John 1:29 → Isaiah 53:7

John the Baptist's title "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29) draws not only on the Passover but on Isaiah's Suffering Servant, who "was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth" (Isa 53:7). Isaiah 53 supplies the interpretive key that the Lamb's role is vicarious and atoning: the Servant bears the iniquity of many (53:6, 11-12), making the lamb-image not merely sacrificial in form but substitutionary in effect. Two roads meet in John's title: Isaiah's prophecy is a divine promise of a coming Servant-Lamb (promise and fulfilment; the Servant is not a type of the person), and the sacrificial lamb of the cultus is a type whose meaning Isaiah already deepens toward a person who suffers. John reads Jesus as the convergence of both streams, the silent, sin-bearing Lamb (cf. Acts 8:32-35; 1 Pet 2:22-24). The escalation is decisive: where every prior lamb was mute and unwilling, this Lamb willingly and knowingly "takes away" sin once for all. The telos is the desirability of the Servant who, having borne our griefs, "will see the light of life and be satisfied" (53:11) — His joy on the far side of the cross becoming the ground of ours.