The first Passover was the first great deliverance of the people of God and was a prophetic picture of even greater things to come! It began in this manner.“Now the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, ‘This month shall be your beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you. Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: “On the tenth of this month every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father, a lamb for a household […] Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year […] Now you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month. Then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at twilight”’ […] And it shall be, when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ that you shall say, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice of the Lord, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households.’ So the people bowed their heads and worshiped” (Exodus 12:1-6, 26-27).
Passover is of great significance to all who are of faith in God through Jesus Christ, whether we are Christian or Jewish; it is God’s great story of redemption and of His personal deliverance of His people! This historic act was first performed in ancient Egypt as the fulfillment of a promise that God had made to Abraham three and a half millennia prior. This promise took 430 years before the time came for its fulfillment. This long duration means that God has a set-time which He has sovereignly determined to bring promises to pass. After what seemed to be an eternity, He acted decisively! He brought Israel out of Egypt with a mighty and outstretched hand! As it was then, it is now, and will always be. God keeps His word! Sometimes after waiting for ten, twenty, or even forty years, we think God must have forgotten what He promised or that we were mistaken in thinking we had heard His voice! Can you imagine the trials of faith the children of Israel went through waiting on God to come through for them after more than 400 years? They had migrated to Egypt as a family of seventy; and after 430 years, they had multiplied into a nation of approximately three million people. It took time for the Lord to mold them into a people, a nation. And it takes time for the Lord to mold us into His “Holy nation, His own special people, that you [we] may proclaim the praises of Him who called you [us] out of darkness into His marvelous light; who once were not a people but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy” (1 Peter 2:9–10).Becauseof Christ’s sacrifice, we are now people of unswerving faith! The apostle Paul tells us that the Passover met its true fulfillment in Christ. The Passover was always pointing to a greater fulfillment: Christ, our Passover Lamb who was sacrificed for us! God is not in a hurry and neither should we be.
He says, “Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (I Corinthians 5:6-8). We must be purged from those sins that so easily ensnare us.We must wait patiently on the Lord and live in a state of preparedness!With all the signs of His coming, we could be living in God’s “kairos’’ time, His set time!
On that first Passover, blood from the slain lamb was placed on the door posts and the lentil of the door, guaranteeing Israel’s deliverance, but our Passover, Christ, is that Blood-stained Door who is our guarantee of deliverance from sin and eternal death! We, for all eternity, shall abide in Him, having been delivered by the sacrifice of His sinless service! As powerful as the first Passover was, our Passover is incomparable! Whereas in the first Passover, a lamb without blemish and perhaps unwilling was sacrificed, our Passover Lamb, the Son of God, willingly gave Himself for us! No one was able to take His Life! He, the truly unblemished Lamb of God offered an incomparable offering which can never be matched, rescinded, nor lose its power to save! Truly, our Passover is the resurrected Christ!
Living in the Passover,
Pastor Don