We are entering the Passover season on the Christian calendar. This coming Sunday has been designated as Palm Sunday; the day we celebrate our Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

I want to walk with you through these days of our Lord’s preparation just before that final week of His arrest, trials, crucifixion, death, burial and of course, His glorious resurrection. To clearly grasp the importance of His final week it will be necessary to review the 3 key elements of the Passover, Palm Sunday, and the Lord’s Supper. Let’s look briefly at the Passover today.

The word, “Passover”, is the Hebrew word that literally means “to pass over”, “to spring over”, or to “spare”. It was and is kept in remembrance of the Lord’s passing over the homes of the children of Israel when God delivered the 10th and final plague in which the first-born of all the Egyptians were killed. The Passover meal, known as the “seder”, commemorates the Israelites’ deliverance from slavery in Egypt. You will remember that God sent Moses to lead the children of Israel out of bondage into the promised land of Canaan. Moses confronted Pharaoh as to the Lords’ command, but Pharaoh refused to release God’s people. It was after a series of 9 different plagues Moses had still not received their release that God pronounced and sent this 10th and final plague. It was the Lord’s decree that the first-born males of every house would die unless the doorframe of that house was covered with the blood of a perfect lamb. That night the Lord, literally, passed over… spared, the first-born of the homes with the blood upon the doorposts. This plague brought death throughout all of Egypt, even the death of Pharaoh’s first-born son. Finally, Pharaoh let God’s people go.

A detailed account of the institution of this feast is given in Ex 12 and Ex 13. It was afterwards incorporated in the ceremonial law (Lev 23:4-8) as one of the great festivals of the nation according to Easton’s Illustrated Dictionary.

The remarkable truth about the Passover is that it not only looks back to the deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt but also as a foreshadowing and type of Christ’s death as the Passover Lamb offered for the sins of the world. Just think, Jesus Christ was slain as the spotless-perfect lamb exactly on Passover to offer to you and I deliverance from eternal death and the clear promise of eternity with Him in heaven when we die.

“There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins, and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains” –William Cowper