Little known tidbits to help you appreciate Easter more

I just read some really interesting little-known tidbits over at http://www.hacres.com that help connect the events surrounding Christ’s death and resurrection — information that enables us 21st century Americans to decipher what was going on in first century Israel:

We hope they will give you an even greater appreciation for Christ and his sacrifice.

•Passover lambs for sacrifice needed to be “without spot or blemish” (Exodus 12:5). To ensure an adequate supply of lambs for the thousands attending Passover in Jerusalem, priestly shepherds were hired to specifically bred spotless lambs. Because of sanitation regulations, they could not be raised in Jerusalem. Instead, the lambs were born a few miles away in a village… called Bethlehem. The same place where Jesus, the spotless lamb, was born.

•A Passover lamb was to be brought into the home and “tested” for 3 days prior to Passover to ensure it was without spot or blemish (Exodus 12:3-6). In the same manner, Christ (the Passover lamb) was ushered into Jerusalem on a donkey and then tested for 3 days (intensely questioned by the Pharisees) before He was declared faultless (ie. without spot or blemish) by Pilate (John 19:4) and sacrificed.

•Christ was crucified and died at the ninth hour, about 3:00 pm (Matthew 27:45). It is at this exact time that the Passover lambs were being sacrificed in the temple.

•The Passover lamb that the temple priests ate was prepared in a way that bears an uncanny resemblance to Christ on the cross. The lamb was sacrificed, then bound and roasted vertically on a metal stake that looks amazingly similar to a crucifix. Most bizarre of all, its entrails were removed and wrapped around its head, looking just like a crown of thorns.

•When Christ was about to die, He cried out “It is finished!” (John 19:30). The High Priest, when all Passover sacrifices are completed, would cry out to the crowd, “It is finished.”

•When John the disciple went into the empty tomb and saw the head cloth that had been wrapped on Christ’s head “folded up by itself” (John 20:5-7), John believed that Christ had risen. Why? In Christ’s day, when carpenters had finished their job, they folded their finishing rag and left it behind to let the homeowner know that the job was done when they arrived home. Each carpenter had a signature way of folding the cloth. Some say John knew the way Jesus’ folded His carpenter cloths and recognized the fold as Jesus’ signature that the “job was done.”

Jesus, The Final Sacrifice

There are 350 references to blood in the Bible. There are almost 300 uses for the word sacrifice. Blood sacrifice is central in God’s plan to forgive His people for their sins. All of this points to the final sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

At the very beginning God had perfect fellowship with Adam and Eve. He gave them only one boundary: do not eat the fruit of one specific tree in the garden. He told them if they ate this fruit, they would die. This is important – the wages of sin is death.

They didn’t need to eat the fruit. Everything they needed was provided for them. But they did, and then were embarrassed when they looked at each other and realized they were naked. And the sin changed their relationship with God too. When He came into the garden, instead of running to Him, they hid.

God slaughtered innocent animals to make clothing to cover their nakedness and shame. Adam and Eve had never seen death before this. Never seen blood. This was a foreshadowing of an innocent third party killed for someone else. They saw that sin was very serious. Sin is a violation of the holiness of God.

The Jews made all kinds of sacrifices over and over and over.

Even pagan people used animal sacrifices to placate an angry god. They figured if they did something bad and a god had any concern for what was right or just, that sooner or later they were going to get in trouble for what they had done. To stop the god from being angry with them they decided they needed to offer him or her a sacrifice. If it was a small sin, it would be a small sacrifice. If it was a big sin it would be a big sacrifice.

So ancient religions understood sacrifice. Later they should have been able to understand the concept of Jesus as a sacrifice when it was presented to them.
But in pagan rituals, sacrifices were made by the people trying to placate a god and this was their error. In Christianity it is never the people who take the initiative or make the sacrifice. It is God who makes the way by which His wrath may be averted. And He did it because He loves us so much. “For God SO LOVED the world, that He gave His only begotten Son.”

What trips people up in understanding this, is it’s not the act (the sacrifice) that wipes out our sins. It’s the fact that God said that the act would do this and we BELIEVE Him.

We were told about the perfect sacrifice in Isaiah 53:1-7. The sacrifice would not be a lamb, but a person. And he would free people from their sins and save them from judgment. Hundreds of years later when John the Baptist saw Jesus in the crowd, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” He was telling us that Jesus is the ultimate Lamb, the innocent third party who would shed His blood as the payment for sinful people.

Jesus’ crucifixion was no accident. It was planned since the beginning of time. He went willingly. And He did it for us. He paid a great price. Anytime we think we have to do something to get saved, we take away from what Jesus did.

Sacrifices

Nothing about Christ’s crucifixion happened by accident. Christ’s sacrifice was foreshadowed in every sacrifice since Genesis. God prepared His people for generations with the idea that a sacrifice could atone for their sin. Leviticus 17:11 says, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood and I have given it for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life.” The wages of sin is death. Something had to die. Something PERFECT had to die.

The first time blood was shed in the Bible was after Adam and Eve sinned and God killed an animal to use its skins to clothe them. This was a sacrifice for individuals. The first Passover, where families killed a lamb to put its blood on their door so the angel of death would pass over, was a sacrifice for families. The burnt offerings that Israel offered for years were sacrifices for the nation, and Christ’s sacrifice of Himself was for the world. The animals used in sacrifice always had to be acceptable to God. They had to be perfect. As Christ was.

The sacrifices taught; that by using perfect animals and holy priests, that God is holy. By demanding exact obedience to how they were to perform the sacrifices, that they were to have total submission to God’s laws, and by using animals of great value, the high cost of sin and the sincerity of their commitment to God.

Sacrifices symbolically transferred our sin to the animal and then the animal died instead of us. In Hebrews we learn that the sacrifices the Israelites were offering weren’t good enough. Hebrews 9:9 says, “gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot perfect the conscience of the worshipper.” All the cleansing the priest did was external and the sacrifices were a pale copy of the true sacrifice of Jesus Christ, which came later. Also they had to sacrifice over and over again. Jesus’ sacrifice was once and for all.

God begins to tell His people that He expects more from them then their offerings. 1 Samuel 15:22 says, “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice.” Psalm 51:17 tells us, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart.” Paul tells us in Romans 12:1 to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.

Sacrifices were important because they prepared people for Christ’s sacrifice. Jesus’ sacrifice was perfect because He perfectly lived God’s will. He was perfectly obedient. Only he could truly make us right with God and give us the power to stay that way.