Editorial - Passover

by Joy Hunting

This is the month of Passover, celebrated this year in Jewish homes beginning on April 11th.

We all remember how God once delivered His enslaved and endangered people from their bondage in Egypt, a bondage that would have led to their ultimate extinction at Pharaoh's hands, and we can see a scenario in our time that has a parallel to that earlier event.

Many world leaders and hostile voices seem to lose no opportunity to inveigh against the Jewish people both in Israel and in other countries. It's a disease with them; it's Satanic and therefore anti-God. Many of them would happily wipe Israel out, run right over them as they challenge their right even to exist.

It's a repetition of Pharaoh's tactics all over again. Yet this man who was worshipped as a god and who considered himself a god once pitted his powers against the Almighty -- and suffered for it, personally and nationally.

In the days of the first Passover it was the blood of the Passover lamb that provided protection from the Angel of Death who passed over the homes in Egypt. "When I see the blood I will pass over you ... when I strike the land of Egypt" (Exodus 12:13).

In the days of the first Passover too any Egyptian, or for that matter any other Gentile at the time, who sheltered under the blood of a slain lamb on door posts and lintel as instructed would have been saved from death.

How wonderful that in our day the Passover Lamb and His shed blood are still available to us as an atonement for sin and a shelter from judgement. Jochanan (John), the Preparer of the way of the Mesiah, said when he recognized the Messiah: "Behold! The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."

The Lamb of God laid down His own life and shed His own blood for our deliverance, and Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians put it this way: "For indeed the Messiah, our Passover, was sacrificed for us" (5:7) -- good news for us all at this Passover season.