「神の小羊とその役割」 三月第一主日礼拝 宣教 2025年3月2日
ヨハネによる福音書 John 1章29〜30節 牧師 河野信一郎
Good morning, and thank the Lord for the blessing of spending the first Sunday of March like this with all of you, offering praise and worship to God. It has been very warm this past week, including today, but it is supposed to be like midwinter again from this coming Tuesday. Please be careful and spend your days carefully. I pray that you will be protected.
Last week, we gave thanks to God for the blessing of a church family given to us through a transfer membership. We thanked God that He has a great plan for dear sister in Christ and that the Lord has led her to Okubo Church, even though she shared with us her suffering and painful walk and how the Lord God has been with her. God has a great plan for us. For those who missed it, please read the March monthly bulletin when it is published on the 16th. If you can’t wait, I would like to give you a copy of the manuscript.
As an announcement for next week, on the coming 9th, we will offer a service to God as “Worship Service to Remember 3.11”. It has been 14 years since the Great East Japan Earthquake, and there are people in the affected areas who are still waiting for the return of their families who were unable to say “good-bye,” “thank you,” or “I’m sorry” on that day. Those affected people are also aging. The serious accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has not yet been resolved. The churches that have been established in the Tohoku region are walking alongside these people.
There are 10 churches of the Japan Baptist Convention scattered in the four prefectures on the Pacific side, Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima from the top, but in the past 14 years, the pastors of nine of them have been changed. The only one that has not been changed is Ayumi-no-ie Christ Church in Fukushima City. Currently, two of those churches are without pastors. There are also churches whose pastors are ill. There are many churches that are financially impoverished and cannot adequately support their pastors and their families. We hope you will pray for such churches and send your support money to them. Please attend next week’s worship service.
Well, this year’s Passion month begins this Wednesday, the 5th, and will continue until April 19th. The Lent is a 46-day period during which we focus our eyes and hearts on the steps of our Savior, Jesus Christ, as He walked the path to the cross and died an atoning death on our behalf. It is very challenging to share and lead young children through the cross and death of Jesus. “Redemption” is a difficult word for the children. Even adults do not understand it. It is not easy to convey the true meaning of Jesus’ death. Therefore, we need prayer and the encouragement of the Holy Spirit. Just as Jesus trusted God the Father, prayed, and was helped along the way by the Holy Spirit, let us walk in trust in God, prayer, and the encouragement and guidance of the Holy Spirit.
From today until the middle of next month, until Friday, April 19, to be exact, we will focus on Jesus walking the way of the cross. However, we would like to listen to the Old and New Testaments to find out why Jesus, the only Son of God, had to walk the path of the cross and die by crucifixion in the first place. The key word that emerges as a clue or keyword to understand the reason is the word “Lamb”.
The word is found a total of 106 times in the Bible. It appears 71 times in the Old Testament and 35 times in the New Testament, concentrated in the first four of the first five books of the Old Testament, known as the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The most frequent use of “lamb” is in Numbers 22 times, of which 15 times it is used as “the lamb as a burnt offering,” “the lamb as an atonement offering,” and “a year-old male lamb as a reconciliation offering”. In other words, we can see that the “lamb” was used as an offering to God. The sacrifice of the lamb provides reconciliation with God.
However, the origin of this expression “lamb” is found in the book of Exodus. In order to free the Jews from the yoke of slavery in the land of Egypt, God uses an angel to strike the land of Egypt, and in order to escape His judgment, the Jews are commanded to slaughter a lamb and smear its blood on the door and doorposts of their houses. The angel passes over the house where the blood of the lamb is smeared, and all the firstborn of the house of the Egyptians who have not been smeared are struck to death. Pharaoh, who had not let the Jews go, finally agrees to let them leave by doing so, and Israel is given liberty and led to the Promised Land of Canaan.
For Israel, it was a salvation event in which the Lord God passed over them and gave them liberty and freedom of faith. The Passover is celebrated to express gratitude and joy for this event, and to pass on their faith to future generations. The sacrifice of the lamb was an essential part of God’s Passover. In other words, the lamb was slaughtered, its blood was shed, and it was sacrificed in order to give Israel salvation, deliverance, and freedom.
If you read Numbers 28, you will see that the offering of the lamb was offered morning by morning and evening by evening. It was offered family by family. In the history of Israel, a great number of lambs have been sacrificed and offered in the temple throughout the history of the nation. However, that era ended with the birth of Jesus on earth.
This morning I am going to talk about Jesus with the theme of “The Lamb of God and His Role”, focusing on John 1:29, but John the Baptist, this man is not the one who recorded this Gospel of John. He is a man who lived to make straight the way of Jesus before His coming. In other words, he was a man sent by God first to prepare the groundwork to create the soil that would lead people to repentance.
John even said of himself, “I am not even qualified to untie his (Jesus’) shoes.” But this is the man who said of Jesus, “He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” In verse 29 we read, “The next day [John the Baptist] saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
In these words of John, we have the testimony that Jesus is the Lamb of God, and the role of this Lamb is clearly stated to be “to take away the sin of the world”. In other words, Jesus Christ is the Savior who was prepared by God to pay the price for the sins of all who live in the world, to remove all sin from among us, and to bring salvation in the form of healing, deliverance, and freedom to this sin-filled world. He is the Savior sent by God to provide healing, deliverance, and freedom to this sin-filled world. How then, does He remove all sin? The only way was for Jesus to offer His life by being slaughtered like a lamb and shedding His precious blood. We have no power to save ourselves. We have only the power to consume life, God’s grace.
Jesus is the Son of God, in other word He is God. At the same time, He was born on earth as a human being. Jesus is both God and man. Is such a thing possible? Nothing is impossible for God. But what is more important than such a thing is for what purpose Jesus was born and lived on earth as a man. Jesus, who is God, came to earth in human form to save us from death, the wages of sin and guilt, and from eternal destruction.
Only God can shoulder the price of all the sins that mankind has committed against God, both consciously and unconsciously, and blot out our sins. Only Jesus can save us by dying an atoning death on the cross in place of each one of us and paying the price for our sins that we owe.
John the Baptist tells us, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”. He says, “Behold!” In other words, “This Jesus Christ is the Lamb who takes away our sins, the sin of our disobedience to God, the atoning offering, who sacrificed his life to save us. Look up to this Savior on the cross and repent of your sins and your weaknesses. Believe in, thank, and praise God who loves us even to the point of sacrificing His own Son”.
But it is not a coercion, but rather a loving invitation that respects our free will. So let us respond to this invitation, believe in Jesus, the Lamb of God, and receive God’s love and forgiveness gratefully, trusting in the Lord.