We have reached the central act of the book of Exodus. The departure of the slave nation of Israel from Egypt (the great imperial power of the ancient Near East) is the hinge upon which the book of Exodus turns. And it is the event to which the rest of the Old Testament looks back more than to any other – one great revealing act of how God saves men and women.
Thank you for your patience with another long reading (although after the 91 verses we had read last week you may have felt that this week’s 67 verses were a mere paltry snippet, and you may even have felt a little short-changed by them). As you heard, chapters 12 and 13 of Exodus are actually a slightly confusing mixture of quite detailed instruction about the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread with fast-moving narrative. So rather than working our way through verse by verse and paragraph by paragraph, as we customarily do, we are going to focus on three clear themes running through this passage:
1. Judgment and Death
2. Sacrifice and Substitution
3. Remembrance and Memorial.
1) Judgment and Death
We need to remember the point we have reached in the story. Please glance back to chapter 5, verse 2 – a verse I’ve kept returning to as I’ve been trying to understand these early chapters of the book of Exodus. Moses and Aaron come to Pharaoh for the first time, and Pharaoh says this: “Who is the Lord, that I should obey him and let Israel go?” I have been realising, studying these chapters, that that question is more important than I first grasped: “Who is the Lord, that I should obey him?” We ask that every day of our lives, don’t we? Who is God, that I should do as He says? Obeying God is all about identifying God. Why should we do what He says, unless He is …. who He says He is? We’re going to use a modern parable to remind ourselves of this aspect of the story so far, from the moment when God, as it were, came knocking at Pharaoh’s door.
The Last Word
(adapted from B. Morris)
“Who are you?” said the Prime Minister, opening the door.
“I am God,” replied the stranger.
“I don’t believe you,” sneered the Prime Minister. “Show me a miracle.” And God showed the Prime Minister the miracle of birth.
“Pah!” said the Prime Minister. “Our scientists are creating life in test tubes and have nearly solved the secret of heredity. Artificial insemination is more certain than your lackadaisical method, and by genetic engineering we are producing fish and mammals to our own design. Show me a proper miracle.” And God caused the sky to darken and hailstones came pouring down.
“That’s nothing,” said the Prime Minister, picking up the telephone to the Ministry of Defence. “Send up a Met. plane, would you please, and sprinkle the clouds with silver-chloride crystals?” And the Met. plane went up and sprinkled the clouds which had darkened the world, and the hailstones stopped pouring down, and the sun shone brightly.
“Show me another,” said the Prime Minister. And God caused a plague of frogs to descend upon the land.
The Prime Minister picked up his telephone. “Get the Department of the Environment,” he said to his private secretary, “and instruct them to procure a frog-killer just as effective as myxomatosis was with rabbits.” And soon the land was free of frogs, and the people gave thanks to the Prime Minister and erected laboratories in his name.
“Show me another,” sneered the Prime Minister. And God caused the sea to divide. The Prime Minister picked up his direct-link telephone to the Polaris submarine. “Lob a nuclear warhead into Antarctica and melt the ice-cap, please.” And the ice-cap melted into water and the sea came rushing back.
“I will kill all the first-born,” said God.
“Paltry tricks,” said the Prime Minister, “watch this!” He pressed the button on his desk and missiles flew to their pre-ordained destinations, and nuclear explosions split the world asunder, and radioactivity killed every living thing.
“I can raise the dead,” said God.
“Please,” said the Prime Minister in his cardboard coffin, “let me live again.”
“Why? Who are you?” said God, closing the lid.
It is an issue of identification: how each one of us relates to God depends on who we think God is. And God’s judgment establishes His identity: that is the fearful lesson of those Ten Plagues. It took the most awful night in Egypt’s history for Pharaoh to grasp who God was. Look now at chapter 11, just at the end of last week’s passage: ‘So Moses said, “This is what the Lord says: ‘About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave-girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt – worse than there has ever been or ever will be again’ ” ’ (11:4-6). Now look on to verses 29 & 30 of chapter 12: ‘At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well. Pharaoh and all his officials and all the Egyptians got up during the night, and there was loud wailing in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead.’ For Egypt to learn that God was God, every Egyptian family had to lose its most precious possession.
And that judgement was the direct action of God: “On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn – both men and animals – and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the Lord” (12:12). It wasn’t some impersonal force, some abstract principle of retribution. It was God establishing His identity with those who refused to acknowledge Him. It was not capricious or vicious, this slaying of the first-born. It followed 9 plagues of increasing severity, each of which had been predicted and interpreted in turn by Moses. But remember how we learned last week that the last three plagues gave Pharaoh no further opportunity to repent (in chapters 10 and 11). They were not for his benefit (a sort of last chance), they were to provide the Israelites, and all of us, with a picture of hell: the destruction of the locusts, the darkness and then death – the ultimate destination of all who refuse to acknowledge who God is.
So the background to the Passover is the judgment of God. When God said “Eat it in haste,” (12:11), apparently the Hebrew could be: “Eat it in fear”. As they heard the screams and wails of grief from the houses of their Egyptian neighbours, I doubt there was any complacency among the Israelites. I guess they sensed the awful price that was being paid by those who resisted the will of God – those who refused to acknowledge who He was (as there has always been).
And notice that, unlike earlier plagues, at this point the Jews were not safe simply because of their race. There had to be sacrifice and substitution (our second point).
2) Sacrifice and Substitution
Look again at those verses in the middle of chapter 12: “On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn – both men and animals – and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the Lord. The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt” (vv 12, 13). And then look on to verse 21: ‘Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, “Go at once and select all the animals for your families and slaughter the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it into the blood in the basin and put some of the blood on the top and on both sides of the door-frame. Not one of you shall go out of the door of his house until morning. When the Lord goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the door-frame and will pass over that doorway, and he will not permit the destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down” ’ (12:21-23).
Now, what on earth is going on here? It is not as though God in His omniscience needed a red marker on the door to tell Him which house was Jewish and which Egyptian. But then, on the other hand, what kind of a gory God is this, who must see blood before He can forego judgment? Well, we notice from chapter 12, that this Passover lamb was a sacrifice: not in the sense that a priest was involved, nor an altar nor a temple. It was not that sort of cultic sacrifice – more of a family meal, I guess, like Christmas dinner. But it was costly (did you notice that from verse 5?) – a perfect young sheep or goat in its prime; it was to be killed and its blood put on the doorframe (vv. 6, 7). It was to be cooked according to precise instructions: roasted with bitter herbs and unleavened bread (vv. 8, 9); and it was to be consumed in its entirety – all of it had to be eaten or burned by morning (v. 10) – and it had to be consumed in a specific manner (v. 11). It was a sacrifice, but it was also a substitute: each lamb or kid was carefully identified with one family or more. There had to be an exact correspondence between the lamb and the number of those who would eat it (vv. 3, 4). It had to be chosen and then kept by that family until the Passover (v. 6). Then its blood on the door would protect all those within that house (v. 13 again, that central verse): “The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.” Notice that the blood was not a sign to the Israelites that God would not harm them because of their race (although I think that if I had been an Israelite eldest son, I would have made very sure that my dad did not forget to sprinkle the blood on the doorframe of our home, and the sight of it would have been a very great reassurance to me, as I heard the wailing begin that fateful night).
No, the blood was actually a sign for the Israelites to God, a sign that in that house there had already been a death, that those within had availed themselves of the way God had provided in order to escape the universal judgment that was sweeping over the land of Egypt. They were safe if there was blood between them and the angel – and that was the only way to be safe: it wasn’t enough just to be a circumcised Jew if you were an eldest son in Egypt that night. “The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (v. 13). And then, later in the chapter, when Moses is repeating God’s teaching, he says it again: “When the Lord goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the door-frame and will pass over that doorway, and he will not permit the destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down” (v. 23).
Look on to the end of that little section: ‘ … there was not a house without someone dead’ (v. 30b). There had to be a death in every home in Egypt that night: either a dead lamb or a dead son. There was no other sort of home in the land. And what a picture that provides for you and for me! There has only ever been one human being who has not said at so many points in his/her life, “Who is the Lord that I should obey Him?” You’ve said it and I’ve said it – even today, every time our consciences have told us what is right to do, but we have chosen not to do it, we have been saying, “Who is the Lord that I should obey Him?” And God rightly establishes His identity by judging that rebellion against Him. We all come under that judgment. We deserve the destruction, the darkness and the death – the total absence of God and of all good, because we have chosen not to have Him rule in our lives. But God has Himself provided a lamb – the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, as John the Baptist described his cousin Jesus by the Jordan river, centuries later.
So in every life there has to be a death – either of the lamb or, eventually, of the individual – the eternal death, separation from God and all that is good for ever. At the end of this morning’s service many were rather surprised to discover it was raining. Imagine that there were to be a torrential thunderstorm now and at the door I were to offer you an umbrella and say, “Go on – you can take this.” You might refuse it for all sorts of reasons – but the one certain thing would be that either you took it and opened it and sheltered under it or you got wet on your way home. Either you get wet or it gets wet in your place. We could make up all sorts of excuses, but either Jesus dies for my sins or I will die for them myself. That is true of every person in church at the moment.
And this Substitute Sacrifice is so important, so central to all God’s dealings with us, that there is a third insistent theme in our passage: the theme of Remembrance and Memorial.
3) Remembrance and Memorial
What God did for His people on that first Passover night and in rescuing them from Egypt was never, ever to be forgotten, as far as He was concerned. Notice what trouble was taken to that end: an annual festival was to be observed in order that each succeeding generation might understand the true meaning of the event. Their calendar would date from it. Let’s just glance through from the beginning of chapter 12 to see how insistent this is in the passage as these verses show: “This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year” (v. 2); “This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord – a lasting ordinance” (v. 14); “Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. In the first month …. ” (v. 17); “Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the Lord will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony. And when your children ask you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians’ ” (vv. 24-27a); “Because the Lord kept vigil that night to bring them out of Egypt, on this night all the Israelites are to keep vigil to honour the Lord for the generations to come” (v. 42). And on we go into chapter 13: ‘Then Moses said to the people, “Commemorate this day, the day you came out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, because the Lord brought you out of it with a mighty hand … you will observe this ceremony in this month … ” ’ (13:3-5); “On that day tell your son, ‘I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’ This observance will be for you like a sign on your hand and a reminder on your forehead that the law of the Lord is to be on your lips. For the Lord brought you out of Egypt with his mighty hand. You must keep this ordinance at the appointed time year after year” (vv. 8-10); “In days to come when your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ say to him, ‘With a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go the Lord killed every firstborn in Egypt, both man and animal. That is why I sacrifice to the Lord the first male offspring of every womb and redeem each of my firstborn sons.’ And it will be like a sign on your hand and a symbol on your forehead that the Lord brought us out of Egypt with his mighty hand” (vv. 14-16).
I think you will agree that I was not exaggerating when I said that this was an insistent note in the passage. It’s there again and again and again. In fact the story is made quite confused by the way much of the detailed instructions concerning the future observing of this event are recorded before the event itself has taken place. But we have already discovered in our studies in Exodus that that is exactly how God works. We are so slow to understand God’s deeds that He explains His deeds in advance to us …. repeatedly, just as He kept telling Moses about the plagues before they actually happened (I think we counted 8 times that God told Moses what was going to happen, how the plagues were going to be received in Egypt and what would happen as a result of them before they actually took place). God’s deeds are sandwiched by God’s words. Thinking about this, it struck me that it’s just the same as Jesus instituting the Communion before the Crucifixion. Has that ever struck you as a puzzling way to do it? Would it not have been much easier afterwards? How puzzling it must have been on that first Maundy Thursday evening, when with those eleven disciples in the upper room Jesus broke the bread and said, “This is my body,” and then poured out the red wine and said, “This is my blood”! How morbid and macabre and cryptic that must have seemed at the time! And how much easier after His crucifixion and His resurrection! But God knows best how human understanding works.
As far as we were told, there was no lamb on the table at that Last Supper. But every Passover lamb that had ever died over the centuries had been a little fleecy signpost pointing to what was to happen to Jesus the next day at Calvary, as He cried out in agony, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and bore the punishment for our sins in His own body on the tree, the substitutionary sacrifice for human beings.
But, if we are slow to understand these great truths about God, we are also extremely quick to forget them, once we have understood them. Hence the almost obsessional concern in these verses with the vivid communication of the faith from one generation to the next. Notice it was behaviour designed to elicit enquiry from the young. Three times it comes: “When your son asks you …” Look again at verses 24-27 of chapter 12: “Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the Lord will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony. And when your children ask you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.’ ” It isn’t very hard to imagine the scene, is it? Dad brings home a lamb and it lives with the family. Just when everyone is getting really fond of it and has got used to its smell in the kitchen, he cuts its throat on the kitchen table. If you don’t think that is the sort of behaviour that will elicit enquiry from the young, try going home and executing the hamster! The faith is taught to the young as they ask the question, "Why?” And not just, “Why do we have to go to church?”, but why do we live differently from other people in this household? Why do we give more money away? Why do we live more simply? Why do we have less possessions? Why do we show more hospitality than other people do? Why am I being brought up in this strange household? Why do we go on cheaper holidays? Why do we have such different priorities from other families at school? The faith is taught to the young as they ask the question, “Why?” And remember, the answer is more important than the question. Look again at the last little bit of our passage: “In days to come when your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ say to him, ‘With a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go the Lord killed every firstborn in Egypt, both man and animal. That is why I sacrifice to the Lord the first male offspring of every womb and redeem each of my firstborn sons.’ ” (13:14, 15). “Because God saved us.” “Why should we go to church?” “Because God provided His own Son as a Lamb who died in our place.” “Why do we live differently?” “Because God has sent His Son to die for us.” That is what has made us different – not to try to gain favour with Him, but because He has done that for us.
Notice, finally, a last point today. This is where our relationship with God begins. Go back to that second verse of our passage. Notice that the Israelite religious year was to begin with this festival: “This month is to be to you the first month, the first month of your year” (12:2). It began with rescue. That is where our testimony begins too. If you are fortunate to be able to recall an actual day when you first put your faith in Jesus Christ and came to know God for yourself, be grateful. I am so grateful to the person who helped me into the kingdom that he marked the date for me. I would never have known it for myself, just as you would not have known the date of your own physical birthday if other people hadn’t told you. And for 33 years that particular person has sent me a ‘spiritual birthday card’ on February 7th. The day God opened my eyes, saved me from my sin, and enabled me to answer for myself Pharaoh’s question with which we began: “Who is the Lord, that I should obey him?” It begins by being saved, at the cross of Jesus Christ.
When God comes to call, what will you offer? A debate about His identity (“Well, it all depends on what you mean by God”)? Your own religious and moral record (“I’ve always done my best”)? Or the blood of a Lamb? Amen.