Point for Meditation: John 13:1 - “Before the Passover celebration, Jesus knew that his hour had come to leave this world and return to his Father. He now showed the disciples the full extent of his love” (New Living Translation).

It’s the last day before Passover, which begins at sundown tonight. In His day, Jesus, knowing that His hour had come, and that He would be delivered into the hands of the Romans to be killed, gave His disciples the lasting, unforgettable ceremony of the New Covenant Passover. The whole story of what happened during the supper He had with His disciples goes from John 13-18, but the first sentence of John 13 is what we will focus on:

Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.

Before humans existed, before the Earth was formed, before the physical universe was created, God had a plan. It was the plan to end all plans: He would create physical beings who would inhabit a physical realm and live finite, physical lives of infinite smallness in comparison to His own limitless eternity. The purpose of creating them would be to teach them the right way to live and give them eternal life to live with Him. God is a family of two beings (the Father and Jesus Christ) of supreme good and light. As the Creator of everything, He has set the rules that govern everything—the laws of physics, the laws of biology, the laws of the invisible spirit realm. Being perfect, good, full of light, and fully comprehending what eternity means, He made humans and encouraged them to seek to live by the same set of rules He Himself exists by—rules of love. He created humans to love each other, serve each other, and in so doing build character that would last for an eternity.

But He created them with a will to choose, and the presence of Satan swayed the first humans to choose a path in the wrong direction—away from God. It was a tragedy, but one that didn’t catch God off-guard. Having infinite wisdom and perfect clarity of understanding, God had enacted a plan in advance, knowing that they might make that wrong choice.

He gave mankind His laws to live by; laws of outgoing concern for others and of obedience to God. He set up a physical system to help physical humankind understand—a physical metaphor for the eternal and spiritual. In that system, breaking one of His laws meant blood had to be spilled as restitution. And in one of the most dramatic events of the Old Testament—Passover—He had His people kill an unblemished lamb in order to signify that they were His; that they were obedient to Him and were seeking to live by His ways. That yearly reminder was kept for generations until its meaning would come to be fulfilled.

So then, having stripped Himself of His eternity and living a perfect life for three decades as a physical human being, Jesus showed His disciples the full extent of His love for them, and for the world. The next day, He would be slaughtered as the ultimate fulfillment of the Passover—the perfect Lamb, unblemished by the world; the One whose blood covered all sin forever. No longer would His people slaughter physical animals as payment for breaking His perfect law. Instead, His sacrifice would cover it all—and allow for imperfect, physical human beings to be not just forgiven for sins, but to become eternal beings in the family of God.

So as the Passover comes at sundown, meditate deeply on the sacrifice that Jesus gave for our benefit. Without His life, without His shed blood, and without His resurrection to eternal life, we would be physical creatures living lives of an infinitely small significance. But by His life, we are redeemed from that.

Today’s Point for Meditation: John 13:1 - “Before the Passover celebration, Jesus knew that his hour had come to leave this world and return to his Father. He now showed the disciples the full extent of his love” (New Living Translation).