It is only through the shed blood of Jesus Christ that we are delivered from the consequences of our sin.
Exodus 12:1–50; John 1:29
The Passover ritual and the tenth plague represent God’s power over life itself, His judgment of Pharaoh’s sin, and the deliverance of the Hebrew people.
It is also typological of Christ, whose blood delivers us from both judgment and death.
God used Pharaoh’s attack on the Hebrew people as an opportunity for a deliverer to arise.
Moses was raised in Pharaoh’s courts but fled when he killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave.
God eventually called Moses to lead the people out of Egypt, but he soon found that Pharaoh’s heart had hardened.
To deliver the Hebrew people and prove His Lordship, God sent ten plagues on the land of Egypt, ending with Passover and the death of the firstborn.
The plagues that precede and include the Passover were specifically pointed to show that the gods that the Egyptians trusted in had no power whatsoever.
“Four of these plagues were events in which the animals, supposedly guardians of the Egyptian population, turned into extremely troublesome or dangerous attackers (frogs, lice, wild beasts and locusts).
Three of them subjected the ‘god-like’ animals to bouts of sickness (pestilence, boils) or devastation (hail) which, in the latter case, required human protection.
Two of the plagues reduced Egyptian gods to a state of powerlessness in which they could not bestow their normal divine favors (Nile water turned into blood; darkness extinguishing Ra’s light).
The last plague threatened and slew Egypt’s firstborn, man, and beast.
This would include Pharaoh himself, because it was usually the firstborn who inherited the throne and who, as noted above, was thought to be the child of Egypt’s foremost deity.
Why does God command the Israelites to slaughter young, perfect lambs (Exodus 12:5–6)?
The animals, by themselves, do not magically secure God’s redemption.
The whole process of eating the animal in obedience to the Passover regulations was an act of faith and obedience, involving faith in God’s gracious provision of the holiness that no human himself or herself provide and obedience to a process that showed confidence in God’s true promises and requirements.
Additionally, the perfect lamb, prefigures Jesus, who died for our sins as a young, perfect sacrifice, and John 1:29 identifies him as “the Lamb of God”.
Paul says, “The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).
Thus, he knew the parallels between Jesus’s death on the cross and the sacrificial lambs used in Exodus 12.
God commanded Israel to apply lamb’s blood to doorposts, and as a result Israel was delivered from both the horror of death and the oppression of Egypt.
The Passover also foreshadowed God’s deliverance of humanity from the power of sin and death by applying the blood of the Lamb to the hearts of men and women.
Both seem foolish to the outsider but revolutionary to the one who experiences God’s deliverance firsthand.