Hebrews 11:28

By faith he kept the passover, and the sprinkling of blood, that the destroyer of the firstborn should not touch them.

THE PASSOVER

The ruler of Egypt had repeatedly resisted the will of God concerning the freedom of Israel; and finally God, as a terminal wonder, decided to slay the firstborn of man and beast. As the tragic night drew near when God would do so terrible a thing, the Lord devised a plan by which the Israelites were spared in this awful visitation through their observance of the passover. On the tenth day of the month Nisan, three days before the catastrophe, each family selected a perfect lamb or kid from the flock and kept it up until the fourteenth day of the month when it was slain between the two evenings, that is, about 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon. Shortly after sunset, each family of Israel gathered indoors, sprinkled the blood of the lamb upon the posts of the door, and ate the Passover lamb, each man being fully clothed with shoes, and staff in hand. The lamb was roasted perfectly whole with fire, not a bone of it being broken. No one went outdoors until morning.

That the Passover recorded in the Bible is a truly historical event is attested by its invariable observance for nearly three millenniums by the Jews, this being one of the most impressive memorial services in all the history of the world. It is thus certain that there was a great deliverance from a great catastrophe and that the deliverance of Israel was a divine act of God himself. There cannot possibly be any other adequate explanation of such a thing as the Jewish Passover. It is equally certain that the extraordinary, even unique, conditions surrounding the destructive wonder and the miraculous deliverance of the Jews, were consciously designed by God himself to point the minds of people to the true Passover, Christ.

The great significance of the Passover for Christians is that Christ is our passover (1 Corinthians 5:7,8), there being a number of typical circumstances linking the passover lamb slain by the Israelites on that dark night of the Exodus with that "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world," even the Lord Jesus Christ. Note the following: (1) the perfection of the lamb (1 Peter 1:19); (2) that no bone was broken (Psalms 34:20); (3) that it was slain at 3:00 p.m., the hour Christ died; (4) that it was eaten with unleavened bread (1 Corinthians 5:7,8); and (5) that there was no safety for them not under the protection of the blood. Thus the Passover was an extension and refinement of a type already in existence, even from the gates of Paradise, in the use of the lamb as a sin offering. John the Baptist hailed Jesus as "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29); and the KJV rendition of Revelation 13:8 has "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."

In the matter of the Passover, Moses' faith in the invisible is again in evidence. No one saw the death angel that night of the Passover; and no one could possibly see, then or now, how the killing of a lamb and the sprinkling of its blood could have made any difference. There was no physical evidence of impending disaster, no precedent to lead people to expect it, and no possible way of explaining just how such a thing could come to pass; but by faith Moses knew in advance what others could know only when the cry of agony arose at midnight when the firstborn of man and beast throughout the land of Egypt expired, as God said they would.