Found in the Pictures of the Gospel

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Wasn’t that an incredible video? And, you know, I could stand here all morning and tell you the International Mission Board is doing incredible work and God is working through our missionaries around the world and we need to pray for them and we need to support them. But it adds a whole other dimension to it when you start to see it with your own eyes.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about this morning. If you’ll turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 5, and you might also put a, you might also mark a spot in Exodus chapter 12. Pictures are important for us to be able to understand the world around us.

And I’ve learned this as a parent because we have one child who will sometimes pout when we don’t give in. And I’m going to try not to name names about who’s who. But Charla and I will say, stop pouting.

You know we never give in just because you pouted. so stop pouting. I’m not pouting.

Really? Tell your face that. I’m not pouting.

Okay, do you know what pouting means? No. Okay, let’s think about that for a minute.

You have no idea what pouting is, yet you’re absolutely certain you’re not doing it. And so Charla, just recently sitting there at the table with the pouting going on, got on her phone and said, Siri, give me a picture of somebody pouting and then takes the phone and says, there, look at that. That’s what your face looks like and that’s pouting.

Oh, I don’t know what the child thought pouting meant, but at that moment they saw the picture and they understood what pouting was. We’ve had the same issue with the other child, well, both of them, but in particular the other child, brushing the teeth. Brush your teeth correctly the way we’ve shown you, and yet we’ll walk in there and see one of them in particular with just the toothbrush sitting in the back of their mouth, kind of gnawing on it with their rollers, and that’s not going to do any good.

And so what did Daddy do? I got out the iPad, because it’s bigger, bigger screen, and I started looking for pictures of people who didn’t take care of their teeth. Boy, no. There were lots of people who’d lost teeth from drug use and stuff, but boy, that made an impact, let me tell you.

And I won’t say they brushed their teeth correctly every time because of that, but they remember because I’ll say, do I need to get the pictures again? No, daddy, no. They understand. Even if they don’t follow through, they understand more than just me telling you, your teeth are going to fall out.

They’ve seen the pictures. They understand this now. And some of you know because you’ve seen me talk about it on Facebook where when they’re ungrateful for what they have, I remind them of our family history.

I talk about my grandmother picking cotton as a little girl and how awful that was for her. I talk about how my great-great-grandparents were forcibly marched here from Mississippi on the Trail of Tears and explain that to them. I think they get to the point, yeah, Dad, whatever.

We took them down to Tuskehoma where the museum is there, and they’ve got an exhibit on the Trail of Tears, and they’ve seen pictures now. They’ve seen some of the cookware where that’s the only thing the people had to bring with them. They’ve seen the pictures of the people marching barefoot through the snow.

They’ve seen the pictures of people just trudging along, and they understand it now. They’ve seen the pictures. They understand it now more than just me telling them.

And I hear them talking about it amongst themselves. They understand. We learn from pictures.

God made us visual creatures. That’s why our eyes are in the front of our head, I believe, because we need to see the world around us to understand it sometimes. And as we’ve been talking about Jesus before Bethlehem, and we’ve been talking about the idea of, or the question of where was he?

Because a lot of people, just without thinking about it, think he started in Bethlehem. That when he was born, that’s when Jesus began. And we see throughout the scriptures that Jesus was around long before that.

There has never been a time when Jesus wasn’t. The problem with thinking Jesus started in Bethlehem is that if he has a beginning, then he’s not eternal, and if he’s not eternal, then he’s not gone. But we see where the scriptures tell us that all things were made by him and for him.

And we see at the beginning, God said, let us make man in our own image. We see the idea of the Trinity talking amongst itself at creation. And we know that Jesus was there.

Jesus was with the Father before the foundation of the world. There’s never been a time when Jesus wasn’t. So that has then led us to the question of, okay, where was he?

What was he doing? And we’ve studied over the last couple of weeks some of the answers to these questions, and we’ve seen where he was found in the promises of God, that God the Father all along was promising the Jewish nation a Messiah. He was promising someone who would come and deal with the problem of their sin.

He was promising his own son, and we’ve looked at some of those promises. Last week we talked about how he’s found in the prophecies of the Jews, and there’s some overlap between the concepts of prophecies and promises, but we’ve seen where promises are where God says, I’m going to send somebody to deal with it, deal with the problem of sin. And the prophecies are where God says, and this is how you’ll know who he is.

And we talked about how he’d be born in Bethlehem. He’d be born of a virgin. We’ve gone through, we looked at eight or nine of them last week and said, Jesus fits these perfectly, these signs so that people would know which person claiming to be the Messiah really was.

Well, today, we’re going to see that we can find Jesus in the Old Testament in the pictures of the gospel. He’s there throughout the Old Testament. There are pictures throughout the Old Testament that point to Jesus and point to the gospel, point to what he was going to do.

Because if God had never prepared the people in any way, sending his son to die on the cross would have been really confusing. And as it is, there were lots of people who missed what was going on, who didn’t understand what was going on. even people who supposedly understood the scriptures.

But if the Jews had no history of the concept of blood sacrifice, if they had no concept of a savior, of a messiah, if they had no concept of the innocent dying for the guilty, then the cross would have made no sense to any of them. But God not only was preparing them with promises and with prophecies, God was preparing them with pictures. God was preparing them with things that were in their religion and in their culture that were pictures of what Jesus Christ would come to do.

So that there would be a parallel when Jesus was crucified, these things would make sense, and they would look back at their own history, they would look back at their own religion, and see the concept of somebody spilling their blood for somebody else, of the need for blood to forgive sins, of somebody dying for the sins of the guilty. All of these things they would be prepared for because they would see pictures of it in their own religion and in their own culture. And there are several. I started making a list this week of some of these pictures, and it would have been really easy for me to come in this morning with 20 and spend an hour talking to you about it.

But a couple will do the trick. Why go over 20 of them when you’ll get the point from a couple? You’d probably rather have it that way, right?

Are you awake this morning? Yes. Okay.

So I’m afraid when they turned down the lights for the IMB video that maybe that got everybody tired. The Old Testament’s filled with these pictures of the gospel, and they illustrated Jesus’ redemptive work in a visible way to prepare his people for his message. Now the first one I want to talk to you about just briefly this morning is in Genesis 22.

You can turn there if you want. I’m really just going to go over what the story was. Abraham’s ram.

If you recall the story, Abraham was 100 years old when he finally had a son, and it was unexpected. I mean, God had promised it, but Abraham still didn’t expect to have a son at 100, especially when his wife was 90. And he had this one son, this one son that God had promised, and then God tells him, take the boy and sacrifice him.

That would be a hard call to make, a hard thing to obey. And yet Abraham was obedient, and he took Isaac, and he went up to Mount Moriah, and they took with them the preparations. They took the knife.

They took the wood. They took everything that they would need except for the sacrifice itself. They didn’t take a sheep, a lamb, a ram, anything like that.

And so they’re walking up the mountain, and Isaac asks Abraham, where is the sacrifice? And starting in verse 8, Abraham said, my son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering. So Abraham said, God will provide.

And they went up the mountain, and they prepared the place, they prepared the altar for the sacrifice. And the Bible says that Abraham, in obedience to God, bound Isaac and laid him on the altar. And as Abraham raised his knife in the air, preparing to sacrifice his son in obedience to God, suddenly he was stopped and God said, don’t put your hand on him.

Don’t do anything to hurt him because you’ve demonstrated that you fear me. Now this was a test of Abraham’s faith. I don’t believe for a minute that God needed him to pass a test before God knew whether or not he had faith.

God knows everything. I believe the test was to demonstrate to Abraham how much faith he really had. But as God’s speaking to him, as the angel of God is speaking to him, Abraham looks up and he looks out and he sees a ram caught in a thicket.

A ram being a male sheep. And a pretty tough one at that. I mean, there’s a reason Dodge didn’t name their truck the lamb.

They named it the ram because these things are pretty tough. And it’s caught by its horns in the thicket. Now, this is not an accident and this is not a coincidence.

because one of these wild animals gets caught in the thorns. I would think a ram is going to be able to pull himself out of some thorny vines. But yet he’s stuck there, and he’s stuck there at just the precise moment God says, no, no, you’re not going to sacrifice Isaac today.

You’re here to make a sacrifice, but you’re not going to sacrifice Isaac today. And Abraham knew that that was what God provided as an offering. And God provides the lamb.

Where’s the picture of the gospel in there? It wasn’t Abraham who had to sacrifice his son for his sins. God would provide the sacrifice.

See, even then, God was doing things to get them thinking about the idea that it’s not about what you’re going to sacrifice. It’s about what I’m going to sin. And yes, they did have to offer lambs and goats and things that they had of their own.

But in this particular instance, God is saying, no, it’s not your son that’s going to die for your sins. I’m going to provide a sacrifice. We see another one in Numbers chapter 21.

the people of Israel as they were wandering around in the desert during the 40 years were really irritating. And I say that knowing full well I probably would be just as irritating if I was wandering in the desert for 40 years. I’m sure I get irritating on a two-hour car ride.

You can ask these two ladies. But they were whiny and they were complaining about everything. I mean, God no sooner saved them from the last problem than they’re complaining that, oh, it’s so hard, it’s so hot, it’s so dry, we’re so thirsty, God brought us out here to die.

And thank goodness I’m not God because I would have just wiped them all out right there, got sick of listening to them. God at times, though, did do things to get their attention. And God, the Bible says, sent fiery serpents among the camp.

And there is some controversy over what the fiery serpents were. There’s evidently a snake in that part of the world that has red on it that looks like it It could be, maybe that’s what they’re talking about, the fiery serpent. Some people have said, no, the bite felt like fire.

I don’t know. All I know is what the Bible tells me. These fiery serpents came in, and they bit the people, and people were beginning to die from the snake bites.

And finally, they cried out to God, said, we were wrong, we’ll listen, what do you want us to do? And God told Moses, go and make a bronze serpent. God said, make a statue of a bronze serpent.

and then raise it up on a pole so that when the people look at it, they’ll be healed of the snake bites. Now, God wasn’t trying to get them to worship the serpent. Later on, when some of the Israelites start worshiping the serpent as an idol, one of the kings has it destroyed, and rightfully so.

God wasn’t trying to get them to worship the serpent, but it was a picture of the thing that afflicted them, being raised up from the earth, that if they would turn in faith, believing that God’s promise was true, that they would be healed. And so the thing that afflicted them was the snake bite. And when that snake was raised up on the pole, those who looked at it as God promised were healed.

Now it had nothing to do with some kind of magical power in the serpent statue. It had everything to do with faith and believing the promise of God. That if God says, if you turn this way, you’ll be healed.

I’m sure there were some people who said, that will never work. There’s always some in every group. That will never work.

And then there were others who said, it doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what God said, and so I believe it. And those were the ones who were healed because of their faith. Now, what does that have to do with the gospel?

One of the most famous passages of all of Scripture is John 3, 16. But if you look a few verses before that in John chapter 3, Jesus compares himself. This is not me coming up with some weird, obscure interpretation of Numbers 21.

This is what Jesus said. He’s talking about himself and comparing himself to the bronze serpent. And he said, starting in verse 14, And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Which leads us then into John 3. 16. Most people don’t know that right before John 3.

16, he’s talking about the bronze serpent. Because what afflicted us, and what afflicts us still, is sin. The thing that has bit us and spread its poison through our bloodstream is sin.

And that is the very thing that was nailed to the cross when the Bible says that God took him who knew no sin and made him to be sin for us. Meaning Jesus was sinless, but he took responsibility for our sins. He took the weight of our sins on himself and he bearing our sins was nailed to that cross and raised up from the earth so that all who turned to him would be saved from the thing that afflicted us.

We’d be saved from the snake bite of sin. Not because there’s magical power or in the wood of the cross, or anything like that, but in faith, because God said, if you’ll turn to Jesus Christ for salvation, you’ll be saved. And God still makes that offer today, that those who will come to him by faith in Jesus Christ will be saved from what afflicts us, which is sin.

And those are just a couple of the pictures that we see in the Old Testament. But I want to talk to you this morning about the one that I find the most compelling. Now, there are so many others that we could have talked about this morning, But this is the one that I find the most compelling.

And if you haven’t already turned there with me, I’m in 1 Corinthians 5, because I want to show you, first of all, that this is not, again, just like with the bronze serpent, this is not just some random obscure interpretation. Oh, the preacher’s taking verses out of context and stringing them together like a necklace to prove the point he wants to make. No, this is what the Apostle Paul says.

Okay, so if you’ve got a problem, take it up with him and the Holy Spirit who inspired him. All right, this is what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5. starting at verse 7.

He says, purge out therefore the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened. And a lot of times in the Bible, leaven or yeast is a symbol of sin. He is talking about the Passover here, and they were supposed to eat unleavened bread for the Passover.

And part of the problem with yeast is you can’t just put yeast in half of a lump of dough and expect half of it to rise. It’s going to spread through the whole thing, and it’s going to make the whole thing rise. And so the idea is you’ve got to get rid of that old leavened lump, and you’ve got to have another one without the yeast, because you can’t have just the little yeast. Same thing in our lives.

A little bit of sin, if we leave it alone and let it fester, it will spread everywhere. Okay, so that’s the point he’s trying to make. He said, as you’re on leaven, here we go, for even Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us.

So as he’s talking to the believers in Corinth about the Passover, he’s comparing Christ not just to the Passover, not just to the celebration as a but to the lamb itself. When he says our Passover is sacrificed for us, he’s talking about the lamb. Therefore, let us keep the feast not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and in truth.

So what’s the point of that? He’s looking at these people and telling them, Jesus, Jesus is the real Passover lamb. Because they would have been familiar with the Passover.

And there are some elements I’m familiar with. I’ve never gone through the whole Passover Seder, but there are some elements I am familiar with. but the lamb is the center of it, as we go back to the story in Exodus.

And Paul said, Jesus is the real Passover lamb. And we look at Exodus. I asked you earlier in the service, you might want to mark a place there, if you would.

And we’re going to be in Exodus chapter 12 now. And look at a few verses here. But starting in chapter 12, verse 1, it says, And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months.

It shall be the first month of the year to you. Speak ye unto all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month they shall take to them every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for a house. And if the household be too little for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next unto his house take it according to the number of souls.

Every man, according to his eating, shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. Ye shall take it out from the sheep or from the goats, and ye shall keep it up until the fourteenth day of the same month, and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.

What’s taking place here is that they are just after the first nine plagues that have faced Egypt as the Israelites during the time of Moses were in slavery. And Pharaoh has steadfastly refused to let the Israelites go. Moses has come to him time and time again and said, God said to let my people go and Pharaoh says no. And so he’s unleashed, God has unleashed plague after plague after plague on Egypt.

There’s been darkness, there’s been frogs, there’s been lice, there’s been boils, there’s been dead livestock, water turning into blood, not all in that order, and other things. It’s hard to remember all nine of them off the top of my head. But after nine things, Pharaoh has finally just dug in his heels and said, no, no, no, absolutely not.

I will not let your people go. And so Moses has said, there’s going to come one final plague from God that’s going to break Egypt because you have not been broken before God at this point. And they were preparing, God was preparing his people to send judgment and to send death through the land of Egypt.

And what would happen for the sin of defying God and for the sin of enslaving, before we think, oh, that’s so horrible that God would send death on the families in Egypt. Think about what the families in Egypt had been doing to their fellow man. They’d been enslaving them and murdering them for centuries, and when they would not stop the violence and the bloodshed, God stepped in and stopped it for them.

And I tell you that because I get so frustrated with people nowadays who think they have a higher moral standard than God, and they will criticize God and talk about how awful he is for the things that he did in the Old Testament with never stopping to think about the context of what was going on and how God stepped in and stopped further violence. And so God said, I am going to send a plague on Egypt that will stop all of this. The firstborn of every Egyptian household will be killed.

The angel of death would come and take them in the middle of the night. But God told the Israelites, each of you take a lamb. And if your house isn’t big enough to support a lamb, you don’t have enough people, you don’t have enough resources for a lamb, you get together with your neighbors, and you all do it together.

And he said, you can take it from among the sheep or among the goats. and I’ve struggled with that verse in particular, verse 5. Take it out from the sheep or from among the goats.

There are some commentaries who said, well, he’s saying here that they could also use a kid, not a child, but a baby goat. But he keeps saying lamb. And I think the meaning of that is it doesn’t matter what pen you take them out of.

The lamb could have been pinned up with the other lambs. It could have been pinned up with goats. It doesn’t matter.

Just take a lamb that you’ve got. I think that’s what he’s saying. He says you’ll keep it for a certain amount of time and then the whole assembly of Israel is going to come together and kill it in the evening.

And here’s what he says, verse 7. And they shall take of the blood and strike it upon the two side posts and on the upper doorpost of the houses wherein they shall eat it. So it says you’re going to kill the lamb, and whatever house you’re going into, your house or your neighbor’s house, you’re going to take the blood of that lamb, and you’re going to paint it on the sides of the door frame and on the top.

And then you’re going to go in and you’re going to eat it. verse 8 says, and they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread with bitter herbs, they shall eat it. Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire, his head with his legs, and with the pertinence thereof, that means the in-herbs, as we’d say here, and ye shall let nothing of it remain until the morning, and that which remaineth of it until the morning, ye shall burn with fire.

So it says you’re not supposed to boil it, you’re not supposed to, you’re not supposed to eat it raw, which why would you? But you’re supposed to roast it with fire, and you’re supposed to take all of it together, and you’re supposed to eat it, and eat everything. Eat as much as you can.

And if you can’t eat everything, when the morning comes, you burn it. You leave nothing behind. And he says in verse 11, And thus shall you eat it with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand, and you shall eat it in haste.

It is the Lord’s Passover. He said, you’re going to be ready to go when you eat this. I’ve read things where people have criticized our eating habits in America, and they say one of the reasons that we gain weight so much more than, say, people in France, is people in France sit down and have a meal, and they take their time, and they spread it out, where, you know, Americans are busy.

We’re on the go. We are an active people and always have been. Well, you know, unless we’re vegged out on the couch.

We grab a double quarter pounder with cheese as we’re running to the next thing we’ve got to do.

and normally that’s not a good thing but that’s kind of what God says here get your coat on, get your shoes on have your keys in your hand and you eat that lamb like you’re ready to go now like you’re ready to get out of Dodge for I will pass through this is verse 12 for I will pass through the land of Egypt this night and will smite 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 and the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are and when I see the blood when I see the blood he says I will pass over you which is where we get the name Passover I will pass over you and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you when I smite the land of Egypt the bottom line of what he’s telling the people of Israel is that if they would sacrifice the lamb and they would paint the blood on the doorposts and then they would hide themselves behind that blood there would be salvation in that blood and hidden under that blood Now, the idea of the Passover is so rich that I could spend, again, I could spend hours going over every detail.

And there are things even that I miss going through this. But just for our purposes this morning, I want to look at three things very quickly as we go through this that are important for us to understand about the Passover as it relates to Jesus. And that’s it.

First of all, verse 5 says, Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. You shall take it out from the sheep or the goats. He says it’s got to be without blemish.

Because our natural inclination would be, oh, we’ve got to make a sacrifice. It’s not one we’re going to get to keep. Where’s the little sick one?

Where’s the one we don’t want to keep? No, God says it has to be without blemish, without spot. It’s got to be a perfect lamb.

That’s because the Messiah himself was going to be a perfect sinless sacrifice. He had to be sinless if he was going to die for our sins. Because if the Messiah had any sin of his own, he’d be dying to pay for that.

I can tell you all day that I’ll die for your sins. I can tell you that. I might even convince some people of that.

Maybe not in this room, but there are people all over the world who are convinced of crazier things. I might even convince some people of that. But the fact remains that whatever punishment I undergo, I’m undergoing for my own sins, and I can’t do a thing for yours.

I can’t save myself, let alone you. We would need a sinless sacrifice. And being that this was a picture of the gospel, and a picture of the sacrifice that would be made on our behalf, that this was a picture of the true Passover lamb who was going to come about 1,400 years later.

The lamb that they took for Passover had to be perfect, had to be without spot or blemish, had to be the best that they had because our Messiah had to be a perfect sinless sacrifice. Second of all, the Messiah was going to shed his blood as a covering for us. Verse 7 says, And they shall take of the blood and strike it on the two side posts and on the upper doorpost of the houses wherein they shall eat it.

They were to take that blood and they were to paint it on the outside of the house. It wasn’t good enough for the Israelites to stand out there in the streets when the angel of death came through and say, oh no, you can’t touch us. We’re Israelites.

We’ve followed the law. We’re God’s chosen people. It didn’t work that way.

No matter how good the Israelites were or thought they were, their only chance of escaping the judgment of God, their only chance to be saved was to hide themselves behind the blood. And folks, that is the gospel, because it doesn’t matter how good we are or how good we think we are. When God’s judgment comes through, when we stand before God’s judgment, it does us no good to say, well, I went to church, and I lived by the Ten Commandments, and I was an upstanding member of the community.

It does us no good, because we are still sinners. And our only hope, Our only hope is to be covered by the blood, to be hidden behind the blood. And so our Messiah would shed his blood as a covering for us.

I haven’t lived a particularly wild life. I’m not telling you I’m perfect and wonderful. I’m just telling you, I had a conversation with my parents and a bunch of friends talking about the most rebellious thing we’d ever done, and my parents and I couldn’t think of anything for me.

I’m just not that wild or exciting. But it doesn’t matter. I’m still a sinner.

And I can tell you that I have no hope. but to appear before God covered in the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanses me from all sin. It doesn’t matter how good you are or how good you’ve tried to be.

Folks, it also doesn’t matter how bad you are or how bad you’ve been. What matters is the covering of the blood. That blood washes us clean from all sin, past, present, and future.

Third of all this morning, we are coming to a close. The Messiah would shield us from the judgment of God. We look at the very end here where he talks in verses 12 and 13 about the angel of death.

He says, I’ll pass through the land of Egypt this night, and I’ll smite the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast. And against all the gods of Egypt will I execute judgment. I am the Lord, and the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you.

And the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, and I smite the land of Egypt. There is coming a day when God’s judgment will be poured out on sin. I realize that’s not a message we hear a lot in church anymore, and that’s not a message that’s popular with the world at large.

But God is still just and sin is still wicked. And there will come a day when God’s wrath and judgment will rightfully be poured out on the sins of mankind. And all the things that are done in open and in secret will be judged.

And I tell you that as somebody who’s got things to be judged. And I don’t want to stand before the judgment of God. Some people think it’s not a big deal. Read the book of Nahum in the Old Testament.

You’ll get a pretty good idea of how God feels about sin and how frightening it’s going to be when judgment is poured out. I don’t want to feel the weight of the wrath of God for my sin. I deserve it, but I don’t want to feel it.

You know what? There’s only one way to avoid it. Th

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