Preparing For The Passover
There is a legend that there was once a God who became flesh and dwelt among men, a God who gave His own life so that these created creatures might have a chance at eternal life and becoming part of His family. This God was beaten and murdered by His own creation, but He did it willingly and without a protest.
This very same God who once died so that all might have life more abundantly and so that He might unwind the curse of death will once again come to free us from the grasp of death for all time as the coming Holy day season pictures.
With Passover, the memorial of this death, just around the corner, now is the perfect time to talk about the importance of preparing for it. The Passover kicks off the Holy day season, and it is the foundation of our faith; as such, it is essential that we understand the necessity of planning ahead. The most important component of Passover is Christ, for without Christ and His sacrifice for our sins, there would be no remission and complete removal of our transgressions. Without Christ’s sacrifice, our faith is in vain.
This person must have been someone extraordinary since any regular human's sacrifice wouldn’t even wash away his own sins, let alone those of another person; yet Christ’s sacrifice was so powerful that it permanently wiped away all the sins of whoever takes His blood as a covering and becomes part of the covenant. What He did for us is of such importance that if even a single component of it isn’t in place, we have no hope.
John 1:1-3 ESV — In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
Everything that was created was created by the Word, which was fully God and who was in existence next to God from the very beginning. This Word is Christ, the one who died for our sins, as we see in verse fourteen of this same chapter.
John 1:14 ESV — And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
There is a legend that there was once a God who became flesh and dwelt among men, a God who gave His own life so that they might have a chance at eternity and becoming part of His family. Everything, including our Bible, is an extension of this Word who was God. Like a giant spotlight, when we bring the Word to bear on Passover and the days of unleavened bread, we see some astounding Old Testament rituals brought to light.
The death of a God was required to unwind the ancient curse that was put upon all mankind by the first man, Adam. Nothing else would suffice. Unless a God fully died and was resurrected, thereby fully conquering death, we have no hope. The ancient curse we brought on ourselves is death as a penalty for sins, which really makes sin the curse.
Romans 5:17-19 ESV — For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.
The death of a God was required to undo this mess made by Adam and his lovely bride; there is no getting around that. This mess requires us to participate in the Passover every year as a renewal of our covenant with Christ because we perpetuate this mess in our day-to-day lives as we continue to sin.
Passover is only a couple of weeks away. With it being so close at hand, we have to realize that the events and ceremonies of Passover begin long before we take the bread and wine. When they were physically killing an actual lamb, the preparation began four days before the Passover on the tenth of the month, when each family would select a lamb for the sacrifice and bring it into their house, where they would spend the next four days examining it for blemishes.
Christ, as our final Passover lamb, underwent this examination process when He entered Jerusalem four days before He died and spent those four days in the temple being questioned by the Pharisees. However, they didn’t realize they were examining the final Passover lamb, but nonetheless, Christ passed every test thrown at Him. Since Christ was our ultimate Lamb and He fulfilled the shadow pointing to Him, does this mean that we no longer have an application for this Passover examination process? Let’s take a look at 1 Corinthians 11:28
1 Corinthians 11:27-29 NKJV Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks [this] cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.
28 But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
29 For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.
Even though we are not lambs, we still have an examination process to go through in order to be ready for Passover.
Examine ourselves for what exactly?
For sin, of course. That’s what the blemishes on the lambs represented. Being blemish free was representative of being sin free. We cannot make ourselves sin-free; that is something that only the blood of Christ can do, which involves repentance.
As we all know, repentance involves change, not just fancy words. Quite often, it’s easy to change the things we can see, but usually, there are hidden problems that are the root cause of the things we can see. For instance, an addiction to looking at bad pictures might be a symptom of a larger and deeper problem with lust. Sometimes there can be things that we don’t even realize are problems, which brings us back to our topic of examination.
If we can’t see something, how do we find it to root it out? The obvious answer is that Christ will remove it for us, but how do we get Him to do that in the first place?
We are dealing with a problem that we don’t even know we have. None of our friends have stepped forward and told us we are real jerks on certain occasions or that we should quit doing a certain thing, so we have no clue where to even begin looking for that hidden leaven. Once we find it, then we can ask Christ for His assistance in removing it, but we have to find it first.
The four days leading up to Passover are the time period set aside for the examination. We can start before this, but these ten days are down to the critical deadline. It seems like it would be better to have a longer time period to examine ourselves, but let’s be honest here, if we try to use fifty days to examine ourselves, we are going to end up with about four days of examination in total if we string all of the days of examination together because life is busy and we forget easily. Four days are just about the right amount so that we don’t forget what we walked into the room for.
Four days might not seem like a lot, but there is a lot that can be accomplished in this time as far as examining ourselves goes; but before we look at methods of self-examination, why are we even examining ourselves at this time in the first place? This returns us to a physical ritual that we all perform every year without even giving it much thought most times. On the afternoon of the fourteenth, Christians around the world can be observed doing something quite odd. They pull out all of their baking soda, yeast, and leavened bread and throw it in the garbage. Even before this, they cleaned and vacuumed their houses to get every crumb out of every nook and cranny; they remove all of the leavening as they were commanded in Exodus.
Exodus 12:15 NKJV 'Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses. For whoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel.
Most of the Israelites probably had no clue about the spiritual significance of what they were doing, but today, because of God’s spirit, we can clearly see the hidden meaning of purging out the leaven. The physical is merely a shadow or image of the spiritual, after all. To see the full image that removing the leaven from our houses represents, let’s take a look at the New Testament.
1 Corinthians 5:6-8 NKJV Your glorying [is] not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?
7 Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.
8 Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened [bread] of sincerity and truth.
Removing the leavening from our homes represents purging sin out of our lives. Sin is quite often represented by leaven in the Bible, and as it says here, even a little can completely corrupt us. There is no such thing as a harmless little sin. This physical process of elimination is a picture of the far more important spiritual examination of ourselves for leavening, or as it’s better known, sin.
Because of Christ’s sacrifice for our sins, we are in an unleavened state after repentance and baptism, as Paul says in verse seven. However, leaven can creep back in and hide for a while, slowly gaining force until it tries to take us completely over. This is what we are purging out, and we are to become new lumps, completely putting to death the old leaven.
Well, we are more or less back to where we started. We need to put sin out of our lives, but in order to do that, we first have to find it. The sin we are talking about is habitual sin. Of course, we need to put all sin out of our lives, but habitual sin is the topic of interest here. The days of unleavened bread are about making a permanent change in our lives, and this involves turning away from our habitual sins.
God didn’t leave us without tools to go through this process, and the number one tool He gave us is His Son’s sacrifice for our sins. Because of this sacrifice, we have direct access to God at all times. In fact, we have an intercessor who can sympathize with our every struggle because He faced them when He was on Earth. Without His sacrifice and His help, the other tools we have would be useless.
Now that we have direct access to the throne of God, we have another powerful tool in our arsenal; prayer. In order to get rid of sin, we must draw close to God, and in order to draw close to God, we must have a relationship with Him. We can’t neglect Him.
The four days leading up to Passover are a perfect refocus for this relationship, and this involves prayer and fasting, asking Him to show us where we need to improve, and asking Him to show us our hidden sins. He can see deep into our hearts and see us for who we truly are and where we need to change. His main source of communicating this change to us is through the Bible by using His Spirit.
Hebrews 4:12-13 NKJV For the word of God [is] living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
13 And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things [are] naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we [must give] account.
The fact that He can see us completely and utterly as we truly are can be very disconcerting, but from another point of view, it can also be very comforting because this means that when we ask Him for help in growing into the image of Christ, He knows exactly where we need to change. However, in order to be able to change, we have to actually ask for help in seeing where we need to adjust as well as with the adjustment itself. When we ask Him to show us where we need to change, we need to be prepared for Him to do exactly that.
It’s rarely comfortable when He does.
To aid in hearing His voice, we have the final tool that we are going to look at; fasting. This really goes hand in hand with prayer because it enhances our listening ability as well as our focus on God. Fasting is a way of humbling ourselves before God and drawing closer to Him.
We show that He is the most important thing in our lives and that we are even willing to give up a necessity of life in the form of food to be closer to Him. Fasting clears our minds as well and enables us to hear Him more clearly.
Joel 2:12-13 NKJV "Now, therefore," says the LORD, "Turn to Me with all your heart, With fasting, with weeping, and with mourning."
13 So rend your heart, and not your garments; Return to the LORD your God, For He [is] gracious and merciful, Slow to anger, and of great kindness; And He relents from doing harm.
When we examine ourselves, we automatically draw closer to God, and since striving to become more like Christ is what this life is all about in the first place, this is exactly what we need. Our fasts are personal, and we don’t flaunt them around like the Pharisees, but we still need to be using this valuable tool. There are several kinds of fasts in the Bible.
In some of the multi-day fasts, you ate and drank no pleasant food; some you could drink but not eat; and for Atonement, you neither eat nor drink. It depends on the circumstances and the timing of your fast as to what you decide to do.
Christ is the most important aspect of the Passover; there is no Passover without Him. We are becoming like Him; thus, the purpose of our self-examination is to,
Philippians 2:5, 7-8, 12-15 NKJV Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, ...
7 He made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, [and] coming in the likeness of men.
8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to [the point of] death, even the death of the cross. ...
12 Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;
13 for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for [His] good pleasure.
14 Do all things without complaining and disputing,
15 that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world,
The goal of our self-examination is to remove sin from our lives, not just for our benefit but to shine as guiding lights in a world of darkness for those who need to find Christ. We need to make sure that our light is reflecting Him so that others are guided to Him. When Christ was crucified on the cross, He started a beacon burning that we reflect to this very day when we live according to the ways that He set before us.
The four days leading up to Passover, as we examine ourselves and our houses for leaven, is a time of spiritual resetting as we prepare to renew our covenant vows with Christ. We are resetting to the correct broadcast frequency, which we have slowly drifted from all year, and we are renewing our relationship with God. This is one of the many gifts Christ gave us with His sacrifice and the institution of these days for all time. As physical beings, we need physical actions to draw us back to the spiritual and to refocus on the kingdom of God.
Christ’s sacrifice was so powerful that it permanently wiped away all the sins of whoever takes His blood as a covering. What He did for us is so powerful that it set us free from the curse of sin and death. This is the legend of the God who became flesh and dwelt among men, a God who gave His own life so that we created creatures might have a chance at eternity and a chance at becoming part of His family. This God who became flesh said to the Father, “I have given them the glory that You gave to Me, in order that they may be one, in the same way that We are one: I in them, and You in Me, that they may be perfected into one; and that the world may know that You did send Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.”
This love is what brought a God to Earth to die for our sins and set us free, and this true legend is what these days coming up so swiftly point to, so let us be prepared and examine ourselves so that we may be ready to renew our covenant and show the world the glory of Christ.
© Kyle Bacher 2023