Turn with me again to the good news according to John, chapter one. And our verse this evening is verse number 29. The next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Well, some things that we have in life that begin with something very, very small and suddenly it becomes obvious that something really, really huge is about to happen. I'm not sure if you've ever seen a video of a space rocket before it lifts off and it's all ready and there's that tiny spark, that small beginning which ignites the fuel and then the huge explosion as the fuel catches fire and shoots the rocket out into space. And of course, in the last few years, we've seen something which has a very small beginning and has completely shaken the world. And that's this virus, something so small, something that just began with something we can't see in just one person. And that's the spark. And very soon, it's everywhere, isn't it? And it's completely changed the way that we think. And it's changed so much of the world. And we're looking this evening at something which is like that, but so much more. This tiny spark gives rise to something which isn't going to fire something into outer space, isn't going to change the world for a few years. But it's actually the focal point of everything that has ever happened. Everything that happened before it was looking forward to this moment. And everything that happened after is to be seen in light of it. We're looking this evening at the most relevant thing which has ever happened, the most important event. And why is that? Well, because it leaves you with the most important decision that you will ever have to make. Why? Well, because of the effects of that decision last not for some weeks as something's fired into space, not for a few years as a pandemic flies its way around the world, but this affects you forever. Not just when you die, but from now, for all time, for eternity. We look today at the focal point of all history, the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. And now your whole life, your whole attention in the same way that the whole universe is arranged around this man, your whole life now needs to be focused on this man, who he is, what he did and why he did it. Why? Well, as I said, because of the results, because it either leads to eternal happiness, eternal fulfillment, eternal bliss spent with the creator of the universe, or, in the opposite, of eternal rejection, of eternal punishment, of eternal shame, cast outside from the loving presence of God. What do we witness together this evening? The beginning of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, the start of his work on earth. And so a Middle Eastern carpenter has left his home, he's left his job and his family for a much more important job, for a much more important task, for the saving of mankind. And Jesus begins his ministry in a thoroughly unremarkable way. He comes to be baptised by John in the Jordan. Lots of men had already done so, and that's the spark, that's the small beginning, but it's John who gives us this explosion, this wonderful thing, this huge thing, when he sees Jesus and he cries out, Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. He's told us as this man comes, he's told everybody to stop what they're doing and look at this man. So we need to think what this passage and what John says teaches us about this man. Yes, he's Jesus of Nazareth. Yes, he's a carpenter. Yes, he's begun some work on earth. But who is he? Who is he? Well, The first thing that we see is that Jesus is Lord. Look in verse 23 with me. Who does John say he is? He says he's the voice of one crying in the wilderness, straightening the way, straightening the path for the Lord. You'll notice there that Lord is all in capitals. Why? Well, he's quoting Isaiah there. And in the Hebrew scriptures, there's a special word which is translated as Lord with all capitals, and it's the most special name for God. You might have heard it as Jehovah or Yahweh. Well, it was so special, it was God's fullest name. That when people wrote down the scripture in Hebrew, they didn't write it properly. They left the vowels out. Why? Because they were so afraid that the scripture over time would fall apart and God's name, the important thing, who he is, would be destroyed. So John says that Jesus is a man. He says he's a man who comes after me. but he also says that Jesus is God because he's making straight the path for the Lord. And so we say Jesus is man, and you've probably heard that, and we say Jesus is God, and you've probably heard that too. And you think, well, surely that's one of those contradictions, isn't it? The Bible is full of them, all these silly things which don't add up and they don't make sense. I can't understand that. It's a contradiction. It's not a contradiction. It's not a contradiction. To say that he is fully God, truly God and truly man is not a contradiction. But how do we deal with this? The first thing that you're telling me this evening, I can't actually understand it. Well, what do we do? We need to submit ourselves to the teaching that God has given us. What does submit mean? It means to come under, to bow, to put yourself under what God is teaching, whether you understand it or not, whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not. It doesn't matter. You don't set yourself as the standard. God is the standard. And this is what he's telling us. So then we need to think, does scripture teach this plainly? Is John really teaching that Jesus is man and Jesus is God? Yes. Look to the beginning of the book. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word, this is the really important bit, and the Word was God. Then we see in verse 14, and the Word became flesh. That God, the Word, that was God, became flesh, came down to be flesh, and that was Jesus. And this isn't just what John taught, Jesus himself taught it. As you read further in John's good news we see in chapter 8 Jesus says before Abraham was, I am, I am. And the response of those around him was very interesting. It tells you what Jesus had said. They picked up stones to stone him. Why? They accused him of blasphemy. Why? Because he said he was God. I am is that special name, Jehovah, Yahweh. Jesus is saying, I'm God. And the people there knew it. And they weren't happy with that because they thought he was just a man. So they were going to kill him for saying he was equal with God. And so you might well have heard people say that you can accept Jesus as a great teacher, as a great man, in the line of Gandhi, or Buddha, or Confucius. No, you can't. He's not a man, just. He's not a man only, he is God, and you must accept that to accept Jesus, because if you accept Jesus aside from that, you're not accepting what the Bible has taught. And so he is God, what does that mean about him? It means he's perfect, morally perfect, without sin, he didn't do anything wrong, he never wasted time, he was never lazy, he was never rude to his mother, he never stole, he never lied. It means that he's almighty, he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. It means that he knows everything. There's nothing which escapes his notice. It means that he is everywhere by his spirit. It means that he's just, and that I mean that he is able to make a right decision about what needs to be done. And it means he is awesome in the true sense of the word, that when you see him in his fullness, you are taken aback, you are in awe. He is God, he is glorious, he's wonderful to behold. And he is man and what does that teach us about him? It means that he got tired, like we do. It means that he got hungry and thirsty, like we do. It means that he felt pain, like we do. He was tempted to sin, like we are tempted to sin. He suffered. like we suffer. And why is that important? Oh, it's so important. So important. In Hebrews, we read, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness. But we have one who was tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin. And so when you're speaking to Jesus, when you pray to Jesus and you're going through something that's very painful, Jesus knew what that was like because he was a man. And so then we need to give up our intellectual pride as I spoke this morning about man wants to get up to God and that's what we want to do with Jesus as well. We want to understand everything about Jesus. We need to realize that we are limited, aren't we? We're limited in time, we die, we're limited in knowledge, we're limited in strength. And so then we accept that we don't understand everything here. We don't necessarily, especially if you're not a Christian this evening, we don't agree with everything in this this evening, but we accept the authority, the power, the strength that the scripture has. Why? Because it is the power, the authority, the strength of God. And the thing is, what I'm here telling you this evening is not my understanding and it's not my authority. It's not that I read it and I thought that sounds like a wonderful thing to preach on a Sunday evening. This is what Scripture is plainly teaching. And the important thing is that as we look at the Scripture, we look what it is saying to us. It comes out. We don't put it in. We don't think that seems to be silly, so I'll say it must mean something else. No, we look and it comes out. We look what God's Word says, and God's Word says that Jesus is Lord. And the second thing that we learn is that Jesus is the Lamb of God, verse 29 again. Behold the Lamb of God. The lamb was a very important symbol for the Jews. It was an offering. It was a sacrifice, a lamb for God. If you sinned, you would have to give a sacrifice, a payment, which would be due to you, from you rather, for your sin. But John doesn't call him the lamb for God. He calls him the lamb of God. This is a lamb sent by God for God to receive. God has sent a sacrificial offering for himself. God is providing what he himself requires for sin. And this fulfills the picture, the type, the shadow which we see in Genesis 22. when God asks Abraham to test his faith to sacrifice his son Isaac on the top of the mountain. And when they're going up, Isaac says, we're going up, father, to make a sacrifice. We haven't got a sacrifice. There's no lamb there. Abraham says, God himself will provide a lamb for the burnt offering my son. And he did then. He did. Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac and God called out to him and there was a sacrifice offering there. But God has done it fully now with the lamb. John the Baptist is saying that picture is being fulfilled now. Jesus has come. Abraham and Isaac point to Christ. He's the lamb of God, well what did this lamb have to be like? God was very specific about what this lamb had to be like. He had to be spotless, without blemish, without marking, purely white. That is to say it had to be a perfect lamb. It was not acceptable to God if it was not perfect. And so we expect, therefore, don't we, that the Lamb of God also would be perfect? Because the Jews were expected to give up the very best they had for God. And God has given up, in a sense, the very best he had, his only son, to be this sacrifice of atonement. of anything that could be offered, Jesus is the best. There is nothing on earth, nothing in the sky, nothing in heaven that could be offered that is better than Jesus. There is no one who was wiser than Jesus. Solomon was wise, Jesus was wiser. There was no one who was more loving than Jesus. Moses was loving and he prayed for his people that God wouldn't destroy them, but Jesus was more loving. There is no one, nothing that could be offered that was more caring, more loving, more perfect. than Jesus. He is said to be the firstborn of all creation. And that doesn't mean that he was born in creation first before anything else. The firstborn was a status. It was a position. And what did it mean? It meant you were the most important son. And Jesus is the firstborn of all creation. He's the most important thing. of everything. It's not saying that Jesus isn't eternal. It's not saying that Jesus isn't God. It's saying that he is what we call preeminent, the most important thing at every time. But the Lamb also suggests something else which is very significant, which is Passover. When God's people were in Egypt, they were slaves and they were going to be taken out. And before that, God was going to punish the Egyptians for their sin and for their treatment of his people. And God instructed his people to sacrifice a lamb, to take the blood of that lamb, to paint it on the doorposts of their house, and when the angel of destruction, the angel of punishment, would come down and go through Egypt, he would, in a sense, see the blood and go over the house, and the firstborn of those families would be protected. A lamb again points to the lamb, the great Passover. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5, Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us, and Jesus again taught this in Luke 22. He says this is the new covenant, the new agreement with God, in my blood, the protecting blood, the cleansing blood of the Messiah, the true deliverer. is pointed to by the Passover, points to the true sacrifice, when they wouldn't just be covered over for the plagues on Israel and taken out of Egypt, no. That God's people would be covered over for the great judgment of the world, and they would be led out into the new heaven and the new earth. Because what we see in Exodus is only in part. It's a picture. When God's people are taken out of slavery, they're still slaves to their own sinful desires. And most of them died in the wilderness because of their rebellion. So it's looking forward to something more important, something bigger than that. So we see that Jesus is Lord, and we see Rather, we see who he is in that Jesus is Lord. We see what he is, the Lamb of God, the acceptable offering, the real Passover. And so we think now, okay, Jesus is Lord, Jesus is the Lamb of God, but we say, okay, he's come to deliver us, but deliver us from what? A Passover of what? Why has he come? Look again to verse 29, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And there's a double meaning there in takes away the sin. It does mean to take away from, to pull it off, if you will, but it also means to take unto himself. He takes the sin from the world and takes it unto himself. What does the world mean? Well, it means every single person who's ever lived. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans in chapter three, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There is no one righteous, no, not one. All have gone their own way. They've together become worthless. They're unrighteous. Well, what happens to the unrighteous? We read in Revelation 14, which is a picture of what's to come in the future. So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and gathered the grapes of the earth. That's a picture for the people. And he threw them into the great winepress of God's wrath, of God's anger, of his punishment for sin. And the winepress was trodden outside the city. And the blood that flowed from it rose as high as the bridles of horses for a distance of 1,600 stadia. What we're being taught in Revelation is that the unrighteous are going to be gathered up. by God's all-powerful hand and he's going to throw them outside the city and the city is a picture of the new heaven and the new earth where his people will live with him. And they're going to be crushed. You'd put grapes in a wine press and you would stamp on them. and the grape juice would come out. And these people, they're going to be collected, they're going to be thrown outside of the city and they're going to be crushed outside of God's love, outside of God's loving and caring presence. They're going to be destroyed and their blood will flow out. 1600 stadia just means for a very long way. And it doesn't literally mean this high, it just means very deep, lots of blood. Why? Because there are lots of grapes. So what can we do about this? How do we save ourselves? How do we avoid being gathered up and crushed? Well, Paul teaches in Romans 11, as he quotes Job, who has ever given to God that God should repay him? He's basically saying there's nothing that we can give to God that God doesn't already own or deserve. So if God owns everything, how can we pay? There's nothing that we can give to God that he doesn't already have. We can't work for him anything that he doesn't deserve. We can't provide him with anything that he needs. We can't do anything. There's nothing that you can do this evening to save yourselves. And so, Because we can't take anything from inside us to save us, it must come from outside. And the whole of creation has been ruined by sin. Everyone's a sinner and the world is falling apart because of it. So the sacrifice needs to come from outside of creation. The lamb sacrifices weren't us. We didn't sacrifice ourselves on the altar for the payment of our sin. And that's pointing to, again, to Jesus, who will be the sacrifice from outside of ourselves, from outside of the whole creation. He is the payment for the sin. And he is the only payment for the sin. We read in Acts 4, as Peter teaches, then let this be known to all of you. And to all the people of Israel, it is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. This Jesus is the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone. Salvation exists in no one else, for there is no other name unto heaven given to men by which we must be saved. He's the only payment. He's the only payment that's enough for everyone. If you could find a perfect man, a perfect woman, a perfect child who'd never sinned, they could only pay for the sins of one person. But Jesus coming outside of creation, being bigger than creation, being God in human flesh was enough. He was worth enough to pay for the sins of all of you, and of me, and of everyone in London, and of everyone in England, and of everyone of the whole world who's ever lived. He is an overabundance of payment, an overabundance of payment. Turn with me now to Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53. We'll read verses 10 to 12. Isaiah 53, verses 10 to 12. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him. He has put him to grief. When you make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see the labor of his soul and be satisfied by his knowledge. My righteous servant shall justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul unto death, and he was numbered with the transgressors. And he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgression. for the transgressors. Our sin, which leads to what we read in Revelation 14 with the crushing, the great winepress of God's wrath was placed then on our Lord. He was trampled outside the city and he experienced hell. You wonder, is hell a place with people that look like lizards throwing you into a fire with pitchforks? No. What's hell like? Hell is being in the presence of God without any love. And so I want you to imagine that you go outside, and suddenly the sun seems much brighter than normal. It's much brighter than normal. And you shield your hand. You put your hand over the sun. And it doesn't matter. And that ray comes through your hand, so you close your eyes as well. And that comes through your eyelids, and you can still see this blinding light. And you go into your house, and you close the door. And this blinding light is coming through it still. And you realize that that light knows everything about you and everything you've ever done is being seen by the world and so you go down into your basement and you close the door and that light is coming through and this light is angry with you and this light is punishing you for everything that you've done and you pull everything on top of you and you cry out for it to stop and it doesn't stop and you know it's never going to stop and all of the filth, all of the wrong things which you have done are seen by the world and by God who is holy forever. That is what hell is like and that is what God did to his only son for you. That you could be saved from that. That you wouldn't experience that. And so that when you die, God will say, come in, my good and faithful servant. Come and share in your master's happiness. And if it wasn't for that, everyone would be crushed. You, me, everyone would be crushed. All crushed for our rebellion against God. And you might say in your heart right now, no, not me. I'm not a rebel, but yes, you are. You've ignored God as he gave you food and he gave you breath and he gave you water and he gave you life. You think, I wouldn't crucify Jesus. You absolutely would. You'd be there laughing and spitting on him as the Roman soldiers were. What terrible lives we have lived. What terrible lives we have lived. Only ever sinning. It's not a question that sometimes you sin. is that all you've ever done is sin. And I've said already, no one relying on his own strength can be saved. So what can we do? What can you do? You can do what John has told us here. Look to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Look to Jesus and say, I'm going to turn from my sin, Lord. I'm sorry for my rebellion. Forgive me, please. He has done it. He has completed your salvation. And later in Isaiah, in chapter 63, we read, who is this who comes from Edom with dyed garments from Bosra, this one who is glorious in his apparel, travailing in the greatness of his strength? I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save. Why is your apparel red and your garments like one who treads in the winepress? I have trod on the winepress alone. and from the peoples no one was with me. For I have trodden them in my anger and trampled them in my fury. Their blood is sprinkled upon my garments and I have stained all my robes. For the day of vengeance is in my heart and the year of my redeemed has come. I looked but there was no one to help and I wondered that there was no one to uphold. Therefore my own arm brought salvation for me and my own fury sustained me. The work is done. The salvation is accomplished. That's what Isaiah is teaching there. Who's come from God's enemies? Edom, who's come from battling Satan, who's come from fighting sin, who's come from fighting death? Jesus has come. He promised, God promised in Genesis 3, that death, sin, and Satan would be crushed, and it has happened. And it's done, which is why on the cross, Jesus could cry out, it is finished, it's done. You can be saved. You can be spared the wine press. You can be spared hell. And the question is, do you want to be? Do you want to be saved? Believe God's promises and you will be saved. Paul taught that Abraham believed God. He believed his promises and it was credited to him as righteousness. What does that mean? It means to have faith. in God, in faith, the Lord, in faith of the Lamb, that we are saved by faith in his cleansing blood. He loves you and he died for you. We read in Isaiah 63, nine, in all their affliction, he was afflicted and the angel of his presence saved them. In his love and in his pity, he redeemed them and bore them and carried them all the days of old. He loves you and he died so that you could be saved. He had nails hammered through his hands and his feet pulled up to be left in the burning hot sun and drowned in his own blood. Why? So you didn't have to be. So you didn't have to be. How do we know that? Well, because God raised him from the dead to prove it. That man didn't stay dead. Jesus was crucified and he was buried, but he was lifted out. Not like Lazarus, who was called out and had to take and came out with the cloths on him. No, Jesus was raised. Death couldn't hold him. and he took them off himself and left. Why? Because the life which he had could not be extinguished. So have faith in his blood, trust it. Trust that he shed it willingly for you, that you would be cleansed of your sin, to pay the debt for your rebellion, to buy your salvation, to make you right with God, to forgive you for your sins. Come now, let us settle the matter, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. How? By having faith in Jesus, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Let's pray. Gracious God and loving Heavenly Father, we worship and praise you for this wonderful salvation. O Lord, that we can be spared the winepress of your wrath. O Lord, that we can be cleansed of all iniquity. And we pray, Lord, for those listening this evening, for those who are unsaved. We pray that they would behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. We pray that they would listen to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And we pray that they would have faith in the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. For your glory and praise. Amen. Let's sing our final hymn for this evening. Hymn 408. I hear thy welcome voice that calls me, Lord, to thee for cleansing in thy precious blood that flowed on Calvary. Maybe you know you're not saved. Maybe you want to be cleansed. And this hymn gives us some instruction as how to do that. 408.