Exodus 12:3-7; John 1:29; 1 Corinthians 5:7
"The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt: Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect. Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the members of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight."
The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"
"For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed."
I want you to picture something with me. It is the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan. Jerusalem is packed with pilgrims. Every Jewish family that could make the journey has come to the city for Passover. The temple courts are deafening. Priests are slaughtering lambs by the hundreds, maybe thousands. Blood is flowing. The air smells of copper and smoke. This is the most sacred moment in the Jewish calendar.
And outside the city walls, on a hill called Golgotha, a man is dying. His name is Jesus. He has been nailed to a cross. And as the priests in the temple are killing the Passover lambs, the Lamb of God is breathing His last.
This is not a metaphor. This is not poetic license. This is the most precise fulfillment of prophecy you will find anywhere in Scripture. Jesus died at the exact hour the Passover lambs were being slaughtered. The timing was not accidental. It was orchestrated.
Let me take you back further. To Egypt. To the night that started it all. The Israelites are slaves. They have been crying out to God for generations. And God sends Moses to Pharaoh with a simple demand: let My people go. Pharaoh refuses. Nine plagues come and go. Pharaoh's heart is hard. So God sends one more plague. The final one. The death of every firstborn in Egypt.
But God makes a way of escape. Every Israelite household is told to take a lamb, a year-old male without defect, and slaughter it at twilight. They are to take its blood and put it on the doorposts and lintel of their houses. When the destroyer passes through the land, he will see the blood and pass over that house. No one inside will die. The lamb dies instead.
That night, every household with blood on the door was safe. Every household without it lost a firstborn. The difference between life and death was not morality. It was not ethnicity. It was not good behaviour. It was blood. Applied blood. On the door. Covering the entrance.
Now fast forward fifteen hundred years. Jesus is in Jerusalem. He is in the temple courts. He is teaching, healing, confronting the religious leaders. And John the Baptist, seeing Him approach, says the words that would echo through every Christian liturgy for two thousand years: "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."
John did not say "Look, the Lion of Judah." He did not say "Look, the King of Kings." He said "Look, the Lamb." He knew. He knew what Jesus had come to do. He knew that the entire Passover story, every detail of it, every lamb slaughtered in every household for fifteen hundred years, was a rehearsal for this moment.
Paul makes it explicit: "Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed." Not "is like." Not "reminds us of." Has been. Past tense. Accomplished. Done.
"Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed."
Here is what I want you to carry from this. The God who saved Israel from slavery in Egypt is the same God who saved you from slavery to sin. The mechanism is the same. A lamb without defect. Blood applied. Death in your place. The lamb died so the firstborn could live. Jesus died so you could live.
When you take communion, you are participating in Passover. The bread is the unleavened bread of the feast. The cup is the cup of redemption. Jesus took the most familiar ritual in Jewish life and said "This is My body. This is My blood. Do this in remembrance of Me." He was not inventing something new. He was revealing what the old thing had always been about.
The Passover lamb was not a suggestion. It was a rescue. And so is the cross.
With the blood on the door and the Lamb on the cross still burning in my mind, Claire