Actual Passover Lamb Sacrifice Online Video in Jerusalem

When someone sinned in the Old Covenant, they were to bring a sacrifice. This revealed how serious sin was (and is), that it deserved death.

The site of the video states the following:

"Over 3,000 years ago, God brought the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt. He accomplished this by bringing ten devastating plagues upon the Egyptians, the last and greatest of which was the death of the oldest son in each family. God made a way for the Israelites to escape this death by sacrificing a lamb and putting its blood on the doorposts of their houses. Then the angel would “pass over” the house with the blood so that the firstborn would not die. At that time, God commanded the Israelites to celebrate the Passover every year. Each family would choose a lamb on the 10th day of the month of Nisan and on the 14th day, the lamb would be slain.

Shortly after the time of Christ, the Jewish temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. Since then, the Jewish people have not been able to follow the command to kill a lamb on Passover. But this year, a group of Jewish people carried out a ritual slaughter in Jerusalem not far from where the temple used to be.

Watching this sacrifice shows how, as God said, “the life is in the blood.” This sacrifice brings home the high cost of sin which requires the death of a substitute in the place of man. And it should bring to mind what the writer of Hebrews said, “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.”

Just before the animal is slain, the priest pronounced a blessing: "Blessed are you, LORD our God, King of the world, who has sanctified us with his statutes and commanded us concerning the [ritual] slaughtering."

Here are Todd Bolen's thoughts:

"We read about sacrifice in the Bible but we don't really understand what that means. We read passages that talk about the "life being in the blood," but those are just words that we don't really consider. We "know" that the wages of sin are high, but we don't get the life lesson that the ancient Israelites received every year.

The point of sacrifice was simply this: you deserve to die because of your sin. This animal is dying in your place. Watching the priest slice his throat and watching the blood drain out drove the point home much better than reading a chapter of Leviticus.

Today New Testament believers know that the blood of bulls and goats is not enough to take away sin. But I think that we can often just take for granted Jesus' death in our place. We don't think about his innocent blood draining away because we can't conceptualize it. We don't always appropriate the idea of substitute because we've never seen a living object die in our place. But our loss can be this: sin is easy because forgiveness (we think) is cheap."

See here for the video.

HT: Justin Taylor