Recently, some people in our area had the opportunity to re-live a bit of the past at an old-fashioned harvest that used antique farming equipment and techniques. There is something special about re-living scenes from the past, whether it’s a Civil War re-enactment, a Renaissance festival, or an antique harvest.
Every time we observe the Lord’s Supper, we are re-living a scene from the past. We are re-enacting something that our Lord Himself did with His disciples, but our observance also has a connection to another ancient, biblical meal—the Passover Feast of the Old Testament. The gospel accounts tell us that when Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper, he did so during a Passover meal. He was re-interpreting the Passover Feast and applying its picture of sacrifice and salvation to His own upcoming death, which was a sacrifice for our sins.
So today we’re going to answer the question, “What’s the connection between the Lord’s Supper and the Jewish Feast of Passover?” The elements of that feast foreshadowed the sacrificial death of the Lord Jesus, and we can draw some amazing parallels by looking at it.
We’re going to look at the instructions that God gave to the Jewish people for the very first Passover meal, which they ate on the night that God set them free from their slavery in Egypt. Turn with me to Exodus 12, and follow with me as I read the first 13 verses [READ Ex. 12:1–13].
Let’s look at some ways that this meal points toward our Lord Jesus Christ.
I. Its primary place in the Jewish calendar (vv. 1–2)
While the Jews were slaves in Egypt, they probably didn’t have the freedom to follow a calendar of their own or to set their own schedule in any sense. But when God spoke these words, He was about to make the children of Israel a free people—free to govern themselves and to organize themselves as a nation. As part of their freedom, God said they were going to have a new calendar—their own calendar, their own way of keeping track of time.
God told them that this month in which the Passover was going to take place would be the first month for their new calendar. Its like God was saying, “I’m about to give you a new history as a people, and you need a new calendar to mark the occasion.” And the focal point of their new history would be their deliverance from Egypt. It would be the basis for their new lives, all the way down to the way that they organized their calendar.
There are some obvious parallels for our lives in this observation. Today, through Jesus Christ, we celebrate our deliverance from our spiritual slavery to sin, and even though our society doesn’t base its calendar on Good Friday and Easter, our lives are to be based on those events. As Paul says in Colossians 3, we are to think of ourselves as having died and risen with Christ, so that we are now supposed to live a whole new kind of life. We have a new history thanks to the freedom from our sins that we enjoy in Jesus Christ.
II. The selection of a Passover sacrifice (vv. 3–6)
Verses 3–6 describe the process of selecting an animal to serve as the Passover sacrifice. The people were to select a year-old male animal—either a lamb or a goat—and this animal would then be sacrificed and put to two uses—its body would be eaten to provide nourishment for the family, and its blood would be used to provide deliverance for the family. We’ll talk more about the blood in just a moment, but for now let’s focus on the animal’s body.
Verse 4 says that the animal should be “without blemish,” which means that by all appearances, it was to be perfect. It was to be strong and healthy rather than sick or weak; it was to be without any sort of physical defect such as blindness or a deformed limb. It was to be perfect because it was being offered to the Lord, and its blood would provide deliverance for the family.
Likewise, our Lord Jesus was a perfect, sinless sacrifice for our sins. In the New Testament, Peter reminds us that we were not ransomed with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot (1 Peter 1:18–19). So Jesus was like a Passover lamb for us—He was a perfect sacrifice, and thus His blood was able to deliver us from the wrath of God.
The Passover sacrifice also provided nourishment for the family as they ate it, and likewise, Jesus provides spiritual nourishment for us so that our spiritual needs are met. Just listen to the following statements from Jesus Himself:
• John 4:13–14—“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
• John 6:35—“I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”
• John 6:51a–b—“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.
• Matthew 11:28—“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
Just as the Passover sacrifice provided physical nourishment for those who ate it, so our Lord provides spiritual nourishment through His sacrifice for those who accept Him.
III. The unleavened bread (v. 8)
Unleavened bread is bread that has no yeast in it, and so the bread would not rise during baking—it would remain flat. The traditional unleavened bread that the Jews baked is similar to a saltine cracker in its appearance and texture. The reason that they were to use unleavened bread in this meal is because on that Passover night in Egypt, they would be leaving immediately after God struck down the firstborn of every family in Egypt; they wouldn’t have time to wait for their bread to rise. That’s also why God told them to eat with their belts on, their sandals on, and a walking staff in their hands—they were going to eat and run, because God was about to set them free!
So in the original Passover Feast, the significance of the unleavened bread was that the Jews’ salvation from slavery was going to be sudden and dramatic. Jesus didn’t quite emphasize that same idea in the Lord’s Supper; instead, He used the bread to represent His body, which would be offered as a sacrifice for us. But it is safe to say that His sacrifice provided salvation for us in a dramatic fashion.
You may remember that at the moment that Jesus passed away on the cross, the veil in the Temple was torn in two, which revealed that mankind no longer had to be separated from God. Jesus’ sacrifice for us removed the barrier of sin that created a separation between God and man, and we no longer had to be held captive in our slavery to sin. So Jesus’ sacrificial death in our place did provide a dramatic deliverance!
IV. The blood of the Passover sacrifice (v. 7, 13)
Perhaps the most significant element of the Passover observance was the blood of the sacrifice. It was the blood that provided salvation from the wrath of God that was expressed in this final plague that killed every firstborn man and animal in Egypt. God told the children of Israel to put some of the blood from the sacrifice on the top and on the two sides of the doorframe of the door that led into their homes, and He said that the plague would pass over every home where the blood had been applied; the families in those homes would be spared from losing their firstborn. When the people put the blood on their homes as God had said, it was obviously an expression of their faith in God; it demonstrated that they believed His promise.
The authors of the New Testament unanimously and repeatedly state that it is the blood of Christ that provides salvation for us from our sins:
• Peter—1 Peter 1:18–19
• Paul
o Acts 20:28—“the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.”
o Eph. 1:7—“In [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses”
• John
o 1 John 1:7—“the blood of Jesus…cleanses us from all sin”
o Rev. 1:5—“to [Jesus] who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood…to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.”
• The author of Hebrews
o Heb. 9:11–12—“But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come…he entered once for all into the holy places…by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.”
In the Lord’s Supper, Jesus used a cup of wine to represent His blood. Now back in Exodus 12, the people weren’t commanded to have a cup of wine with this meal, but most likely they did, just as we always have something to drink with our meals, whether we are enjoying a banquet or eating a bologna sandwich! But by the time that Jesus was on the earth, a cup of wine had become a formal part of the Passover Feast through Jewish tradition, so Jesus used the dark red color of the wine as a very natural symbol for His blood.
And so, when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper together, we are remembering—and in a small way re-living—these events of sacred history that remind us of the sweet salvation that we enjoy through Christ. Just as the children of Israel were saved from their slavery in Egypt, we have been saved from our slavery to sin. Just as the Passover was the start of a new life for Israel, so our salvation is the start of a new life for us lived in light of the death and resurrection of Christ. Just as the Passover lamb was a perfect sacrifice, without any blemish, so Jesus was a sinless, perfect sacrifice for us. Just as the bread meant a dramatic deliverance for the Jews, so the sacrifice of Jesus’ body means a dramatic salvation for us. And just as the blood of the Passover lamb saved the people from the wrath of God that was poured out in that plague, so the blood of Jesus saves us from the wrath of God that has been aroused by our sins. So as we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we join a crowd of saints from across the centuries who have celebrated God’s salvation with a sacred meal.
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