Our Passover Lamb

Two New Testament passages that connect Jesus’ death with the Passover sacrifice:

• 1 Peter 1:18-19. ”[W]e are told that ‘it was not with perishable things such as silver and gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect’. Many of the Old Testament sacrifices specify the need for a lamb ‘without blemish or defect’, but whenever redemption is mentioned, with its connotations of deliverance from slavery, the events of the exodus cannot be far from any Jewish reader’s mind. The fact that Peter specifies Jesus’ blood as the means of rescue recalls the night of the first Passover, in which the blood of the lamb on the doorpost averted God’s judgment.”
• 1 Corinthians 5:7. “Paul says that ‘Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed’. In the context, Paul is urging his readers that as people redeemed by the sacrificial death of Jesus, there is no place for immorality among them. Paul urges them to rid themselves of ‘yeast’ of corruption, drawing on the imagery of the first Passover in which the Israelites were to ‘eat nothing containing yeast’ (Exod. 13:3; cf. 12:8, 15, 18-20; 13:6-7).”

The quotes are from Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution by Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, Andrew Sach. This section of the text concludes with the statement that “it is indisputable that the New Testament writers saw in the sacrifice of the Passover lamb a foreshadowing of Jesus’ redemptive death.”