This is one of two Greek names of Jesus (Yeshua‘) that liken Him to a lamb. This particular Greek word is only found in the book of Revelation and it introduces new ideas about Jesus, the Lamb, that are not said about Jesus, the Lamb of God.
The lamb is still seen as sacrificial, and His blood is important. He is gentle and kind. But He is also worshiped, shares the glory and centrality of God and has authority and power, even over history. The Lamb possesses a book of life, a typical membership list for a king in that culture. The Lamb displays wrath and punishes His enemies, over whom He is victorious (Rev. 17:14). He is also married to the church, His Bride.
Many of the images first appear during inter-testamental times when heroes were sometimes called horned lambs (Enoch speaks of King David and Judas Maccabeus this way). John understood how, in Jesus, truths about the Old Testament sacrificial lambs combined with the truth of God’s victorious champion, Jesus.
The Lamb in Greek:
The Lamb (arnion) in the Greek text of Revelation 6:1.
To arnion
Strong’s Concordance number: 721b
Bible references: Rev. 5:6-13; 6:1, 7, 9, 16; 7:9-10, 14, 17; 8:1; 12:11; 13:8; 14:1, 4, 10; 15:3; 17:14; 19:7, 9; 21:9, 14, 22-23; 22:1, 3
The Greek version of Jeremiah 11:19 uses the same word arnion.
I was like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter; and I knew not that they had devised devices against me, saying, Let us destroy the tree with the fruit thereof, and let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name may be no more remembered. (Jeremiah 11:19 KJV)
