I still remember attending kids ministry at our Catholic church as a kid. I grew up in the city, nowhere near any farm animals and found it odd that a lot of the pictures of Jesus at church also included lambs. For reasons that eluded me; it seemed to me that Jesus was a big fan of lambs.
Learning Bible stories as a kid, I kept waiting for the part where Jesus hung out with the lambs. David the shepherd boy cared for his lambs, but I never heard the story about Jesus where He did the same. Instead, I learned that Jesus and I both had a construction worker dad named Joe and that Jesus was a carpenter, not a shepherd.
It was not until I got older that I realized that Jesus was the Lamb. This is precisely what Jesus’ honey-chugging, bug-munching, Jedi-robe-wearing rural homeschool prophet cousin John said in John 1:29–30:
The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ ”
In the Old Testament Book of Exodus, the godless Pharaoh repeatedly refused to repent of his ways and release the people, so God sent a terrible series of judgments upon the entire nation. The wrath of God was eventually poured out on the firstborn son of every household, each killed in one night. The only households spared from death to their firstborn son were those families who, in faith, took a young, healthy lamb without blemish or defect and slaughtered it as a substitute and then took its blood to cover the doorposts around the entry to their home. As a result, the wrath of God passed over them and was diverted because they were literally covered by the blood of a lamb. This clearly points to Jesus who was – like the Exodus lamb—young, healthy, and without defect, which symbolizes the sinlessness of Jesus (Hebrews 9:12–14). This is why 1 Peter 1:19 speaks of “the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” And in Revelation 5:12 the worshipers sing, “Worthy is the Lamb [Jesus], who was slain.”
This annual celebration for the Old Testament believers is called Passover. They use that holiday to celebrate the fact that the wrath of God passed over them because they were covered by the blood of a lamb. The entire Jewish Passover celebration was to prepare people for the coming of Jesus. At the Last Supper, Jesus said that the Passover elements of bread and wine were His body and blood. Additionally, 1 Corinthians 5:7 says, “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.”
Have you truly accepted Jesus’ full forgiveness for all your sins? Is there anything you are still beating yourself up for that Jesus already died for?