Exodus 12:1-3

THE DELIVERANCE OF ISRAEL

"And Jehovah spake unto Moses and Aaron, in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you. Speak ye unto all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month they shall take to them every man a lamb, according to their fathers' houses, a lamb for a household."

"And Jehovah spake unto Moses and Aaron, in the land of Egypt ..." The plain meaning of this is that the instructions here given were not ceremonially developed at some later age, but that they were revealed by God and tied to the events about to take place, not, long afterward in Canaan, but in Egypt, and at a time actually before the events memorialized. Like so many other things in this inspired record, this too was fulfilled in the fact that Jesus Christ our Lord instituted the Lord's Supper, commemorating his death and looking forward to his resurrection, before either event! The meaning here also includes the affirmation that neither Moses nor Aaron at any time, either here or afterward, ever initiated regulations and legislation from themselves, but that they delivered God's Word on all that they established. "The whole system, religious, political, and ecclesiastical, was received by Divine Revelation, commanded by God, and merely established by the two brothers."[7]

"This month ... beginning of months ... the first month of the year ..." According to Exodus 13:4, this was the month Abib. This was the name of that month used by Israel until after the Babylonian captivity, but following the exile, it was called Nisan, as until the present time. The significance of this is that if the post-exilic priesthood had had anything to do with placing these verses in Exodus, they would never have used this word Abib. Of course, the critics know this, so they call on the ever-ready "redactor" and assign it to R! As we have often noted, every appeal to a redactor is a confession of the failure and bankruptcy of the alleged sources. After the captivity, the Jews calculated the and the ecclesiastical years separately, "The first month of each year, sacred or being the seventh month of the other."[8]

"In the tenth day of this month ... take every man a lamb ..." it is a matter of extreme interest that the plural "lambs" is generally not used in Biblical references to the Passover, despite the fact of there having been literally thousands and thousands of them. Full agreement with Fields is felt in his comment that, "This was no accident, but was God's way of indicating that there was only ONE true passover lamb in HIS mind. That lamb is Christ!"[9] We have not found even an attempted explanation of why the lamb was taken on the tenth day, four days before its slaughter, but here also we may be able to understand it from the antitype. Christ entered Jerusalem on Sunday, four days before his crucifixion, and patiently waited Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday until his crucifixion on Thursday. There really is no other explanation of this phenomenal verse available.

Note also, in this, that each head of a household took the lamb and killed it at the appointed time, as did all who participated. Like nearly everything else in this chapter, it is impossible to identify this with the doings of priests in later centuries. If this narrative had originated in any such fashion, they would have had all the lambs brought together at one place, and the priests would have done the killing. Moses wrote the account here, and it is the account of the First Passover.