To understand how any Old Testament event (or office or officer or institution) preaches Christ and finds its fulfillment in him, we first must grasp its symbolic depth in its own place in redemptive history … The Passover lamb’s blood declared that the exodus was not simply the political liberation of an oppressed people from a wicked and tyrannical empire: Israel’s sons were as liable to death at the hands of God’s angel of wrath as were the sons of Egypt! Without a substitute’s blood smeared on the doorframe of Israelite houses, their firstborn were under the divine death sentence, no less than those of their oppressors. The ram supplied by God as substitute for Isaac provides prior context, and the interpretation of animal sacrifices offered in the tabernacle within the Pentateuch itself points the way to the symbolic depth of this ritual. Later Scripture corrects Israel’s failure to recognize the depth to which the slain animals pointed (Ps. 40:6–8; 50:7–15; 51:16–17), and prophets pointed to a Servant who would justify many by bearing their sin and guilt as a silent lamb (Isa. 53).

Dennis Johnson | Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ from All the Scriptures, ed. John J. Hughes (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007), 235–236.

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