Is Christ’s Cross about God’s Wrath? — part 4

Note: This is the fourth of a four-part series. You can read part one here and part two here and part three here.

As stated in a previous post in this series, there’s arguably no Old Testament event more central to developing a theology of the cross than the Passover/Exodus account (e.g. 1 Corinthians 5:7). In the traditional evangelical reading of the Passover/Exodus account, the blood on the doorposts functions primarily as a propitiation: God’s wrath is coming against both Egypt and Israel because of sin, and only the blood of a lamb turns that wrath aside so that the destroyer (or God Himself) can “pass over” the Israelite houses. Anthony Carter states the view clearly: God’s judgment would have fallen on Israel as well “unless they figuratively covered themselves in blood… What did the blood of the lambs do? It turned away God’s wrath and appeased His anger against sin.”

But several features of the narrative sit uneasily with that framing.

First, the distinction between Israel and Egypt is not unique to the tenth plague. God repeatedly sets Israel apart:

• Flies: “I will set apart the land of Goshen… Thus I will put a division between my people and your people” (Exodus 8:22–23).
• Livestock: “the Lord will make a distinction between the livestock of Israel and the livestock of Egypt” (Exodus 9:4).
• Hail: “Only in the land of Goshen… was there no hail” (Exodus 9:26).
• Darkness: “all the people of Israel had light where they lived” (Exodus 10:23).
• Firstborn: “that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel” (Exodus 11:7).

The plagues are directed at Egypt. The consistent pattern is judgment on the oppressor, not a blanket judgment on humanity from which Israel must be specially exempted by blood. If the tenth plague were a sudden universalization of wrath against both peoples, it would break the pattern the text has carefully established.

Second, Pharaoh himself calls the locust plague “this death” (Exodus 10:17). The language of death is already in the air before the firstborn die, and it is attached to a judgment aimed squarely at Egypt. Death language does not automatically equal “God’s wrath against sin requiring satisfaction.”

Third, the blood is explicitly “a sign for you” on the houses where the Israelites are (Exodus 12:13). The emphasis falls on a sign for the people—an act of identification—rather than a signal God needs in order to tell the houses apart.

An Alternative Reading: Participation in Death Already Suffered

What if the blood does not primarily turn away a wrath that would otherwise fall on Israel, but rather represents the death Israel has already endured under Egypt?

Egypt had already brought death upon Israel—through crushing slavery and, most starkly, through the earlier decree to kill the Hebrew male infants (Exodus 1). The people of Israel already lived under a regime of death. The Passover lamb dies, and its blood is placed on the doorposts. In that act the lamb participates with the people in their state of death-under-Egypt, and the people, by applying the blood, identify with the lamb. The sign is “for you”: a visible, corporate declaration that “we are the people who have already been brought low into death by this empire, and we mark ourselves with the death of the one who shares that death with us.”

God then brings the very death Egypt inflicted back upon Egypt. The firstborn of Egypt die. At the Red Sea the pursuing army is swallowed by the waters—the same sea that becomes the pathway of life for Israel. The oppressors are overtaken by the death they dealt out; the oppressed are brought through the waters into freedom. The Exodus itself is resurrection language: God raises a people out of the grave of slavery and into life under His rule.

This reading keeps the distinction pattern intact. It takes seriously that the blood is a sign for the people. It lets Pharaoh’s own language of “death” for an earlier plague inform how death functions in the narrative. And it places the Passover inside the larger movement of the book: from death-under-Egypt to life-with-God, with the Red Sea as the decisive crossing from one to the other.

Implications for the New Testament

Paul calls Christ “our Passover lamb” (1 Corinthians 5:7). If the original Passover blood is about participation in a people’s already-suffered death and the subsequent raising of that people, then the cross and resurrection of Jesus fit the same pattern. Jesus participates with humanity by taking on flesh and entering fully into our state of death. Humanity participates with Him by being raised with Him from death to life. Through His death and resurrection God brings a people out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of His beloved Son (Colossians 1:13). The destroyer is disarmed; the people are raised.

This is precisely the pattern Paul unfolds in Ephesians 2:1–10. The problem Paul names is not God’s wrath but death: humanity is “dead in the trespasses and sins” in which we once walked, under the dominion of the powers. God solves that problem by making us alive together with Christ—because Christ first participated fully in our death—and raising us up with Him. The Passover-Exodus story is the Old Testament enactment of that same gospel: a people already living under death are identified with the one who shares their death, then raised out of the grave of slavery into life under God’s rule. In both stories the decisive issue is God’s people bound in a state of death, and the decisive resolution is God bringing a people from death to life.

The traditional reading has to import a universal wrath that the earlier plagues do not support and then treat the blood as the mechanism that redirects that wrath. The participation-and-resurrection reading stays closer to the actual distinction language of Exodus, the “sign for you” emphasis, and the larger story of a people brought from death to life.