<p>1:29 <em>The next day he saw Jesus coming towards him, and he said: Behold The Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world</em>- John the Baptist beheld the Lord Jesus walking, and commented that He <em>was then</em>, as He walked, the lamb of God (with all the sacrificial overtones of that phrase), that <em>takes away</em>, right then, three years before the cross, the sin of the world. The essence of what the Lord did on the cross was in fact ongoing throughout His life. John saw every man as in the desperate, urgent intensity of Passover night, needing to identify with the slain lamb. John <u>sees</u> Jesus and <u>says</u> &ldquo;<u>Look</u> The lamb of God&hellip;&quot;. The three words for &ldquo;see&quot;, &ldquo;says&quot; and &ldquo;Look&quot; are uniquely repeated in Jn. 19:26, where again we have the lamb of God, now sacrificed, on the cross. &quot;Takes away&quot; is the word used by John to describe the cry of the Jews: &quot;Away with Him&quot; (19:15). Here we see how human volition, however bad, is used within God's plan of salvation. The &quot;world&quot; whose sins are taken away is the world of believing persons, as mentioned earlier in this chapter. The Lord was thereby the creator of that world. The &quot;world&quot; simply cannot be understood as the literal universe. For it is persons who sin and whose sin is taken away by the Lord.</p>