Numbers 9:2 KJV
“Let the children of Israel also keep the Passover at his appointed season.”
The Feast of Passover was to be kept as a memorial by the Children of Israel on how they were delivered by God, out of Pharaoh’s grip of bondage in Egypt. The Feast of Unleavened Bread was kept over 7 days & the book of Leviticus tells us, it occurred after the feast of Passover. Passover was to remind each generation of the night before they fled Egypt. They had to gather everything in a hurry & bake unleavened bread in haste, eating it quickly & gathering up their clothes as they did this, so they could leave. Leavened bread contained yeast & it needed to rise before baking. Unleavened bread of course, did not contain yeast. The children of Isreal’s journey from Egypt was to be an arduous one & God was showing them even in this, they were to prepare a sacrifice. The Feast of Unleavened Bread was to focus on the freedom of the children of Isreal from sin, bondage & the rituals of Egypt & also, their coming into righteousness, their sins being cleansed as the passed through The Red Sea, a type of baptism. Yeast represented sin. But the only real way to get sin out of our lives is to invite Jesus Christ into our lives. He is the only one who can completely remove the yeast, the sin, from within us. He is the only way.
When Jesus Christ, –all God & all Man, “came & dwelt amongst us”, He became the Passover Lamb. John declared “behold The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of this world” when He saw Jesus approaching. Jesus our Redeemer. His sole purpose was to be The Sacrifice for our sins & to bring us salvation through redemption. Moses was sent to deliver Gods people after more than 400 years of slavery under Egyptian brutality. He was sent to serve & to direct the children of Israel on how precisely, they were to prepare for Passover & even, how to eat the Passover meal. Then how to live without the yeast of sin in them from the years of being under Egyptian rule & custom. The children of Israel were to be set apart, a peculiar people. Jesus came to deliver us because there was no one worthy. He came that we might have life & have it more abundantly. We too are to be set apart for His Light to be readily seen in us. He is the freedom that Moses was leading the children of Israel to. Jesus began acting out the plan of salvation by fulfilling Gods promise as the sacrificial Passover lamb. Isaiah speaks of how Jesus would do this; “the lamb before the slaughter & the sheep before her shearer is dumb, He openeth not His mouth. He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon Him & by His stripes (every lash Jesus took) we are healed”; silent, Jesus stood before those who persecuted Him. He never protested His perfect innocence. He took the betrayal from one named Judas, who was close as a brother to Him; He took the bad mouthing & He took it when His beloved apostle Peter denied Him. He gave His life as a sacrifice for the atonement of our sins. As the ultimate gift, He laid it down on the cross, no man took His life. He fulfilled His promise & the prophecies from The Old Testiment in scriptures such as Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel, Hosea & again in the New Testament which said “He would rise again & rebuild the temple in three days.” Matthew 12:40 “For as Jonas (Jonah)was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” This is the prophecy of Christ’s death & resurrection.
As Paul stated in 1st Corinthians 5:7 “For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us; Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Jesus requires the inner truth in each of us. It matters not to Him how murky it may appear or be. Through true confession to Him, we are able to come and share His body & blood. He wants our true heart.
Over the weekend I received Communion, The Lord’s Supper, at my home because I was not well enough to attend the Service at Church following a medical procedure. I felt so revived in my spirit despite the pain in the right side of my body. Do you know that each time we receive the broken body & blood of Jesus Christ, something happens to the soul & spirit within us? I claimed my healing & wholeness, as I received Communion by faith. Jesus Christ The Potter, keeps cleansing & restoring & sanctifying & healing us. Each time we partake, we should be doing so in memory of Him dying on Calvary for us. It is imperative we take & share Communion, The Lamb who was slain because it is for the removal of our sins and as above states, we are to come & take it “with sincerity of heart & in truth”. The Word of God tells us “let a man (& this is applies to women too) examine himself & if we think we are not worthy to receive Him through Communion, “God is greater than our hearts” He loves the humility of us admitting we have sinned because we all do “I’m not worthy of You Lord Jesus but if You say the word, I shall be healed”.
There is also deliverance, forgiveness & love in the body & blood of The Lamb, the breaking of the unleavened bread is Jesus’ body & sharing of the Passover wine symbolises the shedding of His blood. By taking The Lord’s Supper or Communion, we are observing Jesus’s example of what He demonstrated with His apostles, until He returns, something He instructed the apostles to do then passing this down to us, His adopted children. Just as He demonstrated humbleness in His actions during Communion, He also showed the fellowship in the body of Christ. The oneness of the apostles in breaking bread & sharing one Cup, shown by Him as He was serving His apostles & washing their feet. He did this so must we live our lives humbly and our service to God, is to serve others, on His behalf.
When we partake of The Lord’s Supper we are to do so with love & in reverence, not ritualism. We partake with the reality of who God is, what He did for our salvation & how He lives in us, so that we are being cleansed, filled & strengthed. When our struggles against sin present itself throughout our lives & it will, we can surrender our will to God and rely on the power of the risen Christ who lives His life in us & on the power of His Holy Spirit, who fights for us. With Christ, The Hope of glory & His resurrection power working against our sins, we will say with holy boldness & as Paul emphatically stated in Philippians 4:13, was “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!” & “ greater is He that is within me than he (Satan) that is in the world”. As God sent Moses to lead His people out of captivity, a type of sin, so has Jesus died on the cross to set us free from the chains of sin & death. We are to observe & partake of The Lord’s Supper often & in truth, passing on the importance of what why we do this in memory of Jesus Christ to our children & their children, the next generation & also, to those around us, until the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, His death, resurrection & our redemption is shared in the “four corners of this earth only then shall the end come” In doing so we are observing Christ resurrection until He returns & what a day of rejoicing & feasting it will be!
#Share this verse with all you meet today, maybe you know Jesus maybe you don’t but the message is the same, there is power & healing in His body & blood. Jesus was The Passover Sacrificial Lamb for us, we must continue what He first taught us through Communion at the most famous meal there ever was,The Lord’s Supper. We are to observe this as a memorial until He returns for us??
Be richly blessed in Jesus name
Samantha ?
