This unblemished lamb that dies as a substitute so that the angel of the Lord would pass over them looks ahead to the day when Jesus, the perfect sacrificial Lamb, would die as a substitute for his people so that they may be redeemed from bondage and be free to worship Him.
The history of the revelation of God as presented in the Bible is the history of the supernatural and the divine, which is brought into relation with, and acts upon, what is natural and human. What is exceptional to man is ordinary to God. What is supernatural in the eyes of man is natural to God.
God promised to give Abraham a son and a line of descendants as numerous as the stars, but warns that his family line will be enslaved in a foreign land before they are redeemed and given the Promised Land.
One of the central themes of Ephesians 5:3-14 is the metaphor of “light”. Paul uses this concept to help us understand how putting on the “new self” is a process of exposing the darkness in our hearts and in our actions to the light of Christ and his finished work on the cross.
He taught and preached out of love — Matthew 9:36, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
The Hebrew word “offering” (qorbān) primarily used in Leviticus and Numbers is best translated as “a thing brought near.” Sacrifices are thus concerned with the issue of how one can live in nearness to God.
Love, especially love for one’s enemy, becomes the norm to distinguish virtue from vice, especially as that love is seen in “life in Christ” and its social implications.
To know the love of Christ is to know Christ himself, in ever widening experience, and to have His outgoing and self-denying love reproduced in oneself.
