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GOD IS KEEPING HIS PROMISES : RESCUING US AND MAKING US A FREE PEOPLEExodus 12:21—42INTRODUCTION How many of you remember what you were doing three years ago yesterday? My guess is that anyone over the age of 10 remembers what they were doing on September 11, 2001 when 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial jetliners and flew two of them into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and the other crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. How many of you spent any time yesterday remembering what happened? Our nation will be remembering this anniversary for years to come because on that day life changed for every citizen of the U.S. Granted, some lives have been more radically transformed than others but all of us have been affected by the events of that day and we will be remembering it as a nation for years to come. There are many days of transformation that our nation remembers each year and that we remember personally each year. The 4 th of July is our annual remembrance of the day the founders of our country signed the Declaration of Independence. Wedding anniversaries and birthdays are also days we remember events that changed us personally, forever. We have come in our consideration of the story of God’s delivering the nation of Israel out from the slavery of Egypt to the day on which God transformed Israel. What we have recorded for us in the second half of chapter 12 is a day of unequaled importance in the life of the nation of Israel. This is the night and day upon which Israel becomes a free and independent nation. Every person who was alive at this time will remember what they were doing when the command came to leave behind their lives of slavery and head into the wilderness on the journey to the Land of Promise. Like the 4 th of July, like Veteran’s Day, like Sept. 11, it is a day that changed the history of the nation forever and of every individual person in the nation and is to be remembered and commemorated throughout the generations of Israel. As I made clear two weeks ago, this day when the Lord passed over the homes of the Israelites, not killing the firstborn sons in their homes and rescuing them out of their slavery is used throughout the NT as an illustration of the work of Jesus. Two weeks ago we saw how this deliverance set forth the glory of Jesus Christ. Today I want us to concentrate on how this deliverance foreshadows the deliverance that Jesus has accomplished for us. I want to be quite blunt about my purpose this morning. Over the almost thirty years I’ve been a Christian and have been involved in talking with others about their faith I have observed a very troubling reality. Most Christians begin the Christian life full of joy that God has forgiven them of their sins and promised them eternal life not due to anything they have done but by what Jesus has done. New Christians regularly report how meaningful communion is to them, how they cry when they sing in church. I remember the delight I felt the first Christmas after my conversion when I sang the old Christmas carols and realized how much good news was contained in the lyrics I had sung for years without even knowing what I was singing. New Christians report how reading the Bible and prayer are such sources of delight. Those newly converted to Christ delight to be with other Christians and seek out opportunities to develop friendships with other believers. Yet how often does the joy fade and the practices of Christian life and worship become merely perfunctory duties. The celebration of communion or of the Christian holidays, which once were full of joy are barely noticed as the years pass. Rather than seeking out other believers we complain about how nobody ever calls us or how unfriendly is our church. But most troubling of all is the fact that for so many professing Christians, being saved by Christ is far down the list of things that occupy our time, our thoughts or thrill our hearts. I think there are several factors that contribute to the growth of apathy in Christian hearts but I am convinced the greatest trouble is we forget what happened to us on the day that Christ came into the world and lived a perfect life and died in our place. I am out today to persuade you that belonging to Jesus Christ is the greatest thing that can ever happen to anyone and ought to be at the center of your attention every day. On the day that Israel left Egypt no one was complaining about how insensitive their spouse was or how annoying their parents were or how rebellious their children were. No one cared that their neighbor insulted them the day before. No one was worrying about the fact their neighbor had more sheep than they did. There was only one thing that mattered: “Our home escaped God’s wrath and he is now rescuing us out of our slavery and we are headed for the Land of Promise. We need to get out of here.” Being rescued from death and slavery and made into a free nation is all that mattered and remembering this deliverance was to be the center of their attention as a nation for the generations to come. We cannot think too much about the saving work of God in Christ. There is no deeper spiritual truth. There is nothing more important or of greater value than the fact that we who were slaves to sin have been set free from sin and made heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. This morning I want us to consider why it is that the saving work of God in Christ is to remain at the center of our attention. MAIN POINT The saving work of God in Christ is the center of our attention because it… I. Is deliverance from death and hell (vv. 21-23 & 28-30) In 12:1-20 God spoke to Moses and Aaron and now in vv. 21-27, Moses talks to the elders of Israel who will in turn talk with the rest of the people. The conversation here related takes place on the 14 th day of the first month. Sometime in the previous week Moses explained the details he was given concerning the selection of the lamb and the other preparations for the meal. So on this day of crisis, when God’s wrath is about to descend upon the land of Egypt he concentrates on the most necessary feature of the entire meal, the spreading of the blood upon the door of each home and of the necessity of remaining inside these homes. The only safety that will be found in Egypt on this night is the safety behind the blood stained doors. He makes sure that every Israelite home does the only thing that will preserve the lives of the firstborn males who live within each home. The only defense against the wrath of God that is about to come upon Egypt is the blood of the year old male lamb that has no blemish. That night, at twilight, in every believing Hebrew home, the lamb that has lived with each family for 4 days has its neck slit and its blood is drained into a large bowl. Then the father of each home takes the bowl and a bunch of hyssop and standing outside his door, he dips the hyssop into the bowl and paints the sides and top of his door with blood. Then the families gather inside and shut the door and wait as the lamb is roasted over the fire. They share a meal of lamb and unleavened bread and bitter herbs nervously awaiting the command to flee from Egypt. They are dressed for travel and prepared to run at a moment’s notice. There is a terror let loose in Egypt on this night that is worse than the horror of slavery. During this night, the greatest fear is not of Egyptian soldiers knocking on your door, but of the destroying angel of God coming to kill your firstborn sons. All other fears are far overshadowed by this great terror, as the families wait for this final judgment. There is nothing more important than to escape from this fury that is being poured out on Egypt. So families sit gathered together and wait to see if the blood will hold the terror at bay. Every home is helpless and defenseless against the divine anger except for the blood smeared on the doors. Wrath will not be averted because of how good the people in the home have lived. Death will pass each home covered with blood, not because of how righteously the people in the home have behaved. Having witnessed the other nine plagues they wonder, “Will God truly pass over our homes and not visit death merely because of blood from the slain lamb he has provided? Is it possible to escape this horror by merely hiding behind and beneath the blood of the lamb?” Then, in the middle of the night, as children sleep while adults talk in muted tones and keep watch on the door of their homes, a great cry arises throughout Egypt as every Egyptian home, at the same time, is awakened to find the firstborn males in their homes are dead. God passes through Egypt and passes over the doors that he sees are painted with blood but he visits death upon every unstained home. The wailing of grief and terror increases as each Egyptian home realizes that their private loss has been multiplied throughout the entire land from the highest home to the lowest. The Egyptians discover on this night that it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. I want to remind you, especially if you are not familiar with the first 11 chapters of Exodus, that the death that God visits upon each Egyptian home is just. They are getting what they deserve. There are no Egyptians, including the children, who can protest and say they do not deserve to die for their many sins. There are no innocent human beings, as the Scriptures repeatedly say: “There is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who seeks God. There is no one who does good.” What human being can stand up and say to God, “I do not deserve to suffer for my sins. I have loved you and my neighbor every moment of my entire life and therefore it is unjust for me to suffer?” On this night the Israelite people come to understand that they are subject to God’s wrath and that they have only escaped because of the blood of the lamb that God has provided for them. They ought to learn on this night that their biggest problem is not that they are slaves in Egypt but that they ought to die for their many sins. You could not conceive of a more vivid illustration of the danger every human being is in and of the power of the shed blood of Jesus Christ to rescue everyone who takes refuge in him. My dear friends, what can I say to convince you that your greatest problem is your sin and God’s just wrath against you for your sin? I know how hard it is to believe this and act as if it is true. When your bills far outstrip the money in your account, it is hard to believe that hell is a greater danger than bankruptcy. When your spouse doesn’t love you it is hard to remember that God’s wrath is infinitely worse than years of loneliness. When your child is permanently disabled it is difficult to see how your sin and God’s anger against it is your biggest problem. When your sibling is annoying you or mocking you it is hard to remember that your biggest problem is your sin. It is only when you live as though God’s destroying angel is just outside the door, ready to bring judgment, while you and your family wait within that you will be delivered from all lesser fears and troubles. What greater thing could happen to any one of us than to have God pass over our sins and not kill us and send us to hell? To pass through the night of his wrath because you have taken refuge behind the blood of Jesus Christ is the best and greatest thing that could happen to you. It is better than having sex or getting a job you love or having friends to do stuff with on Friday night or being healthy or losing weight. If you are trusting in Jesus Christ and have thus escaped God’s wrath, being joined to the people of God forever, the best thing that can happen to you has happened and there is nothing left to fear. The saving work of God in Christ is the center of our attention because it…
II. Creates the church (vv. 24-28 & 42) This conversation that Moses has with the elders of Israel is within hours of God’s visiting Egypt with wrath and of Israel’s fleeing into the desert. In a few hours, over 2 million people are going to leave behind their lives of slavery and head out into the desert on a journey to take over the land of Canaan. However, God, through Moses, uses this time to remind the Hebrew people of what life will be like after they have been rescued and live in the Land of Promise. He reminds them in vv. 24-27 and again in v. 42 that while each individual family will escape the wrath by putting blood on each individual door, yet they are not being saved as individuals but as an entire nation. They are all to celebrate the Passover on the same night, in the same way for as long as they are a nation. They are joined into the people of God by the blood of this lamb and they are to remember that this is their identity, this is the moment of their becoming a nation, throughout their history. On the tenth day of the first month of every year that follows this day, every home is to select a year old male lamb without defect and have it come live with them for four days. Then, at twilight of the fourteenth day they are to kill the lamb and place its blood on the doorways of their homes. They are to roast the lamb whole and whatever they don’t eat they are to burn up with fire. They are to remove all the leaven from their homes and eat only unleavened bread for a whole week. They are to have a community wide worship service on the first day and the last day of this week. When they do this, their children are going to ask them, “Why are you doing this?” At that time they are to explain to their children how God came to Egypt to destroy all the firstborn sons of every home but that when he saw the blood of the lamb on the door of their houses he passed over and did not destroy the firstborn in their homes. The entire community is to remember together and pass on to their children the fact that they are a people saved by the blood of the lamb. They are the people of God by virtue of their being preserved from God’s wrath through the death of the lamb. It is the death of this lamb that stands at the center of the life of this community of people. It is the death of this lamb that is the occasion of their communion with one another. It is the meaning of the death of this lamb that is to be passed on to the succeeding generations. When we put vv. 24-28 together we are given a remarkable picture of the life of the church. We are gathered together as a result of the death of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ. The meaning and benefits of the death of this lamb form the subject matter of our corporate life and discussion. We are commissioned to pass on this message to succeeding generations. According to the end of v. 27 we are a worshipping community. This truly is a remarkable picture. If you will remember, back in chapter six they did not believe God’s promise to deliver them. They did not think that God loved them or that he had the power to rescue them from their slavery. However, they have witnessed the nine plagues and now, upon hearing that this is the final plague and upon being instructed in how they are to live in the land of promise, they believe what Moses is saying and they worship God. There is a direct correlation between Moses’ describing what their life will be like in the future, in the Land of Promise and their worshipping God in the present. They have not yet received what is promised. They are still slaves. Yet, they worship God for his salvation that is coming. This is just like us. We have not yet received the fullness of the salvation we are promised. Yet we understand how amazing this promise is and so we worship God together. We are impressed with the greatness of his promise and astonished by the scope of his salvation and so we declare his greatness together. Finally, notice that after they worship they do everything that God has told them to do. They don’t just have a nice worship experience and then go on about their lives as they please. They don’t just go to church and then continue to live like slaves. They kill the lambs and put up the blood and eat the meal and wait in their homes. Here is the final mark that distinguishes the true people of God: they obey God’s word. Notice that they are still slaves and they are obeying God’s word. There is no circumstance that can keep you from being a Christian. It doesn’t matter what is happening to you, you can always do what God wants you to do. Nothing and no one can prevent you from doing his will except you. Here is a definition of the church: We are the people of God by the death of the lamb and so we worship God and declare his greatness to the next generation, showing by our obedient lives that he and his salvation are better to us than everything else in life. The saving work of God in Christ is the center of our attention because it…
III. Results in a radical change of status (vv. 30-39) It would be hard to overstate the radical change that happens to the Israelites in this 24-hour period. It begins with the complete surrender of Pharaoh. We have here the highest example of that Proverb which states, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.” (21:1) God has determined it is time for Israel to leave and so he has, through his sovereign power, brought about the change of heart in Pharaoh. The man who refused to let Israel go, who murdered their children, who lied and sought to manipulate God’s people for his own benefit now commands that they leave without any conditions. Pharaoh’s release of Israel is a complete reversal of every demand he has made prior to this. In addition, he acknowledges that any hope he has for a happy future depends upon Moses’ blessing of him. He knows that without Yahweh’s intervention, his future will not be good and so he begs Moses to bless him before his leaves. It is not only the heart of Pharaoh that is changed towards the Hebrews but the entire Egyptian population is in dread and urges the people to go. These people who have been enjoying the fruits of the Hebrews’ slave labor, now urgently request them to leave before they all die. Egyptians are running into Jewish homes, helping them pack and hurrying them out the door. The Israelites are in such a hurry that they do not have time to let the bread rise or to bake it so they carry it on their shoulders as lumps of dough and they quickly leave behind their homes of slavery and begin the journey to the land of promise. As they are leaving they ask their Egyptian neighbors to hand over their wealth, as Moses instructed them to do. The Egyptians, under the sovereign power of God grant what the Israelites ask and hand over the wealth of Egypt to the Jewish nation. So Israel doesn’t leave Egypt as a ragtag bunch of slaves but as a conquering, plundering army. They rule over their rulers. The radical transformation that occurred to the nation of Israel, literally overnight, is a foreshadowing of the radical transformation that occurs in the life of everyone who is born again by the Spirit of God. I want you to think with me of the amazing transformation that takes place in the life of everyone whom God saves by his grace. First, the moment of transformation for Israel was preceded by years of preparation. The moment of Christ’s entering the world and accomplishing God’s work of salvation was preceded by years, even centuries of preparation. It was in the fullness of time that God sent his Son into the world. So it is in the life of each individual Christian. God usually works in our lives for many years preparing us for the moment of spiritual birth. Second, there was a moment in which Israel’s status changed. The moment that Pharaoh surrendered, the moment that Egyptians urged their Hebrew neighbors to leave, the moment each Hebrew family left its home behind, it was at this moment their status changed. In the same way, it was a moment in time that God’s work of saving his people was fully accomplished. At the moment that Christ died on that cross, God’s saving work was finished. The entire universe was transformed at that moment. In the same way, in the life of each individual Christian, there was a moment in time prior to which you were dead in your sins, destined for hell, a slave to sin and the devil but then, in a moment, by the sovereign grace of God, the Holy Spirit made your blind eyes to see and your hard heart to believe. You were at a moment born again by the Spirit and the Word. There was a process leading up to your emancipation and there is a process of living as an emancipated slave but if you are a Christian there was a moment in time when God made you one. No one was born as a Christian or became a Christian by something you did. Just as God delivered Israel without any help, so God delivers every Christian from sin and death and hell at a moment in time, without any help. At that moment you went from being dead in your sins to being alive in Christ. You went from being God’s hated enemy to being his beloved son or daughter. You went from being a child of God’s wrath to being an heir of eternal life. You went from being a slave to sin to becoming a slave to God. You were transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. You went from being lost to being found. You went from being under condemnation to being justified, declared not guilty but perfectly righteous. As Paul says in Titus 3: “At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.” I heard an interview this last week with one of the volunteers who went to the World Trade Center as soon as he saw the reports. He and another former Marine went onto the wreckage looking for survivors when everyone else was being ordered off from it because of the danger. In their searching they found and rescued two firemen who were trapped and badly injured. They saved these two firefighters. These men went from being trapped, injured and facing certain death, cut off from their families to being free, healed and living with their families in a moment of rescue. Their status changed in a moment. Everyone who hides behind the blood of Christ and who trusts in the saving, resurrected life, has had their status more radically altered than even these two men. It is impossible to not be taken up with how radically our lives have been altered by the work of God in Christ. The saving work of God in Christ is the center of our attention because it…
IV. Is a work of grace (vv. 40-42) Moses concludes his record of this momentous night by telling us, twice, that Israel lived in Egypt for 430 years. It was 430 years from the time that Jacob and his household of 70 people entered Egypt to live with Joseph until this day when close to 2 million of Jacob’s descendants left their slavery as a free people. Why does Moses tell us this? What Moses is reminding us of is the promise that God made to Abraham and then to Isaac and then to Jacob that he would make them into a great nation and give them the land of Canaan. If you will remember, back in Genesis 15, God assured Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation, with as many descendants as the stars of heaven, even though he did not as yet have even one son and he was over 80 years old. When God told Abraham that he was going to do this for him he also told him that his descendants would be enslaved for about 400 years and then he would bring his descendants out of their slavery and give them the land of Canaan as their own possession. Moses is reminding us that these years of slavery, this multiplication from seventy people into 2 million people, this miraculous deliverance from slavery and into freedom, is a gift of grace and not due to the goodness or worthiness of the people of Israel. God chose Abraham and his descendants to be his people by grace, not by works. He freely, contrary to what Abraham deserved and contrary to what every individual Israelite deserved has fulfilled all the promises he made and is gong to fulfill the ones yet to come. Moses ends his record by reminding us that there is no reason in us that we are Christians and on our way to heaven, but purely as a result of God’s free, unearned love for sinners. I mentioned this earlier but it stands out to me as the clearest expression of this grace. As the Israelites huddled behind their blood stained doors and God passed over their homes, it was not due to their own goodness. These homes were as full of bickering as the homes of the Egyptians and as our homes. These homes were full of proud, lust filled, cursing, insensitive, unloving, unkind people as our homes and as the homes of every human family in the world. These hundreds of thousands of homes had alcoholics and sexual perverts and greedy and quarrelsome and rebellious people in them. The condition for the Lord’s passing over their sins was not the absence of sin or because they were trying really hard to be good. The Lord passed over these sinner’s homes only because the lamb had died in their place. He looked upon the blood of these lambs and saw the blood of his very own son and his wrath against the sins of those in these homes was satisfied. He told these people about the blood and not the Egyptians because he had made promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He chose them. They did not choose him. They exhibited their chosen status by placing the blood upon their doors and so they were saved from wrath, from slavery and became the free people of God. We are the people of God not because of righteous things we have done but because of his mercy. This fact is to be at the center of our attention now and forever. The saving work of God in Christ is the center of our attention because it…
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2004 John Swanson. |