A Devotion from John Duncan

Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! 
—John 1:29

Look at what he takes away: “the sin of the world.” Not “sins,” but “sin”; sin with which not some individual but the whole world is charged. None but God can number the sins that have been committed since the world was, that will be committed while the world lasts. But though the sins are many and the sinners who commit them many, a unity binds all the sin of the world together. “The sin of the world,” of which the various sins are so many branches and displays, is the world’s apostasy and alienation from the living God. “Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). And the law of God is one; multitudes of commandments, but one in its principle—its principle being love to God and love to all created beings for God’s sake. It is one, as flowing all from the same essential purity, justice, and universal moral good of the divine nature. Sin has a unity contrary to this.

What is a world’s sin, the sin of a race that for six thousand years has been sinning? What is the amount of actual sin?

It’s “the sin of the world.” It involves me, it involves you, it involves each individual. We as individuals have our sins and as an integral part and portion of Adam’s posterity are connected thus with the whole amount of the sin of the world.

Now if we look through the world we will not find anything to take away its sin or even to lessen and restrain its sin—nothing there to make amends for it in whole or in part, nothing to subdue it. It is only capable of growing worse and worse. Isn’t this a pitiable world!

But, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” He was in the world, but he was not of the world. He comes into this world from the God against whom this world transgressed. And what may the world expect he comes to do? On what other errand could it be but to condemn the world? Ah no! “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:17). O what a visitor! How rightly might John point to him, how rightly may we all listen to John’s short but pithy declaration, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”