Having thus unveiled Christ’s coming exaltation and glory, John the Baptist again presents Him as the Lamb of God. “Again the next day after John stood, and two of His disciples, and looking upon Jesus as He walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God” (John 1:35-36). In the former passage it was Christ in His sacrificial character — the meek and gentle victim — offering Himself for the sin of the world; in this it is the display of what He is in Himself that excites the wondering admiration of His forerunner. Looking upon Jesus as He walked, his heart is filled with adoring praise, and he says, “Behold the Lamb of God”; behold Himself, the beauty of His ways, the perfectness of His walk, the unfolding of a divine-human life, which was in itself a full and perfect moral presentation of God to man. It was indeed an object that might rivet the gaze of all beholders. For that lowly Man, whom John thus designated, was the only One on earth who fully answered the desires of the heart of God, the only One on whom He could look, and in whom He could rest with complacency and delight. John therefore was in the current of God’s own thoughts when he pointed his disciples to this beauteous Lamb of God.
This, at the same time, helps us to understand the significance of this second cry of the Baptist. John himself was arrested as he looked upon Jesus as he walked; and in utter forgetfulness of self, knowing that his lesser light must fade away and be extinguished by this heavenly luminary, he desires that his own disciples should be occupied with the object that had drawn forth and absorbed his affections. He had first proclaimed Him as the sacrifice for sin; for we can never know the Person of Christ until the question of sin has been settled, and then he pointed Him out to his disciples as the object for their hearts, as the One who was entitled, in virtue of His sacrifice and what it accomplished, to claim their allegiance and affections. And very blessed is it for us all when the claims of Christ are fully acknowledged. Under the pressure of our sin and guilt we are all willing, or rather often driven, to seek relief through His blood; but our danger is, when the relief is obtained, of forgetting that He who has borne our sins in His own body on the tree, has by that very fact the right to all that we have and are. The right? Most surely the right! But how it evidences the feebleness of our conceptions of what He is, and what He has done, when we have to argue and enforce it. Who would speak of a mother having the right to the love of her child? In like manner to speak of Christ having the right to our love, is only to prove the hardness of our hearts. To behold Him as the One who has taken away our sin should be enough to bind us forever to His service, to keep us at His feet as His willing servants, to melt our hearts to gratitude and praise.
E. Dennett (adapted)