Exodus 12:1-7; 21-28 • Saved by Sacrifice
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
As we begin again in this school year, and what is a fall startup for every church, we begin with the Lord's Supper. And I prepare you for that by thinking of how that Supper originated in the midst of a Passover celebration of the Lord Jesus as He prepared to die for us. Would you look in your Bibles at Exodus chapter 12, Exodus chapter 12, as we remind ourselves of God's provision for His people that became provision for us as well. Let's stand as we honor God's Word. I'll read portions of this long chapter guiding you as we go. Exodus chapter 12 and verse 1.
"The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, "This month shall be for you the beginning of months.
It shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their father's houses, a lamb for a household.
And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of persons, according to what each can eat. You shall make your count for the lamb.
Your lamb shall be without blemish.
A male a year old, you may take it from the sheep or from the goats," as Moses explains to the people. Look at verse 21.
"Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, "Go and select lambs for yourselves according to the clans and kill the Passover lamb.
Take a bunch of hyssop," which is like a leafy branch.
"Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin and touch the lintel in the two doorsposts with the blood that is in the basin.
None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning, for the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians. And when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you. You shall observe this right as a statute for you and for your sons forever. And when you come to the land that the Lord will give you as He has promised, you shall keep this service.
And when your children say to you, "What do you mean by this service?"
You shall say, "It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, for He passed over the houses of the people of Israel and Egypt when He struck the Egyptians but spared our houses
and the people bowed their heads and worshipped.
Then the people of Israel went and did so, so as the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron, so they did."
We'll end there. Let's pray together.
Father, it is a message of wrath passing over and mercy being applied, an old, old message
that we need every day.
Teach us of what it means to be those who are recipients of a God who is made a way for people who need provision. This we pray in Jesus' name, amen.
Please be seated.
It's actually with a very special purpose that we celebrate the Lord's Supper on a day that we are reading an account of the Passover because the two events are intertwined.
We often think that Jesus, as He instituted the Lord's Supper for the church to be celebrated perpetually until He comes, was initiating something important for us, and in fact, He was. But He taught us about the Lord's Supper, His provision for us in the midst of a Passover service as He Himself had traveled to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover before He Himself would become the sacrificial lamb for us.
The Jews had, by the time of Jesus, already celebrated the Passover for 1,500 years. Think of that. A millennia and a half, they had every year been celebrating the Passover, and in it they were being taught essential gospel truths that we sometimes don't recall because we have lost sight of what was happening in that Passover service.
Jesus, at one key moment, said, "The cup that you drink is a new covenant in my blood, which is shed for the remission of sins."
But that was the third cup in the Passover service. Already there would have been the first cup modeled on verse 17 in the passage that we have just read. Within the Passover service, there was an honoring of these words. God said to Moses, "You shall observe the feast of unleavened bread," that is Passover,
"for on this very day I brought your host out of the land of Egypt." It's those words, "I brought you out. I separated you from slavery and oppression and darkness." Don't go back there. You are a separated people. This was known as the cup of sanctification, as the people even at Passover would remind themselves we are to be a separate people, not like the rest of the world, but those that God has called out of slavery and bondage and darkness.
There was a second cup. It was the cup of praise modeled on verses 26 and 27. Do you remember?
And when your children say to you, "What do you mean by this service?" You shall say, "It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover."
He passed over the houses of the people of Israel and Egypt when He struck the Egyptians but spared our houses and the people bowed their heads and they worshiped. In the midst of the meal in which they would say, "God has separated us out for a purpose," they would also say, "He did this." It wasn't our goodness. It wasn't our strength. God made a way. Praise God. Whatever your children ask, why are we here, say, for the praise of God? It was the second cup of the Passover service. But what was the means of that salvation? How was God going to provide for His people? That was the third cup signifying verse 23. The Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians and when He sees the blood on the lentil and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses. This was the third cup known as the cup of redemption. The angel of death would see blood and pass over. And within the context of that Passover meal, Jesus said, "This cup is now the new covenant
in my blood, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you do show forth the Lord's death until He comes." He is the Redeemer. He is the one who makes the way. And He does it through the shedding of blood. This cup reminding you of shed blood in the past is to remind you of shed blood that makes the way for you now.
Why in the midst of a meal that was even by Jesus' time, 1500 years old, that we have now celebrated the church for another 2,000 meals, years, would Jesus be explaining? This is the essence of the gospel.
What is it that's being driven so deep into heart and mind and so that it would take millennia of understanding among the Jewish people and then two millennia by the church to actually understand what Jesus is after and then celebrate it over and over again to remind ourselves and begin anew.
Every Lord's Supper in our walk with the Lord. What are you supposed to know?
Surely one of the things that the Lord is communicating is the terror of our God. We don't like to talk about it. It's not politically correct at all. But you must recognize by this Passover service, there have been nine plagues that have already come upon Egypt as the Lord is going to force Pharaoh's hand to say, "Let my people go." And as Pharaoh's hardened heart and his wily nature continue to resist the will of God, finally the Lord leverages in a way that He cannot resist. The angel of death will pass among you, and if you are not covered by blood, the wrath of God shall come upon you. Why would God remind us in a Passover meal of His terrors?
One is because He's reminding us what He can actually do.
Verse 27, we may read by quickly, but we need to read slowly.
It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover. He passed over the people of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians but spared our houses. What is the power of God actually able to do to strike and despair?
And we need to recognize that power of God or we do not approach Him adequately with true humility or the honor He deserves. He is the God who can spare and strike. He has power even over death itself.
After all, what has God been demonstrating over and over again as He brought the plagues upon Israel? He is the God who is greater than the gods of Egypt. He is greater than earth or skies, frogs or flies, the gods of Pharaoh, Pharaoh himself. Therefore God is greater and you must not disregard who He truly is. We do it so readily.
Consider this. It's been just three months since the death of Stephen Hawking, the one who proposed the theory of everything that would be a unified theory of physics and cosmology that would in essence do away with the need of God and the secular world, embraced it, and many Christians were challenged by His theory of everything.
And now only three months later, the scientific community that heralded Him is now denying the truth of the words that He preached and wrote and said. This from this month's edition of the Atlantic.
A new conjecture in physics challenges the leading theory of everything.
The new formula posed in multiple papers by scientists at leading universities identifying the same problems simultaneously in America, Austria, and Japan. Depending on different projects, the efforts have revealed that it is impossible to accept the contemporary picture and leading model of the universe's birth.
The new observations cast doubt on the widely believed story of the universe's birth known as the Big Bang Theory.
And then the Atlantic goes on to explain math I do not understand about how dark matter and string theory will not explain the common mathematic formulas that Stephen Hawking's was using.
Well, uh-oh.
That kind of ruins the name of a popular TV show.
But what it also means is that after thousands of years of human inquiry, our best ingenuity, our best science, we have no better explanation for the origins of our world than in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. He is that God. He is that creator. And we don't even have the explanations to say how He did it. The power beyond our imagining, beyond our ability even to get our arms around. We just this last week send the solar probe named Parker toward the sun. It will travel faster than any human instrument ever invented, almost a half million miles per hour.
And it will still take it seven years to get to our closest star, the sun.
And to think of the vastness of the universe that God has created and the power that it indicates, recognize that that nearest star, the sun, is but one star in what scientists tell us is a universe so full of stars that the stars number more than the sands of the sea of all the beaches of the world.
It is a power of such magnitude that we can hardly even begin to think of how majestic and powerful is that God. And if He were to appear before us in the reality of who He is, I would tell you, you would be terrified.
This is the God who walks the earth, who comes to our souls if you truly believed that the God of such power was present in this place, in this table.
How would it change you?
What would it do to your sense of honor and regard for Him?
Dorothy Sayers writes, "It is a terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world,
lived in the world, passed through the grave and conquered death."
That is the God we say that we worship. But if we domesticate Him, if we make Him small and sentimental, what happens to us?
James Emery White, the pastor and writer, says, "I know of a professor at a Christian college who had a student come and say, look, I know I'm sleeping around and I know it's wrong.
But after all, I really believe that all my sins were taken care of on the cross 2,000 years ago."
By whom?
What Jesus do you think did that? Gentle Jesus, meek and mild? Or the Jesus who created the powers of the universe of such expanse and magnitude? We can hardly imagine them. If that is your God and you think you shall side-lub him and say, well, you saved me and you'll forgive me so it does not matter what I do, your God is too small and your grace is too cheap.
This is a God who says, "I will be known among my people. I will be honored in this world because I hold the keys of sin and death and I will save my people and I will use my people to make my ways known to the world." Don't you dare think that I will simply turn a blind eye. Who after all are the people at risk in this passage? You know that the Egyptians are at risk. You know that Pharaoh is at risk. He's the one who's hardened his heart. He's the one who's not let the people go. And yet we do this game in our minds. We kind of make, you know, Pharaoh the wicked witch of the west and Israel's Dorothy, you know, kind of innocent and easygoing and no problems and we forget what's being said here. It must have shocked the people of Israel to hear Moses say, "If you don't put the blood on your doorpost and lentil, you too shall die."
Why? We're the nice guys. We're the good people.
No. Well, do you remember when Moses came to these people and said, "God the great I am has sent me," and then he went and spoke to Pharaoh and life got a little rougher for the people of Israel? What did they say?
"May your God judge you for the trials that you have brought into our lives." And they rejected the Word of the Lord.
He was not their only rejection. They would not just reject the Word of God, they would consistently reject the worship of God. Israel just in a few weeks get to that golden calf.
When the people of God running into problems after they release from Egypt, turned back to the gods of Egypt, and it would not be the first or the last time.
It just amazes us when we actually read that when the people of God, 40 years after this account, are getting ready to go into the Promised Land, the ones who have seen the power of God, preserved them in the desert, who have led them by pillar of fire at night, cloud by day, man in the wilderness, water in the desert, that same God who so provided for them, what does Joshua say to them as they are getting ready to finally go into the Promised Land?
Your forefathers worshiped other gods, and now you throw away the gods of your forefathers and the ones that they worshiped. Wait a second.
It's been 40 years of following Jehovah, and now they're getting ready to go into the Promised Land, and Joshua says, "The idols that you have hidden away, that you have scurried away from the sight of one another, the things that you have been hedging your bets with, say, "Ah, I'll worship God, but I've got this thing over here to satisfy and help and provide for me."
Put away the other gods.
These same people not only rejected the Word of God, they rejected the worship of God, and God is saying to them and to us, "There is none righteous, no not one."
If you think that you are free from the terrors of God because you're good enough that your actions don't matter, God is saying, "You don't recognize who I am.
I am the God who creates all and the one who should be honored." And if that holy Creator is before us, He is saying, "You must trust Me to make a way."
It is not you who can do it.
I think if God's saying to us, "No one is safe," do you not recognize that?
It's the language of, remember Mr. Beaver too, the children in the Lion Witch and the Wardrobe. Why should you follow Aslan?
Is he safe?
Of course he's not safe, but he's very good.
It is that same one who says to us, "Look at me. I can provide good, but don't you dare think that there is a world that you can claim for your own apart from me." I think of Damien Aisley as he was preparing to be the great acclaimed ballplayer of his generation as he played for the Angels second base, tremendous power, tremendous speed. Where did all that come from? A child of a broken home baseball had become his security, his escape.
As he began to get the Player of the Year awards and win all the awards, everyone praised him.
But after a game on a plane going home, he heard teammates behind him talking.
And one said to the other, "If this plane crashes, what will save you from hell?"
And at that point, easily recognized, not my speed, not my ability, not my glove, not my power hitting, I need God.
And it is that terror of the reality of the God whose wrath would justly fall upon us apart from his provision that this Passover meal is supposed to remind us of. Because there's not just terror on display, there is great triumph on display. We should just recognize, of course, the plagues are indicating God has power over the earth. He has power over creation. He has power over evil like Pharaoh.
But ultimately he is showing us his great power with his triumph over you so that we will turn to him for the triumph. We ourselves need, "God, I can't make a way. I can't make this right. If you truly have the wrath of the goodness of a holy God that will come upon all evil, I must recognize my doing, my works, my righteousness will never be enough to make me right before you.
How will I be saved?" And God says, "Remember how powerful I am, not just for terror, but for the triumph that I give to those who come with me."
I think of the American Moses, Harriet Tubman, as she took slaves on the Underground Railroad to freedom. Even her own journals tell us that she kept a huge pistol with her. Do you remember? In her purse, she would take people. And we think, "Well, I know what that's for." It's for the slave masters or their dogs as they would follow. And I'm sure that was part of the reason.
But she says there was another reason.
When the group would be made threatened by the terror of one of the slaves who was on the escape route, who was threatening to give them away or who's trembling or fear or scream would give them away, she would pull out the pistol, put it in the face of the slave and said, "You go to freedom or you die."
And God says to His people, "You go to freedom with me or you die before my wrath."
Freedom.
From my sin, my guilt, my wrong. It is what God is promising to His people. Why should you go with Him?
Because He does not just display His terror or His triumph, but remarkable tenderness.
It's just incredible what God is telling us about His own means of escape that is being provided. You take a lamb and it should be without spot or blemish and sacrifice it and take the blood and put it on the doorpost and the lentil and I will pass over in my wrath.
You have to understand that it's strange even to a Hebrew.
Why is blood going to protect me from the power of God? I mean, if this God is all He has said He is, the one who created the moon and the stars, the heavens and everything in them, if that's Him, why is this blood painted on doorposts that you would need a micrometer to measure? Why is that going to stop the wrath of God? That's like tissue stopping a locomotive. How is that going to help?
But God is saying what that blood is about. Moses would teach the people.
In the blood is the life of a creature.
If there is blood on the doorpost, you are indicating there has been a life given to save lives.
And we know what they did not fully understand, that this was all pointing and precursor and foreshadowing of what God would do through His Son.
I will provide the lamb without blemish and I will buy His blood provide for you. It's not just blood, that's not the point. It's saying He will take the penalty, His life for your life. Your sin should condemn you. Your sin is deserving of the wrath of God. But God would take all of that wrath and He would put it on His own Son, that life for your life.
It's everything that would come to fruition as the apostles and prophets would allow it to come to its culmination in the way they would speak to God and to His people later on. Do you remember John the Baptist?
On the road.
And one day he sees Jesus walking toward Him and he says, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." The apostle Paul would say it this way, "Christ, our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed."
Peter would say, "We are redeemed by the precious blood of Christ like a lamb without blemish or spot." For 1,500 years God had been saying it, "I will provide the lamb. I will provide the innocent. I will provide the life of righteousness for your life of sin. But how do I claim it? How do I make it mine? How do I make sure the wrath does not come upon me?" The very same way God was teaching. Not just showing that He would save by blood, but that He would save by faith in the blood. Be a Hebrew.
You're telling me an angel of death is coming tonight and he is going to kill all the firstborn of this land, man and beast. But I'm going to be protected by putting a little blood on my doorpost and lentil.
How is this going to work?
Have faith in what God said is true.
And God said for those who act in faith, trusting in what He provides, His wrath will pass over.
It is what God said in His Son.
By grace are you saved through faith. And that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of your works lest anyone should boast. Trust in what God has provided. And in that trust God is saying new start, new beginnings, new ways, opportunity to serve Him without the sin and guilt of the past. Have faith that He has made a way to turn His own wrath aside.
How was He communicating that to us?
In the same way He did to His people so long ago.
There was a fourth cup of the Passover meal. This fourth cup of the Passover meal reflected verse 25, "When you come to the land that the Lord will give you as He has promised, you shall keep this service." You will come into a new land, a new kingdom, and you shall perform this right as you are there. What will it mean?
It was said right at the very beginning of the chapter, verse 2, "This month shall be for you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you. When you celebrate this cup of the kingdom that you are redeemed now, and so God has provided a way for you, it's a new beginning.
The starting over of everything, the Passover is really an opportunity to start over.
Green slate, new honor made right.
But Jesus said to His disciples in the Lord's Supper, "But I will not drink of this cup
until I come again in my kingdom."
Because I want you to understand that it is through the cup of redemption that you are made right with me. This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for many for the remission of sin. And when you know that, you are being prepared for the cup of the kingdom so that when Christ returns you who have started anew, who begin again, who recognize the Passover as the chance to start over, are prepared for the kingdom of God, which He shall bring with Him in power and great glory as He welcomes all who have been spared the wrath of God into the kingdom of heaven forever.
You'll hear the words differently now.
The Lord Jesus on the night that He was betrayed took bread and when He had given thanks He broke it. And He said, "This is my body which is for you.
Take and eat.
Do this in remembrance of me." In the same manner He took the cup after supper and He said, "This cup of redemption is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for many for the remission of sins. All of you drink of it, for I will not again drink of this cup until the kingdom comes.
We prepare for that day. Prepare with me."
Heavenly Father, thank You for giving us opportunity for new beginnings, for the recognition that when Christ took the penalty for our sin that His shed blood was signaling heaven, God pass over them.
Your wrath not on them as they trust in Jesus.
This is our hope. This is our claim.
This is our great blessing.
So teach us again as we celebrate this Lord's Supper that You are inviting us out of great tenderness to come to You that we would not experience the wrath that fell upon Your Son when He took it for us.
We take this in faith, not believing that these elements are somehow superstitioned, that these elements are somehow made magical, but rather they are a testimony of our faith.
Jesus made a way and we trust in what You provide.
Our faith is in Him.
And when that is our confession, we begin again with You.
So lift our hearts to You, we pray. Unite us to Christ by faith in what He has done. Refresh us, renew us for the calling You give us now in the year ahead. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.