passover-lamb
Definition
Passover lamb (Hebrew: שֶׂה se; Greek: ἀμνός amnos) is the lamb slaughtered in Exodus 12 to protect Israel’s firstborn from God’s death-angel in Egypt. Its blood was applied to the doorposts as a sign of deliverance. In NT typology, the passover lamb points to Jesus Christ as the true spiritual fulfillment of this type.
Author Variant
Noordzij
Noordzij sees the passover lamb primarily not as a sin-offering (although Paul in 1 Cor. 5:7 speaks of “Christ, our passover lamb”) but as a deliverance-sign. The distinction is crucial: where the physical lamb in Exodus 12 was merely an external sign on the door, Christ is the true lamb — the spiritual reality itself.
The lamb that was then slaughtered points to Jesus, our passover lamb (1 Cor. 5:7). [Noordzij, Brood en Wijn, b9]
The fulfillment is functional, not juridical. Jesus takes the place of the type in that his blood truly liberates — not symbolically, but spiritually. Jesus is both the lamb and the one who liberates through the lamb.
In eschatology this becomes radical: where the passover lamb of Exodus 12 offered protection for only one night against a physical plague, Jesus, the Passover Lamb, offers eternal liberation from the “bondage of the flesh” (Rom. 7:24). This deliverance-principle extends to the entire history of salvation: the firstborn protected in the Passover (Ex. 12:12-13) prefigures Jesus as the Firstborn raised first from death (Col. 1:18).