He can go where the sinful cannot go. As the sinless one, he can stand in our place. He can be our representative. He can carry our sin, because he is not carrying his own. He can bear our punishment, since the punishment he is enduring is not for him, for anything he has done. And thereby he can offer an acceptable sacrifice to God. One of the things we have seen as we have gone through John’s Gospel is that, right from the very beginning in chapter 1, when John the Baptist twice points to Jesus and says, “Behold the Lamb of God”. The Passover has always been in the background. The Passover sacrifice of the lambs that were taken, thousands of them every Passover period, were led to Jerusalem to be sacrificed, in memory of that Passover lamb that died so that the people would be freed from Egypt and bondage in Egypt. The Passover Lamb became a picture of what God’s Messiah would do for us. He would die in our place. Those lambs were examined by the temple priests, and if there was one flaw, one fault, they were not acceptable as a sacrifice. To be the Lamb of God who would carry away the sin of the world, Jesus had to be innocent; he had to be sinless.