Nov
30
2009
Behold the Lamb of God: 10th Anniversary Edition
(First things first: for those in Chicagoland, this Thursday (December 3) Andrew Peterson’s musical about the birth of Christ, “Behold the Lamb of God,” will be performed at Elmhurst Christian Reformed Church at 7 PM. You can get tickets here.)
Now for everyone else:
Andrew Peterson’s classic Christmas album, Behold the Lamb of God, is now being released as a two-disc, 10th anniversary edition (you can download the MP3s–26 tracks, half of them live–for $8.99).
The widget below should let you sample the tracks:
Amazon.com Widgets
In a foreword to a forthcoming Advent book Peterson explains what he was hoping to accomplish as he wrote the album:
At its core, it was to present the story of Christmas in a new way. I wanted to reach deep into the Old Testament and sing about the Passover, and King David, and Isaiah’s prophecies. I wanted to capture with song the same thrill that captured me in Bible college when the epic scope of the Gospel story first bowled me over. But I didn’t just want to dwell on what came before Jesus’ birth. I wanted to sing about what came after. His crucifixion and resurrection were the reasons he was born in the first place. You can’t have Christmas without Easter.
Elsewhere he’s written:
What makes this bunch of songs unique is that I wanted to remind (or teach) the audience that the story of Christmas doesn’t begin with the birth of Jesus. Many people tend to forget or have never even learned that the entire Bible is about Jesus, not just the New Testament.
So the musical begins with Moses and the symbolic story of the Passover (Passover Us) and works its way through the kings and the prophets with their many prophecies about the coming Messiah (So Long, Moses) to the awful four hundred years of silence before God told Mary she’d be having a baby (Deliver Us). After the song called Matthew’s Begats, which lists the genealogy of Jesus, the story picks up in more familiar territory with Mary and Joseph and the actual birth (It Came To Pass, Labor of Love). The final song is called Behold, the Lamb of God, which ties together the Passover and the beauty and scope of the story.
Here’s one of those YouTube videos that takes a song and attempts to put a video with it. I’m usually not a fan of such things, but it allows you to hear a good recording a song that seeks to help readers see the storyline of Scripture leading to the Savior: