The Atonement Part 47--Christ the Lamb of God

This is the first of two lectures critiquing the sixteenth claim in the composite model of atonement. This sixteenth claim states: “As the perfect unblemished offering, Christ satisfies God’s wrath against sin once and for all, thereby obviating any further need for blood sacrifice.” This claim creates decidedly less furor than the model’s other claims for the simple fact that this theology seems to be held by everyone in the Christian world. Even respected thinkers within Eastern Orthodoxy espouse this claim.

The professors of this theology fail to reckon with the falsity of the two presuppositions atop which it rests. The first of these wrong ideas asserts that all of the Old-Testament sacrifices prefigure Christ. In point of fact, only the Passover lamb prefigures Christ. The sacrifices instituted after Israel’s apostasy with the Golden Calf have no bearing on Christ and the New-Testament Church whatsoever, given that this “second legislation” was purely ad hoc and punitive.

The second of these ideas wrongly asserts that Christ, as the Paschal Lamb, represents the fulfilment of the young goat slain as a sin offering on the Day of Atonement. The obvious problem is that a lamb is a young SHEEP; a young goat is a KID. Christ is the Lamb of God (John 1:29), not the “Kid of God!” Additionally, the offering of the first Passover lamb is not a sacrifice of atonement; rather, it is a sacrifice designed to destroy heathen gods. The New Testament ascribes precisely the same purpose to Christ’s incarnation: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8).

This lecture draws heavily from the Epistle to the Hebrews and from an anonymous work of the third century AD called The Apostolic Constitutions.

(For the other podcasts in this series, go to www.paulvendredi.com.)