Ralph Wood, professor of theology and literature at Baylor University, once asked a group of seminary students to compare an astute collegian, who tells you insistently that sin and the fall of humanity are fallacies invented by the superstitious, and a young pagan in a remote village, whom you find in the woods sacrificing a chicken on a makeshift altar. "Which man is farther from the truth?" he asked. The students hemmed and hawed, but hesitantly agreed that the pagan boy, however primitively, understood something the other did not. There is a need in our lives for atonement.

Malcolm Muggeridge insisted that the depravity of humankind is at once the most unpopular of the Christian doctrines and yet the most empirically verifiable. We have within us a basic sense of our desperate condition. Something has gone wrong, something we yearn to see made right, but somehow find ourselves incapable of the restoration.

Through the symbolism of the Lamb of God, Scripture reminds us that Jesus has restored that which has gone wrong. Christ is the Lamb whose blood atones my depravity, the Lamb who moves me forever into the presence of God.

When the apostle John described his vision of heaven in the book of Revelation, the Lamb was found in the center of a singing multitude. He writes: "Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders" (Revelation 5:6).

But how can a slain lamb stand? The Lamb who bore my sins also forever bears the scars of my atonement, even as He stands.

As the Lamb, Christ has met a need we could not. He has become the sacrifice we could not give. Behold the Lamb of God, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Cornerstone, the Shepherd, our Advocate who overcomes. The Slain Lamb stands!

With Love,

Mike