Lesson 5: “Passover”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
When you think of the Passover, what did the blood on the door posts protect Israel from? What was the significance of Egypt’s firstborn being killed and of Israel’s firstborn being saved? Do you know what qualified Jesus to be the Passover Lamb? And one last question: which is older: Passover or Sabbath?
The fifth Sabbath School lesson for the third quarter of 2025 eclipses the eternal meaning of Passover and makes Adventist moral lessons out of this foundational event.
Pharaoh An Anti-Role Model?
This week’s lesson is entitled “Passover”, but I was startled to realize that author Moskala somehow used the story of the stubborn, hardhearted Pharaoh an example of what a good Adventists should NOT do. He states that “Pharaoh and his officials will be responsible for the fate of many people, either for life or for death,” and observes that Pharaoh’s attitude toward God will determine the future of his nation. Then the day’s lesson ends with these words:
The problem, however, is that, in our own stubborn hearts, we don’t always want to do what is right. We know what it is, but we refuse to do it. In the account of the Exodus, one man’s refusal to submit to God, even in face of overwhelming evidence, brought tragedy upon many others besides himself, which is often how it works, anyway.
Only in a behavior-based religion would the Pharaoh of infamy become an example meant to frighten people into renewed obedience to Adventist principles and “right doing”. The story of the tenth plague in which the firstborn of Egypt died while Israel’s firstborn, under the blood of their lambs, were spared, is a story of God’s justice and mercy. It is not a story demonstrating how NOT to be—although one can make that application—but this story is in Scripture because God was showing His own fledgling nation how He was saving them from His own wrath and judgment!
The lesson never makes this connection. Instead, at the end of Sunday’s lesson in which the author states that the ten plagues pointed to “God’s full expression of His justice and retribution” while He was also being “on the side of the sufferers, the abused, the mistreated, and the persecuted,” the lesson offers readers advice to balance mercy and justice::
If we can’t get the perfect balance (which we can’t), why is it better to err on the side of mercy instead of justice? Or is it?
God is no more our moral example than Pharaoh is our anti-example. God’s dealings with Egypt were not illustrations for us to imitate. God’s provision for Israel while He killed Egypt’s firstborn were demonstrations of His eternal righteousness. He is eternally merciful, personally providing for His people’s deliverance and life. Concurrently, He is eternally just, the judge of all the earth, and He will punish evil. What we see in the story of Passover and the tenth plague is the reality of God’s righteous judgment and mercy. This is not a moral tale to improve our behavior.
From What Was Israel Protected?
Monday’s through Wednesday’s lessons discuss the ritual and meaning of Passover, but not surprisingly, the discussion is superficial and very “Adventist”. Readers don’t understand any of the deep significance of the meaning of the lamb’s blood nor of what that blood spared Israel.
We learn in Monday’s lesson how the Israelites were to kill the lamb and prepare it, and the lesson ends with this paragraph and question:
The celebration of the Passover was to remind every Israelite of the mighty and gracious acts of God on behalf of His people. This celebration helped to secure their national identity and seal their religious convictions.
Why is it so important always to remember the good that God has done to you in the past and to trust that He will do good for you in the future, as well?
To be sure, Israel was to remember Passover and a perpetual feast in remembrance of God’s deliverance of them. Yet in this lesson introducing the death, preparation, and eating of the Passover lamb, their is almost no emphasis on the blood. The author says that the lamb’s blood was “the sign of life and salvation” (59), but it doesn’t discuss the meaning of the blood nor the fact that the blood spared the Israelites from not merely a death angel but from God Himself.
The reality that the blood of the Passover lamb was a type of the blood of Jesus who became sin for us and literally paid the price of death for sin is not even hinted.
Tuesday’s lesson continues to discuss the Passover lamb, but this lesson never deals with the biblical truth that the Lord Jesus became a man in order to be our Passover Lamb, standing in our place to receive the wrath of God for sin. Instead, this lesson interprets the blood this way on page 60:
The Passover lamb had to be without blemish because it pointed to Jesus Christ, “ ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’ ” (John 1:29, NKJV). The animal’s blood played a crucial role: it symbolized protection and was the sign of life at a time of death…
The whole gospel was associated with the celebration of the Passover because it pointed not only to freedom from slavery and going to the Promised Land but to Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for our sins and His merits applied to all who are covered by His blood.…
The unleavened bread is a symbol of the sinless Messiah, who overcame all temptations and gave His life for us (John 1:29, 1 Cor. 5:7, Heb. 4:15).
What does the fact that it took the blood of Jesus, God Himself, to atone for sin to teach us about how bad sin really is?
There is so much wrong with these paragraphs. First, they are vague; the meaning of the words is nebulous and unclear, almost “metaphorical”. In the first paragraph the author says that the blood of the lamb “symbolized protection and was the sign of life at a time of death.”
Those words are not wrong—but they do not state the truth. The animal’s blood symbolized the blood of the Lord Jesus. The lamb’s blood on the doorpost didn’t just symbolize “life at a time of death”, whatever that means. It literally represented—although the Israelite’s couldn’t have understood this in detail—the “blood of the eternal covenant” (Hebrews 13:21) that guarantees salvation from God’s own judgment when we submit to Him.
These lessons never say that the blood on the doorpost spared them from GOD! Instead the author talks poetically about life at a time of death—and the reader is supposed to understand that Israel escaped the death angel by putting blood on their door posts. Yet observing Passover literally saved them from God’s vengeance, His justice poured out on stubborn, unbelieving, rebellious Egypt. He warned Pharaoh and the Egyptians. He gave them opportunities to repent and to let Israel go—but even though Pharaoh KNEW that Yahweh was more powerful than his own gods because He could see that Yahweh was using the symbols of the Egyptian gods to persecute the Egyptians—he refused to act on what he knew. He KNEW Yahweh would do what He said. Pharaoh KNEW that Yahweh would perform the plagues He said He would do.
Yet Pharaoh refused.
God saved the Israelites from His own wrath! That blood wasn’t just a poetic symbol of life in a dark time. It symbolized the substitutionary death of a lamb to pay the blood-price of sin. The sinful Egyptians refused to believe and obey God. The Israelites DID obey, and God showed them that He would protect them from His own righteous wrath.
What Qualified Jesus to be Passover Lamb?
We also have to point out the way the author speaks of Christ as he attempts to explain the meaning of the blood.
Notice in the quote above that the author says that the blood “pointed not only to freedom from slavery and going to the Promised Land but to Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for our sins and His merits applied to all who are covered by His blood.”
I ask you: what are those “merits” that are applied to all, and what does an Adventist mean when he says one is “covered by His blood”?
The “merits of Christ” is a phrase that has always confused me. Since Adventists do not believe that being justified means being imputed with the literal, actual alien-to-us righteousness of Christ, what “merits” are “applied”?
And what does it mean to an Adventist to be “covered by His blood”? Adventism does not believe the atonement was completed at the cross but that it continues in heaven ever since October 22, 1844. Jesus has been “applying His blood” to the confessed sins of the saved since that date—and no one knows when his or her name will come up in the heavenly judgment.
More progressive Adventists who have tried to reimagine the investigative judgment make the heavenly books of record to be the source of providing the saved with all the answers to all their questions. God will vindicate His justice by showing from the books of record exactly why some people are saved and some are not.
Yet even the progressives do not believe that the atonement was completed at the cross. They do not believe that a person can place one’s faith in the FINISHED work of the Lord Jesus’ death for sin, His burial and His resurrection, and literally pass from death to life at that moment. They do not understand being born again and having one’s dead-in-sin spirit brought to eternal life through faith in the finished work of Jesus.
Further, the end of the quote above compares the unleavened bread of Passover to the “sinless Messiah, who overcame all temptations and gave His lie for us.”
Jesus Was SINLESS
Adventists have no understanding that Jesus did not sin BECAUSE He was sinless. He did not come to earth, incarnate, with inherited tendencies to evil in his gene pool as a legacy from Mary. No! He had no sin in Him—and He was conceived by the Holy Spirit. His existence is a singularity, a mystery we cannot explain. Yet we know that He is fully human, a man born of Mary. We also know that He is God the Son sent by the Father. He was never dead in sin. He never had to be born again. He came from the moment of His conception a spiritually-alive human being, conceived by God, and able to live without sin from the moment He became incarnate.
He didn’t come to overcome temptation and show us how to keep the law as Adventism says. No! He came utterly sinless. He was qualified to be the Passover Lamb for us because He was completely sinless, spiritually alive from conception, the spotless Lamb of God—the only One qualified to be the second Adam, the head of the new creation which came into being on the Day of Pentecost. Those who believe and are born again are His new creation, and He is the head over the church!
In fact, the question at the end of that quote from Tuesday’s lesson reveals how wrongly Adventism understands their own sin and what Jesus did: “What does the fact that it took the blood of Jesus, God Himself, to atone for sin to teach us about how bad sin really is?”
This question implies that God Himself died for sin and shed blood. Yet this understanding misses reality. The Lord Jesus had to become a man because, as Hebrews 2 explains, He had to have a body to do God’s will. He had to DIE. God can’t die—and God is spirit, as Jesus Himself said in John 4:24. So God the Son took a body IN ORDER TO DIE for human sin. Animal blood could not forever atone for human sin. Only human blood can atone for human sin.
Yet the Lord Jesus is our Creator; only our God, our righteous creator, can take responsibility for us, His rebellious creatures. Only He had the authority to take responsibility for us, and only a Man could bleed human blood to pay for human sin.
The man Christ Jesus is the one Mediator between God and man, Paul says in 1 Timothy 2:5, 6, and in Himself the Lord Jesus represented both parties of God’s covenant: God, the offended party, and man, the offending party. The Lord Jesus fulfilled the shadows of the passover lambs HIMSELF. In Himself He took human sin.
He made Him who knew no sin [to be] sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.—2 Corinthians 5:21 LSB
Our sin isn’t just disobediences to the law. Our sin is primarily in our very nature. We are born in Adam, literally dead in sin. We are born without the life of God in our spirits, and He has to reveal Himself and draw us to Himself. We do not have the ability to seek and please Him on our own. Our sin is a death sentence. The fact that God didn’t destroy humanity when Adam sinned was His grace, and God preserved us on the basis of His Son taking flesh and shedding human blood in real time and then shattering the curse of our death sentence because His blood was sufficient.
What was it sufficient to do, you ask?
It was sufficient to satisfy God!
Jesus didn’t die to demonstrate how much He loved us and was willing to suffer. He literally died a substitutionary death for us, fully paying GOD’S required price of death for sin.
Jesus Himself said that those who do not believe are “condemned already” (John 3:18), and when we believe we pass from death to life (John 5:24).
What about Sabbath?
Almost opportunistically, Friday’s lesson can’t miss maneuvering the comments from Passover to Sabbath. To the Adventist reader, this mention would seem unremarkable and might go unnoticed. But we can’t let this egregious sentence go unnoticed. At the end of Friday’s comments are these words:
To this day, observant Jewish families around the world celebrate Passover, Pesach. They have what they call a “Passover Seder” (“Seder” means “order/arrangement”) during which they recount the Exodus and then enjoy a special meal as a family. Amazing that this has been kept since, literally, the time of the Exodus! Only the seventh-day Sabbath, which observant Jews keep as well, goes back even farther into antiquity.
Did you see that? The author casually but confidently stated that the Sabbath “goes back even farther into antiquity” than does Passover!
Absolutely Not!
I realize the author is assuming his readers will agree with him that the Sabbath dates back to creation. Yet the Bible distinctly denies this idea.
The very first time a command to keep the Sabbath appears in the Bible is Exodus 16, when God gave the manna to Israel about a month before He codified it into the law at Sinai. There are NO previous statements of Sabbath or Sabbath observance.
Genesis 2 speaks of the seventh day, the day after creation, unbounded by a morning and evening, when God ceased His work of creating and decreed that His finished work, the unbounded seventh day, was sanctified and holy—set apart for His work.
The seventh day was not a “Sabbath”. God gave no command to Adam and Eve to rest, and no command was given to anyone to rest until He gave Israel the manna and the Sabbath together.
Yet it wasn’t until the giving of the Law at Sinai that the Sabbath was codified. Nehemiah tells us:
“Then You came down on Mount Sinai, And spoke with them from heaven; You gave them upright judgments and true laws, Good statutes and commandments. So You made known to them Your holy sabbath, And commanded to them commandments, statutes and law, By the hand of Your servant Moses.”—Nehemiah 9:13, 14 LSB
For this lesson’s author to throw in a Sabbath-command that binds the consciences of his readers when he is writing a lesson about Passover is pure opportunism. It is unfair and manipulative and FALSE. The Sabbath is not a “creation ordinance”, nor was it given to anyone other than Israel on Mt. Sinai—and Mt. Sinai came AFTER Passover and the exodus!
Summary
The Passover was a foreshadowing of the Lord Jesus coming as the Messiah promised to Israel. He came as a man and literally took, by imputation, our sin into Himself and hung on the cross, enduring the wrath of God on our behalf. He died the death our sins deserved and He satisfied God’s demand that sinners die. He was buried, and on the third day He rose, shattering our curse of death!
Now, when we realize that we are hopelessly sinful and need a Savior who will take responsibility for us and rescue us, when we believe in Him and trust His death and resurrection as the complete payment for our sin, we pass from death to life! The Lord Jesus gives us His resurrection life, bringing our dead spirits from death to life.
The Passover wasn’t just about God’s generalized rescue of Israel. It foreshadowed that God demanded blood to protect us from His own death sentence. The Israelites applied the blood to their houses, and God spared them from His own wrath—but the unbelieving Egyptians lost their firstborn.
God saved His own nation, Israel, whom He declared to be his “firstborn” in Exodus 4:22. God even told Pharaoh through Moses that if he didn’t let His, God’s firstborn son go, then He, God would kill Pharaoh’s firstborn.
The tenth plague was not a recapitulation of Egypt’s infanticide of boy babies when Moses was born. Rather God told Pharaoh that Israel was His firstborn son, and Pharaoh was to let Israel go.
Yet God provided a rescue for all who would believe Him. The blood of the Lord Jesus paid for our sin, and Passover was Israel’s sign that God would save those who trusted Him.
Have you trusted the Son? Have you believed that the blood of Jesus completed the atonement at the cross, and that His resurrection was the fruit of His sufficient blood sacrifice? Have you believed in the Lord Jesus Christ?
If not, look to Jesus today. Look and believe—and live! †
This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
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