Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29) and Jesus is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah (Rev 5:5) who has triumphantly purchased us and included us in his heavenly realm!
The meekness of Jesus as the Lamb who was slain on the cross isn’t the same thing as weakness. Christ’s meekness is his power and authority restrained for a far greater good that impacted all of humanity. The Lamb was slain willingly—by his strong choice. Jesus was never a victim! Yes, horrendous things were done to him that could have made him out to be a victim, but Jesus can’t be a victim when he willingly subdued his power to allow the depravity of humans to play out our power grab against him.
In case you missed the implication of the last sentence, God the Father didn’t kill Jesus. We did. This is such a critical perspective to grab hold of to maintain the integrity of the Father’s character. God didn’t punish Jesus for our sins. Rather, we punished Jesus as a result of our blindness to see the truth of Jesus as the perfect representation of God, and ourselves as created in his image. The love of the Trinity willingly submitted to our complete misunderstanding of who Jesus was as the son of a loving Father.
Scripture indicates that it was mankind who put Jesus to death on the cross.
We were the ones who brought to the table a suspicion that never existed before in the garden. A suspicion about whether God was truly good. This is the root of sin and this is what killed the Lamb of God.
And this is what the Lamb submitted himself to in obedience to the Father. They were both in agreement that this was the only way to heal the disease called sin. You can’t punish a disease to make it go away. There must be a cure. The cure was to demonstrate perfect love and take it to it’s ultimate conclusion. In so doing, our diseased misperceptions about God and ourselves were nailed to the cross with Jesus and taken to the grave to die.
And so we have the drama of the cross in context the man Jesus Christ who is fully God, becomes fully man to the extent of willingly dying humanity's death at the hands of his own creation. He embraced the curse and shame of the lowest kind in dying a criminal's death.
Philippians 2:8 (Mirror)
The Lamb’s death, which was your death too, removed the old.
The Lion’s resurrection, which was your resurrection too, ushered us into our new life IN Christ!
This is how grace rescued us: while we were yet in that state of deadness and indifference, we were co-quickened together with Christ. We had nothing to do with this. Grace freed us, once and for all from the lies that we believed about ourselves under the performance-driven system and now defines our authentic identity.
Ephesians 2:5 (Mirror)
Love, Brent Lokker
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