“For Christ our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed.”

Talk about wicked!  This must have been about as bad as it could get.  And of course, it was going on in Corinth, that debased port city of unbridled evil.  The 4-mile wide isthmus where the city stood trapped people and ideas and behaviors like a choked sewer pipe backs-up its contents.  So the reputation was there to make this event no surprise.  But this event was so bad that it had even the immoral Corinthians screaming, “That’s just wrong!”  What was wrong, you ask?  Well, to be precise, two things: (1) A man in fellowship with the church “has his father’s wife” (1 Corinthians 5:1) and (2) the Corinthian church was “proud” about it.

I’m not sure how Paul could even write to these people.  “Your boasting is not good” (v. 6) is such an understatement.  The Corinthian reputation was such that to be called a “Corinthian” meant you were a complete sex maniac and drunk.  It was an indicator that you could hardly get any worse or go any lower.  Ah, but leave it to the “church” in Corinth to do one worse, to go one step lower.  How’s that for a testimony?  How’s that for representing a holy God to a lost world?  How’s that for being salt and light?

So write Paul must, and correct Paul must.  And correct he does!  It is in this corrective passage that we find Christ described nowhere else but is pictured in the Old Testament.  “Christ our Passover” is rich with meaning that is especially highlighted by the sick drama of the Corinthian church.  While the NIV says “Passover Lamb,” lamb is found nowhere in the text, and obvious addition by translators to clarify readers’ understanding.

The background for the Passover feast can be found in Exodus 11.  As the last of ten plagues, God told Moses that this one would be the final straw that would break Pharaoh’s back.  It would affect all of Egypt like never before (Exodus 11:6).  As a result, Egypt was never able to fully restore herself to her former glory.  This was the beginning of the end of Egypt’s continuing dominance as a world power.

Two distinct but related pictures accompanied the Jews’ liberation from Egypt.  First, an innocent healthy lamb, inspected for four days (11:3, 6), would be killed at twilight, its blood brushed on the doorframes of Jewish homes.  “When I see the blood,” God said (v. 13), “I will pass over you.  No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.”  Second, that day kicked off the Feast of Unleavened Bread (v. 17), in which they were to “eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day.  For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses.  And whoever eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel” (vs. 19).

These two pictures can be summed up with two words.  For the Passover lamb it is position.  Position was everything — everything! — for the Jews.  For the firstborn to survive and for the firstborn’s family to avoid loss and grief, they needed to remain inside their house, behind the blood-covered doorframe.  Everyone outside of it would either die or have a family member that would die.  Because of our Passover, our position is to be found in Christ.  In the first three chapters of the book of Ephesians, you can find over forty descriptions of believers directly attributable to our position “in him” (vs. 4, 7, 11, etc.).

For the unleavened bread the word is possession.  The Jews had been living in Egypt as slaves.  Now they were to be freed.  God told them that they were to eat unleavened bread for a week to celebrate the deliverance from the “yeast” of Egypt, representing the world.  This was initially caused by the fact that the deliverance came so fast that “the people took their dough before the yeast was added” (Exodus 12:34).  Yeast puffs up the dough, increasing the dough’s size 10 to 15 times its normal size, illustrating the vanity and deception of pride.  Thus the command to rid themselves of all yeast, or be “cut off from Israel.”  Pretty serious stuff!  So how is it with us?  Do we take pride, self-deception, worldliness, sin, etc., seriously enough to draw a line in the sand never to cross back over?  The Corinthians didn’t, and look what happened to them: they not only lost their testimony, they became the talk of the world!

Because of our position, we must be careful what we possess.  Any leaven in your life?