Related to the eating of the meat of the lamb, there are a few things that need to be taken care of. The Lord told the children of Israel that they should not eat the meat when it was raw or boiled. The lamb had to be roasted by fire (Exo. 12:9). To be raw indicates no passing through of sufferings, and to be boiled means to suffer something merely under the human hand. The modernists say that Christ’s death was only a martyrdom. To them Christ merely suffered the persecution from man. This is what it means for the lamb to be boiled. But to be roasted with fire means to suffer under God’s burning judgment. Fire represents God’s holy anger. For the lamb to be roasted means that Christ had to be judged by God. Christ suffered not just under the hand of man as a kind of persecution, but under the hand of God as divine punishment, divine judgment. This is the roasting under the divine fire. Christ is not a raw lamb or a lamb boiled with water. Our Lamb, our Christ, is a lamb roasted under the divine fire. We take this Christ.
When I was young, I was always taught that we had to take Christ as our example. Because Christ loves people, we have to imitate Him to love people. Because Christ was nice and humble while He was on this earth, we were taught that we had to be the same way. To imitate Christ in this way is impossible. The best way to follow the Lord is to get Him into us by eating Him. We need to be one with the Lamb by eating the Lamb. Then we will be constituted with the Lamb. God did not tell the children of Israel to slay one lamb for the blood and then to have another lamb that they needed to learn to follow. God told them to slay one lamb, put the blood on the house, and under the covering of this blood eat this slain, roasted lamb. In this way the lamb would be one with the children of Israel, would be in them, and would be their constituent. The thought here is very deep. The Christian life is not a matter of imitating Christ, of following Christ in an outward way. But it is a matter of our eating Christ, receiving Christ into us, and assimilating all that He is into our being.
The children of Israel also had to eat the lamb with unleavened bread and with bitter herbs (Exo. 12:8). The bread and the herbs signify that the Passover is composed not only of the animal life but also of the vegetable life, the plant life. The tree of life was the plant life, but the lamb is the animal life. The lamb is first for redemption, but after redemption is accomplished and experienced, the lamb becomes the tree of life to give us life.
In John 6 the Lord Jesus told us that He is the bread of life (v. 35). He also told us that His blood is drinkable and that His flesh is eatable (v. 55). In John 6:51 the Lord said that the bread which He will give is His flesh. In John 6 the bread of wheat is also the bread of blood and meat. Christ was the Lamb slain for us, and with the Lamb there is the blood and the meat. Christ also is life to us, so He is the bread of life, the tree of life, the plant life. In John 1 is the Lamb, and in John 15 is the tree of life. Between these two chapters is the bread of life in chapter six with blood and meat. On the one hand, Christ is the redeeming life, the animal life, but on the other hand, Christ is the generating life, the plant life. He is the lamb, the animal life, for redeeming and the tree, the plant life, for generating. Thus, there are the matters of redemption and life.
The bread is of the vegetable life and is only for feeding; the flesh is of the animal life and is not only for feeding but also for redeeming. Before the fall of man, the Lord was the tree of life (Gen. 2:9), only for feeding man. After man fell into sin, the Lord became the Lamb (John 1:29), not only for feeding man but also for redeeming man (Exo. 12:4, 7-8, 12-13).
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