Rachel Joy Scott as “Sacrificial Lamb”

Rachel Joy Scott sacrificed herself—an innocent, good (even when her five “good” friends were not, and abandoned her), forgiving, kind, spotless virgin (decisively giving up her boyfriend and giving up the hope of marriage) lamb (“rachel” in Hebrew) to become a sin-offering (αμαρτια) as a protection, shelter, or shield (ιλαστηριον—“propitiatory shelter,” “mercy-seat“) concerning the sins or offenses of her high school (particularly bullying). Not only that, but also concerning the sins of her parents in divorcing.  Rachel’s willing, voluntary self-sacrifice in accordance with God’s desire, brought the overcompensation of God’s graciousness to her whole family, giving back to her father Darrell a vast ministry of salvation in high schools across the nation, along with her mother Beth (plus both of her parents’ new spouses), as well as her sisters and brothers.

Rachel Joy Scott, by her heroic self-sacrifice, also delivered Columbine High School from a manifold worse devastation than it did suffer in fact.  Bombs placed in the cafeteria refused to detonate, thus sparing hundreds of lives!  Only twelve students (“disciples”) and one teacher (“master”) died…although many more were wounded.

And God was pleased, well-pleased, propitious, gracious, and thousands more have been saved across the nation and beyond, as a consequence.  [4/21/06—the 7th anniversary of the Columbine massacre; 12/31/25]

God, throughout the Old Covenant with Israel, required that the regular sin-offerings employ a flawless lamb (a virgin animal), white (“without spot”).   Why?  Obviously, to depict sinlessness.  That being the case, the offering portrayed a sin against the creature itself—the harmless, amenable animal.  This ritual act, in effect, depicted wrong or injustice, per se.  In this precise way, the sin-offering (αμαρτια) truly did depict a sin (αμαρτια).

Thus did the sinless sacrificial victim bear “the string of sins,” in the words of Rachel Scott, Columbine High School martyr, leading up to its slaughter and death, by accepting all these injustices without complaint and without self-defense, vengeance, or retaliation.

Jesus had the right from his Father to not bear those brutal injustices—no one could have taken his life from him (John 10:17-18); he could have called more than twelve legions of angelic messengers to save himself if he had chosen.  (Matt. 26:52-54)  Yet many bystanders erroneously taunted, “Others he saves!  Himself he cannot save!”  (Matt. 27:42)  Not! Rather, he carries their “string of sins“/”strings of sin” without reviling and without threat (1 Peter 2:23-25).  By those savage “welts” we are healed (Isaiah 53:5), precisely because God avenged them by healing his flesh at resurrection, then proceeding to overcompensate him with superabundant  healing for us in the bargain!  (I love this Gospel, I do!)  Jesus’ only choices were to avenge himself or to bear those sinful assaults.  He willingly gave up what our sins had deprived him of.  He chose to not avenge himself, to not vindicate his own honor, to not use his own authority, which he had direct from his Father.  He laid it all down, surrendering himself instead into his Father’s hands—”Him Who is judging justly” (1 Peter 2:23).  And that would mean, in the meantime, surrendering himself to his vicious enemies whom he loved, many of whom, by his subsequently demonstrated mercy and  graciousness came to trust him after all and got saved!

The medieval notion that at the Cross God avenged His insulted honor is 180° backwards.  Messiah bore or carried that dishonor instead of avenging himself (although the legitimate authority to do so had never been, nor could ever be, taken from him). He waited for Jehovah’s righteous judgment to avenge the enormity.  It is from LOVE that the Savior died instead of lashing out in revenge to decimate his enemies.  The supernal wisdom behind love aims at “winning souls” back to amity and friendship.  God’s goal was not to incinerate the sinner but to conciliate the silly (from a word suggesting “deserving pity,” meaning feeble-minded, showing little sense, judgment, or sobriety; foolish, stupid, absurd, ludicrous, etc. [Colloq.]:  dazed, senseless, as from a blow.  [Dial.]:  helpless, weak.  [Archaic]:  feeble, infirm.  [Archaic]:  simple, plain, innocent.).

To conclude, the ancient sacrificial lamb, appointed by covenant and well-pleasing to God, got consumed by fire—burning wrath, anger, indignation, fury.  Yet dare we allege that these represented the disposition of God?  The cross of “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29, 36) illuminates the truth that yields the true interpretation.  That fiery holocaust depicts the furious hatred and wrath of Satan and the viciousness he propagates in the world.  Yet the smoke rises “into God’s nostrils” as a memorial testimony of faithfully obedient submission depicted and figured by the unblemished lamb.

The raising up of the serpent in the wilderness onto a pole (John 3:14) likewise graphically symbolized the future crucifixion as a heinous sin.  [4/21/06; 12/31/25]

The cost of ransoming humanity was paid to us by God (in merciful exchange for the crime perpetrated against Christ) in order for us to accept, absorb, and pay it forward.

Under the Old Covenant of  Moses, all Israel had to eat the lamb during Passover.  Should it, then, have seemed so strange to the Jews of Jesus’ day for him to have declared, “You must eat my flesh and drink my blood or you have no life in you” (to paraphrase John 6:53)?  John the Baptist had already announced, “Look!  The Lamb of God which is taking away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).  And by what mechanism, if you please, were sins taken away?  Why, by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Lamb of God, for that is agelong life!

That price which he paid, that cost of our liberation from sin, that ransom, we must ingest and let it become an intrinsic, inextricable element of our own body and blood.  We are the ones to whom the Son of Mankind paid his ransom price!  The precious blood of Jesus belongs rightfully to us who trust him!  The Father doesn’t need it.  The Devil doesn’t want it.  The Law doesn’t claim it.  It’s ours, with all its life-making nourishment!  We’re alive!!!

The entry of the body and blood of Jesus into our body and blood cleanses us by reversing the necrotic deterioration of our existence toward death.  Of course, as Jesus clarified, “the flesh benefits nothing,” literally.  Rather, his “declarations are Spirit and are life,” so as we hear and believe and obey all his explanations, promises, and directives, his Spirit is given more room within us to find housing and bear fruit.

Thus our participation in the Master’s Dinner should always be associated with feeding on his Explanations.  At the very same service we should be practicing our analyzing and memorizing and reciting of Jesus’ teaching among ourselves.  Then we should digest this feast by meditating on this nourishment.  Later, we should gather and discuss what the Wholesome Spirit is teaching us through it.  Then we should arrange to proclaim and teach what we have learned to all nations, including our own.  And, moreover, we should develop plans and programs and methods and institutions to implement God’s desire in every sphere of activity on earth, bringing his Kingdom with power!  [5/14/04]

In overcompensating Jesus for the sacrifice of his body of flesh on our behalf, the Father gave him back a much larger body than he gave up.  And that’s what we eat in communion…and that’s what we become as a consequence—his new body (!), with his resurrection-life-giving blood coursing through us, cleansing, nourishing and energizing us to do even greater acts than Jesus, who returned to the Father.  [5/21/04]

It is well worth contemplating that God’s superabundant graciousness is the divinely demanded rightful overcompensation for the viciousness perpetrated against the whole human race by Satan, the fearsome Alien, but especially against the perfectly innocent and sinless Son of God.  Graciousness in exchange for viciousness. Worth pondering.  [5/31/04; 9/30/25]

The shedding of Jesus’ innocent blood justified God in avenging him immediately…not by destroying his executioners—the perpetrators—but by actually reversing the sentence and then proclaiming a pardon instead to all who criminally executed him!  What graciousness!  [9/15/04]

All who put themselves voluntarily under Messiah’s authority by faith benefit from the spoils of his victory over Satan!  For he won the right/authority and sovereignty, to give anything which (consequently!) is his to all who are his because they trust him and believe this testimony that God gave about His Son.  Thereby we, too, get adopted as sons to inherit allotments in his Kingdom so that we get to live and reign together with him as priests to God on our restored planet!  [9/29/04; 9/30/25]

The Post-Resurrection Explosion of Favor from God, through Christ

The reason God appears so often “wrathful” in the Old Testament but so largely “gracious” in the New Testament, is because the Law of Moses–the Old Covenant–was not able to vivify (Gal. 3:21)  and therefore could not justify its subjects but only convict them of sins and injustices, which, when persisted in, brought upon them God’s indignation, anger, or  wrath.  “For the Law is producing indignation” (Rom. 4:15); “the Law through Moses was given; graciousness and truth came to be through Jesus Christ” (Jn. 1:17).  Thus there is indeed a vast difference between the face and disposition that for the most part characterized Jehovah under the Old Covenant, and how He much more perfectly became characterized after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ His own Son, who was commissioned to “take away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29) and thereby unleashed an utterly unprecedented, even astounding, torrent of favor!  Yet God’s attitude toward sin had not altered one iota between the Old and New Covenants.  He remains the very same God throughout every era and eon.  The change was on our part when we “realized the favor of God in truth” (Col. 1:6) and trusted Messiah Jesus, thus receiving God’s gratuitous justification and remission of sins and thereby entering God’s favor and Kingdom!  So the problem had been entirely on our side, not on His, for the Law was impotent (Rom. 8:3) and without benefit (Heb. 7:18), its weakness (Heb. 7:38) due to our weakness of flesh (Rom. 8:3, Heb. 7:16).

However, that weak Law did become an escort (paidagogos) to Messiah for the Jews (Gal. 3:24), the superinduction (epeisagoge) of “a better expectation, through which we [also those of the nations] are drawing near to God” (Heb. 7:19).  But it is an escort no longer!  (Gal. 3:25)  Now that we (both Jews and those of the nations) are sons of God by trust in Messiah Jesus, we have our Father’s very own motivation, and so are no longer “under law” (Rom. 6:14-15, 7:1-2, 6, Gal. 3:23, 25, 4:5, 21, 5:18), which is to say,  “under guardians and administrators” (Gal. 4:2), “under the elements of the culture” (Gal. 4:3), and due to our fleshly weakness,  “under sin” (Gal. 3:22, Rom. 7:14), hence “under a curse” (Gal. 3:10).  

Messiah Jesus has reclaimed us from the curse of the Law of Moses (with any attendant anger of God) against our sins.  It is, much rather now the favor of God that is our starting point for conduct and behavior.  Moses’ Law is no longer our ethic, training us by the use of disciplinary curses and object lessons of anger and destruction (which might easily lead to the notion of a constitutionally angry Deity).  Jesus’ favor now takes actual priority since it has invaded a creation still disrupted by sin, and in spite of sin (Rom. 5:6-8), and even overwhelming it (1 Tim. 1:14), taking it off guard, so to speak (1 Cor. 2:6-13), and triumphing over all our enemies in high places (Col. 2:13-15, 1 Cor. 15:8-28).  The saving favor of God is now our trainer (Tit. 2:11-15), our discipliner in ethics (Heb. 12:1-15); the Wholesome Spirit of graciousness is now our coach (Jn. 14:16-17, 26, 15:26, 16:7-14)!  [11/24/97]

God might have spared ancient Israel their tormented history, as we know it, by not giving them the Law/Torah of Moses at Sinai in the first place.  The Law aggravated their sinfulness, thus exposing them in a higher degree to God’s anger than the surrounding nations who had less knowledge of God’s desire, so were less liable to disciplinary action for conscious violations.

In tandem with this provocative intrusion of revealed demands that could not help but heighten Israel’s culpability and expose them to the danger of disciplinary avenging by God, He conjoined sacrificial provisions that promise pardon/ release/ remission/ forgiveness from sin.  But in reality those sacrifices, in themselves, accomplished exactly nothing whatsoever to effect that forgiveness.  They had this one benefit:  they were attached to explicit Divine promises concerning forgiveness, thus faith in God was required to keep offering them.  It was this faith that pleased God to pardon the Law’s infractions, though any essential and perpetual cleansing of the conscience could not actually be attained by the operation of those sacrifices.

Upon reflection, this is truly astonishing!  It means that “in the forbearance of God” He “passed over the penalties of sins which had occurred” throughout Israel’s entire tortured history long “before” the essential cleansing was made available through Jesus, the Messiah (Rom. 3:25, Heb. 1:1-3).  So it was not so much the ancient sacrifices that God was after (to be sure, He even despises and overtly denounces them in no uncertain terms at decisive moments throughout their history), but rather their trust that He really had pardoned them their sins.  The ancient mechanism was in itself but a sign, the obedient performance of which could only be a fruit of their belief that God forgave them when He saw the sign (for He saw their repentant, trusting heart impelling it,  [12/26/22]).

However, with the work of Messiah accomplished, the Truth was fully unveiled, and the whole scheme of things was inverted!  Wrath and grace were transposed; anger and favor  got counter-emphasized.  Now grace/favor could vaunt over wrath/anger for a change, because Messiah’s Crucifixion had justified God in bursting forth from heaven to avenge his unjust execution by Raising him from the dead and exalting him to highest heaven, above all enemies of God’s Kingdom, and giving him superabundant favor as an agelong recompense!  Such an expression of God’s hidden heart was historically impossible prior to Messiah’s barbaric murder.  That heinous deed forced God’s hand to intervene in history and natural processes (uh…His own design, as we know…) beyond all precedent.  This divine judgment precipitated a new age in which the entire Old Covenant Law was itself pointedly “nailed”!  God Himself nailed it fast and blew it to Kingdom come!  The supreme standard of righteousness it is no longer!  What the Father did for the Son, what God did for His chosen Messiah, far surpasses every precedent of justice.  And, mercifully, it even left the culprits alive in the bargain so that they could have time to repent and trust God anew!  The human imagination had never conceived such love from any deity.

The spiritual polarity of the universe was reversed in an instant on Resurrection morn!  Then at Pentecost, 50 days later, the circuit between heaven and earth was closed and the juice turned on, in order to blow Satan out of the water in the first of a new series of shattering encounters with his resurrected, exalted, and now enthroned Foe!

For us who trust the Victor, Messiah Jesus, this compact scenario heralds a new order of the cosmos!  The old-fashioned Law of Moses cannot possibly hold the New Wine of God’s Wholesome Motivation thereupon injected into human affairs.  God’s favor has taken over!  The Regime of Grace now demands supreme allegiance.  Accordingly, the first words we communicate among strangers to this Truth must be words of favor from God in the Messiah—favor that “overwhelms  (huperpleonaz-) with trust and love in Messiah Jesus” (1 Tim. 1:14).  Thus Paul can add:  “Faithful is the explanation, and worthy of all welcome, that Messiah Jesus came into the world to save sinners, foremost of whom am I.  But therefore was I shown mercy, that in me–foremost!–Jesus Messiah should be displaying all his patience, toward a pattern of those who are about to be believing on him for life agelong” (1 Tim. 1:16).

Moreover, it is then precisely this favor that proceeds to become the pivot of our way of life in this age, in contradistinction to the old-fashioned Law of Moses.  Our ethic, our morality, our very customs must become  powered by favor so that God gets full credit for every good action and activity we do.  God’s own Motivation of Wholesomeness is now our inspiration for good projects and fine deeds.  “Don’t fence me in by antiquated rules” could well be our byword in the face of inveterate judaizers; “Don’t tread on me,” our rejoinder to hypernomian tyrants who dare devalue and disdain the motivational dynamic of Divine favor set loose to stimulate every human potential to the very zenith of glorious achievement and integrity.  [11/25/97]