Lamb of God

The Lamb of God title draws on a layered OT backdrop. The first anchor is Genesis 22:7–8 — Isaac's question "where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" meets Abraham's answer "God will provide himself a lamb." Matthew Henry hears in this exchange both immediate reassurance to Isaac and, beyond it, the distant provision of another Lamb on another mountain. The second anchor is the Passover of Exodus 12: a male lamb without blemish (v.5), its blood struck on the lintel and side posts (v.7), the household passed over when judgment fell. Henry observes that the Passover functions as a primary type because it joins three ideas later carried over into Christian theology — substitution, blood as covering, and eating as participation. Third is the Day of Atonement (Lev 16), where blood-sacrifice and scape-goat answer to sin's guilt and its expulsion. Fourth and most articulate, Isaiah 53:7 — "he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter" — puts the sacrificial figure on the lips of the prophet himself. Chrysostom, preaching on John's later declaration, says the Baptist had all four of these passages in his ears as he identified Jesus by that single word.

John the Baptist's pronouncement supplies the pivot: "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (Jn 1:29, repeated Jn 1:36). The force of the title is that it condenses every OT sacrificial type into one name placed on one person, and the four sweeping categories — Passover, Day of Atonement, Isaianic suffering servant, Abraham's provided ram — all resolve at the same point. Philip reads the title into Isaiah 53 for the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:32–35); Peter picks it up in the opening of his first epistle — "the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot" (1 Pet 1:19). The Revelation then makes the title dominant in the heavenly register: the Lamb stands "as it had been slain" (Rev 5:6), the Lamb opens the seals (Rev 6), the saints overcome "by the blood of the Lamb" (Rev 12:11), the Lamb is worshiped (Rev 7:10), the Lamb is the temple of the new Jerusalem (Rev 21:22), and the Lamb is its light (Rev 21:23). Spurgeon's repeated sermonic return to this image was not accidental — he preached often that the victor in Revelation wears the form of the sacrifice.

The title holds together what the OT types held apart. Chrysostom, homilizing on John 1, argues that in calling Jesus "the Lamb of God" John the Baptist names both sacrificer and sacrifice — the lamb is God's own, not merely provided to God but provided by God from himself. Matthew Henry develops the pastoral register: the Passover lamb covered a single household for a single night; the Lamb of God covers the world for all time. Augustine reads Revelation's imagery ecclesiologically — the church is the community that stands beneath the marked lintel still, sheltered by blood not its own. E. W. Bullinger, working in the nineteenth century, traces the sustained pattern from Genesis to Revelation and argues that the Lamb is the single governing image of biblical redemption — a thread running the length of Scripture that, once noticed, cannot be unseen. The title is therefore not a sentimental figure but a theological summary: substitutionary atonement, covenantal protection, sacrificial worship, and eschatological victory held together in the one who stands slain and alive at the center of the throne.