At face value the resurrection of Jesus is a pretty unbelievable event, as most miracles are. But there’s no denying that Jesus lived and was executed on a Roman cross. What’s always thrilled me about the Bible is the symbolism of the book of Exodus in the Old Testament and the death of Jesus in the New Testament.
In Exodus, the second book of the bible, we meet God’s people, the Israelites, mired in slavery in Egypt, making bricks for all those giant pyramids. Enter Moses, who asks the Egyptian Pharaoh to let God’s people go free. Pharaoh refuses, so God hammers the Egyptians with a series of plagues. In plague No. 10, God tells the angel of death to kill the first-born son of everyone in Egypt. He instructs the Israelites to sacrifice a lamb and put its blood on their doorposts. If the angel of death sees the blood, he will “passover” that house and no death will occur. The people will be saved from death. Pharaoh then loses his son, and in his grief allows the Israelites to leave so they can start their 40-year desert vacation. It’s a good thing that No. 10 worked because ancient texts reveal that plague No. 11 was to have Fox baseball announcer Tim McCarver’s voice piped into Pharaoh’s palace.
While in the desert, God sets forth the entire constitution for the Israelite nation. He gives them all of their laws, feasts, sacrifices, and celebrations. One of the feasts was the Passover. It was a week-long remembrance of their escape from Egypt and how they were delivered from death by the blood of the lamb. The celebration included a special meal known as the Passover feast.
They also had another ceremony called the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). This was when the priest would sacrifice a goat. Before killing the goat, the priest would lay his hands on it and symbolically transfer all of the sins of the entire nation to the goat. Then the goat was sliced up and his blood was poured on the altar in their traveling temple, the tabernacle. God has a bad attitude toward sin. It’s a really long story, but sin had to be paid for with death. God could have killed everybody for their sins, but he chose to accept the sacrifice of the goat instead. There were a lot less funerals that way. Plus he had made a promise to love his people.
There also was a second goat. This goat too had the sins of the people transferred upon it. This goat was led out into the desert where it was set loose to carry away the sins of the people. He was known as the ‘emissary goat’ in Latin, which was translated to ‘scapegoat’ in English (escapegoat). So, not only was the price of sin paid for through the death of the first goat, the people’s sins were also removed from the presence of God through the scapegoat.
Now fast forward on your biblical DVR to Jesus’ final week. He enters Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. He is arrested shortly after eating the Passover meal and is crucified the next morning. With his death, Jesus actually did what the Passover lamb and the two goats in Exodus symbolized. He was sacrificed, willingly I might add, like a lamb at Passover. He accepted the wrath of God toward sin represented by the first goat, and he removed our sins from the presence of God as did the scapegoat.
The days of Exodus were a good 1200-1400 years before Christ. How did Jesus just happen to die during the Passover? How did the manner of his death mirror the Old Testament sacrifices? He could have been poisoned, starved, suffocated or buried to death? Neither of those methods involves the shedding of blood. Did the four gospel writers conspire to create a horrible death scene that just happened to symbolize the rituals explained in Exodus?
I find the events of Jesus’ death and their connection to the Old Testament stories more than just coincidence. Isn’t it possible that God arranged the whole thing? And if he could do that, then he certainly could have raised Jesus from the dead. Why would he set forth such a plan in motion? The answer too is found in Exodus. He chose to love his people. He chose to deliver them from Egypt and save them from death. He loves you too. Today we celebrate his love that rolled the stone away. A love that separates our sins from Him as far as the east is from the west, on the back of the scapegoat -- Jesus the risen Lord.
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