“And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself.” (John 12:32, NKJV)
Several names for Jesus is found in the Bible. An unknown person once counted them all, and determined that there were 365 different names, one for each day of the year. But one of the names is remarkably interesting, as it is the first name that Jesus is called when He is identified by John the Baptist as the Son of God; it is also the name most frequently used in the book of Revelations when referred to the Son – the Lamb of God. In these last teachings that wrap up the secondary theme of the blood of Jesus it is important to note that the entire identity of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, is grounded in the name the Lamb of God.
But it is also more than that – as the old American psalm powerfully attests – “the Lamb who is the great I AM”. It requires serious pondering to consider how the God of the universe could present himself as an animal to be slaughtered. Rev 5:12 identifies Him as the lamb who was slaughtered (ISV).
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was revolted by the idea of God as a sacrificial lamb. In his essay “God on the cross” (in the anthology The Anti-Christ) he disdainfully rejects, in absolute disgust, the idea that a God can be that weak. He then goes on to say – “What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness … The weak and the failures shall perish.” His attitude of having no grace with the vulnerable was later echoed by Hitler.
A few months after Nietzsche had written his book he visited the town of Turin (where the cloth in which Jesus was allegedly wrapped before He was placed in the tomb is kept). It is here that an event took place that possibly pushed an already spiritually threadbare Nietzsche over the edge of sanity. A man with a horse cart loses all patience with a horse that would no longer walk, and keeps on hitting the animal out of brute anger and frustration. He was, proverbially, flogging an almost dead horse.
Nietzsche could no longer face the horse’s anguish. He cast his entire body in front of that of the animal, placing himself in the way of the man’s whip, attempting to spare the horse from any more pain. This single act nullified the entire philosophy propagated in The Anti-Christ. After this he not only lost his philosophy, but also his mind, and was admitted to an institution for the mentally ill. It is here that he wrote his last rambling letter, signing it as “The Crucified One” which points to the paranoid pre-occupation with the crucifixion of Jesus. After the incident with the animal he sunk into the bottomless pit of despair which he had theorized about his entire life, the nothingness from which he proclaimed that God is dead. Ten years later he would die in the institution.
The contemporary popular philosopher Jack Miles states that the horse in Nietzsche’s Europe is the symbolic equivalent of the lamb of ancient Israel – “Hyperdomesticated, like the human animal itself, and therefore poignantly vulnerable to abuse, the lamb invited metaphorical use in myth and ritual.” In this light the Lamb that was slaughtered and exalted on the cross, did exactly what he had promised in John 12:32. And – literally ironic – not even Nietzsche could not be overwhelmed by the amazing grace of a defenseless God.
- Sela: What is the significance of a mighty God of the universe presenting himself as a defenseless lamb?
- Read: Num 4; Zech 13; Ezek 5
- Memorize: Zech 13:6 (and memorize it in the fear of the Lord)
- For a deeper understanding: Read Jack Miles’ Christ: a crisis in the life of God.
