Walk Of Life – Day 24, December 2021 – Lord Jesus Christ, Our Passover
Lord Jesus Christ, Our Passover
For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.- 1 Corinthians 5:7
Israel was in Egypt, in extreme bondage; the severity of their slavery had continually increased till it was so oppressive that their incessant groans went up to heaven. God who avenges his own elect, though they cry day and night unto him, at last, determined that he would direct a fearful blow against Egypt’s king and Egypt’s nation, and deliver his own people. We can picture the anxieties and the anticipations of Israel, but we can scarcely sympathize with them, unless we as Christians have had the same deliverance from spiritual Egypt. Let us take away our imagination to Egypt where we are toiling hard as slaves in preparing bricks, without proper food, water or rest under the ruthless masters. How much hard it would it be. Many of us who are employed really don’t like the insult or the humiliation that we face at our work place because of our performance. We grumble, we murmur and sometimes we go to an extreme of quitting the job. But it’s not easy for the Israelite who are under the bondage of the Egyptians.
But there came a night when the blood of the lamb that was faultless and without blemish was sprinkled on the door posts about which we read in Exodus 12 the angel of the Lord passed over.
We commence, first of all, with the victim—the lamb. How fine a picture of Christ. No other creature could so well have typified him who was holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners. Being also the emblem of sacrifice, it most sweetly portrayed our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
A blemished lamb, if it had the smallest speck of disease, the least wound, would not have been allowed for a Passover. The priest would not have suffered it to be slaughtered, nor would God have accepted the sacrifice at his hands. And was not Jesus Christ even such from his birth? Unblemished, born of the pure virgin Mary, begotten of the Holy Ghost, without a taint of sin; his soul was pure, and spotless as the driven snow, white, clear, perfect; and his life was the same. In him was no sin. He took our infirmities and bore our sorrows on the cross. He was in all points tempted as we are, but there was that sweet exception, “yet without sin.” And, in any respect, can you find in him any blemish? Ah, no! he is the unblemished lamb, the pure, the spotless, the immaculate, “the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world;” and in him there is no sin.
An immaculate Lamb! The officers said, “never man spake like this man.” His foes found none who could even bear false witness against him, such as agreed together; and Pilate declared, “I find no fault in him.” He would not have been fit for the Paschal Lamb had a single blemish have been discovered, but “I find no fault in him,” was the utterance of the great chief magistrate, who thereby declared that the Lamb might be eaten at God’s Passover, the symbol and the means of the deliverance of God’s people.
Christ’s sacrifice absolved us of the guilt of sin but did not eliminate sin’s presence in our lives. Instead, Christ’s work empowers us to “put to death the misdeeds of the body” by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:13). Just as the first Passover delivered Israel from slavery, Christ our Passover has broken the back of sin and has rescued us from its bondage. We are still capable of sin—but are no longer compelled to be its slaves (Rom. 6:12-14).
