“The new is in the old concealed; the old is in the new revealed.” – St. Augustine

I first heard that quote when I was a teenager, and it stuck with me. It refers to the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and the fact that God’s covenant of grace is evident throughout both. There are many prophecies and symbols of Christ’s death and resurrection, in the Old Testament, but the prophecies were not made clear until the New Testament when He actually came in the flesh to do the work of redemption that the Old Testament prophecies and symbols pointed to.

Jesus was not murdered. We may think it was the Romans or the Jews who killed Him, and certainly they played their parts. But Jesus Himself said, in John 10:18, “No man takes My life from Me; I lay it down by Myself.” It was a willing sacrifice in submission to the Father’s will. He, the Lord Jesus Christ, was the final Passover Lamb, to pay the penalty for sin for all who would believe.

The sole purpose of Christ’s coming to earth as a man was to die. He knew this, and He knew every detail about when, where, and how He would die.

Passover is named for the event that happened just before the Israelites were delivered by God, from slavery in Egypt. Moses petitioned Pharaoh many times to let them go, and each time Pharaoh said yes, only to change his mind before they could leave. Each time he refused, God sent a plague on the Egyptians. The tenth and last plague was the death of all the firstborn of people and livestock in Egypt would die. God told Moses that each Israelite family was to kill a lamb and apply its blood to the lintel and doorpost of their home. When the angel saw the blood, it would pass over that home, and the firstborn in that household would be spared. This is why it is called Passover.

As John MacArthur explains in one of his sermons:

“To be delivered from judgment requires death. The message of Passover is, God delivers through the death of an innocent substitute. From then on, all sacrifices were clearly indications that God delivers from judgment by the death of a substitute. But the animal sacrifices were not that substitute. No person was ever delivered from divine judgment by the death of any animal. The repeated sacrifice of animals was simply a continual symbol of the fact that God does deliver by the death of an innocent substitute, but no animal was ever satisfactory to God, so the sacrifices went on and on in the millions all pointing to the perfect sacrifice that would satisfy God. That perfect Lamb was Jesus Christ, chosen by God as the adequate sacrifice.”

The shadows of the Old Testament all disappeared in the Reality of the New. In the Last Supper, Christ brought to an end the old covenant of the Old Testament, and inaugurated the new covenant of the New Testament.

The Last Supper was the last legitimate Passover, looking back to Israel’s deliverance from Egypt – and  the Lord’s table, the first new memorial feast, looking back to the cross, a new deliverance and a much more powerful one.

“He ends millennia of a celebration looking back to God’s delivering power in Egypt, and inaugurates a new memorial looking back to the cross and the deliverance, far greater, accomplished there.”  – John MacArthur

I invite you to watch this video by Pastor MacArthur, who says it much clearer and better than I can! Please, watch it with your Bible open, so you can see if what he is saying agrees with what God says in His Word.