When I See the Blood

The strangest dinner in Scripture is eaten standing up. On the night God brought Israel out of Egypt, each family was to eat with “your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand” (Exodus 12:11) — coats on, bags by the door, a meal taken by people already halfway out of it. It is the first Passover, and it is the whole drama of redemption folded into the sacred ordinary: a family supper that turns out to be the hinge of a nation’s rescue.

But the hinge of that night was not on the table. It was on the doorframe. Each household took a lamb “without blemish, a male a year old” (Exodus 12:5), kept it a few days, killed it at twilight, and brushed its blood on the two doorposts and the lintel. For that night the LORD would pass through Egypt in judgment, and one thing alone would turn death aside from a house: “when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13).

Sit with what made the difference between a house of mourning and a house at supper. It was not the goodness of the family inside; it was the lamb that had died in its place, and the blood on the wood outside. The people sheltering under that mark could not even see it — they were indoors, in the dark, trusting a sign that faced the street. It was enough that God could see it. Our safety that night hung not on our hold of the blood but on his sight of it.

Israel kept this feast every spring for centuries, and every Passover table was a kind of arrow pointing forward — until one year a preacher by the Jordan saw a cousin of his walking toward him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Paul says it without ornament: “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). He is the Lamb John later saw in glory, standing, as though it had been slain.

Watch how far the pattern is carried. The rule for the paschal lamb was that “you shall not break any of its bones” (Exodus 12:46). When Jesus hung dead on the cross and the soldiers came to hasten the end by breaking the legs of the crucified, they came to him and found him already gone, and left his legs alone — “that the Scripture might be fulfilled: ‘Not one of his bones will be broken’” (John 19:36). The true Lamb was kept whole even in death, exactly as the shadow had promised.

This is the mercy of it. The blood that turns death aside is no longer ours to brush onto anything. It has been shed once, and God has seen it and been satisfied. Our peace does not rest on how vividly we feel the cross or how tightly we grip it on a given morning; it rests on the fact that the Father has looked at his Son and passed over us. The destroyer has already gone by. We eat, still, as people who are leaving — dressed for a journey with a country at the end of it — and we go out under a mark we did not make and cannot lose.