The Messiah as Lion and Lamb

If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?

This is the question we started out with on Sunday night before playing a game of speed charades (you only have 30 seconds to get your team to guess correctly) of all animal clues.

In this series we've talked about Jesus as high priest, king, servant, Son of God, Lord, savior, life, redeemer and now we finish the series talking about Jesus as lion and lamb!  To focus on this understanding of Jesus, we looked at Revelation.  Revelation often gets a bad reputation in a lot of Christian writing and understanding.  I bet I can count on one hand the number of you who read this who have heard a sermon from Revelation.  When we look further though, Revelation is a letter written to seven Christian communities who were under severe persecution.  The reason so many people shy away from Revelation is that it uses a lot of imagery-based writing where symbols and visuals are used to represent other things.  Since it is not literal, the writings in Revelation often confuse people and just seem weird and even scary at times.  Ultimately, though, one of the biggest themes of Revelation is worship, not "the end times".

For our lesson on Sunday night, we looked specifically at Revelation 5:1-8 where Jesus is named both the lion and the lamb.  When we think of a lion, we think of Jesus as things like king, courageous, a leader, brave, powerful and mighty.  When we think of a lamb, we think of Jesus as being meek, peaceful, and a creature killed in sacrifice for sins.  So while lions and lambs are incredibly different, both pinpoint important characteristics of who Jesus is!

Since we are in the season of Lent, we looked at the clip from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" where Aslan is killed and resurrected.  We talked about the parallels of this movie to the Gospel story of Jesus' death and resurrection.  It's amazing the similarities that are present between the two stories, and what better way to understand Jesus as lion than to have him portrayed as an actual lion in this movie!

We took a look at a few photomosaics where artists have created one big picture from lots of smaller ones.  This is a good example of what this series has been like for us.  We looked at lots of different names, understandings, and characteristics of Jesus that together created the bigger picture of who Jesus is.  What a great series to explore, especially during Lent as we prepare our hearts for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Next week we will have a mission and games night!!  So you won't want to miss it, and bring a friend along with you!