Object Lessons | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Dec 29, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 50.

Object-Lessons

God has ever used objects, types, symbols, figures, in the instruction of His children in all ages. This was especially true before our Lord came to this earth. When man fell, two great facts faced him: the awfulness of sin, and the hopelessness of the future. Sin ended in death. Death, to human sight, seemed to end all.

Into this gloom period of doubt, despair, and death, shone the light of God’s love. One member of the Godhead, the eternal Son of God, “gave Himself”— a voluntary sacrifice for all. The infinite Father gave His Son. But not then was the great sacrifice demonstrated; it was an offering for the ages, for eternity. Centuries must roll their dreary round before the culmination, the depth of the sacrifice, could be reached.

But man must not forget the meaning of sin nor the love of the Redeemer. Therefore the sacrifice of the lamb from the days of Adam. Every time a lamb was offered, it told that the result of sin was death, that he who offered it was worthy to die, but that One who was innocent had yielded Himself in behalf of the guilty, in order that the guilty might be accounted innocent. The first-born spotless lamb, offered by Adam, by Abel, by Enoch, by Noah, by Abram, typified the blameless Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world. John 1 : 29.

The lamb did not atone for the sin. It paid no penalty. It remitted no guilt. Its shed blood washed away no sins. Yet the testimony of the Word is that “without shedding of blood there is no remission” (Heb. 9 : 22), and yet again, “It is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins” (Heb. 10 : 4). These sacrifices, these object-lessons, were types or figures of the spotless Lamb of God, slain in purpose before the foundation of the world, manifested in fact when Jesus died upon the cross. 1 Peter 1 : 18-20.

The more elaborate services of the sanctuary were but enlargements, fuller object-lessons, of the great evil of sin, and the great fact of a Saviour. They point out the holiness of God, the utter inadequacy of man to meet that holiness by his own efforts; but that God has met man’s needs in His own plan, His own purpose, His own goodness, His own sacrifice of love, His perfect righteousness, and His indissoluble life. These meanings will be more fully developed in the articles which follow.