Seder Lamb

Yeshua is the Seder Lamb
Without spot or blemish.
Thirty-three years He lived with us
And Him did we cherish.
Inside our homes did He come stay
And at out table eat.
Our children did delight in Him
And call His name so sweet
Until the time they would take Him
By darkness of the night,
Prepare Him for the sacrifice
And kill Him at twilight,
For though it was but three o’clock
The sky turned to darkness.
The moon, earth’s lintel, rose blood red
As God’s judgment passed us.
His lot was bitter as the herbs,
His tears for us He shed,
His body roasted in God’s wrath.
To cover us, He bled.
Though His whole being was consumed
None of His bones they broke.
He gave His Spirit of His own
As the old prophets spoke.
Yeshua is the Seder Lamb.
The Lord is calling out
To lead us from slavery to sin
To freedom’s victory shout.

When my family holds a Seder, it’s not just about remembering how God led the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt. To us, it’s also about Jesus leading us out of slavery to sin into freedom in Christ. He tells us,

“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

John 8:34-36

Until we believe in the Name of Jesus, we are slaves to sin. We do not have the power to free ourselves from sin and so we can do nothing but serve our sin. But when we stop relying on our own righteousness and put our faith in the righteousness of the One Who paid the price for us to be free, He gives us the power. He purchased our freedom. He is our Redeemer (Psalm 19:14).

I want to take some time to walk through the parallels between Jesus and a Passover lamb that I used in my poem “Seder Lamb.” The Apostle Peter tell us in 1 Peter 1:18-20 that we were “ransomed…with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot,” like the Passover lamb (Exodus 12:5). This next part gets me so excited: “He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you.” See, when God gave the sacrificial law to the Jews, He knew all along that it was pointing to His Son, and one day we’d get to put the pieces together like missing parts to a puzzle. Jesus is the last piece that completes it all!

My next parallel comes from Jonathan Cahn. John the Baptist was a descendent of the priesthood, and a priest had to declare an animal fit for sacrifice before it could be offered. Before Jesus began His public ministry, John the Baptist declared, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). John the Baptist was the priest who declared Jesus as fit for the sacrifice. Now this is what I have found after further study: John the Baptist makes this declaration twice. He says it again the next day in verse 36. If God says something once, He wants you to know it, but if He says it twice, you’d better listen up. This reminds me of Joseph’s words to Pharaoh in Genesis 41:32. Joseph interprets two dreams for him, which were really one (Genesis 41:25), and says, “And the doubling of Pharaoh’s dream means that the thing is fixed by God, and God will shortly bring it about.” If we apply the significance of doubling to John the Baptist’s revelation, could it be emphasizing that God had fixed Jesus as the Lamb of God, and that God would shortly bring it about? John baptized Jesus, Jesus entered the wilderness for 40 days, and immediately afterward He came out to begin His three-year ministry before He was crucified.

Okay, here are some other parallels between Jesus and the Passover lamb from Exodus 12. It must be “without blemish” (vs. 5) and it must be killed at twilight on the 14th day of Abib (vs. 6) “at the place that the Lord will choose, to make his name dwell there,” (Deuteronomy 16:2), that is, Jerusalem. Jesus was without blemish, that is, sin, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Jesus died exactly at twilight as the Jews transitioned from Abib 13 to Abib 14, for darkness covered the earth at His death when it should have been day (Matthew 27:45), and for Jews the new day begins at sunset. God accelerated the Sabbath for us through Jesus. And Jesus was sacrificed in Jerusalem.

Exodus 12:46 says none of the bones of the Passover lamb should be broken, and “when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs” (John 19:33) because He had already given up His spirit (Luke 23:46, Psalm 31:5).

As the doorpost was supposed to be painted with the blood of the lamb for the angel of death to pass over (Exodus 12:7), so God painted the moon red as it rose over the whole earth so that we may be covered by His blood (Joel 2:31). I know that Joel’s words were fulfilled at Jesus’ crucifixion because Peter quotes them in Acts 2:20 in his Pentecost sermon. Peter was speaking to contemporaries who had just been in Jerusalem around the time of Jesus’ death. They could not refute his words. Moreover, a gentleman in my church named Dennis Strickland has been able to use the program Starry Night and go back in time to Jerusalem on April 3, 33 AD on the day of preparation before the Passover at exactly 3:00 pm (the hour Jesus died as recorded in Matthew 27:46) and find a blood moon, also known as a lunar eclipse. Now if God miraculously darkened the earth from the sixth hour (12:00 pm) to the ninth hour (3:00 pm) (Matthew 27:45), you would have been able to see that blood moon there in Jerusalem. God had miraculously darkened a section of land before. In Exodus chapter 10, the ninth plague is “a darkness to be felt” (vs. 21), and it is the second to last plague, the one right before the angel of death passes through the land to kill the firstborn male of every family. Well, this darkness at Calvary was right before Jesus died as God’s firstborn Son for our sakes. Even as I’m writing this, I continue to find new levels of parallels between Jesus and the Passover and it just gives me chills. Wow! As for the blood moon, if you search CrossPointe Church and Dennis Strickland, you will find this information at the end of his video presentation on December 9, 2020. I hope this reading was digestible enough for you to gather something good from it, and maybe I will try to put these parallels in a table in the near future to make it more concise. Until next time, take care and God bless.

Reference

The Bible. English Standard Version, Crossway, 2001.