Read: Exodus 12:21-28
Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, “Go and select lambs for yourselves . . . and kill the Passover lamb.” (v. 21)
From the beginning, the early church connected Jesus’s crucifixion with the Old Testament story of the exodus. When the Israelites were oppressed by Egyptian taskmasters, God acted through Moses to deliver his people from bondage and lead them into freedom. God sent ten plagues to convince Pharoah to free his people, the final plague being the most devasting. God would strike down all firstborn children and animals. But God instructed the Israelites to sacrifice a lamb and mark the lintel and the two doorposts with its blood. God would pass over their homes.
For the first Christians, Jesus’s death on the cross was the new Passover, and his resurrection was the new exodus. First Corinthians 5:7-8 declares: “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
The focus of Christ’s blood shed on the cross in this context is not as an offering to atone for sin (although it certainly is that) but as God’s plan to save his people from death and deliver them out of bondage. The eucharistic prayer in the Episcopal liturgy captures it powerfully: “He has brought us from bondage into freedom, from sin into righteousness, from death into life.” Thanks be to God, our true deliverer!
As you pray, thank God for Christ’s blood that saves you from death and sets you free in the Spirit.
Brian Keepers has been an ordained pastor in the Reformed Church in America for more than 20 years. He is currently serving as the lead pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Orange City, Iowa. Brian is married to Tammy, and they have two daughters and a granddaughter.
