Now the Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, “This month shall be the beginning of months for you; it is to be the first month of the year to you. Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying, ‘On the tenth of this month they are each one to take a lamb for themselves, according to their fathers’ households, a lamb for each household. Now if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his neighbor nearest to his house are to take one according to the number of persons in them; according to what each man should eat, you are to divide the lamb. Your lamb shall be an unblemished male a year old; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats. And you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month, then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel is to kill it at twilight.’”
The climatic event of the story of the Exodus had been
shared with Moses. It was going to
happen, but at a significant cost to the Egyptians. And the Israelites themselves had to follow
strict instructions. God gives Moses
(and thus the Israelites) those instructions while they are still in the land
of their bondage. It seems we are most
ready to accept God’s way of salvation when we are embroiled in slavery and
suffering.
And, through Moses, God then tells the children of Israel
that the month they are about to enter “shall be the beginning of months for
you”. In essence what God is about to do
for them is so significant that they need to have a whole new calendar going
forward. Up to this point, their years
started around the beginning of September on our calendar. From then on, their very continued existence
would be measured from their freedom from bondage and slavery and their mighty
delivery. Thus their year was now to begin around the middle of March on our calendar. This was the origin of what is now known as
the Jewish Religious Calendar and still observed today. So the first month of this new calendar will
be at the time of the Passover and the subsequent Exodus from Egypt that
followed it at that time. It is called
“Nisan”. You can learn more about this
topic at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar
. The Jewish Civic Calendar year
actually begins in and around the Gentile month of September while Nisan is
closer to our mid-March to mid-April period of the year. What is also interesting is that the
Israelites got a new calendar when they were being rescued from bondage and the
modern world got a new calendar based on the arrival on earth of the King of
Kings Who would free us from the judgment and punishment our sins brought upon us. The parallelism here is striking.
Moses was to speak to “all” the congregation or people of
Israel and give them detailed instructions – right down to the date of the
month when they were to act. It is
possible that as the plagues occurred the people were becoming more and more
cohesive. God said on the tenth day of
what was to become known as the month of Nisan, each household was to get a
hold of a lamb and let it actually dwell with the family for four days, so they
could identify with it as part of their household, but more importantly that it
be separated from the rest of the flock.
Some commentators align the four days to be representative of the time
Jesus was taken and then held for interrogations before being crucified about
one thousand years later.
No household could be without a lamb, nor could they count
on using a lamb of their neighbor’s unless – and I find this most interesting –
unless a household was too small to have its own lamb. How small is small? Well, historians like Josephus lead us to
believe that each lamb normally would be sufficient for as few as ten
people. So a household that had fewer
family members than ten was required to partner with another household in the
same boat. What amazes me is why God
would even bother with that kind of instruction or approach to the matter? Surely there were enough lambs around for
every family, regardless of how small it was.
I am almost tempted to say that God was indeed a great
conservationist. I will not yield to
such temptation seriously. My better
judgment suggests that perhaps God wanted in some small way to model even as
early as the Exodus our dependence on not only Him, but also on each
other. I think today of how so many
Christians and even Christian leaders want to do their own thing. They want to have their own church, their own
mission – and never get together with others laboring in the same fields as
they do, in their own communities. Sometimes
there are good reasons why a group must separate from another large group and
go it alone. Sometimes new locations
where the Gospel is to be preached make it necessary. But woe to anyone who simply wants to be a
“big frog” in a “small pond” and he/she allows their ego to say, “I’m going it
alone.” No, God wants us to worship in
community and His Son is head of the Whole Body.
God instructs further that the lamb, henceforth known by
us as the Passover Lamb (which later also becomes a title assigned to our Lord
Jesus Christ), should be unblemished, a male, and one year old. Commentators have suggested that the
slightest blemish would make the lamb unsuitable for the Passover meal. This is clearly a ‘type’ of Christ Who indeed
was without sin when He was sacrificed for us.
No one else would do; no one else would be sufficient to pay for your
sin and mine. In addition, some think
the reference to the lamb’s age was a foretelling that Christ would be in the
prime of His life when He was killed on the cross. It could also be a reference to this lamb’s,
and also to the Holy Lamb’s, innocence.
On the other hand, the lamb the Israelites could use could
either come from the sheepfold or from the herd of goats. How do we explain that? The Hebrew word for ‘lamb’ is ‘seh’ and is
quite a neutral word according to translators.
Strong’s Dictionary says it is the word for a young sheep or a young goat. The Israelites did not distinguish between
goats and sheep when it came to the newborns.
The word literally means “head of (small) stock”. If you search the Internet, you will find,
sadly perhaps, many sites addressing the issue of whether our Passover Lamb
(Christ) was indeed a Passover Goat symbolically, often citing this passage as
the source of the issue. We will leave
that to others to stumble over.
Whatever the young animal was, it was supposed to be kept
by the household until the 14th day of the month of Nisan. And then all those lambs were to be killed
simultaneously at twilight. One can see
the further parallelism in foretelling Christ’s death here as well. They were to kill the lamb late in the
afternoon as a
sacrifice. But it was not a sacrifice in
the formal sense as it was not to be offered upon the altar. It was simply to be viewed, as Matthew Henry
tells us, “as a religious ceremony, acknowledging God’s goodness to them, not
only in preserving them from, but in delivering them by, the plagues inflicted
on the Egyptians.” This was the very
late afternoon of the night in which they were to become free.
Many
of us have been similarly delivered.
Maybe not from Egypt and slavery, but delivered from the bondage of our
sin. I wonder how often we celebrate
that fact and acknowledge God’s goodness to us.
For those of us not yet delivered, I wonder if it is time for you to
“get yourself a Lamb”.
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