from the devotional book, PICTURES OF GOD

Read Exodus 12:1-28, 43-51

When Jesus initiated the Lord’s Supper, He and His disciples were celebrating Passover. To understand the Lord’s Supper, we must look briefly at Passover.

Passover memorialized God’s deliverance from the hopeless and bitter bondage of slavery into the glorious freedom of God’s chosen and blessed people.

Read the Exodus 12 account of Passover while keeping the Lord’s Supper in mind. What parallels do you see? Here are a few:

• Both were remembrances, re-enactments of God’s salvation. God reveals Himself primarily by His actions, and some memories of His actions are too important to be entrusted to words alone. Both Passover and the Lord’s Supper were ways of physically acting out what God had done for His people.

• The Lord’s Supper, the new Passover, is so sweeping that it makes the first Passover, which is glorious in its own right, into a mere foreshadowing of what God did for us in Christ.

• The first Passover celebrates the defeat of the greatest power among nations, the oppressor of God’s people. The Lord’s Supper celebrates the defeat of all evil.

• With Passover, God demonstrated His power through killing Egypt’s firstborn. With the Lord’s Supper, God demonstrated His love by offering His own firstborn.

• Jesus invested the bread and wine, parts of the Passover meal, with a new meaning. They became symbols of His own body and His own blood. He Himself was the meal God offered.

• Jesus became the unblemished Passover Lamb on whom God’s people feasted. It was His blood that saved them from death.

Listen and sing:
Hymn: Remember Your Lord
Recording
Printed Music & Lyrics