When Judgment Passes over Us

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It is a major rite of passage in our culture when somebody turns 16 and is able to get their driver’s license and is able to get their first car. and for young men especially, I mean, I don’t know what it was like for teenage girls because I’ve never been one, but I’ve been a teenage boy. And I know we tended to be crazy about our cars, that first car we got.

Now, mine was not cool. It was old in every conceivable sense of the word, but I loved that car because I bought it and I babied it. It was my baby.

And one day shortly after I got it, my grandfather stopped by to visit. He said, why don’t you come out to the driveway and see what I did? And he had put a gigantic sticker on my baby.

Thank you. Why, Papa, why did you do that? It was a gigantic sticker for the Oklahoma Sheriff’s Association.

Annual supporter, 2001. I said, thanks. Why?

Didn’t want to be ungrateful, but why did you do that? He said, that’ll keep you from getting a ticket. Okay, I thought all that driver’s ed I just did was supposed to take care of that.

But I don’t know if, I don’t know if it worked or not. I’m closing in on 40 and I’ve still never had a ticket. Of course, that could be because I drive like an old person and always have.

Maybe it was the sticker. I don’t know. But he was convinced that that sticker was a mark on my car that would get me a free pass.

And I just tried my best to never need a free pass. But this morning, we’re going to look at something that really was a mark of protection for those that were underneath it. In the Old Testament, there’s one of these situations where God says you put this mark on yourself and it’s going to protect you.

That’s what we’re going to look at this morning in Exodus chapter 12 as we continue through this series of studies on finding Jesus in the Old Testament. And I think I told you this last week. Once you start looking for stories that point to Jesus in the Old Testament, for prophecies, for promises, for details that point to Jesus, once you start looking for them, they are everywhere.

And so there’s no way in this series that we’re going to be able to go over every conceivable detail of the Old Testament that points to Jesus, but we’re kind of hitting the highlights. And one of the clearest stories in the Old Testament that points to Jesus is found in Exodus chapter 12. So once you’ve turned there, if you would stand with me as we read together from God’s Word.

If you can’t find Exodus 12 or don’t have your Bible with you today, it’ll be on the screen where you can follow along as we read. We’re going to start at verse 21, Exodus 12, 21, and read through verse 27 this morning. It says, Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel and said to them, Go and take for yourselves lambs according to your families and slay the Passover lamb.

You shall take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood which is in the basin and apply some of the blood that is in the basin to the lintel and the two doorposts and none of you shall go outside the door of this house until morning. For the Lord will pass through to smite the Egyptians and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the door the two doorposts the Lord will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to come into your houses to smite you. And you shall observe this event as an ordinance for you and your children forever.

When you enter the land which the Lord will give you, as He has promised, you shall observe this rite. And when your children say to you, what does this rite mean to you? You shall say, it is a Passover sacrifice to the Lord who passed over the houses of the sons of Israel in Egypt when He smote the Egyptians, but spared our homes, and the people bowed low and worshiped.

And you may be seated. God is very clear in what He’s telling Moses here that the Passover lamb was a means of salvation for Israel. In those first few verses of that passage we just read, He said, this is what is going to save your lives.

Now, when we hear salvation, a lot of times we think about spiritual salvation, which is no less important, but He’s talking about right here and now, your lives, Your actual physical lives are on the line, and this Passover lamb is going to be what separates you between life and death. It’s going to be what separates those who are going to live from those who are going to die. This is going to save you.

Last week, we looked at the story of Joseph, 14 chapters about Joseph and the connections between Joseph and Jesus. And really just, I think I went over nine of the connections out of some 50 or 60 that Bible scholars have pieced together. And we left off in Genesis 50, I believe, where Jacob had died and his sons, including Joseph, were still there in Egypt.

Well, eventually Joseph dies. The whole family remains in Egypt. Joseph dies, a new Pharaoh rises up and gets a little concerned about these Israelites who are living in his territory and decides to make them slaves.

And they are enslaved in Egypt for 400 years. In bringing them there to save them from the famine, God was pointing to Jesus. And now some 400 plus years later, in freeing them from Egypt, God is still pointing to Jesus.

This is the end of what we know as the ten plagues of Egypt. And this has been a situation where God tells Moses, go to Pharaoh and tell him, let my people go. Moses says no. And so God begins to send plagues every time.

He says, go and let my people go. And he says, no, and another plague will come, and it will affect everything in Egypt. And a few years ago, I started to realize each of these plagues attacks one of the gods that the Egyptians worshiped, showing the power of the God of Israel over the God of Egypt.

And every time one of these plagues comes, it says that Pharaoh hardened his heart until you get about halfway through, and then it says God began to harden Pharaoh’s heart. People will look at that and say, well, this is not fair. God is punishing Pharaoh for something God made Pharaoh do.

But understand, Pharaoh had a choice in the beginning whether to obey God or not. And every time he just dug in further and dug in further until finally God said, okay, your moment of being able to turn back has passed. Now we’re going to see this all the way through so I can show this to Israel.

And we come down to this 10th plague where Pharaoh has just said, absolutely, I’m not letting your people go. They had talked about some things, maybe I’ll let them go momentarily so that they can go sacrifice and then come back. And God has done playing.

And he says, I want my people freed. Pharaoh says no. And so God says there’s going to be one last plague. There’s going to be one last plague.

That God is going to send the angel of death who is going to take the life of every firstborn in Egypt, both the humans and the animals. And we can talk and we will talk tonight about how do we reconcile this with a loving God? How do we reconcile this with a holy God?

We’ll talk about that tonight. But for now, understand that Egypt as a nation had sinned against God. It wasn’t just Pharaoh that mistreated the Israelites and refused to let them go.

The whole nation was complicit in this. And so God said there’s going to be a punishment. But here he warned them about the judgment that was coming and he told Israel, so that you don’t get swept up in this, so that you don’t get swept up in this, I’m going to make a way out.

This judgment was going to be overwhelming once it came. There was going to be no way of escaping. It was going to hit Pharaoh’s house down to the house of the laborers who lived on the other side of town.

It was going to hit everybody. There was going to be no escape from this judgment except for the way that he laid out. Does this start to sound familiar?

That God’s judgment is going to be overwhelming once it comes, and there’s no escaping it except for the one escape path that he’s made. And by the way, even though he makes this promise to Israel, he says everyone who’s behind that blood is going to be saved. He doesn’t say only the Israelites who are behind that blood.

If an Egyptian went and took refuge behind the blood, they would be saved as well. So, He tells them that there’s going to be this punishment, and there was only one means of escape, and that was to take refuge behind the blood of the Lamb. The Lamb and its blood, it was literally going to be the difference between life and death.

So, each family, each Hebrew family in verse 21, They’re instructed to take a lamb and sacrifice it. Take this lamb and sacrifice it. And there’s some things about the lamb that we need to recognize that are going to come up later.

The lamb was supposed to be spotless. It’s supposed to be a year-old lamb, which to us sounds like a baby, but it’s in the prime of its life there. And the lamb, according to verse 6, was going to be sacrificed before the people of Israel.

They’re not necessarily going back into some private area and doing this. They’re bringing their lambs out in front of the assembly of the congregation of Israel, as it says. and they’re sacrificing these lambs.

And the blood was to be collected in basins, and they were to take a hyssop branch, which if you’re not familiar with, it seems like an odd detail to include or emphasize. But in Middle Eastern cultures in that day, hyssop was a symbol of cleansing and purification. It also had the practical benefit of the way the flowers were arranged.

It worked really well as a brush. So you get a win-win situation here. And God says you’re supposed to take this hyssop that is a symbol of cleansing, and you’re supposed to dip it in the blood, and then you’re supposed to paint it, paint the blood on the lentil, which is the top frame of the door, and on the doorpost, which are the sides, you’re supposed to have this covering of blood on the door frame.

And once that was painted, they would take refuge inside the house behind the blood, according to verse 22. And he even warned them, don’t go outside. There’s nothing you need outside that is worth incurring the judgment of God.

You just stay hidden behind that blood. And at some point during the night, verse 23 tells us that the destroyer, this angel of death, as some translations call it, he was going to see the blood as he’s making his way through the streets and villages of Egypt. He was going to see the blood on the Hebrew doors, and he would pass over those houses so that everyone who was inside sheltering behind that blood would be saved from what was to come.

And again, I know we look at this and in our modern minds we say, this makes no sense. How could God do this? This isn’t fair.

Because we would say not everybody in Egypt participated. The nation as a whole participated. For 400 years, people had been victimized.

How did God do such a thing? You see where we’ve kind of painted God into a no-win situation? We get mad if He doesn’t do something, and then we impugn His character when He does.

It’s much easier just to look at it and say, God knows what He’s doing. But for Israel, this was a moment of salvation. Not only that this plague was going to come through and finally bring Israel to the end of the day.

Because don’t forget, Israel was not perfect either. these same people that are being set free from slavery in Egypt are the same people that in just a couple days are going to be whining about the way God did it and complaining about everything God does on their way out of Egypt. If God had just said I’m going to send an angel to wipe out everything in Egypt not just firstborn everything in Egypt and that blood was painted on the doors and the blood did a couple of things that we’ll look at just real quick.

The blood first of all identified them as belonging to God. When that angel of death came through Egypt and saw that blood, it wasn’t that the blood itself of those lambs was somehow magical. You know, it’s not like Superman and Kryptonite. Not because everybody in that house was perfect, not because the people in that house were extra special, but because those people in that house belonged to God.

they were spared the judgment. And so God does this thing and tells them, I want you to remember this. Several of the things that we’ve looked at in what happened, that’s part of what we’re doing when we observe the Lord’s Supper, is we’re reminding ourselves and teaching future generations what Jesus Christ did for us.

I don’t get to experience this a lot because I’m normally up front when we’re doing the Lord’s Supper, but I’ve been around small kids enough and I’ve had conversations with my wife. As they’re eating the lamb and they’re eating the unleavened bread and they’re doing all the things that they’re told to do, those same questions come up. What does this mean?

Why are we doing this? Why do we do this every year? Why can’t I participate in this part?

But why do I do this? And they got to have those conversations about what God had done. The commemoration of the Passover was a reminder of God’s salvation.

And he’s. . .

I read that he talks about in the part before we picked up and started reading. All these things you do, you’re not just going to do it tonight. You’re going to do this year in and year out as a reminder.

So future generations never forget what happened here. And the way God used this lamb to deliver his. .

. He tells him that in verse 25. He’s specific.

This is supposed to continue. Even once you get into the land that I’ve promised you. And I think the reason for that is we tend to remember God in hard times.

And then when we get into good times again, he kind of fades from memory. That’s why some of our greatest times of spiritual growth, some of the times we get from moment to moment for God to do something, for God to fix it. And when he does, we’re so grateful for it and things go back to normal and we forget about how much we rely on God.

He said, I’m not just wanting you to remember what I’ve done here while you’re in Egypt. And even though they didn’t know they were going to wander the wilderness for 40 years, God already knew. I’m not even just wanting you to remember this during the.

. . When all the promises come true, when you’re where you want to be, when things are going well for you and life is as it should be, that’s the time you most need to remember what God has done to bring you to that point.

So this commemoration, it was a reminder of what God had done, and it was an opportunity to teach their children about His salvation. and this wasn’t just God saving a generation of people. It was God saving that nation.

And so he said, your children need to remember this. And just as an aside, something we’ve talked about, you know, as we were in the book of Joel, and God told Israel through Joel, make sure your kids know what happened with this plan, kids, know about the struggles you’ve gone through in life and know how God’s brought you through them. And get to see the track record of faithfulness to God through your life.

Of course, you want to keep those stories and what you divulge age appropriate. But if you’re able to look back and see where you came from and where you are now and how God has worked to get you from there to there,