Behold the Lamb!

by: Jill Ver Steeg

Thirteen hundred years before Christ, the Israelites were living under bondage in Egypt. God speaks through Moses, “Go, select lambs for your families, and slaughter the passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood. . . . None of you shall go outside the door of your house until morning. For the Lord will pass through to strike down the Egyptians; when he sees the blood . . . the Lord will pass over that door and will not allow the destroyer to . . . strike you down” (Ex. 12:21-23 NRSV).

Thirty years after the birth of Jesus, Jesus and his disciples are celebrating the Passover. It is the day on which the Passover lamb was sacrificed. When the hour comes, Jesus says to his disciples, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15 NIV). Jesus died the very day Israel observed the Passover.

But unlike every earlier Passover, the people did not have to select their own lamb. This time God provided the unblemished Lamb to take away the sins of the world. The first Passover was a foreshadowing of that very Passover night, when God, through the sacrifice of his Son on a cross, would free us from bondage to sin and death.