Read: EXODUS 12:11-13 (English Standard Version)
We will kick off our brand new series, “Past Perfect”! For the next four weeks, we will discover the significance of God’s sovereign plan of salvation as revealed in the Old Testament. We’ll also be able to learn how this came to pass through Jesus’s life and death. After this series, May each of us live a life in accordance to the gospel.
For the Christian, the Passover isn’t a festival as such, but for what it represents as a symbol of redemption. Here we see a foreshadowing of Jesus as the Lamb of God, the Saviour of the world to as many as would believe in Him. We can be assured of the truth of this when we recall the encounter the two despondent disciples had with Jesus on the road to Emmaus. After the journey ‘They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us … and opened the scriptures to us?”’ What did the resurrected Christ do? Luke tells us, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, Jesus explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.”
The story of the Exodus from the clutches of Pharaoh is well-known. Moses had been commissioned to lead the Israelites from Egypt but Pharaoh was loathe to leave them go as they were a valuable source of free labour in his building projects. They were held in slavery, and were forced to submit to hard labour, to suffer unrestrained beatings and to make bricks without straw (2:23,24; 3:7). Demonstrations of God’s power in inflicting successive plagues of increasing intensity and discomfort to Egypt’s infrastructure only served to harden Pharaoh’s heart. God had to move against him, in the words of the historian, with ‘an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment’ (Exodus 6:6).
It was God who took the initiative, revealing Himself in faithfulness and compassion for His people. He had heard their cries for help in the unjust denial of their liberty and had remembered His promise to the founders of their race, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of the Promised Land of Canaan. He was a covenant-keeping God and this great deliverance of the Exodus was a foretaste of the deliverance of salvation from sin to be made possible by the atoning sacrifice by Jesus on the Cross. The Passover meal, a real historical event, is also a vivid type anticipating in symbolic form the greater escape from sin’s penalty in what Jesus would do some eighteen hundred years later at Calvary. Freedom for the Israelites, and later for mankind, would come in obedience to God’s careful instructions to be carried out to the letter. In this lesson, we will talk about Jesus as the Lamb in the Passover.
i. SPOTLESS LAMB
ii. SUBSTITUTE LAMB
iii. SHELTER LAMB
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I. SPOTLESS LAMB
5 Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, 6 and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight. EXODUS 12:5-6
22 He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. 1 PETER 2:22
5 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. PSALM 51:5
19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. ROMANS 7:19
24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. ROMANS 7:24-25
21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:21
18 knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. 1 PETER 1:18-19
God was very specific about the lamb that was to be chosen for the Passover. There were three conditions. First, it had to be male. Second, it had to be in it’s first year-both of these things speak of the great value of the lamb, and lastly, it had to be without blemish. The sacrifice had to be in its prime, carefully chosen, and kept under scrutiny for four days to ensure it was ritually pure at the time of its death. Nothing less than perfection would be adequate as an offering to God. How true this was of Jesus. He began His ministry around 30 years of age. At His first public appearance at the River Jordan when He was baptized at His own request by John, we’re told that ‘heaven opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in bodily form like a dove, and a voice came out of heaven, “You are my beloved Son, in You I am well pleased”’ (Luke 3:21-23). Throughout the three years of His earthly ministry the Jewish leaders subjected Him to intense observation, trying to catch Him out in something He might say and do. The accusers of Jesus had to resort to the words of false witnesses to condemn Him. Isaiah prophesied of the coming Messiah that ‘he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth’ (53:9). Yes, as the writer to the Hebrews put it, Jesus was ‘one’, the only one, ‘who is holy, blameless, pure’ (7:26). He, like the Passover lamb, was a perfect offering, sinless, spotless and without blemish.
II. SUBSTITUTE LAMB
7 “Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. 8 They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. 9 Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts. 10 And you shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. 11 In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord‘s Passover. EXODUS 12:7-11
7 Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 1 CORINTHIANS 5:7
God commanded the children of Israel to kill the lamb. They couldn’t keep it for a pet. They had to slaughter it. In the same way the Lamb of God was killed for our sakes. In the Biblical setting what it means is that the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross appeases, turns away the wrath of God. It was Christ’s sacrificial death on the Cross as our substitute which counts as atonement for our sins. Our sin debt has been paid. The wrath of God was vented on Him so that we could be saved. God’s holiness is satisfied and God’s justice has now been satisfied. The psalmist put it: ‘Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other’ (85:10). Jesus gave Himself as a ransom for our sins. As He Himself said, ‘the son of Man’ came ‘to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45). In the words of the wonderful ‘Hymn to Christ’ in the letter of Paul to the Philippi church, Jesus ‘being in very nature God … being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross’ (2:6-8). The Passover lamb wasn’t only a personal offering and a sacrificial death.
III. SHELTER LAMB
12 For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord. 13 The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt. EXODUS 12:12-13
22 Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. HEBREWS 9:22
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. ISAIAH 53:7
1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.ROMANS 8:1
29 The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! JOHN 1:29
5 And one of the elders said to me, “Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”6 And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and withseven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. REVELATION 5:5-6
Now the children of Israel had to do something with the Lamb’s blood. They didn’t just pour it out because it was precious! They were commanded to take that blood and apply it over the doorposts of their homes. God said that when He saw the blood, He would pass over them. Not one home with the blood applied was touched by the plague. Every home in Egypt without the blood lost their firstborn! The blood of Christ is my shelter today. It’s my shelter from the judgment of God! Through Christ as the Saving Lamb, we have a complete deliverance and salvation by God’s hand alone. This is a picture of what God has done for you and me in the person of His only begotten Son. He sent His Son into the world to bear our sins in His body on the Cross of Calvary. Jesus made it perfectly clear at the Last Supper in Jerusalem. On the night before He was crucified, writes the apostle Paul, ‘The Lord Jesus … took bread … he broke it and said, “This is (represents) my body which is (broken) for you!”’ (1 Corinthians 11:24). And similarly with the cup, “This is (represents) my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mark 12:24). Jesus ‘offered for all time one sacrifice for sins’ (Hebrews 10:12). The Old Testament sacrifices had to be repeated again and again as they were merely a temporary covering for sin until the ultimate Passover sacrifice by Jesus was made once and for all. The shedding of Christ’s blood was crucial to God’s plan of salvation for sinners. This tells us of a Biblical principle: ‘the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness’ (Hebrews 9:22).
JESUS IS THE ONLY TRUE LAMB OF GOD BY WHOM WE CAN BE SAVED AND REDEEMED THROUGH HIS PERFECT SACRIFICE.
