The Jewish holiday called Passover commemorates the emancipation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt. After fleeing Egypt when he was forty and living in the desert until he was eighty, God sent Moses back to Egypt to bring His children out of bondage. In order to get Pharaoh to agree, God had to send ten great plagues, the last of which was the death of the firstborn sons of every home in Egypt, including the son of Pharaoh. God, through Moses, told the Israelites to kill an innocent lamb then put some of its blood on the top and sides of the doorpost of the home. The family then stayed in their home all night, at which time the Death Angel saw the blood and “passed over” those in each Israelite home.They left Egypt the next day.
God instructed the Jews to observe the Passover every year beginning on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, typically our March or April. In Israel, the Passover meal, called the Seder, is held on the first night of the seven nights of Passover. They remove all leavening from the home, retell the Exodus story, and eat symbolic foods that represent different aspects of that story, including matzah, (a flat, unleavened bread made from flour and water), bitter herbs, a roasted egg, a roasted lamb shank bone, “charoset,” (a mixture of chopped apples, nuts, and spices, and parsley.) The Seder includes drinking four cups of wine. All these things foreshadow the life, death, and resurrection of the Messiah, Christ Jesus. As I read from one website, “The Passover table screams out, ‘Jesus is the Messiah.’” For example, the matzah itself is pierced and striped, as was Christ’s body. Jesus offered the wine as a symbol of the shedding of His blood.
The command to observe the Seder was given in Exodus 12:14, in the Old Testament, but it was not until the New Testament, in the Book of John, when Jesus is having His last meal with His disciples, that we see people actually sharing this meal together, in memory of the Exodus from Egypt. In fact, the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci called The Last Supper is actually a depiction of the Lord and His disciples observing Passover together before Christ was crucified.
Throughout the centuries since 70 A.D., when Jesus’s prophecy concerning the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem was fulfilled, the nation of Israel has been scattered all over the world, where they were kept separate by keeping the Sabbath and the Passover meal. Now, prophecy has been fulfilled further, with the people returning to the land of Israel, since May 14, 1948, when Israel became a sovereign nation. All hail King Jesus, the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29)
