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Exodus 12:1-13
“Now the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, 2 ‘This month shall be your beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you. 3 Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: “On the tenth of this month every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father, a lamb for a household. 4 And if the household is too small for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take it according to the number of the persons; according to each man’s need you shall make your count for the lamb. 5 Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats.
6 Now you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month. Then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at twilight. 7 And they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses where they eat it. 8 Then they shall eat the flesh on that night; roasted in fire, with unleavened bread and with bitter herbs they shall eat it. 9 Do not eat it raw, nor boiled at all with water, but roasted in fire—its head with its legs and its entrails. 10 You shall let none of it remain until morning, and what remains of it until morning you shall burn with fire. 11 And thus you shall eat it: with a belt on your waist, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. So, you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord’s Passover.”
12 ‘For I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night, and will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the Lord. 13 Now the blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you; and the plague shall not be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.’”
Jesus is the central character of the whole Bible. This story of the Passover is one of the most famous stories of the Bible up there with David and Goliath, and of course Christmas as we celebrate at this time of the year. Movies like The Ten Commandments have burned this into the minds of millions of viewers over the years. We have worked to show Jesus through the Old Testament in our previous lessons. In Genesis, we saw Him with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We saw Him in the person of Joseph, and now we are hundreds of years later, and He is in the Passover. Let’s get caught up.
Joseph is dead, and the new Pharaoh, the new king of Egypt, does not know about him and his reputation. This new Pharaoh does not know what Joseph did and how the Jews are seen in the land. He just knows that they are having a lot of kids and soon they will outnumber the Egyptians. This new Pharaoh brings in new laws that allow the midwives to kill all of the Hebrew boys upon birth, but God intervenes, and as far as we can tell, none of the boys are killed.
Then we see the birth of Moses; he is hidden until he is 3 months old, then set in a little ark in the river. He is rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter, and he is fundamentally adopted and lives as an Egyptian prince until he is 40 years old.
One day, while out and about, he sees an Egyptian guard hurting one of his Hebrew brothers, and he kills the guard and hides his body, or so he thought. Soon, it is clear that his sin is known, and he runs to the land of Midian and ends up marrying a lady named Zipporah and becomes a shepherd for his father-in-law. Forty years later, Moses has an encounter with God that we all know as the ‘Burning Bush’ encounter, and God then sends him and his older brother Aaron back to Egypt to demand that Pharaoh let the Jews go.
While there in Egypt, God performs one miracle after another known as the Ten Plagues, each attacking one of the false deities that the Egyptians worshipped. The last plague, the one we will explore, is an attack on Pharaoh himself and his bloodline. The Egyptians worshipped Pharaoh as a god; the son of Ra, the sun god. As such, his son would also be a god and, of course, the next Pharaoh. God uses this belief of the Egyptians to attack one of the gods of Egypt and, at the same time, establish the Passover feast, one of the permanent feasts of Israel, as established in Leviticus 23.
In this Passover, a perfect lamb is killed in the evening, its blood is caught in a basin, and then the man of the household would paint the doorposts and the lintel at the top with the blood. The blood would drip and pool at the threshold, forming the sign of the cross in blood. That night, God himself would pass through the land and kill the firstborn of man and beast.
Exodus 12:12-13, “For I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night, and will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the Lord. 13 Now the blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you; and the plague shall not be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.”
The blood is all that protected the people. If you obeyed, killed the Passover lamb and put the blood on your doors, then waited inside as the Lord had commanded, no one of your family or livestock died. No death. The blood of the lamb kept the people safe. Jesus, we are told, is our Passover lamb. He is the Lamb slain before the ‘foundation of the world.’ Revelation 13:8, “All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”
We are told in Hebrews that there is no remission of sins, no removal of sin without blood. Hebrews 9:22, “And according to the law almost all things are purified with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no remission.” Jesus is our Passover lamb, killed at the Passover, that pure blood of the perfect Son of God that covers my sin and yours if you have put your trust in Him.
Colossians 1:20, “and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
Ephesians 1:7, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace.”
Hebrews 9:14, “How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!”
We can go on, but I hope that you get the point. The whole world is about to celebrate the Christmas season and Jesus’ birth, BUT He was born to die. Most love the babe in a manger; few love the Man on the Middle Cross. Rather, they avoid Him and deny Him, they accuse Him of all manner of evil, and choose to live in their sinfulness. Jesus is the Passover lamb that takes away the sins of the world. But He is also the Holy God who will come and judge those that rejected His free offer of salvation. They will die like the thousands did that fateful night back in Egypt; they will die an eternal death.
Jesus is the story of the whole Bible. Rejoice if you know Him and His blood is covering your sins and transgressions. Sing loud this Christmas, those of us who are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb.
Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Bethany Baptist Church
70 Victoria Street, Elora, Ontario
The post The Whole Story of the Bible is About Jesus, Part 8 :: By Sean Gooding appeared first on Rapture Ready.
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