Three Appointed Times Fulfilled in Order

Part Four has followed the hour and the lamb, from the night in which He was betrayed and the words of Exodus 12:6 to the burial just before the Passover evening came. This last chapter of Part Four steps back and asks what the whole of it means. Scripture gives us two words for the answer.

A Shadow of the Good Things to Come

The writer of Hebrews puts both into one sentence.

Hebrews 10:1 For the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law) has but a shadow of the good things to come, not the true form of these realities, and it can never, by the same sacrifices that are offered continually every year, make perfect those who draw near.

“For the nomos(law) has but a shadow of the good things to come, not the true form of these realities.” A shadow is real. It has the shape of the thing that casts it, and anyone who sees the shadow can know a great deal about what stands in the light. But a shadow is not the thing itself. The verse goes on to say why: the same sacrifices, offered every year, could never “make perfect those who draw near.”

The Passover is a clear case. Year after year, at the evening that opens the fourteenth, Israel offered the Passover and ate it, and remembered the night when the LORD saw the blood on the doorposts and passed over the houses (Exodus 12:13). The offering had the shape of something greater. Paul names what that was: “Messiah our Passover has been sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). The Passover of the Torah was the shadow, and the death of the Messiah was the substance.

As we saw in Book 1, Paul writes of the appointed times as “a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Messiah” (Colossians 2:17), and he uses the present tense. The shadow did not vanish when the substance came. It still has His shape.

The Shadow and the Substance on One Evening

Part Four lets us see the shadow and the substance side by side, on one evening.

In the daytime of the thirteenth, while the Passover offerings were being made ready, the Messiah died at the ninth hour. By late afternoon His body had been laid in the tomb. Then, when evening came and the fourteenth began, the households of Israel offered the Passover and ate it with unleavened bread, as the Torah commanded. When they ate the roasted lamb that evening, the true Passover sacrifice had already been offered, and His body lay in the tomb.

The shadow was being kept at the very hour when the substance had already come. No one arranged this by human planning. The Torah set the appointed time, the Gospels record the hours, and the two meet without any forcing.

Three Appointed Times in Order

The Passover was not the last of it. Leviticus 23 sets the appointed times of the first month one after another, and the days that followed the cross fell exactly on them. We read the first of them in Chapter 18 (Leviticus 23:5-7). The fourteenth is the Passover. The fifteenth is the day of “the feast (chag חַג khag) of unleavened bread” (Leviticus 23:6), “a holy convocation (miqra-qodesh מִקְרָא־קֹדֶשׁ mik-raw'),” on which no work of service was to be done. This is the great sabbath of Unleavened Bread. Then comes the day of the first sheaf, which Chapter 41 examines in full (Leviticus 23:10-11). The priest waved the sheaf “on the morrow after the Shabbat.” The Shabbat here is the great sabbath of the fifteenth, and its morrow is the sixteenth. That is the day of the first sheaf, the Omer Reshit, when the first of the harvest was waved before the LORD “for your acceptance.”

Now set the three appointed times beside the three days.

Three appointed times, in the order the Torah gave them, fulfilled in the same order on three successive days. He was the Passover offering, already made when the fourteenth began. For the Passover to be offered on the fourteenth, He had to die on the preparation day; without the atonement of the cross on that day, the offering on the fourteenth would have been impossible. He rested in the tomb through the great sabbath of the fifteenth. And very early on the sixteenth, at first light, on the day of Omer Reshit, He rose.

The First Fruits

Paul draws the last line himself: “But now Messiah has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20). The word Paul uses for first fruits is aparche ἀπαρχή ap-ar-khay', the word for the first portion of a harvest, given to God. He did not choose it by chance. The Messiah rose on the very day the first sheaf of the harvest was offered, “the first fruits of those who are asleep.” Chapter 41 returns to this verse and to Leviticus 23:10-11.

For Us

Paul’s sentence ends with the words that matter most: “has been sacrificed for us.” The precision of the timetable serves that one truth. The Lamb was given, at the hour God had appointed, for us. We are made right with God by grace, through faith in Him, as a gift.

And Paul draws from that gift a way of life: “Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven nor with leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and aletheia ἀλήθεια al-ay'-thi-a(truth)” (1 Corinthians 5:8). Those whom the Lamb has redeemed walk in sincerity and truth. As we saw in Part Three, the leaven was put away before the feast began.

What Part Four Has Shown

This part has carried one question: how could the Messiah who died on the thirteenth be the Passover of the fourteenth? The answer has come from the text. The lamb was kept before the fourteenth and offered in the evening that opens it. Its preparation filled the daytime of the thirteenth. The Messiah was crucified at the third hour of that day and died at the ninth, while the offerings were being made ready. He was laid in the tomb by late afternoon, before the evening of the fourteenth came. Then the great sabbath of the fifteenth followed, and very early on the sixteenth, at first light, on the day of Omer Reshit, He rose.

One phrase in John, met in Chapter 32, still needs to be explained. The Jews asked Pilate that the bodies be taken away, John says, “for that sabbaton σάββατον sab'-bat-on(referring to every Moed of Leviticus 23) was a high day” (John 19:31). Which sabbaton was it, and why does John call it high? Part Five begins with that question, and from there it goes on to the Greek words that tell us when He rose.