The Look Out - Exodus 12:42-51

12:42-51 - As the Israelites are in the process of leaving Egypt on the night of the Passover, Moses takes the opportunity here to go over more specifics of what the annual ordinance will entail. It is to be observed at night and “observed unto the Lord for bringing them out from the land of Egypt.” Strangers aren’t allowed to partake in it, unless they and all the men with them are circumcised beforehand. It is all to be eaten within one household, which I think would mean that if the households were too small to consume one sheep and had to combine to share the sheep, then they would probably perform the ordinance together in the same house, and all had to be consumed on the same night, there weren’t supposed to be any leftovers. This might be so that the significance of the of the event is not diminished by making the items commonplace afterward.

One more note that is made is that when it comes to sacrificing the sheep, “neither shall ye break a bone thereof.” After going through this chapter and seeing all the requirements for the sheep to be sacrificed during the Passover meal, who’s blood is going to save them from death, and liberate them from captivity, it’s interesting to make the connections between this sheep and the Savior. The sheep must be a male without blemish and must be killed without breaking its bones and it’s blood sprinkled on the door in order to be saved. I think there are other requirements too but I think those are brought up later.

The one thing that has never made sense to me was that if these are the requirements for the sheep that has to be killed and they so obviously are meant to relate to the sacrifice of the Savior, but it only has to do with His death, nothing about His life or His teachings. My question is, if the sheep is only meant to represent Him in death, then how were the Israelite people supposed to recognize Him in life and accept Him, if they are only familiar with his manner of death. Because if they didn’t accept His teachings while He was alive but then saw that His death was exactly like the Passover sheep’s death and then they made that connection, they still missed the opportunity to accept Him as their Savior while He was in his mortal ministry.

One way that I guess we can look at this is through the lens of the Book of Mormon prophets. They had the same information as the Hebrews at the time of Christ and they had completely different views of who they were looking for in terms of a Messiah. When Jesus was preaching, the Israelites were looking for a militant leader to save them from the oppressive Roman rule, but the Nephites were looking for a man who would sacrifice himself for the sins of His people to save them spiritually. They were able to take the account of the Passover and the deliverance from Egypt and equate it with the spiritual deliverance that the Savior’s atonement was actually meant for.

So maybe the problem wasn’t that the couldn’t see the life of the Messiah and who they were really looking for through the ordinance of the Passover, but that they wouldn’t, because clearly other people were able to make that connection, even in Jerusalem at the time of Christ’s birth, Simeon and Ana are two that come to mind, and even the disciples and all those who did follow Christ. They saw it, so it was there for whoever was looking for it.

And just like that after 430 years, “the selfsame day, that the Lord did bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt by their armies.”