Jesus is the Easter lamb

Happy Easter! The focus this week for Christians around the world has been on the events in the life of Christ leading up to His death on the cross and His resurrection which we celebrate today.

I’ve spent some time this week reflecting on Passover and the Passover Lamb. The Word of God is filled with references to lambs and and the shedding of their blood. It sounds gruesome, but as the word says, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin.” It’s necessary and a blessing if we want a relationship with the God of the universe.

At His last supper with His disciples, Jesus blessed the cup of wine and told His disciples that it represented His blood, which was the new covenant. He also blessed the bread and asked His disciples to eat it in remembrance of Him. The communion bread represents the body of Christ and the wine represents His sinless blood.

If we compare the Jewish Passover with what Jesus accomplished on the cross, we can find so many similarities. The Passover lamb was to be slaughtered at twilight, the Jewish people had to apply the blood of the lamb to the doorposts of their homes and then eat all of the lamb. When the angel of death went throughout Egypt, it passed over the homes where the blood was applied and the first born in the homes where there was no blood all died. Jesus died on the cross in the late afternoon, His blood covered the beams of the cross which represent, to believers, a doorway to eternal life.

As believers, we symbolically eat His body and drink of His blood every time we take communion - it is an act of remembering what He did for us.

I find it interesting that people are referred to as sheep throughout the Bible and Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God. If we think of Him as a lamb, we think of a meek, helpless, docile creature. But the Bible reminds us in 1 Corinthians 1:27, “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

Jesus could have become the King of the World when He walked on the earth, but that wasn’t the reason He was here. He came to offer salvation to the rest of us weak sheep. The only way He could do that was to become a “sheep” himself.

If that was the end of the story, it would be kind of sad, but His resurrection was a demonstration of God’s power and Jesus’ willingness to die for our sins was the ultimate in obedience to God.

The good news is that Jesus will come back again, but not as a meek lamb. The next time that Jesus sets His feet on the earth, it will be as a conquering king and all of those who believe in Him and have accepted His gift of forgiveness will join with Him when He returns.

That is the message of Easter - we serve a king who willingly died for us. We serve a king who has overcome sin and death. Our King Jesus is alive and well and just waiting for the right moment to return and set up His government on earth.

He is risen! He is risen indeed!