Good morning. Today is Wednesday, August 26th!

🥳 Congratulations on starting today with God, and thank you for letting us be a part of it.

📖 Verse Of The Day

— 1 Corinthians 5:7

🧠 Devotional

The first Passover and the sacrifice of Jesus happened more than a thousand years apart, but God built the same picture into both. The lamb in Exodus was pointing forward to the Lamb who would come later.

It starts in Egypt.

The Israelites are slaves, and the final plague is coming. God tells every household to choose a lamb. But not just any lamb. It had to be a year-old male “without defect” (Exodus 12:5).

You wouldn’t be wrong to think of it as one of their best lambs. They weren’t supposed to choose a sick or damaged animal they didn’t want anyway. Later, in Malachi 1, God even rebukes His people for offering blind, lame, and diseased animals.

Then the lamb without defect was sacrificed. Its blood was placed around the doorway, and God said, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13).

The lamb died. Its blood was shed. The people under that blood were spared, and Israel was delivered from slavery.

Now fast-forward to Jesus.

John the Baptist sees Him and says, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).

That word Lamb wasn’t random. God was bringing the Passover picture back.

Peter makes the connection especially clear:

“For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed… but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” — 1 Peter 1:18–19

Think about that wording.

God required Israel’s lamb to be without defect. Then Scripture calls Jesus “a lamb without blemish or defect.”

We couldn’t be that lamb. Romans 3:23 says “all have sinned.” In the picture, we’re the ones with the defect: sin. Our lives could never provide the spotless sacrifice needed to remove our own sin.

But Jesus could. Hebrews 4:15 says He “did not sin.”

So God followed the pattern He had established at Passover. A Lamb without defect was sacrificed. His blood was shed. And through that blood came deliverance, only this time from sin.

Paul even says it directly: “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7).

Passover was the foreshadowing. The cross was what it had been pointing toward.

God once told His people to provide a lamb without defect. Then, when the greater sacrifice was needed, God provided the Lamb Himself.