Joseph Shulam
I want to discuss some New Testament passages that are easier to understand, given their background in the Jewish world of the first century. The whole New Testament is only possible to understand with the backgrounds of the Greek and Jewish worlds from which Yeshua and the apostles came.
Most Christians belong to movements that started in the 19th century, aiming primarily to restore the first-century church.
Restoring the first-century church is necessary in our time because "Christianity" as a world religion has become more pagan and has departed from the world of God. World "Christianity" has departed, misunderstood, or wrongly interpreted Yeshua of Nazareth—the Son of God and His teachings.
In this article, I would like to address an issue that will help us better understand Yeshua and the world He lived in. I want to deal existentially with Yeshua's teachings and the doctrines that represent Him as a Jew as a fulfillment of God's promise to the people of Israel and the world.
I want to deal with the subject of Passover. Why Passover?
The Passover is an inseparable part of the nature, teaching, and understanding of the Messiah. We cannot be New Testament Christians without understanding the Passover and participating in it meaningfully.
There was no such thing as a "Christian" Bible when the Jews wrote the Bible. They wrote the New Testament from the perspective of Jewish world themes. The Bible deals only with Jewish themes, not one Gentile theme in the pages of the New Testament.
The Sabbath, what to eat, what to drink, when to eat, the Lord's supper, the Messiah, the resurrection from the dead, the resurrection of Yeshua, the salvation of the world, the inclusion of the Gentiles, circumcision of the Gentiles, life after death, the judgment day, angels, and demons are all Jewish subjects. These were the themes and problems prevalent in the time of Yeshua. These themes dealt with what God revealed to Abraham, Moses, and the prophets.
Let us look at a passage in I Corinthians. 5: 6,7,8. The context of the chapter deals with a sin being committed in Corinth.
"Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, just as you are, in fact, unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth."
Within that context, Paul, in verse 6, uses a simile, a parable, taken from the Jewish New Testament world. The significance of the parable is that the people who read the letter understood what he was talking about.
"Let us therefore celebrate the feast, not with old leaven but with unleavened bread of sincerity and truth."
The Messiah, our Passover motif, is as old as the first person who followed Yeshua Ha Mashiach. John the Baptist, when he saw Yeshua, proclaimed to the world,
'Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world' (John 1:29).
We all believe that Yeshua is the Lamb of God and that He takes away the sins of the world. What does it mean to us in the 21st century for Yeshua to be the Lamb of God? Where does this picture of the world's Savior as a lamb come from? The world's salvation hinges on the fact that one man would be the Lamb of God. This motif, the Lamb of God, is essential from the beginning of the Gospels to the very end of Revelation.
Please put yourself in my position as a Jew and recreate or reconstruct the Passover so that you can plug the Messiah, Yeshua, into the Passover and draw out what it means. He is our Passover who has been sacrificed for you and me.
Passover has many meanings for the Jews. It is, first of all, a feast of remembrance of the days that we were enslaved in Egypt and our deliverance from that slavery. It is a holiday of independence. In Genesis 15, God told our forefather, Abraham,
'I give you the land and promise that your children will not inherit it until after they have served another nation for 400 years'.
God had already foretold Abraham that this would be so long before Joseph was even born and long before the children of Jacob went down to Egypt to look for bread. We served this nation for 400 years. That servitude was backbreaking. The people cried unto God, Exodus chapter 1, and God heard them. It was not a pleasant thing to be slaves to the Egyptians.
Passover is also a day of victory over the oppressor. We were oppressed, taken advantage of, and given hard labor for 400 years. Our children were thrown into the Nile River and drowned so that we would not increase and multiply and become a danger to the Egyptians. The Passover was a day of vindication. The Jews in Egypt were vindicated. The promises of God were fulfilled after 400 years - God delivered them.
When the children of Israel celebrate the Passover, it is a celebration of God's faithfulness to our forefathers. It is a celebration of being saved from a catastrophe. When the children of Israel left Egypt, they knew that between them and death and annihilation stood the Sea in front and Pharoah and his army in back. God delivered them from that catastrophe by a great miraculous act.
Passover means salvation from a catastrophe.
It means being brought from darkness into light. Exodus 9 says,
'There was total darkness to the Egyptians, but to the children of Israel, there was light.'
Passover means purification from leaven. Before Passover, every Jew cleaned his home of all the leaven. So, when Paul says clean yourself from the old leaven because God, in Christ, has made you unleavened bread without malice, without wickedness, but of sincerity and truth, every Jew can relate to that. We work hard to clean our house from top to bottom before the Passover to eliminate every morsel of leaven. Not because we believe leaven is evil or harmful but because it symbolizes what it means to purify our lives.
Finally, Passover means experiencing the mighty hand of God.
"when they saw the mighty hand of God, they believed in God and in Moses, His servant. (Exodus 14:30).
A part of our problem is that we are so shortsighted that we have forgotten how it was to be a sinner in the world and what it means to be saved. We have forgotten, or we have never experienced it.
For every one of these aspects or meanings of Passover, there is a physical celebration and a symbol. For example, when we gather together like Jesus and His disciples gathered together on the night of the Passover, certain foods are on our table. For instance, we have a hard-boiled egg on the Passover plate. Why an egg? An egg symbolizes the suffering we suffered in Egypt. In Exodus 1, we read,
"and as they oppressed them, they grew and multiplied."
There is a shank bone of a lamb on the Passover plate that reminds us that there was a sacrifice and blood put on the door so that we might be delivered from the hand of the destroying angel that destroyed the firstborn.
There are bitter herbs - horse-radish. It reminds us that we were servants, enslaved people.
There is salt water that reminds us of the tears that we cried in Egypt.
Unleavened bread reminds us of the purification with which God has purified us.
With all these symbols, we can relate to the verses Paul wrote to the church in Corinth two thousand years ago in a very real way.
Let me review some New Testament passages that deal with this general theme. In addition to the passage in John 1:29 - behold the Lamb of God," and the passage in I Cor. 5, almost every book in the New Testament - Ephesians, Galatians, Colossians, Revelations, I John, and I Peter has these themes.
In Revelations 12: 11
"they overcame him (Satan the beast) because of the blood of the Lamb."
Just like the children of Israel overcame the destroying angel in Egypt by the blood of the Lamb on the doorpost.
It didn't make a difference if you were a Jew, if you kept the Sabbath, if you were being purified, if you did or didn't eat pork — it didn't make any difference in Egypt. What you did or what your family name was didn't matter if you didn't have the blood on your doorpost. Your firstborn would have been dead, not only your firstborn son or daughter but your firstborn from the cattle and the pure and unpure animals as well.
The destroying angels would have killed the one to have the inheritance. That blood meant something. Everyone had to take a pure living one-year-old lamb and cut his neck there in front of his doorpost before his children, wife, and Egyptian neighbors. Everyone could see the Lamb that was being slaughtered and the blood on your doorpost. It was a total recognition by the world around you of who you were. It was an admission that you were a Jew, an enslaved person.
The book of Revelation describes the Judgment scene as a scene in which we will sing the song of Moses and the Lamb. The song of Moses is the song of Israel's deliverance from Egypt in Exodus 15. All the acts of salvation God has done in human history have been prototyped in Exodus—in the Passover.
Revelations 19:20, which describes the great victory at the end of history, says,
"The beast was taken and with him the false prophet who worked miracles before him by which he deceived them that had received the mark of the beast and them that worshipped his image. These both were cast alive into the lake of fire burning brimstone".
The false prophets, his disciples, and Satan, himself, and his demons will be cast into a lake of fire alive. That is the picture of the Pharaoh and his army being cast into the Sea, which God opened for them and closed on them. That is the picture of the Passover - the Exodus.
At the end of history, it will be painted with the colors of the Exodus. Isaiah, the prophet, already knew that and painted the scenery of that great day of salvation with the same colors. Let us look at Isaiah 51:9-11.
"Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; Awake as in the days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not Thou who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon? Was it not Thou who dried up the Sea, The water of the great deep; Who make the depths of the Sea a pathway For the redeemed to cross?' So the ransomed of the Lord will return, And come with joyful shouting to Zion". The last salvation will be the same as the first salvation."
In conclusion, I want to draw these things together to better understand Jesus as the Passover Lamb. Paul is right. John the Baptist is right. The Gospel of John correctly describes Yeshua as the supreme Passover. In Him, we have all that the Passover means—not only for the Jew but also for the Greek—and humanity, not only physically but in an eternal way.
Because the Jewish people, when God took them out of Egypt by the hand of Moses," believed in God and Moses His Servant." However, in the following historical note, Exodus 16:2 says,
"They grumbled in the wilderness and said, 'Why hath thou brought us out to kill us in the desert?"
That great act of salvation didn't have an eternal effect.
Our history has been riddled for two thousand years with the effects - not of God's salvation - but the effects of our human rebellion.
In Christ, the Messiah, we enjoy the eternal aspects:
The eternal victory
The eternal deliverance from darkness into light
The eternal vindication over our enemies
The eternal salvation from catastrophe
The eternal promises of God
In this way, He is a perpetual Passover Lamb. In this way, we propitiate our being saved from the hand of the destroying angel when we have His blood on our doorpost. What does it mean for us to have His blood on our doorpost? It is not only the act of putting the blood. It is not only the act of baptism or "becoming a Christian." It is the act of perpetually having the badge that can be seen, experienced, portrayed, spit upon, and struck. It is being made vulnerable like the children of Israel made themselves vulnerable when they put their blood for every Egyptian to see, to laugh at it, and to revile.
To have Christ as our Passover means cleaning up our act, like cleaning the leaven from our houses. It means doing everything the way God commands us to because if we don't, we won't leave Egypt. We may be eating the fleshpots of the Egyptians until this day. If so, we will not eat the great feast of the Lamb at the end of days.