Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Exodus 12:21-27, NASB
- Series: Jesus in the Old Testament (2024), no. 3
- Date: Sunday, October 27, 2024 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
Listen Online
Watch Online
Text
A Mark of Protection
It is a major rite of passage in our culture when somebody turns sixteen, gets a driver’s license, and is able to get a first car. For young men especially—I do not know what it was like for teenage girls because I have never been one—but I have been a teenage boy, and I know we tended to be crazy about that first car. 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.
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?” He had put a gigantic sticker on my baby. Thank you.
I remember thinking, “Why, Pawpaw, why did you do that?” It was a gigantic sticker for the Oklahoma Sheriff’s Association: Annual Supporter, 2001. I said, “Thanks. Why?” I did not want to be ungrateful, but I wanted to know why.
He said, “That’ll keep you from getting a ticket.” I thought all that driver’s ed I had just done was supposed to take care of that. I do not know whether it worked or not. I am closing in on forty, and I have 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 do not know. But he was convinced that sticker was a mark on my car that would get me a free pass, and I tried my best never to need a free pass.
This morning, we are going to look at something that really was a mark of protection for those underneath it. In the Old Testament, there is one of these situations where God says, “Put this mark on yourself, and it is going to protect you.” That is what we are going to look at in Exodus chapter 12 as we continue through this series on finding Jesus in the Old Testament.
I think I told you this last week: once you start looking for stories that point to Jesus in the Old Testament, for prophecies, promises, and details that point to Jesus, they are everywhere. There is no way in this series that we can go over every conceivable detail of the Old Testament that points to Jesus, but we are hitting the highlights. One of the clearest stories in the Old Testament that points to Jesus is found in Exodus chapter 12.
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 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.
The Lamb That Separated Life from Death
God is very clear in what He tells Moses here: the Passover lamb was a means of salvation for Israel. In those first few verses, He says, “This is what is going to save your lives.” When we hear salvation, we often think about spiritual salvation, which is no less important. But here He is talking about their actual physical lives. Their lives are on the line, and this Passover lamb is going to separate life from death. It is going to separate those who live from those who die.
Last week, we looked at the story of Joseph, fourteen chapters about Joseph and the connections between Joseph and Jesus. I think I went over nine of those connections out of some fifty or sixty that Bible scholars have pieced together. We left off in Genesis 50, where Jacob had died and his sons, including Joseph, were still there in Egypt.
Eventually Joseph dies. The whole family remains in Egypt. A new Pharaoh rises up and becomes concerned about these Israelites living in his territory, so he decides to make them slaves. They are enslaved in Egypt for 400 years. In bringing them there to save them from the famine, God was pointing to Jesus. Now, 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. God tells Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and tell him, ‘Let my people go.'” Pharaoh says no, and so God begins to send plagues. Each time, Moses says, “Let my people go,” and Pharaoh says no. Another plague comes, and it affects everything in Egypt.
A few years ago, I began to realize that each of these plagues attacks one of the gods the Egyptians worshiped, showing the power of the God of Israel over the gods of Egypt. Every time one of these plagues comes, it says that Pharaoh hardened his heart. Then about halfway through, it says God began to harden Pharaoh’s heart.
People look at that and say, “That 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. Every time, he dug in further and further until finally God said, “Your moment of being able to turn back has passed. Now we are going to see this all the way through so I can show this to Israel.”
We come to this tenth plague, where Pharaoh has just said, “Absolutely, I am not letting your people go.” They had talked about some things, maybe letting them go momentarily so they could sacrifice and then come back, but God is done playing. He says, “I want my people freed.” Pharaoh says no, and so God says there is going to be one last plague.
God is going to send the angel of death, who is going to take the life of every firstborn in Egypt, both humans and animals. We can talk about how to reconcile that with a loving God and a holy God, and we will talk about that. But for now, understand that Egypt as a nation had sinned against God. It was not just Pharaoh who mistreated the Israelites and refused to let them go. The whole nation was complicit in this.
So God says there is going to be a punishment. But here He warned them about the judgment that was coming, and He told Israel, “So that you do not get swept up in this, I am going to make a way out.” This judgment was going to be overwhelming once it came. There would be no way of escaping. It would hit Pharaoh’s house down to the house of the laborers on the other side of town. It would hit everybody.
There was going to be no escape from this judgment except the way God laid out. Does this start to sound familiar? God’s judgment is going to be overwhelming once it comes, and there is no escaping it except for the one escape path He has made. And by the way, even though He makes this promise to Israel, He says everyone behind that blood is going to be saved. He does not say only the Israelites who are behind that blood. If an Egyptian took refuge behind the blood, he would be saved as well.
There was only one means of escape, and that was to take refuge behind the blood of the lamb. The lamb and its blood were literally going to be the difference between life and death. Each family, each Hebrew family, is instructed in verse 21 to take a lamb and sacrifice it. There are some things about that lamb we need to recognize because they will come up later.
Taking Refuge Behind the Blood
The lamb was supposed to be spotless. It was supposed to be a year-old lamb, which sounds like a baby to us, but the lamb was in the prime of its life. According to verse 6, the lamb was going to be sacrificed before the people of Israel. They were not necessarily going back into some private area to do this. They were bringing their lambs out in front of the assembly of the congregation of Israel, as the passage says, and sacrificing these lambs.
The blood was to be collected in basins, and they were to take a hyssop branch. If you are not familiar with that, it may seem 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 that, because of the way the flowers were arranged, it worked well as a brush.
So God says they are to take this hyssop, a symbol of cleansing, dip it in the blood, and paint the blood on the lintel, the top frame of the door, and on the doorposts, the sides. They were to have this covering of blood on the door frame. Once that was painted, they would take refuge inside the house behind the blood, according to verse 22. God even warned them, “Do not go outside.” There was nothing outside worth incurring the judgment of God. They were to stay hidden behind that blood.
At some point during the night, verse 23 tells us that the destroyer, this angel of death as some translations call it, was going to see the blood as he made his way through the streets and villages of Egypt. He would see the blood on the Hebrew doors and pass over those houses. Everyone inside, sheltering behind that blood, would be saved from what was to come.
I know we look at this, and in our modern minds we say, “This makes no sense. How could God do this? This is not fair.” We might say not everybody in Egypt participated, but the nation as a whole participated. For 400 years, people had been victimized. We look at evil circumstances, suffering, pain, and oppression, and we say, “How could God let this go on?” Then when God does something to stop it, we say, “How could God do such a thing?” Do you see where we have painted God into a no-win situation? We get mad if He does not do something, and then we impugn His character when He does.
It is much better to look at it and say, “God knows what He is doing.” For Israel, this was a moment of salvation. Not only was this plague going to come through and finally bring Egypt to its knees so that they would send the Israelites away and give them an opportunity to escape, but God was also making a way of salvation for the Israelites so they would not be harmed by this plague.
This is a testament to God’s grace, because Israel was not perfect either. These same people being set free from slavery in Egypt are the same people who, in just a couple of 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 simply said, “I am going to send an angel to wipe out everything in Egypt, not just the firstborn, but everything in Egypt, including the Israelites,” He would have been well within His rights to do so. But God says, “I am going to come into this situation, and I am going to bring salvation.”
He chose to do so through this lamb. The blood was painted on the doors, and the blood did a couple of things. First, the blood identified them as belonging to God. When that angel of death came through Egypt and saw the blood, it was not that the blood of those lambs was somehow magical. It was not like Superman and kryptonite, where the angel cannot go past the blood because he is scared or allergic to it. That blood meant the people behind that door belonged to God.
The blood also spared them from the coming judgment. Not because everyone in that house was perfect, and 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.
Remembering Salvation and Teaching the Children
God does this thing and tells them, “I want you to remember this.” Several things we have looked at in recent months, especially where the Old Testament is concerned, include God telling His people, “Remember this. Remember this and teach your children. Remember this and pass it down to future generations. Show them what happened.”
That is part of what we are doing when we observe the Lord’s Supper. We are reminding ourselves and teaching future generations what Jesus Christ did for us. I do not get to experience this a lot because I am normally up front when we observe the Lord’s Supper, but I have been around small children enough, and I have had enough conversations with my wife afterward, to know there tend to be questions. “Why are you eating and drinking that? Why don’t I get to have some? What does that mean?” Those questions give us conversations about what Jesus did.
As Israel ate the lamb, the unleavened bread, and all the things God told them to eat, those same kinds of questions would come up. “What does this mean? Why are we doing this? Why do we do this every year? Why can I participate in this part?” And they would get to have those conversations about what God had done.
The commemoration of the Passover was a reminder of God’s salvation. God spends the latter part of this passage laying that out for them. Not only were they going to sacrifice this lamb one time, and not only were they going to eat the bread that He talks about before the passage we read, but they were going to do this year in and year out as a reminder so future generations would never forget what happened.
The way God used this lamb to deliver His people was a lesson God intended them to remember forever. So He instituted this annual Passover, and in verse 25, God says that when He delivers them into the promised land, He wants them to keep doing this. He is specific. This is supposed to continue even once they get into the land He promised.
I think the reason for that is that we tend to remember God in hard times, and then when we get into good times again, He kind of fades from memory. That is why some of our greatest times of spiritual growth, some of the times our faith grows the strongest and fastest, are times when we are struggling. We endure those times of struggle, and we have to hit our knees just to get through it. We cry out from moment to moment for God to do something, for God to fix it.
When He does, we are so grateful, and then things go back to normal and we forget how much we rely on God. God said, “I do not only want you to remember what I have done here while you are in Egypt.” Even though they did not know they were going to wander in the wilderness for 40 years, God already knew. He said, “I do not even only want you to remember this during the 40 years.”
They were going to need the reminder during those 40 years. Times were going to be hard, but God can deliver us because God has already delivered us from Egypt. They were going to need that reminder. But He said, “Once you come into the promised land, do not forget.” When all the promises come true, when you are where you want to be, when things are going well for you and life is as it should be, that is the time you most need to remember what God has done to bring you to that point.
This commemoration was a reminder of what God had done, and it was an opportunity to teach their children about His salvation in verses 26 and 27. Make sure the lesson does not die with you. Make sure that the generation that came out of Egypt does not remember this for the rest of their lives and then let it go no further. What benefit would that be to the nation of Israel?
This was not just God saving a generation of people. It was God saving that nation. So He says, “Your children need to remember this.” And just as an aside, as we were in the book of Joel, God told Israel through Joel, “Make sure your kids know what happened with this plague of locusts. Make sure your children know what happened when I delivered you from it. Make sure they know what happened.”
It is not a bad thing to make sure your children and grandchildren know about the struggles you have gone through, how God brought you through them, and how they can see the track record of God’s faithfulness in your life. Of course, you want to keep those stories and what you divulge age appropriate. But if you can look back and see where you came from, where you are now, and how God has worked to get you from there to here, there is nothing wrong with letting them know that.
Throughout Israel’s history, every time they were called to take a step of faith, they frequently stopped and remembered all of their failings and yet how God had worked in each situation. When we stop in those moments of difficulty, when we are called to take a leap of faith, it is not blind faith. It is faith in God’s track record, God’s past performance. When you stop and say, “God has done this, and God has done that,” it gives you the courage to step out and trust God again.
In my own life, there have been circumstances where I have said, “I do not know whether I can do this, what God is calling me to do, or how God is calling me to handle this next step.” I have had to stop and breathe and think, “God has taken care of this. God has done that. God has worked out this situation when I never thought it would work out.” You begin to recount God’s faithfulness, and it gives you courage and confidence to take that next step forward.
For Israel to continue to trust God, they needed to remember how God had delivered them in the past. So they were told to teach their children. If that is where the story ended, that would be incredible enough: God sending this plague to finally convince Egypt to let go of the slaves who had made them so wealthy and powerful for four centuries, and God doing so in a way that protected Israel from the same plague. That would be an incredible enough story, but it points to something else in the future.
Jesus, Our Passover Lamb
Elsewhere in Scripture, we see that what lambs accomplished for a moment, Jesus accomplished forever. This is not just me pulling things out at random and trying to make them fit. The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 5 talks about Jesus being our Passover Lamb, and we see these comparisons through the book of Hebrews as well. This was not a coincidence. This was intentional.
John the Baptist called Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. If Jesus was not that, He would have told him, “That is not an accurate thing to call Me.” But He accepted that title. He is our Passover Lamb.
We can see some of the parallels. This is another instance where, if you go looking for Him and see what other people have written, I would encourage you sometime to do that with some of these Old Testament stories. Read through them and see what jumps out at you as far as how they parallel the story of Jesus. Do it on your own, and then consult what some other people have written.
I did that with the Passover lamb this week. I found some people who had really long lists, and some of their parallel details seemed like a bit of a stretch. I do not want to just come up here and make things up. But these are the parallels I see and think make sense.
The lamb was supposed to be without blemish. Jesus was without sin. The stories of His temptation tell us He was tempted as we are, yet without sin. The Apostle Paul calls Him “He who knew no sin” and says He was made to become sin for us, that He took responsibility for our sins because He had none of His own. Even when His worst enemies and fiercest critics were trying to find an excuse to put Him to death, they realized they had to make it up.
The Gospels tell us they had to make up stories about Jesus because He had given them no rope to hang Him with. He had never done anything wrong. He was a lamb without blemish.
He was crucified during the Passover. There is debate about whether He was crucified the day before Passover, when they sacrificed the lambs, or the morning after Passover. Different people have different views on that. The point is that He was crucified during the Passover time.
We are told in the book of Exodus that when they slaughtered, prepared, cooked, and even ate the Passover lamb, not one bone of that lamb was supposed to be broken. I already see some of you nodding your heads because the book of Psalms talks about the Messiah and says not one bone of His would be broken. When Jesus was crucified, John tells us that to speed things along, because the people had Passover observances to get to, the Romans were going to break the legs of the three men on the crosses so they would die more quickly. But when they came to Jesus, they found He was already dead, and they did not have to break His bones. John ties that back to this.
When they ate the Passover lamb, they were supposed to eat it quickly. You would think that something religious and respectful like this should be done calmly and reservedly. Instead, they were almost supposed to scarf it down like they were running out the door, to commemorate the flight from Egypt. I have some kids who would be excellent at this. God even says through Moses, “Do not keep any leftovers.” It is all supposed to be gone.
They were also surprised at how quickly Jesus’ death occurred. Pilate was shocked at how quickly He had died. But the most telling parallel of all is that the Bible treats His blood as the covering for our sins and our only refuge from the judgment of God.
Not only did they have to offer this lamb, but every day they were offering lambs at the tabernacle and later at the temple. They were offering sacrifices, sin offerings, to cover their sins temporarily, and they had to do it over and over and over. That must have taken a huge toll on the sheep population after a while. Yet the book of Hebrews calls Jesus our High Priest and says our High Priest does not need daily, like those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the sins of the people, because He did this once for all when He offered up Himself.
Tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of offerings of sheep could never atone for our sin. They could never bring us lasting peace with God. They could never exempt us from judgment. But Jesus Christ, with one sacrifice, with one act where His blood was shed, gave us blood to hide behind. That great Passover Lamb gave us blood to cover our sins for all time and to take refuge behind from the judgment of God for all time.
All you and I have to do is look at Him as the ultimate sacrifice and trust in what He did. We do not have to make further sacrifices. We do not have to earn it from God. The sin has been paid for and covered once for all time.
Hiding Behind the Blood
The judgment of God is certain. The world gets mad sometimes and says, “It is narrow-minded to say there is only one way to God.” But that is one way more than we deserved. It is one way more than I deserved. It is a testament to the grace of God that He made a way out to begin with.
If we want to be hidden and sheltered from the judgment of God that we deserve, the blood of Christ, the blood of that Passover Lamb, is the only way. What that means for you this morning is that you must acknowledge that you have sinned against God. In your words, in your actions, and in your thoughts, we have all disobeyed God. That incurs a penalty, and we are separated from Him, not just now, but throughout eternity. The judgment on that sin that we deserve is coming.
So we believe that Jesus died in our place to pay for our sins, that He shed His blood to pay for our sins. We believe that He paid for them in full. We believe that He rose again to prove it. And we ask God to forgive us because Jesus has already paid for it. That is how you and I hide behind the blood.