Passover

The Passover (Hebrew pesaḥ) is the founding festival of Israel's redemption, instituted on the night the LORD struck down the firstborn of Egypt. Each household was to take an unblemished year-old lamb, kill it at twilight, and smear its blood on the two doorposts and the lintel; when the LORD passed through to judge Egypt, he would "pass over" the blood-marked homes and the destroyer would not enter (Exodus 12:1–13). The lamb was roasted whole and eaten in haste with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, the meal of a people dressed and ready to leave their bondage (Exodus 12:8–11). A strict rule guarded the rite: not one of the lamb's bones was to be broken (Exodus 12:46; Numbers 9:12).

Passover became the annual memorial of the exodus, the night on which Israel was born as a nation set free. It was to be kept forever and explained to every new generation as the story of the LORD's deliverance (Exodus 12:24–27; Deuteronomy 16:1–8). It anchored the sacred calendar and Israel's very identity: a redeemed people, bought out of slavery by blood, joined to the festival of Unleavened Bread that called them to purge the leaven of the old life. The prophets made this rescue the pattern of a coming greater redemption, a new exodus in which God would again ransom his people.

The shadow finds its substance in Christ. Jesus deliberately kept this feast as his hour drew near, declaring how earnestly he had desired to eat it (Luke 22:15), and at the table he reinterpreted the bread and cup of the Passover meal around his own body and blood, inaugurating the new covenant (Luke 22:19–20). John the Baptist had already hailed him as "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29), and John's Gospel notes that, exactly as the law required of the Passover lamb, none of his bones was broken on the cross (John 19:36). Paul states the fulfillment plainly: "Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed" (1 Corinthians 5:7), and Peter says we were ransomed "with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot" (1 Peter 1:18–19).

So the Passover is the gospel in miniature. As the blood of the lamb on the door turned away the judgment that fell on Egypt, the blood of Christ shields his people from the wrath their sins deserve, and his death works the true exodus — deliverance not from Pharaoh but from sin and death. The Lord's Supper is the church's new Passover, the memorial of a greater rescue, kept until the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:9).