Jesus was Sacrificed on Passover

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Luke 22:14-15 tells us:

When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. And he said to them, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer."

While I was growing up, I got the idea that the Last Supper which Jesus enjoyed with his disciples was the Seder meal, which is the Passover ceremonial meal. (Tweet that!) Furthermore, Mark 14:12 tells us:

On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, when it was customary to sacrifice the Passover lamb, Jesus' disciples asked him, "Where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover?"

But now I believe the Last Supper actually was not the Passover Seder but rather the dinner meal the evening before Passover. (Tweet that!) In the Mark quote above, the disciples ask where to go to prepare for Passover, but they could have prepared for the Passover Seder and never got to have it with Jesus.

There is another possible timeline that works better: that Jesus did not eat the Passover Seder because he was actually crucified on Passover and was hanging on the cross instead of enjoying the Passover meal. (Tweet that!) 

In light of God's prophetic calendar and the meaning of the seven Feasts of the LORD, this only makes sense.

Jesus was our Passover Lamb. He had to be sacrificed on Passover to fulfill the prophecy pictured in Passover. (Tweet that!)

And in doing so, another prophecy was fulfilled.

"For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed" (1 Corinthians 5:7b, NIV).

✟   Jesus was slain on Passover and so fulfills all the symbolism of the Feast of Passover. 

In the next two days we will discuss how Jesus fulfilled the prophecies pictured in two more Feasts of the LORD. If you missed the April 11 post about these Feasts, you can find it here: The Prophetic Significance of the Feasts of the LORD (Tweet that!) 

If you enjoy this blog and would like to learn more about how Jesus fulfills the seven Feasts of the LORD, you would enjoy my new book just released this week, Prophecies Fulfilled in the Life of Jesus. The last seven chapters in the book discuss the historical as well as the prophetic significance of the seven Feasts of the LORD. For more on the discussion of Jesus fulfilling the Passover, see chapter 36.

The Prophecy of the Potter’s Field

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Judas has betrayed Jesus.

The religious leaders of Israel offered Judas Iscariot thirty pieces of silver to betray the sinless son of God. Judas took the money and betrayed him.

This was prophesied in Zechariah 11:13:

"And the LORD said to me, 'Throw it to the potter'—the handsome price at which they priced me! So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the LORD to the potter."

After Judas betrayed Jesus, he felt remorse, but Judas Iscariot did not repent—not in the way that is required by God to obtain forgiveness. (Tweet that!)

Remorse means he felt bad about it. Repent means to stop doing something that is wrong, admit that wrong, turn around, and go another direction. (Tweet that!)

Scripture tells us Judas repented, but he repented to the religious leaders…not to God. Matthew 27:3-10:

When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. "I have sinned," he said, "for I have betrayed innocent blood." 

"What is that to us?" they replied. "That's your responsibility."

So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. 

The chief priests picked up the coins and said, "It is against the law to put this into the treasury, since it is blood money." So they decided to use the money to buy the potter's field as a burial place for foreigners. That is why it has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: "They took the thirty pieces of silver, the price set on him by the people of Israel, and they used them to buy the potter's field, as the Lord commanded me."

Matthew attributes the prophecy to Jeremiah and apparently had in mind a similar passage written by Jeremiah. Jeremiah worked as a prophet from 626 B.C. to 585 B.C.

Zechariah was a contemporary of Jeremiah's and was among the exiles who returned to Israel from Babylon in 538 B.C. He wrote this prophecy sometime after 480 B.C. So this prophecy which Judas fulfilled in the betrayal to death of Jesus was written around 500 years before the events of Jesus' death. (Tweet that!)

This is another Bible prophecy that was fulfilled in amazing detail. (Tweet that!)

Jesus Prophesizes He will be Crucified on Passover

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Well as the excitement of the first of the four lunar eclipses on major Jewish Feast days wanes, let's settle in during the remainder of this holy week leading up to Easter and refocus on some prophecies fulfilled in the last week of Jesus' life.

In Matthew 26:2, Jesus said:

"As you know, the Passover is two days away—and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified." (Tweet that!)

As of today, Good Friday is two days away. Good Friday is the day when Christians traditionally observe the crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus knew what was going to happen to him. He knew.

He told his disciples.

This is prophecy.

Of course the disciples probably could not understand, even though Jesus was speaking plainly. But really? This was the man who had fed 5,000 people with only a few loaves and fishes. He had healed the sick, made the blind see, made the deaf hear, cured leprosy. He had walked on water. He had calmed the wind with his rebuke. This man had power.

Claiming that he would be "handed over to be crucified," the Roman way of execution, when Jesus had done nothing wrong, probably sounded like gibberish to the disciples. (Tweet that!)

And yet… Jesus knew. This was prophecy. And all prophecy must be fulfilled. (Tweet that!)

The Passover was two days away. And Jesus would be crucified, shedding his blood as God's ultimate Passover Lamb. (Tweet that!)

"Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29, ESV)!

Prophecy would be indeed be fulfilled.

If you missed any of the recent posts on the first of four lunar eclipses on Feasts of the LORD which occurred earlier this week, you can find them here: (Tweet that!)

• Day 10, April 9: The Moon as a Sign and the Prophesied Blood Red Moons
• Day 9, April 10: How the Jewish Calendar Works
• Day 8, April 11: The Prophetic Significance of the Feasts of the LORD
• Day 7, April 12: What Causes the Moon to Turn Red Like Blood?
• Day 6, April 14: "Tetrad" of Four Lunar Eclipses on Jewish Feast Days in the Past
• Day 5, April, 15: The First Lunar Eclipse on Passover 2014 (and why I don't expect anything to happen today.)

Not a Bone Broken

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Yesterday we talked about Jesus as the Passover Lamb. Do you still have any doubts that Jesus is the ultimate Passover Lamb? Well then, check this out: (Tweet that!)

God is into details. He gives us the broad picture so we will "get it"—whether that's a message He is communicating to us (such as Jesus is our Passover Lamb) or a prophecy of something that is to come. But then He also throws in a detail or two…just in case we might think something is just coincidence instead of believing it is the invisible God at work. (Tweet that!)

One detail in the story of the Passover lamb in Exodus seemed strange to me from the first time I read it: God strictly instructed that none of the bones of the slain Passover lamb were to be broken.

Seriously, how could the bones of a dead lamb possibly matter? Well, it matters because this is yet another detail that connects the Passover lamb to the sacrifice of Jesus, the ultimate Passover Lamb.

In the instructions for that first Passover, God said:

"It must be eaten inside one house; take none of the meat outside the house. Do not break any of the bones" (Exodus12:46).

God, through Moses, reiterated the instructions for future Passover remembrances in Numbers:

"They must not leave any of it till morning or break any of its bones. When they celebrate the Passover, they must follow all the regulations" (Numbers 9:12).

King David wrote prophetically of the Messiah about 1,000 years before the birth of Jesus. In Psalm 34, speaking of God, David wrote:

"He protects all his bones, not one of them will be broken" (Psalm 34:20).

When the event of the crucifixion of Jesus occurred, John records not only what happened to the ultimate Passover Lamb, but John directly connects Jesus to the above prophecies of the Messiah (Tweet that!):

"But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs… The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe. These things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: 'Not one of his bones will be broken'" (John 19:33, 35-36).

That not a bone was broken in the crucified Lord Jesus Christ is an amazing detailed prophecy fulfilled. (Tweet that!)

My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?

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As Jesus hung dying on the cross, he cried out to His father God in heaven:

"About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?'—which means, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' " (Matthew 27:46).

Did you know Jesus was actually quoting the words King David wrote in Psalm 22:1 around 1,000 years earlier? Here are the words of Psalm22:1:

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?"

It is hard—no, it is impossible—for us to imagine or comprehend how the all-knowing, omnipresent God could abandon God the Son. (Tweet that!) The only way I can comprehend it is like this:

We know that God cannot or will not allow sin in his presence.

When Jesus died on the cross, he became sin as he took on the penalty of all the sin of all the people of all time who will accept him.

God the Father could not look upon this in that eternity and eternal moment when Jesus died. (Tweet that!)

"For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God," (2Corinthians 5:21, ESV). (Tweet that!)

He was Crucified

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In the post on Saturday March 8, Day 37, in the article "Jesus Prophesied He Would Go Just As It Was Written About Him," we looked at Isaiah 53 and the many prophecies in that chapter that were fulfilled in the crucifixion of Jesus. This included verse 5:

"But he was pierced for our transgressions,

    he was crushed for our iniquities; 

the punishment that brought us peace was on him, 

    and by his wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5, NIV 1984).

Another passage in the Old Testament that is very prophetic is Psalm 22:14-17, which was written by King David who lived about a thousand years before Jesus was born. David lived from about 1040 to 970 B.C.

Here is Psalm 22:14-17. How many details do you see in these verses that describe a crucifixion and were fulfilled in the crucifixion of Jesus? (Tweet that!)

"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. 

"My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me. 

"My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death. 

"Dogs have surrounded me; a band of evil men has encircled me, they have pierced my hands and my feet. 

"I can count all my bones; people stare and gloat over me" (Psalm 22:14-17, NIV 1984).

Jesus' words, and God's Word in the Old Testament, spoke of the crucifixion of the Messiah. When Jesus died on the cross, he fulfilled all these prophecies.

Jesus is the one all of Scripture points to. There is no other. (Tweet that!)