How does the passover lamb relate to Christianity?

Good question, Edward N:

Let us recall that the early church knew we were saved by liquid and wood.

For example, the juice of the tree of life and it's wooden trunk.

Noah saved by wood and water from the wicked world.

Moses saved in a wooden ark in the water.

The raised staff while the Red Sea delivered them from Egypt

The wooden ark in the Jordan while Israel entered Canaan

The branch that saved the submerged axe head.

And you mentioned the Passover lamb's blood on the wooden door lintels.

The shed blood on the wooden cross of Calvary,

And looking to that sacrifice through faith in the cleansing blood of Jesus, our Firstfurits and Pasqual lamb.

More on this when you prove Jesus is the Messiah in the Bible code e-book: http://revelado.org/thetimeoftheend.pdf

Ben Yeshua

I have never heard that baptism is "supposed to be the application of the blood of Jesus"

Where did you come up with that one???

John the Baptist was baptizing with water before Christ was ever crucified. (Matthew 3:1-17)

Christianity embraces the concept of a tripartite God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It's not three separate gods, but three aspects of the One God. So if the Son suffered for us, it affected all three.

The Passover lamb is one of those moments when Christianity gets all excited over apparent similarities with Judaism without realizing how superficial and opposite they are.

Passover doesn't have anything to do with salvation from sin. It's about freedom and the presence of injustice *in this world*. The Pesach lamb isn't a sin sacrifice, it's a commemoration of one of the moments when G-d orders the replacement of human sacrifice with an animal sacrifice. And then there's the underlying symbolism of killing an Egyptian god and leaving the Egyptians' ways behind.

Which makes it very strange when Christian theology does its utmost to reclaim divinity for the Egyptian god and bring in a celebration of a human/god's sacrifice.

Those were what Judaism left behind. Why does Christianity want them back so badly?

Acts 20:28

28 Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.

the Holy Spirit and God the Father are mentioned here.

the Father,Son,and Holy Spirit are God.

Jesus himself said "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" Matt 28:19

All three persons of the Trinity give us our salvation. The Father sent the Son to die for us and He left the Holy Spirit to dwell in us. When we pray, we pray by the Spirit to the Father, through the Son.

This is a really interesting question. Let's look at the role that Christ the Lamb of God played in the paschal sacrifice a bit closer first.

Jews in the time before the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem (before 70 AD) would remember the passover with a symbolic meal that included wine, bread, bitter herbs, lamb, and some other things. The lamb was from a sacrifice to God, made at the Temple. (Still today, Jews celebrate a very similar Passover meal, but they do not include lamb because the Temple at which they made the sacrifices has been destroyed.)

At Christ's last supper, this was in fact the Jewish Passover meal. This is why Easter and Passover occur at the same time of year.

Christ was redefining the symbolism of the meal. "Take this wine, this is my blood of the new covenant" - no longer does this have the old Jewish significance; now it represents a new promise of God the Father, realized through Christ. Similarly, the bread now is Christ's body, no longer necessary for the old Jewish bracha (prayer) but rather for a new Christian ceremony of remembrance. This ceremony, with the bread and wine, became the Communion meal.

Christ also took the role of the sacrifice upon himself, as you rightly point out. As a consequence, in this meal he also took on the part of the lamb, which in the old meal was a sacrifice to God the Father at the Temple of Jerusalem. Thus, like the lamb sacrificed at the temple, he became a sacrifice on Calgary, saving us from eternal death just as lambs' blood had saved Jews from earthly death so many years ago.

Okay, so where are we?

1. The Passover pamb relates to Christianity because in some ways the Lamb of God took over the role of the old Passover lamb in a pre-existing Jewish religious tradition.

2. We invoke the name of the Son of God at baptisms for obvious reasons, we are agreed.

3. We invoke the name of God the Father at baptisms in part because Christ plays a part in a redefined ceremony that was always for the sake of God the Father. In accepting Christ, we are serving God the Father.

But there is more. You seem to interpret the significance of the baptismal water only symbolically, as the blood of Christ as seen in revelation. But this is not quite right. There is a lot of importance to water itself, as a cleaning agent that can purge sin. Before a meal, to wash their hands to make them clean when they were unclean before, Jews had to wash three times; similarly, the infant is dipped in water/has water placed on them three times in a baptismal ceremony. This is supposed to cleanse the child of sin.

We can see this on a grander scale in the Great Flood. God the Father uses water to purge the whole earth of sin.

Additionally, God's baptism in Christ makes you in a sense "eligible" for heaven, despite being born a sinner. We are all sinners; only membership in Christ's church can get you into heaven, because none of us actually deserve it. The Holy Spirit is often said to give us free will: we are made in God's image not because we have 10 fingers and leg hair like God (obviously not), but because like God we can make choices and do right or wrong in the world. Baptism purifies us; in some ways it wipes us clean of our sins and we become like a blank slate. That's why baptized people can go to heaven despite being sinners. In baptism, then, we also invoke the Holy Spirit to help us make right choices - because from this point on, there is no "second baptism" that can purge our sins again, and because we want to live good lives in Christ, we want to be close to God the Father, and we want to ultimately be able to go to heaven.

Ancient pagan priests mistranslated Jewish scripture and inserted demons and hell (paganism) into a religion they did not understand.

paul was the first to write of jesus, and paul taught what he knew from a psychotic and disturbed mind - he taught from a hallucination (imaginary being - the definition of demon is imaginary). Other xtians of the time would be the other savior/man/god believers. some were dionysus xtians, others adonis xtians, and jesus was just another mythical man/god that never lived.

the gospels were written many years after paul died, by anonymous writers. They are not historically written, but written as intimate stories, but those writers were only writing from what they heard, not first had knowledge. much like the arabs who wrote intimate and outlandish stories about mohamed a hundred years after his death.

Just as the quran used the xtian bible and the gospels, but has no relationship to xtianity, xtianity wrote the xtian bible from Judaism, but has no relationship to Judaism.

the Trinity didn' t die on the cross but a christian is to serve the Trinity

Where does it say TRINITY at all ?