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GOD IS KEEPING HIS PROMISES TO HIS PEOPLE WHO ARE OBSESSED WITH CHRISTExodus 12:1—20INTRODUCTION Two weeks ago we examined Moses’ final conversation with Pharaoh. He announced to Pharaoh that the Lord had one more plague he was going to bring against Egypt: the destruction of all the firstborn sons in Egypt, along with the firstborn male offspring of all their livestock on one night but that among the people of Israel, there would be no disturbance, no one would be harmed. He told Pharaoh that when God did this, he would know that “the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.” This judgment of God upon Egypt and this salvation of Israel points ahead to that final day when God will make plain how he feels about every human being. God discriminates between people. He hates Egypt and he loves Israel. There is a day of judgment coming upon the whole world when Jesus will show that all of humanity is divided into two groups. Those on his left hand, the wicked, whom he hates, he will cast into eternal fire but those on his right hand, the righteous, whom he loves, he will raise up into eternal life. Exodus 10:21-11:10 helped us to think about what heaven and hell will be like. We examined the nature of the two final destinies that await every human being. However, we didn’t answer the question as to how you can know which destiny awaits you. This week, we are going to look at Exodus 12:1-20 to find out what characterizes those whom Jesus will place on his right hand and reward with eternal life. You can know now how Jesus feels about you and whether he is going to receive you into eternal life or condemn you into an eternal hell. The way you know how Jesus will treat you when you stand before him in the final judgment is to consider how you feel about him now. As John Owens says in his book, “The Glory of Christ”: “No person shall ever behold the glory of Christ by sight in heaven who does not, in some measure, behold it by faith in the this world…. All of us naturally regard ourselves as fit for eternal glory. But few of us have any idea of how unfit we really are, because we have had no experience of that glory of Christ, which is in heaven…. A fish would not thank you for taking it out of the sea and putting it on dry land under the blazing sun! Neither would an unregenerate sinner welcome the thought of living forever in the blazing glory of Christ.” What we are going to see in this passage is that the people of God are obsessed with Jesus. The chief mark of the people of God is a growing delight in the beauty and worth of Jesus Christ. The way to know that you are a Christian and on your way to heaven, is not by having some “spiritual” experience or being involved in some religious ceremony or in praying a “sinner’s” prayer. Rather, the primary evidence that heaven awaits you in the future is that you are obsessed by Jesus Christ. Some of you may be looking at me a little funny right now because I’m talking about Jesus and as we just heard in Exodus 12:1-20, the Lord is talking to Moses and Aaron about the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. I want to show that this passage really does teach us that the chief mark of the people of God is obsession with Jesus Christ. First we are going to see how this passage functions in the story of God’s saving of Israel out of Egypt and the life of Israel following this deliverance. Then we are going to look at how the Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread is used in the NT to describe the glory of Christ. The first thing I want you to note is when and where this speech of God to Moses and Aaron takes place. Moses has just left the presence of Pharaoh, “hot with anger.” He told Pharaoh that the end has come and that God is going to deliver one final blow to Egypt after which the rulers of Egypt will bow before Moses and beg him to take Israel away. He leaves Pharaoh and now God gives he and Aaron a message for the Israelites. They are still slaves in Egypt. He is about to set them free. During the previous 12 months, the Lord has been doing his work without any involvement from the people of Israel. They have been barely mentioned since chapter 6. Now, God has a message for them that requires they do something. However, he not only tells them what they need to do in order to make it safely out of Egypt, kill and eat the lamb, put its blood on their doorways, but even more what they need to do after they leave Egypt. Most of vv. 1-20 is an explanation of how the Lord wants them to celebrate his deliverance from Egypt every year forever. He has something for them to do right now but what they do now is simply the beginning of a way of life that will occupy them through all generations. Their identity as the people of God depends upon their killing this lamb now and their killing and eating a lamb on the evening of the 14 th day of the first month of their calendar year forever. The thing that they will all do together that will identify them as his people is to celebrate the Passover meal and the 7 days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread every year. Notice that in v. 13 there is a warning for Israel. If anyone refuses to kill the lamb and puts its blood over their door, the Lord will destroy the firstborn son of that house, even though they are Jewish. Then in vv. 15 & 19 those who refuse to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread will be cut off from the people of God. In other words, participation in the Passover meal and the Feast of Unleavened Bread is how you enter into the community of God, how you escape the destroying angel, and how you remain part of the community of God. Israel is to be obsessed with God’s delivering them from Egypt through the blood of the sacrificial lamb. They are to be consumed with remembering and worshipping God’s deliverance when they had to eat unleavened bread and left behind their bitter slavery. We are repeatedly told in the NT that the entire OT is about Christ. Jesus is the fulfillment of and the one who fulfills the OT as he says in Matthew 5:17. Also, as we heard in 1 Peter 1, the prophets, including Moses who wrote Exodus, were all writing about “the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.” Let me draw your attention to just a few of the ways the NT ties Christ and his church to the Passover and Israel. First, you will remember that the night before Jesus was crucified he instituted a memorial meal for all his people to celebrate until he comes again. In fact, he and his disciples were eating the Passover meal on the evening of the fourteenth day of the first month of the Jewish calendar when he said, “This is my body, broken for you.” “This is the blood of the new covenant shed for you.” Just like Moses commanding Israel right before God delivers them from their slavery to remember God’s deliverance from Egypt in the Passover meal, Jesus commands his church to remember his deliverance in the communion meal. What Jesus did during the last Passover meal he ate with his disciples was an intentional reenactment of what God tells Moses to do here. Second, John the Baptist calls Jesus, “The Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.” This is a clear reference to Jesus as the Passover lamb. Third, Paul (1 Cor. 5) identifies Christ directly with the Passover lamb that has delivered us from God’s wrath. He goes on to identify the yeast with sin and shows that just as Israel had to be a community without any yeast so we are to be a community without any sin. Fourth, Peter (1 Peter 2:19) uses the exact same language to describe Christ in his letter that God used to describe the Pascal lamb in Exodus. God tells Israel before he delivers them from their slavery that they forever will be remembering and worshipping him for the deliverance he is about to accomplish. In the same way, we, the church of Jesus Christ are to forever remember and worship God for the deliverance that he has accomplished through Jesus. I want to look now at the ways in which the glory of Christ is revealed in this passage. This first Passover meal and all those that follow were given to Israel and to us through Israel so we could see more clearly the greatness of Christ and his salvation. This passage teaches us that… MAIN POINT The people of God are obsessed with the grandeur of…I. The person of Christ (vv. 1-10) God’s instructions to Israel begin by telling them to obsess over this year old sheep. He describes in great detail what kind of a lamb. It must be a year old, male and without any blemish or defect. It can be from either the sheep or the goats. They must bring it into their house on the 10 th day of the first month of the Jewish year. It is to live with the family for four days. Then God gives very detailed instructions about how to determine how many people will be needed to consume each sheep. It is to be killed and its blood placed upon the doorframes of the houses on the evening of the 14 th day of the first month. It is to be cooked and eaten in a very specific way. There can be no leftovers. Whatever is not eaten must be burned up. God is obsessive about this sheep and how it is to be treated. The sheep is central to the method he has devised for delivering his people. This obsession with this lamb and this meal is very strange when you remember that he is giving these detailed instructions to people who are about to leave their slavery and travel across a very large desert and then go to war with seven other nations. Wasn’t there a more relevant thing for him to tell these people? How are over a million people going to survive in the desert? How are slaves going to win any battles? God thinks the most relevant thing he can tell them, as they leave their slavery and head into the desert is how to select and eat a lamb together as families. The glory of the person of Christ is seen in the symbol of the Passover Lamb in several ways. First, just as the lamb comes to live with the family for whom it will give its life and become food, Christ came into the world of sinners. The eternal Son of God came and lived with us. He endured all the miseries of our lives. He experienced the loss of loved ones, including his human father, Joseph. He lived in a family with at least 6 siblings and all the bickering that entails. He experienced being misunderstood and insulted by others, even by those who were closest to him, his family and disciples. He experienced poverty and hunger and sickness. Jesus is not a God who is far off and distant. He has lived among us. He knows what it is like to be human. He laid aside his rights to be treated as God and to act as God. As Paul says, “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor.” He gave up all the comfort and glory of heaven to come and live with us and endure all that we endure plus the wrath of God on the cross. He did all of this voluntarily, out of his love for God and for us. The second thing about the lamb that points to the grandeur of Christ’s person is that it was without defect. He was tempted in every way that we are tempted, yet was without sin. Jesus has no moral defects. He never yelled at his parents or siblings. He never lied about anything to anyone. He never tried to make himself look better than others or was jealous when others were treated better than he. He never lusted after a woman. He never swore. He was never angry with God or complained when things didn’t go his way. He never got mad when he hit his thumb with a hammer or cursed a piece of wood for not fitting, as it ought. He always hated evil perfectly, without any mixture of selfish lust or pride. No unwholesome talk ever came out of his mouth. Every word he ever uttered met the needs of those to whom he was speaking and was aimed to build them up, not him. He never worried about money or relationships or the future. Jesus continues perfect in his holiness, his justice, his love, his wisdom and his compassion. There is no imperfection in Jesus. He has no flaw. He is perfectly lovely and attractive. Let me read for you a description of Jesus written by an African-American pastor, the late L.M. Lockridge, entitled, “You Can Trust Him.” Just as there was no more relevant thing that God could tell Israel as they were about to leave Egypt than how to select and eat a lamb, so there is nothing more relevant I can say to you than to urge you to be obsessed with the person of Jesus Christ. The people of God are obsessed with the grandeur of…
II. The death of Christ (vv. 11-13) In vv. 11-13 God tells the people of Israel why they are to be so obsessive in their selection, slaughter and cooking of this lamb. First, notice that this meal is entitled the Passover that belongs to Yahweh. This is not a human invention but a divinely ordained sacrifice and meal. God has created it for his purposes and commands his people to partake of it in a certain way. Israel is not free to partake of it any way it wants but must follow the Lord’s directions. It’s like being part of the Boy Scouts. You have to meet certain conditions to be a part of the Scouts. You have to be a boy. You have to memorize the Scout pledge and oath. You have to wear the uniform. You have to show up at the meetings. You can’t be a Boy Scout without doing these things. If you are a girl or refuse to memorize the pledge and oath or refuse to wear the uniform, you cannot say you are a Boy Scout. You and I don’t get to decide what it takes to be part of the Boy Scouts. The Scouts do not belong to us. We have to adjust ourselves in order to meet the standards for joining the Boy Scouts. In the same way, this Passover sacrifice, meal and festival belongs to the Lord and you can only participate in it and receive the benefits of partaking when you do it as the Lord prescribes. This flies in the face of how our culture handles the entire question of how to know God and go to heaven. We act as though each individual gets to decide for himself or herself what God requires. Rather than us deciding for ourselves, we must each one discover God’s requirements and then adjust ourselves to fit them. The main thing to notice about this Passover sacrifice and meal is why God calls it the Passover. God is going to go throughout Egypt and strike down the firstborn son of every Egyptian household during the night. He says that this is the final blow and after this Pharaoh will drive Israel out of his country. Presumably, God knows who are the Egyptians and who are the Israelites. He doesn’t need any help figuring out which homes to strike and which ones to spare. He has distinguished between Israel and Egypt in the other plagues without any help before. Yet now, he requires every Israelite home to keep a lamb for 4 days, kill it on the evening of the 14 th day, spread some of its blood on the door frames of their homes, cook the lamb whole and then eat it together along with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Why does he do this? Why not just kill the Egyptians and spare the Israelites? First, by requiring the death of this year old, male, unblemished lamb God shows that the reason he is sparing Israel’s firstborn sons is not because Israel is somehow more deserving than the Egyptians. Every home in Egypt, including every Jewish home, deserves to have the firstborn sons in it killed. It would be perfectly just for God to kill the firstborn sons of Israel along with those of Egypt. What distinguishes Israel from Egypt is not that Israel is somehow less sinful and more holy than Egypt. What will distinguish each Israelite home that does as God says is the blood of the lamb on their doors. If there is not blood on the door, the firstborn son will justly die, even if the family is Jewish. Second, God has provided a substitute for the firstborn sons of Israel in the lamb. Rather than killing the firstborn sons, God accepts the death of the male lamb in place of the sons. Every home, Egyptian and Israelite, deserves to have death visited upon it. Therefore, either the firstborn sons must die or the substitute Lamb that God supplies must die. Third, every home that lives with a lamb for 4 days and then kills it, spreads the blood and eats it is living by faith in the promise of God. There is no logical connection between a year old lamb and a firstborn son except that God himself has said this is the condition for his sparing the Jewish homes. Every home that obeys God does so in faith, believing that the blood of the Lamb secures their salvation. Fourth, it is God who sees the blood covering the doors and so passes over those homes covered by the blood and spares the firstborn sons. God is killing the sons out of his just anger with Egypt’s sins. Therefore, the blood of the lamb is the satisfaction of God’s just anger against the sin of the Israelites. He provides the lamb and he accepts the death of the lamb in place of the firstborn son. It is his work, beginning to end, none of it a work of man. The Israelites receive and get the benefit of what God has done by trusting in his promise. The death of these lambs is what secured the salvation of Israel. It is this death that God wants Israel to remember forever. In the same way, it is the death of Jesus, the Lamb of God, that is to be the center of our attention and affections, individually and as a church. This death has made us God’s people. There would be no reason for us to be together this morning if it were not for the death of Jesus in our place. Every person sitting here deserves to die for his or her sins. Yet, God provided his very own Son to be the satisfaction of his wrath against our sin. God has sprinkled the blood of his son upon each person who trusts in Christ. When he sees the blood, he passes over our sins. He does not give us what our sins deserve because he has given what our sins deserve, death, to his son. The person and the church that belongs to God is obsessed with the death of Jesus for our sins. It is this death that we sing about and think about and pray about and talk about. Nothing is more appealing to us or more astonishing to us than the death of the perfect, spotless Son of God for us. The main event in the history of the universe is the death of Christ. You cannot think about his death too much. It will be the focal point of heaven for all of eternity. The Lamb of God who was slain will be at the center of our attention in heaven forever and so the crucified Christ should occupy our attention now. The people of God are obsessed with the grandeur of…
III. The return of Christ (vv. 11 & 14-20) In v. 11 you will notice that the Israelites are to eat the Passover meal, ready to flee from Egypt. They are to be packed and ready to go. However, you will note that the language doesn’t limit the hastiness of the meal or the “ready to leave” attitude to just the first Passover. The meal to be celebrated throughout their history continually maintains this attitude of readiness to leave. The meal is a continual reminder of leaving Egypt and heading for the Land of Promise. Even after they have arrived in the Land of Promise, the meal maintains this forward-looking aspect. In addition, in vv. 14 and 17 God tells Israel this is a lasting ordinance; literally it is an eternal ordinance. It is a feast to be celebrated by God’s people forever because we will forever be remembering God’s saving work. This is why Jesus says in Luke 22:16 that he will not eat the Passover meal again until it finds its fulfillment in the kingdom of heaven. The completion of what God began at the first Passover and the Exodus, continued at the last Supper and the death of Jesus, will only be completed when all God’s people are gathered around the table at the wedding feast of the Lamb of God in heaven. We will forever remember and worship the Lord Jesus Christ for his great salvation. The Passover meal is always a reminder of what God has done to save his people but also a looking forward to the final salvation that will come with the arrival of the Messiah. In 1 Corinthians 11:26 the apostle Paul summarizes the purpose of communion by saying, “…whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” Communion, like Passover, is a regular reminder of what God has done to save us and that his final salvation is yet coming. While we are always looking back at the death of Christ, which is the guarantee of God’s deliverance, so we are always looking ahead to that final deliverance. We are watching for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are two things this Passover points to in light of the fact that while we have been saved, our salvation will not be complete until the return of Christ when he gives us resurrected bodies and makes a new heavens and earth. First, the death of the lamb not only provided the blood to secure God’s passing over the sinful Israelites it also provided the meal that would sustain them on their journey to the Land of Promise. The unleavened bread they cooked that night was their food on the journey. It is the same for us. We not only remember what Christ did to deliver us from wrath but we feed on Christ now by faith to sustain us on our journey through this life to heaven. As Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.” We are upheld in faith as we daily come to Christ and trust him to be all that we need. We are upheld in faith as we celebrate communion together every month. We never outgrow our need for Christ. He is our life. We must daily live in him. Second, the entire community of believers is to get rid of all yeast from their midst during the seven days of the Passover feast. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 5 used this to point to the necessary holiness that characterizes God’s people. Whenever the NT talks about the return of Christ it emphasizes the necessity of growing in holiness to be sure we are ready when he shows up. Jesus says it like this, “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come… So you also must be ready because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect.” Peter after describing the fire that accompanies the coming of the Lord, says, “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God…” Paul says that grace “…teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in his present age while we wait for the blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” There is a lifestyle that corresponds to our faith in the return of Christ. It is a lifestyle that aims at sinning less. We are preparing for heaven now by seeking to live now as we will in heaven. We are like a family traveling to Colorado for a family vacation. We stop at the hotels and enjoy the swimming pool but we don’t rent out the room permanently. We enjoy the scenery but we don’t spend our entire vacation budget while in Omaha, NE. We are looking forward to getting to Colorado and so we make use of the amenities along the way but we don’t let anything stop us from getting to Colorado. We talk about and we think about all the fun we’re going to have when we get there, we don’t plan on having all our fun on the trip. The way we travel shows that Colorado is our destination. The feast of unleavened bread reminded the people of Israel throughout their history that there was a final salvation yet to come. This is what marks us as the people of God. We are headed for heaven. We are not trying to create heaven on earth. We do not act as though we can live like hell here and expect to end up in heaven. As I’ve said before, the only people who are going to heaven are those who are going to heaven. The people of God are obsessed with the grandeur of…
I want to close this morning with this quote from “The Glory of Christ” by John Owen: “It is by beholding the glory of Christ by faith that we are spiritually edified and built up in this world, for as we behold his glory, the life and power of faith grow stronger and stronger. It is by faith that we grow to love Christ. So if we desire strong faith and powerful love, which give us rest, peace and satisfaction, we must seek them by diligently beholding the glory of Christ by faith. In this duty, I desire to live and to die. On Christ’s glory I would fix all my thought and desires, and the more I see of the glory of Christ, the more the painted beauties of this world will wither in my eyes and I will be more and more crucified to this world. It will become to me like something dead and putrid, impossible for me to enjoy.” © Copyright
2004 John Swanson. |