For the World

I think you chose a great weekend to be in church today because today we're starting a brand new series called 77. That stands for the 77 days between now Super Bowl Sunday and Easter Sunday. And we're gonna take those 77 days and go through the life of Jesus and end it on Easter. Why? My goal is that when Easter happens, Easter is going to make more sense to you and it's going to be more powerful for you than perhaps it's ever been before in your life.

I think for a lot of people the whole Holy Week thing—Good Friday when Jesus was crucified and then Easter and he's resurrected—it just does not compute for a lot of people. First of all, it just kind of hits you from out of the blue. You're never really emotionally prepared for it, and then it's all this whole thing about why would somebody want to crucify Jesus when he just went around preaching peace and love. It just doesn't make a lot of sense.

In fact, for a lot of people, the whole ministry of Jesus doesn't make a lot of sense. It's like this forest of unrelated random parables and miracles and sayings and journeys. Like what's the through line? What's it all about? What's the plot line, and how in the world could a bunch of healings and parables about being nice to each other end up with everybody crying, "Crucify him"? It doesn't make any sense.

Well, it does make sense if you know the plot line, and all we're going to be doing for the next 77 days, every weekend in this series, is telling you another chapter in the story that explains the plot. If you stay with us every weekend this year, when Easter hits, I think it's going to hit with an emotional power and with spiritual impact like perhaps never before.

And I'm excited about starting literally on day one of the ministry of Jesus Christ because from day one, as you'll see today, Jesus saw his ministry as being for the world. This past week has been World Outreach Week here at TLC, celebrating how God is doing work among all kinds of people like the indigenous Alaskans, Indian orphans, South African kids, and kids in Eastern Europe. Ministries all over the world that 10% of everything that comes into Twin Lakes Church goes to support these global ministry partners, and it's been an exciting week.

But this idea that our faith is meant for the world is not something new. It was part of our faith and part of the teaching of Jesus from day one. And so let's go all the way back to day one. Now, I always like to give credit where credit is due; much of the phrasing in today's message I got from a great sermon that I heard on this topic from Andy Stanley at North Point Church in Atlanta. I always look up other sermons when I'm preaching on a passage, and I just love the way he tells part of the story that really makes it relevant to modern day.

For example, he says if you are the type of person who enjoys going to concerts, you know, big-time like national arena concerts, you know that usually a big national act at a concert always has a warm-up act, right? The headliner has a warm-up act, and so to Jesus, John the Baptist steps onto the pages of history as the opening act to Jesus. It's almost like, "Ladies and gentlemen, from the Jordan River Basin, dressed in animal skins and smelling of locust breath, would you please welcome John the Baptist?" And here he is.

And the reason, by the way, he was called John the Baptist was not because he wasn't John the Methodist or John the Catholic or John the Lutheran; he was called John the Baptist because John, as far as we can tell in human history, was the very first person to ever baptize someone. Now, people were baptized before John the Baptist, but the way baptism worked in those days was it was the end of a long process whereby a Gentile—that is, a non-Jewish person—would convert and become a Jewish person. This process was full of classes and instruction and it ended with a ceremonial meal and finally a baptism. The Gentile person was saying, "I am, by going down in this water, dying to my old life as a Gentile and I am being reborn as one of God's people, the Jews."

Let me show you. So you can imagine this; this is a picture of an ancient mikvah in Israel—that's a ritual cleansing pool—and one of the things that this one would have been used for was baptism of converts. This is one from the first century, the time of Jesus, and nothing about the way these were constructed was random. They were always built according to a precise design and mathematical formula—the number of steps going down into the pool and back up out of the pool; it was all precisely regulated by the people who controlled the religion in this culture in the first century, and that was the temple authorities up on the hill in Jerusalem where the Temple Mount was.

There were literally mikvah monitors who worked for the priests who would go around and make sure that your ritual cleansing pool was being built in the approved way. And so the way you did your baptism was people stood around these pools and watched you, but you would walk into the ceremonial pool yourself and you would dip yourself; nobody would baptize you. John shows up and starts changing a lot of things about this. First, he's actually physically baptizing people exactly the same way that we do to this day, and most importantly, not in a pre-approved pool that was all okayed by the temple authorities, just out in the wilderness, just randomly in the wilderness. And this is how he got his nickname, John the Baptizer.

Now John's story is known from three of the four gospels that start out the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Mostly this morning, I'm going to be in the Gospel of John, but I'm going to start with some verses from Luke and Matthew to establish the historical context and then just tell you the story again to begin to establish the plot line for what ends up on Easter. All right, you got the picture? So you ready for this? Here is how Luke describes the beginning of Jesus Christ's opening act—very thrilling, very exciting. Here we go.

Luke says, "In the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod Tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip Tetrarch of Eteria and Trachonidas, and Lysanias Tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas." Now, if you ever read the Bible and you get to these parts and go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, what's up? Well, let's just get to the good parts. Let me skip, skip, skip, skip," let me tell you why this is so important. This is Luke saying to his skeptics, "Fact check me." In other words, this is Luke saying, "The story I'm about to tell you did not happen a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I'm about to tell you a fable, and it doesn't matter if it historically happened because it has a moral to it by which you can live your life." No, he's saying this really happened in human history, and if you don't believe me, let me just give you all the details you need to know to check this out.

And by the way, John the Baptist's story is known from sources outside the Bible—did you know that? There are like the ancient Jewish historian Josephus talks about John the Baptist; he was wildly popular in his day. Luke is saying what I am about to tell you is about a historical figure. And so he goes on and he says, "Here's what happened: the Word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness." Now that's interesting; John's the son of Zechariah. Now Zechariah is just not some random name; he is a person that we met in the previous chapter in the book of Luke. And you'll remember Zechariah's job was—does anybody remember what his job was? He was a what? He was a priest. Thank you! You're a Patriots fan, but now you may stay because you got the answer right. He was a priest, and he was a priest up there literally as part of the temple system in Jerusalem.

Now that's interesting because it means John the Baptist was very familiar with the temple hierarchy. It was part of the family business, you could say. John, in fact, had probably been groomed to follow in his father's footsteps and get into the whole religious system, the temple hierarchy, the priesthood. But John does something completely unexpected; he opposes the establishment. And instead of wearing priestly garbs, the Bible says he's wearing animal skins, and he's, you know, I can imagine him with matted hair and this long beard—this prophet-looking guy way out in the wilderness. The Bible says he ate locusts and wild honey, and he's out there in the middle of nowhere.

And Matthew says people went out to him from Jerusalem, the big capital city where the temple was, and all Judea—that's the whole province, the whole Roman province where the Jews lived—and the whole region of the Jordan that includes the other countries that were around there too. This isn't a dozen people listening to a crazy man preaching on the backside of the Jordan River; probably hundreds of thousands of people are coming out to hear him because he makes history. And yet he's preaching in the middle of nowhere; he's in the wilderness, in the desert on the Jordan River. It's a wasteland like this until you get close to the river when it starts looking like this. I mean, it is wild, and this is not a convenient trip from even the closest cities, which were Jerusalem and Jericho. You'd have to get up at the crack of dawn and then travel for hours and then hope you could find him out there in the middle of nowhere.

And John is a problem. Why? Well, at that time, there is a very uneasy alliance between the elite ruling families of the Jewish province Judea and the rulers of the world at that time, the Roman Empire. This story happens at really the height of the Roman Empire up to this point. I mean, the Roman Empire is just in the ascendancy, and here is how Romans saw the whole rest of the world. This is a really interesting carving from a sarcophagus of a leading Roman at this exact time. So this is on his coffin; like this is what this is. This is a good thing; this is what they brag about. Do you see what's happening in this carving? See on the top there are the Romans, and on the bottom, there are the others—the guys with the beards and the curly hair, you know, and the Romans. What are the Romans doing to those people? They are making fun of them, and they're stomping on them; they're riding their horses over them. They are literally walking over the people who are not Romans, and the Romans are like, "Yep, that's us; we're the best. That's what we do to everybody." And when they got to Judea for Jerusalem, the ruling class of the Jews, we know from history that these people were elite. They were very wealthy; they educated their children in Rome and in Athens, and so they could speak Latin; they could kind of get Roman culture.

And what happens is they say, "Look, look, come here, come here, Romans, your son and my son, they went to university together, right? So we can talk; we got something in common. We just want to warn you historically, our Jewish people, they just rebel against every foreign oppressor; they will cause you no end of trouble. But we can help, and here's the deal they make: the elite class in Judea says, 'We're gonna keep the peace; you guys just leave us in power. You don't even have to call us the governor or the pro consul or any of your Roman terms; you just call us the high priests, and we can help you out, and you can help us out; just call us the high priests because in our country, whoever controls the religion controls the people.' And they felt like this is a win-win because we help keep the Romans off the backs of our people, and we get to stay in power.

Now there was a lot of criticism of this arrangement even in those days, even outside the Bible. In fact, a lot of the Dead Sea Scrolls—you've heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls that archaeologists have found? A lot of those are just sermons skewering the temple leadership for this power grab. And what happens was from time to time, somebody would arise claiming to be a Messiah-type figure, and he would say, "People, we need to do two things: overthrow the Romans and get that, you know, 1%—that elite class, that temple leadership—get them out." And the people would start to get riled up, and the Roman governors would go to the Jewish leaders and say, "Do you guys remember that arrangement you said we had? We don't like what's happening out here; can you control this? Because if you don't exert control over these people, we're gonna come in and exert control the Roman way, and you're not gonna like the way we exert control, so deal with it." And so the high priest would try to figure out a way to deal with these disturbances.

Now, thanks to the high priests and King Herod, things had gone along pretty smoothly for a couple of years, and then suddenly there's this guy out on the banks of the Jordan River, and thousands upon thousands of people in the region show up to listen to him. And here's what really disturbed the religious leaders: it says the people were confessing their sins. It's not just a political rally; they're confessing their sins. Now we read this in the 21st century, and it's like, "So what?" But in those days, there was a prescribed way that you would confess your sins and deal with your sins. The temple religious leaders in Jerusalem, on the hill where the Temple Mount stood, they had taken what the Bible taught about dealing with your sins and they had taken it to a whole new level of complication.

You had to go to the big mega temple in Jerusalem and make certain sacrifices for certain kinds of sins, and every one of those sacrifices cost coin. You had to go to say certain things to the priests, and for certain sins, you could go just to the priest's assistant, but you had to go through a credentialed authority, and he would tell you what hoops to go through to hopefully be forgiven. And now here's a nobody in the middle of nowhere, and people are confessing their sins to him for free. And not only that, they're being baptized by him in where? The Jordan River. Remember, to be baptized, you were supposed to go through a long protocol in an approved pool. Plus, that was mostly meant for Gentiles to convert to Judaism; these people were mostly already Jews. They didn't need to be baptized. What is he doing?

It was all, to use a Silicon Valley term, so extraordinarily disruptive. It was disruptive to kind of the status quo, to the religious system at the time—this guy with no authority, no backing, no explanation, just some wild-eyed preacher in the middle of nowhere in the whole countryside blocks to hear. Okay, now that the stage is sort of set, I want to switch to another one of the gospels, the Gospel of John. The first thing John does is he begins to tell the story of John the Baptist. John, John the Apostle, wrote John's gospel, and he starts with the story of another John, John the Baptist. And the first thing he says is he kind of foreshadows the conflict that you're going to see every week. He says, "For the law was given through Moses." The law of Moses was all about the commands of God, and again, the temple authorities in those days had taken the law and expanded it into hundreds and hundreds of extra commands that weren't even in the Bible, and the people were burdened by this.

The law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. He would speak the truth about what had happened to their religion, and he would bring grace, not law. And you don't even have to understand this right now; as we continue in this series, you'll see how this develops. The point was something new was coming—something that would change everything about the way people looked at their relationship with God. And the nervous temple leadership over in Jerusalem is starting to smell something in the wind; something doesn't smell right, and they're sniffing it out, and it's all coming from the banks of the Jordan River over in the wilderness.

So the high priests and the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the leaders, say, "We got to send somebody over there to check this out." So they send some underlings. This was John's testimony: "When the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was." So they send their underlings first; go down there and find out what's going on. And these guys show up, and I would have loved to have just watched these city slickers show up and try to intimidate John the Baptist, you know, like, "Who do you think you are? Where's your authority come from?" And it says he did not fail to confess but confessed freely, "I know what you're worried about; go tell your masters I'm not the Messiah." And so they follow up with this question; they ask him, "Well then, who are you? Are you Elijah?"

The reason they ask him this question is because the very last prophet in the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, was Malachi. It's in fact the last book of the Old Testament in the English Bible because he's the last prophet chronologically, and one of the last things he says is, "Before the Messiah comes, the prophet Elijah will come to prepare the people." And some people thought that meant that Elijah was literally going to be brought back to life. And so these guys are like, "Okay, if you're not the Messiah, do you see yourself as that guy? Because we actually know your dad, and if you see yourself as that guy, then you're crazy." And he says, "I'm not. Nope." And so then they said, "Well, are you the prophet?" Because there was a big movement at that time, and again, we know about this from the Dead Sea Scrolls, that said that a prophet like Moses will arise before the Messiah comes and will lead the nation back to God. "Are you that guy?" He answered, "Nope." Do you see him? He's just going, "No, no, no, no, you guys are way off." And they're getting kind of frustrated with this, and finally, they said, "Well, who are you? Don't just keep saying no; give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself? What's your deal, John? We can't just go back and say, 'Well, we found out who he's not.' Who are you?"

And John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, "I am the voice." Guys, I'm just a voice. I'm not the guy; I'm just a voice of one calling in the wilderness, "Make straight the way of the Lord." In other words, what I'm saying is people get ready because the Lord is coming, and the way you get ready is you repent and realize your need for a Savior because you're a sinner. And he says people who are in that headspace, they're the ones who are going to recognize him because they're gonna see their need for him; they're the ones who are going to receive his message. People get ready.

Next verse: "Now the Pharisees who had been sent questioned him." Well, now look at what they're concerned about. "Why then do you baptize if you're not the Messiah, you're not Elijah, you're not the prophet?" What's really their concern? The ritual. Why? Because the ritual is where they get their power from; it's where they get their authority from; it's where they get their money from. And sort of like, "Well, wait a minute, you can't ask people to get baptized here, and you can't ask people to confess their sin down here in the middle of nowhere; they got to confess their sin up there on the hill with us." And John kind of avoids their question and gets all mystical. Watch this answer: "I baptized with water, but among you stands one you do not know." And what he's saying is, "You think I'm a big deal? Are you serious? You're worried about me baptizing? You think I've unsettled things? You think I've made your bosses nervous? Just wait because compared to me, compared to who's waiting in the wings, I am a footnote to history. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie."

So these guys have to bring this conversation back to their bosses, and this answer does not calm them down. And I think the head Pharisees and Sadducees and the high priest, they're like, "You fools, do we have to do everything ourselves? Do we have to do every intimidating interrogation on our own?" And so they decide to make the trip themselves. So imagine these guys are upset already, but they get up at dawn, and they put on their finery, and they get into some decked-out caravan and wagons pulled by horses. And we know from the way they're described that there were always people marching in front of them, blowing trumpets, flags flying, and all the way people are very impressed; people honor them, and they get out of the way because they're really the de facto rulers of the country.

And so these guys show up, and imagine the contrast. They smell good, and they look good, and they dress good; they are manicured, powerful, sophisticated, you know, oiled hair. And there's John, disheveled and wearing animal skins and smelling bad and kind of acting crazy, you know? Got the picture? And so their caravan snakes its way down to the river, and the Bible says before they even reach him, John looks up and sees them coming, and here's what happened. I'm gonna dip back into Matthew for a second. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing—they haven't even gotten to him yet; he's seeing them approach—he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?" I mean, a hush goes over the crowd; no one ever talked to these guys like this.

And John just goes on; he says, "Produce fruit in keeping with repentance." He's saying, "I don't know exactly why you're here, but if you're here to put on a show of baptism for everybody, you're not gonna fool me. You better follow that up with some real fruit in keeping with the fruit of the Spirit in your life." He's saying, "I know what is in your hearts." Now remember, he grew up in their system; he is the son of a priest that's serving in Jerusalem. And he says, "I know the kind of people you are; I know what is in your hearts. Your brand of my religion is toxic. Don't you dare tell anybody else to repent; you're the ones who need to repent!" Wow.

And so here it is. This right there, this is the tension; this is the friction; this is the conflict; this is the grit that becomes part of the ministry of Jesus Christ between him and these authorities. It starts right here, and John's just giving them a warning; he's giving them a heads-up; he's giving me a heads-up; he's giving you a heads-up: something is about to change. Those high priests, their brand of religion, their brand of compassionless, systematized religion that's hyper-authoritarian, that is about to start to come to an end. And so they don't even—these guys don't even get into a conversation with John; they just turn around, and apparently, did they just go back? And I imagine John's going, "Snakes!" as they leave. "Did you hear me? Snakes!"

Then the next day, John sees somebody else coming down the same road, but has a totally different response. This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan. I want you to picture this: here's Jerusalem up on the hill, here's the Jordan River, and on the other side, the eastern side of the Jordan River, there are some people we have seen in the Bible earlier who are on that side of the Jordan River. And that's centuries before this story in the Bible; the people of Israel were on that side of the Jordan River, and they crossed the Jordan River to begin something new and revolutionary. Keep that in your minds.

So this happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan; that's where John was baptizing. The next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him. Now, I was thinking about it; if you could freeze this moment in history, at that moment, only two people fully understood who Jesus was: John the Baptist and Jesus. This morning, this Sunday morning, across the world, there are billions of people who love Jesus and who call him their Savior and Lord—billions of people worshiping in big churches and small churches and house churches and under trees in the open air, people worshiping Jesus in underground churches and in mega churches and on every continent on planet earth—billions of us. But on that day, there were two. Makes the whole thing seem real fragile, doesn't it?

And John the Baptist sees Jesus coming down, and he looks up and he says these classic, classic words. He says, "Look, everybody, everybody, everybody, look! Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin." Now stop there for just a second because already this is again so disruptive because just at this part of what he says, people would have been, "Wait, John, we were something miles away from the temple, and we know about the lambs that take away sin. We go up to the temple mount every year to atone for our sins with the Passover lambs, and we have to do that annually. And now you're telling us that God's providing a lamb out here in the middle of nowhere, miles away from the temple system?" But that was nothing compared to what came next. If all their categories are blown up to this point, their heads are about to explode with the next line: "The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." What? Wait, wait, wait, John! Wait! God's gonna forgive the sins of the world? Like even Gentile sin? The sin of our enemies? The sin of those Romans who get funny to walk all over us? John, why would God do that?

John, you know this: our entire religious system and our entire culture right now is designed to keep us separate from the world, meaning the whole rest of the world—the Gentile world. We don't go into their houses; we don't eat their food; the holiest among us don't even let them touch us. We have been praying for God to judge them, not forgive them. Even at the temple, there are signs all over the temple, and archaeologists have found a couple of these like this one that, when translated, say, "No Gentile is allowed within the wall surrounding the temple; whoever enters will invite death for himself." And now you're, John, you're telling us that God is concerned about forgiving the sins of the whole world? And this is another part of the tension that Jesus stepped into and part of the root of the conflict that followed him.

Now, people shouldn't have been surprised because this was part of the Hebrew Scriptures from their day one when God promised Abraham 2,000 years before Jesus. He said, "Abraham, from you and from the people I'm going to bring out of you will come blessing for the whole world." And all throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, the law and the prophets have repeated this idea that the Jewish people are going to be a blessing for the world, and there's going to come one to arise from the Jewish people who is going to save and unite all the people that God loves all around the world. And John the Baptist's point was to prepare the people and say it's finally happening; the long-awaited Messiah of the world is here. He is coming and is here not just to be the next in a long line of Jewish kings but to be the first and the one and the only lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

And this is the good news. And you'll remember that Jesus—we talked about this at the very end of December—when he preached his very first sermon to his hometown crowd, he said, "I am here to bring glad tidings of good news and great joy." And then he quotes Isaiah the prophet to say the Messiah's here with a message for the Gentiles, not just the Jews. And this enrages his hometown audience because the culture of that time and where they were at. So even though this was good news and it did not exclude anybody, it was still very, very difficult for people in that culture to hear because transitions are hard. You know that from your own life, right? Transitions are difficult. Well, this transition, this was gonna be rough.

Again, I love the way Andy Stanley puts it; he says the fact is those who profit most from the status quo are least inclined to let it go, right? Always. And when Jesus showed up, the temple system was very wealthy and very powerful and very corrupt. Now, be careful here; this can be very confusing because we know from like Sunday school and from the Bible that God is the one who designed the sacrificial system and God is the one who gave the law of Moses. This isn't anything against those, but Jesus is, among other things, saying under the leadership of the temple high priests, the system has become corrupt. And what we need is new wine and new wineskins, and Jesus says, "I am here to bring the new covenant that the law of Moses and the prophets talk about where the law of God is written on hearts, not just on tablets of stone. And I am here to bring a new command that summarizes the law of Moses." And you're gonna see later on in the series how Jesus took the 600-plus commands that they'd come up with that supposedly explained the law of Moses, and he says, "Well, let me explain it to you more simply." And he summarizes the law into two commands, and then on the final night of his life, he summarizes those two into one unifying ethic for his new movement—this kind of new people, this new nation that he was founding, which is going to be multi-ethnic and multi-racial and multinational and for the world. And all this is what's coming, and all this is why the defenders of the status quo feared him.

Okay, so now Jesus takes his first step onto the world stage, and he makes his way down to the water, and he says, "John, my friend, baptize me." And John says, "Are you kidding me? I baptized you! I just got done telling these people yesterday that I'm not worthy to untie your sandals, and now you want me to baptize you?" And Jesus says, "This must be done to fulfill all things." And although it doesn't say it specifically, I believe that Jesus must have been thinking in part of that group of Israelites on the same side of the Jordan River crossing it; they knew would start something brand new. And Jesus is saying, "We're about to start something," and the next stage in those people that is just as revolutionary. And so, "Baptize me, my friend," and he did. And so it began: God's promise to Abraham would finally be fulfilled through a man who came as a lamb to take away the sin of the world.

Now, in a few minutes, we're going to be receiving communion to remember this, but just stay right where you are for just a second and look up here because I want you to think of what this sentence means to you. Because in those moments when you fall, you sin, and you're so overwhelmed with guilt and shame and how stupid you've been, what do you do in those moments? You behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And in those moments, maybe late at night, and you're haunted by a mistake from your dark past, and it's a mistake maybe nobody knows about, maybe everybody knows about, and they all hate you for it, and you're just haunted by regrets. What do you do in those moments? You behold not your own sin; you behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin, takes away the sin of the world.

When bitterness takes root in your heart, and you find it so difficult to even imagine forgiving and reconciling somebody because of what they did, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. In those moments when you feel like benching yourself because you can't believe that God would use somebody with your baggage and your garbage, and you hear about the church needing volunteers, and you hear about going on a mission trip, but you're like, "I gotta wait until I'm a better person; I gotta wait until I quit this and quit that because I'm just garbage." What do you do in those moments? You behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, including whatever sin is haunting you and weighing you down and giving you all that negative baggage.

And when you read the headlines and you look at the world that it's so messed up, and you despair of ever imagining anything that could unite this world, you remember that picture in the Bible of every tongue and every tribe and every nation and every race and every ethnicity coming together in glory and in the New Jerusalem, worshiping the Lamb who is worthy. And you remember that in that moment, what brings them together is they're gonna behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. If you let this sentence sink down into your soul, it literally changes everything about how you see yourself and how you approach God and the freedom in which you live and how you can forgive and approach others. And that sentence, this is really a prophecy of John the Baptist, and three years after he said this, it would actually happen on one specific Passover night: the Lamb of God was sacrificed at the crucifixion of Christ for the world. But before we get to that moment, there are 77 days of stories to tell; there are diseases to heal; there are crowds to feed; there are temple tables to topple. And you'll see it; those aren't random. There's a plot line that runs through all of those things Jesus did; all of that to show with certainty that he was bringing something new, full of grace and truth for the world.