But if the feast of the Passover was a commemoration, it also claims to be a sacrifice, and the first sacrifice which was Divinely founded and directed.
This brings us face to face with the great question, What is the doctrine which lies at the heart of the great institution of sacrifice?
We are not free to confine its meaning altogether to that which was visible at the time. This would contradict the whole doctrine of development, the intention of God that Christianity should blossom from the bud of Judaism, and the explicit assertion that the prophets were made aware that the full meaning and the date of what they uttered was reserved for the instruction of a later period (1 Peter i. 12).
But neither may we overlook the first palpable significance of any institution. Sacrifices never could have been devised to be a blind and empty pantomime to whole generations, for the benefit of their successors. Still less can one who believes in a genuine revelation to Moses suppose that their primary meaning was a false one, given in order that some truth might afterwards develop out of it.
What, then, might a pious and well-instructed Israelite discern beneath the surface of this institution?
To this question there have been many discordant answers, and the variance is by no means confined to unbelieving critics. Thus, a distinguished living expositor says in connection with the Paschal institution, “We speak not of blood as it is commonly understood, but of blood as the life, the love, the heart,—the whole quality of Deity.” But it must be answered that Deity is the last suggestion which blood would convey to a Jewish mind: distinctly it is creature-life that it expresses; and the New Testament commentators make it plain that no other notion had even then evolved itself: they think of the offering of the Body of Jesus Christ, not of His Deity.[20] Neither of this feast, nor of that which the gospel of Jesus has evolved from it, can we find the solution by forgetting that the elements of the problem are, not deity, but a Body and Blood.
But when we approach the theories of rationalistic thinkers, we find a perfect chaos of rival speculations.
We are told that the Hebrew feasts were really agricultural—“Harvest festivals,” and that the epithet Passover had its origin in the passage of the sun into Aries. But this great festival had a very secondary and subordinate connection with harvest (only the waving of a sheaf upon the second day) while the older calendar which was displaced to do it honour was truly agricultural, as may still be seen by the phrase, “The feast of ingathering at the end of the year, when thou gatherest in thy labours out of the field” (Exod. xxiii. 16).
In dealing with unbelief we must look at things from the unbelieving angle of vision. No sceptical theory has any right to invoke for its help a special and differentiating quality in Hebrew thought. Reject the supernatural, and the Jewish religion is only one among a number of similar creations of the mind of man “moving about in worlds unrecognised.” And therefore we must ask, What notions of sacrifice were entertained, all around, when the Hebrew creed was forming itself?