Ten Ways to Find Messiah in the PassoverНамуна

The Messiah Is Our Sacrificial Lamb

The lamb shank bone on the Seder plate represents the lamb slaughtered on the first Passover in Egypt and whose blood the Israelites put upon the lintel and doorposts of their houses. This act of obedience would spare the people from the last of God’s plagues, the death of the firstborn. This sacrifice of a lamb during Passover is the exact image John the baptizer had in mind when he saw Yeshua and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29, emphasis added). John directly applied the image of a lamb—a common biblical symbol—to the Messiah and the sacrifice that He too would embrace for the sake of others.

Through Messiah’s sacrifice, God has promised to spare all who would apply Yeshua’s blood to their hearts and souls from the well-deserved punishment of ultimate death—the just penalty for sin in the eyes of God. The prophet Isaiah used the image of a sacrificial lamb in his prophetic profile of the Messiah, the Suffering Servant: “Like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so He did not open His mouth” (Isa 53:7). Passover is the clear biblical backdrop of the gospel, and Yeshua’s sacrifice is the ultimate fulfillment of the Passover story.