Today on the Jewish calendar

Today on the Jewish calendar is Nissan 10. On this day, the ancient pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover would be selecting their lambs to sacrifice for the Passover. According to Exodus 12:3-8, each family was to select the lamb and keep it until the 14 of the month and then sacrifice it for the Passover.

The night we studied the Passover when we did STEPPING UP, we talked about what it would mean to select a lamb, get attached to it, and then have to kill it--knowing that we were the ones who deserved to die, and an innocent would die in our place.

I found this blog today talking about this, and a video showing a sacrifice in Jerusalem. This is very graphic, but we can never understand what this means unless we see it.
It is very tough, but I recommend you watch it.
If you need to go back and read Exodus, do so.

But more importantly, remember that Jesus is our Passover Lamb. He died in our place. jl

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Video: Passover Sacrifice in Jerusalem

Recently I noted an article about a planned animal sacrifice in Jerusalem. This event was controversial because 1) there is no temple or altar in Jerusalem today; 2) killing an animal makes some people mad.
Friends in Jerusalem went to the Old City that day and saw a guy they suspected of carrying a ritual knife in his briefcase and followed the guy through a wild maze of streets in pursuit. It turned out they followed the right guy. They filmed the service.
We talked about the appropriateness of putting this online. The 5-minute video is as graphic as it gets. More and more people today don't realize that meat doesn't originate at a grocery store. They have little concept of an animal being raised and then slaughtered. Furthermore, almost no one in the Western world has ever sacrificed an animal for religious purposes.
I think, however, that is precisely why this *graphic* video should be shown. We read about sacrifice in the Bible but we don't really understand what that means. We read passages that talk about the "life being in the blood," but those are just words that we don't really consider. We "know" that the wages of sin are high, but we don't get the life lesson that the ancient Israelites received every year.
The point of sacrifice was simply this: you deserve to die because of your sin. This animal is dying in your place. Watching the priest slice his throat and watching the blood drain out drove the point home much better than reading a chapter of Leviticus.
Today New Testament believers know that the blood of bulls and goats is not enough to take away sin. But I think that we can often just take for granted Jesus' death in our place. We don't think about his innocent blood draining away because we can't conceptualize it. We don't always appropriate the idea of substitute because we've never seen a living object die in our place. But our loss can be this: sin is easy because forgiveness (we think) is cheap.
The video was made by SourceFlix Productions. Instead of dubbing over the scene with English commentary, they chose to include some explanatory text below. Don't watch this video while eating, and if you're thinking about showing your children, watch it yourself first.

Link to Passover Sacrifice video

Passover begins Saturday at sundown.

Related: for photos and explanation of the Samaritan Passover, see BiblePlaces.com (modern photos) or LifeintheHolyLand.com (19th century photos and text). Several years ago I wrote an article about a visit to the Samaritan Passover sacrifice (En Gedi Resource Center).