Background Story: After 430 years as slaves in Egypt, God delivered His people from captivity. Before they left Egypt, God gave them clear instructions to celebrate an annual feast to remember their redemption from slavery called the Passover (Exodus 12). We read more in Deuteronomy 16:1-8, Numbers 9:1-14 and the fulfillment in Luke 22:1-38 and 1 Corinthians 11:23-34.

Read Exodus 12:1-6

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, ² “This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. ³ 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. ⁴ If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. ⁵ The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats. ⁶ 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.

Big Idea: Jesus is the Passover Lamb.

For 5 days before the Passover, Exodus 12:1-6 tells us that the lamb was examined before being sacrificed. Taken into their home, they observed it to verify it was to spotless without defect. Then after these days of examination, this male lamb was sacrificed at twilight for the forgiveness of sin.

On Nisan 10 (6 days before the Passover), the Bible tells us that Jesus entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey. And for the days that followed, Jesus was examined and questioned by the leaders about everything from His authority to paying taxes. At the end of those days, He was arrested and taken to the religious leaders. Finding no way to execute Him under their law (John 18:31), they took Him before Pilate and King Herod to be examined. After questioning and examining Him, we read that Pilate told the priests and the crowd in Luke 23:4, “I find no guilt in this man.” In Luke 23:15, King Herod agreed that He had “done nothing to deserve death.” And Judas who betrayed Him to the religious leaders confessed in Matthew 27:4 that he had “sinned by betraying innocent blood.”

None of this occurred by accident but was ordained by God. Jesus said in Luke 22:15 knowing what was to come, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” And on the cross at twilight (Matthew 27:46), Jesus became the fulfillment of the law and the prophecy spoken in Isaiah 53.

He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
    each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
    the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and afflicted,
    yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
    so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
    Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
    for the transgression of my people he was punished.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
    and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
    nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
    and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin”

Jesus, the Lamb of God, came as a sacrifice and offering for you. He came as a sacrifice for me. And through His death and resurrection, He became our “offering for sin” so that through Him, we could become “the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

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