Christ: The Final Passover Lamb
Advent Week 3
When we gather together during the Advent season with our trimmings and trees, our gifts and parties, with our feasts and singing, we do not often dwell on death. But when Christ was born in Bethlehem to the Virgin Mary and his adopted father Joseph, Mary wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger. These cloths were not customary wrappings for newborns. Instead, they were foreshadowings of the ultimate mission of our Lord Jesus: death. They foreshadowed the burial cloths that he would wear as he was laid in his tomb. The same cloths that would be found by his disciples neatly folded and laid to the side at his resurrection. In his birth, we are reminded that he was born to die. “Mild he lays his glory by, Born that man no more may die. Born to raise us from the earth. Born to give us second birth.” This substitutionary atonement was not a new concept. It was something that had been building since the beginning of history, and was in fact, foreordained before the foundations of Earth itself. The slaying of the Lamb of God.
As we continue in our Advent series on the promises of the Old Testament fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ, we turn our attention to the people of Israel in dire bondage, 400 years after Abraham. It is in Egypt that God institutes a feast that will find its culmination on Calvary’s hill 1500 years later. In this first localized feast, we find the seedling of a promise that will one day impact the entire world. And indeed, that seed has already taken root and has grown into a mighty tree! As Noah’s Flood brought judgment upon all flesh, now Jesus’ blood has brought salvation to the whole world - to all who would believe on him.
MAIN IDEA: Jesus Christ is the promised Passover Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world
Today, we’re going to take a look at the Lord’s institution of the Passover in Exodus 12:1-14 and 26-27, and see how God used this historical event to fulfill his covenant promise to Abraham, then see how the Passover foreshadows the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord, the Lamb of God who Conquers.