There was no need for the blood of the Lamb in creation as it came fresh from the hand of the Creator, exhibiting, in every stage and every department of it, the beauteous impress of His hand--"the infallible proofs" of "His eternal power and Godhead" (Rom. i.); but when, "by one man," sin was introduced into the world, then came out the higher, richer, fuller, deeper thought of redemption by the blood of the Lamb. This glorious truth first broke through the thick clouds which surrounded our first parents, as they retreated from the garden of Eden; its glimmerings appear in the types and shadows of the Mosaic economy; it burst upon the World in full brightness when "the dayspring from on high" appeared in the Person of "God manifest in the flesh;" and its rich and rare results will be realized when the white-robed, palm-bearing multitude shall cluster round the throne of God and the Lamb, and the whole creation shall rest beneath the peaceful sceptre of the Son of David. Now, the lamb taken on the tenth day, and kept up until the fourteenth day, shows us Christ foreordained of God from eternity, but manifest for us in time. God's eternal purpose in Christ becomes the foundation of the believer's peace. Nothing short of this would do. We are carried back far beyond creation, beyond the bounds of time, beyond the entrance in of sin and everything that could possibly affect the ground-work of our peace. The expression, "foreordained before the foundation of the world," conducts us back into the unfathomed depths of eternity, and shows us God forming His own counsels of redeeming love, and basing them all upon the atoning blood of His own precious, spotless Lamb. Christ was ever the primary thought in the divine mind; and hence, the moment He began to speak or act, He took occasion to shadow forth that One who occupied the highest place in His counsels and affections; and, as we pass along the current of inspiration, we find that every ceremony, every rite, every ordinance, and every sacrifice pointed forward to "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world," and not one more strikingly than the passover. The paschal lamb, with all the attendant circumstances, forms one of the most profoundly interesting and deeply instructive types of Scripture. In the interpretation of Exodus xii, we have to do with _one_ assembly and _one_ sacrifice.--"The whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill _it_ in the evening." (Ver. 6.) It is not so much a number of families with several lambs--a thing quite true in itself--as one assembly and one lamb. Each house was but the local expression of the whole assembly gathered round the lamb. The antitype of this we have in the whole Church of God, gathered by the Holy Ghost, in the name of Jesus, of which each separate assembly, wherever convened, should be the local expression.