Sermon Transcript
From Exodus chapter 12, verses 21 through 32. Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, go and select lambs for yourselves according to your clans and kill the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin and touch the lintel and the 2 doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning, for the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the 2 doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you. You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and for your sons forever.
And when you come to the land that the Lord will give you, as he has promised you shall keep this service. And when your children say to you, what do you mean by this service? You shall say, it is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses. And the people bowed their heads and worshiped. Then the people of Israel went and did so as the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron.
Aaron, so they did. At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians, and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead. Then he summoned Moses and Aaron by night and said, up, go out from among my people, both you and the people of Israel, and go serve the Lord as you have said. Take your flocks and your herds as you have said and be gone and bless me also.
Many times a lot of life seems to happen all at once. You’ve been going along doing the same thing day in and day out for years, and then almost out of nowhere, the company reorganizes, maybe your kids get married or have a kid, or you get the phone call about the opportunity you always wanted but you had given up on, and everything changes. Before that moment, life seemed like it would never change. It would just go on forever how it was, and then in a blink of an eye, life was totally different and would never be the same. Ever again.
The story of the Passover in the Bible is like that. The Israelites had been enslaved to the Egyptians for 400 years, treated poorly, bound to indefinite servitude, seemed like it would never end. Pharaohs had come and gone, generations had come and gone, but day in, day out, remaining quite similar and quite oppressive for the Israelites. For them, it would have been so easy to be lulled into believing this is the way that it will always be. It would be so easy to have lost hope that God would ever do anything about their plight.
If you’ve been a nation of slaves for 400 years, you probably can’t even conceive of anything anything else. God’s promise way back when to their ancestor Abraham that God would bless their nation, that promise had to ring pretty hollow because the only thing any of them had ever known was slavery. No one even knew of someone who could remember what Israel was like before they were enslaved. So for however many Israelites were still clinging to belief in God of their ancestors who had promised to bless their nation. Those Israelites must have been asking, where is he?
Why isn’t he doing anything about the harsh conditions that we’re enduring? And then there also had to be other Israelites who had stopped asking where God was altogether because maybe this God who supposedly spoke to Abraham was just a faint memory of past generations, or a lie, not real, not worthy of attention or even questioning because he hasn’t done anything for 400 years, and if he is there, he must be pretty irrelevant to our lives. It would have been easy to think that after 400 years of slavery. But as often happens, God was about to do a whole lot all at once. God speaks to Moses through a burning bush.
God tells Moses, you are going to lead my people of Egypt, God tells Moses to go to Pharaoh and demand that Pharaoh free the Israelites. Pharaoh says no, like God said he would, and then God brings a series of plagues onto the Egyptians, the final plague of which we read kills all the firstborn children in Egypt while it passes over the houses of the Israelites. And Pharaoh finally releases the Israelites from their slavery and they escape out of Egypt, head to the desert. That’s the Passover. That’s the beginning of the Exodus, their journey away from Egypt.
As we study this fairly famous section of Scripture this morning, I mean, movies have been made about it, you probably have some familiarity with it already, but as we study, we will see the sovereignty of God, the message of the firstborn, and then the Lamb that we all need. The sovereignty of God, the message of the firstborn, and then the Lamb that we all need. So first, the sovereignty of God is unrivaled. A number of scholars have noted the 10 plagues on Egypt were not random disasters, but they were all related to the gods of the Egyptians. In some way.
So a brief summary of the 10 plagues in case they’re not on the top of your brain this morning. The Nile River turned to blood, there were swarms of gnats, flies, locusts, there was an infestation of frogs, the livestock died, people broke out in boils all over their skin, hail fell from the sky, darkness blotted out the sun, and finally the firstborn all died. In each one of those, Israel’s God is discrediting a specific belief of the Egyptians, and He is showing Himself as the unrivaled true God. So, for instance, the Egyptians worshiped the Nile River as a source of life. So, God made it a source of death, turned it to blood so nothing could live in it.
It was a way to communicate the Nile isn’t the source of life, Israel’s God is the source of life. They worship frogs as a type of fertility worship. So, God gave them more frogs than had ever been fertilized before. What they had hoped in for like an increase in their population, you know, future generations, it’s now their problem. There’s frogs everywhere.
They worshiped locusts or swarms out of a type of reverence or fear because swarms with an agricultural society could be very destructive, ruining entire harvests. So, they hoped if they paid enough honor to these swarm gods, their harvest would be protected. But God shows them their tribute to these supposed gods had bought them nothing. It’s Israel’s God who has control over the swarms. They’ve been paying tribute to the wrong deity.
They worshiped bulls as a symbol of strength. They would even mummify particular bulls and put them in the tombs. But Israel’s God shows them the symbol of their strongest strength, the bull, isn’t strong at all and can be wiped out in a second. They worshiped a number of healing deities. When these boils broke out on everyone, these healing deities and their sorcerers were powerless against the God of Israel.
And perhaps most of all, the Egyptians worshiped the sun. You may have heard of Ra. So, God, the God of Israel brings about some kind of eclipse and Ra is darkened. The point is these deities had no power compared to the God of Israel. What they had placed their hope in, what they had counted on to bring them success, disintegrated.
And we would be wise to pay attention to that lesson. Here’s Egypt, the most powerful, sophisticated, technologically advanced society society in the history of the world. They thought they had it all figured out, and you have to give it to them. They invented batteries, for crying out loud. They built the pyramids to a level of precision that we still don’t know how they did it.
Maybe they had some supernatural influence from one of these supposed gods, but whatever they were doing, it was working. So they were pretty confident they knew how to navigate the world, how to navigate gods. You know, we have to pay homage to this god over here. We know who runs the Nile. We’ve built impressive structures.
We rule unchecked in the region. And sure, ultimately it’s the gods who are in charge, but we know how to buy them off, get them on our side. So really, if we’re buying them off, it’s us who are in charge. They thought they had it, and for good reason. They were were unrivaled compared to the nations around them.
And doesn’t that sound familiar? Doesn’t that sound like us who believe we do a pretty good job of controlling our world? And yeah, sure, there’s a few forces outside of our control or for a limited period of time like some virus, but for the most part we got it. We are the most sophisticated society in the history of the world. Nothing can stop us.
Our confidence really is pretty justified, like theirs was, but be careful. We have to pay attention to the narrative. Egypt was a society at its pinnacle and it collapsed, and they were unable to do anything about it because everything they trusted in to be able to provide their their gods, their technology. It didn’t work. We need to listen to that narrative because that moment will come in our lives.
Not might come, will come in our lives. Probably for our society as well, probably. The US won’t be here forever. But most likely, I hope, before it happens in our society, society, it will happen in your life and in my life. We all live under the quasi-delusion that we individually have it all figured out.
We’ve paid off the right gods, so to speak, uh, the Dow Jones, the college degree, the antioxidants, the sunscreen, right? We think, I’ve done everything right, I’m gonna be okay. But there will come a moment in your life, in my life, when you realize there is nothing you can do to stabilize your world. That moment will come. And in that moment, what do we do?
Do we shake our fists at the heavens, angry that God has shown Himself to be in charge?
Angry at God because we aren’t in charge? Is that what we do?
Or do we submit to the One who is actually in charge?
Got it? Okay, that’s one lesson from the story. God is sovereign. Nothing else is. Nothing else ever will be.
It’s important. Next lesson, which is probably more difficult to hear and to admit because it relates to the last plague on the firstborn. And the plague on the firstborn is by far the most troubling part of the Passover story. We didn’t cover all the plagues in the first point. We left one off.
God didn’t just bring a plague on animals, crops, weather, and skin. He brought a plague children, likely thousands of them. And if there is anything that would ever make us shake our fists at heaven, it would be if something happened to our kids.
Surprisingly, the Egyptians, when they reacted to the plague on the firstborn, they reacted both the same as we would react and they also reacted very differently different from how we would react. For us, most— much of our emotions probably come from the perception of the injustice of the death of the firstborn children of an entire nation. We think it is wrong for God to allow such a thing or to do such a thing. We accuse God of being cruel or unfair. And, of course, also, we, like, we feel the loss of it.
We believe it’s a tragedy. It’s unimaginably sad, we grieve, but maybe more than like the grief itself, it’s that we think that God is unfair or God is wrong to do that. That’s us. That was not the Egyptians. The Egyptians obviously cried out in despair like we would.
It was heart-wrenching for them, of course, but they never accused God of wrongdoing. They never thought God was unfair or unjust for taking the firstborn, which is not like us. They’re very different from us. And to understand why, we need to remove ourselves from our own cultural presumptions and look at the events as the Egyptians did. The Egyptian culture, the Israelite culture, and many cultures still today are way more what is called collectivist than we are.
We in the not collectivist. We are by far the most individualistic society that has ever existed on the planet. And there are pluses and minuses to individualism. It’s not all good, it’s not all bad, but it’s the way we are. But in the US, your success is yours alone.
Your guilt is yours alone. And if your neighbor gets into some kind of trouble, you may think that’s his problem. Like if you hear a car alarm go off, What’s the only thing that you think? Is that my car? And if it’s not my car, then, oh well, you know, too bad.
You don’t— it’s like you’re not as concerned for somebody else as you would be for yourself, and your neighbor likely thinks the same thing about you. We have the strongest sense of not my problem out of any culture that has ever existed. Existed. We’re very individualistic. So for us, problems, successes, honor, guilt, they are not shared by the community.
It’s just the individual. But that’s not the way that most cultures are even today, and that’s certainly not the way the ancient cultures were. Both shame and honor were collective. They were shared by families in particular. If one member had success, the whole family succeeded.
They considered it their victory, kind of like maybe if your sports team wins the championship and you say, we won the championship, we did it, even though you were sitting on your couch the whole time, right? It’s still your championship, like you feel like you participated in it somehow. So they were like that except to the nth degree. Degree. An individual may not even use the phrase, my success, because individual success is the family’s success.
In the same way, if one person in the family has guilt, it’s on the whole family. The whole family is shamed. The whole family pays for it, so to speak. And it was most represented by the firstborn. The firstborn carried the status of the family most of all.
The firstborn carried the honor of his parents or the shame of his parents. He would, more than anyone else, one way or another, pay for their mistakes, their sin, their shame. He carried the debt. He represents the debt, the family debt. Debt because it’s collective and every family has debt and they knew it.
They even had ceremonies to represent it. You see this sprinkled throughout the Old Testament but these cultures would do something called redeem their firstborn. It was a kind of buying back the firstborn from the family debt that he was carrying. Some Jewish communities still practice this ceremony today. It’s pay literal silver coins to redeem the firstborn back to the family because he’s carrying the debt of guilt for the whole family.
But at the same time, the ceremony, the coins, that was all way more symbolic than anything else because they realized a few coins don’t really cover what we owe. They knew coins couldn’t possibly make up for their shame, their sin. They knew their sin was bigger than what you can just pay off with silver. It was just a way to acknowledge and to confess kind of to the world and the community and remind themselves like, yes, we owe because we have sinned. So, our family owes, our firstborn owes.
So, when the firstborn across Egypt die and it’s only the firstborn that die, the Egyptians understand God is calling in the debt. My son has died for my sins. And they don’t argue. They don’t say it’s unfair. They don’t say it’s unjust.
They’re heartbroken, obviously, but they get it. They understand the God of Israel is the one that we owe. It’s to Him that we are in debt, not these other supposed gods. Pharaoh even asks Moses, will you bless me me as he sends Moses out because he realizes I’m not in correct standing with this God. I need help because I’m in debt.
That’s the message of the firstborn. We all owe a debt to the God of Israel. You’ll notice it’s not just the Egyptians that have the debt, but it’s everyone. Moses says the destroyer is coming to every house— Egyptian houses, Israelite religious houses, irreligious houses, people who say their prayers every day and people who have murdered other people, people who exploit the poor, people who help the poor, the oppressed and the oppressor, the slave and the master, literally, right? Egyptian and Israelite, pagan houses, faithful Jewish houses, everyone.
It’s not the bad people who experience judgment and the good people get out of it. The destroyer visits everyone.
House. Every house has the debt. And the only way this destroyer didn’t take the firstborn is if a family sacrificed a lamb. The destroyer didn’t get to a house and say, okay, let me tally up your pluses and minuses. Let me see if your good outweighs your bad, and then I’ll decide if I’m coming in.
That’s not what he did, or it did. We don’t know what this destroyer is, something God released into the world. It’s coming to every house because every house has guilt. Every house owes the same debt. Moses and Pharaoh owe the same debt.
So, there is zero room for spiritual superiority. It’s easy to fall into the trap that, or to believe that we or our tribe is spiritually superior to other tribes, to think if God came down in judgment, you know, those people over there would really be in trouble, but we’d be okay because we’ve lived a better life. As Christians, it’s easy to look around and say this world has lost all its morals, and it has, right? Corruption, greed, promiscuity off the charts, but we are above all that. We live right, so we are worthy worthy.
We are superior. We will escape judgment because of how we have lived. We are better. It is easy to think that. And if we are not Christians, it is probably easy to judge Christians, to look in disgust at Christians who think they are so holy, to say, look, these Christians, they are being so judgy and exclusive.
We are better than them. We are enlightened, we’re progressive, we’re the worthy ones because of how we live. We have way more good in us than these Christians do.
Whatever tribe you’re in, it’s so easy to look down on others, to think that you’re the one that’s arrived, that you’re the one who would escape judgment because of how you live. But the story of the Passover stands in contradiction to all of that, no one is righteous. The destroyer is coming to every house. Everyone has the same guilt. The only way any family was spared was by the sacrifice of a lamb, to kill it, to have it for dinner, and put some of the blood on the doorpost outside of your house, which brings us to the Lamb that we all need.
The Israelites, of course, didn’t only celebrate the Passover that one time. After they escaped Egypt, they observed the Passover every single year as a lasting ordinance, just like God tells them to do in these verses. That didn’t mean that the destroyer was going to come every year, but they celebrated the meal every year as a reminder that God didn’t call in the debt that He could have, that God passed over over our houses and freed us from slavery. I mean, it’s one of the most cherished parts of Jewish history, and it’s still a big deal today. But the peculiar part of the history of the Passover celebration is that the early Christians in the 1st century who were Jewish, they stopped celebrating the Passover, kind of opposite from what God tells them to do in these verses because God tells them to keep having it.
And that’s odd because in addition to God telling them to do it, it was perhaps the most observed cultural tradition of the year. The early Jewish Christians had grown up celebrating it every year with their family, and their parents had done it every year with their grandparents, and their grandparents had done it every year with their great-grandparents back 1,000 years. But then once Jesus got here, they stopped stopped like that. It didn’t fade away, it stopped all at once. As a small comparison for us, it would be like if we stopped celebrating Christmas or stopped celebrating Easter or Thanksgiving.
If we had been doing this every year with our family for generations and then suddenly we just never did it again, it would indicate something major must have happened, some monumental shift must have taken place. And for them, it was their beliefs about the Passover. Their understanding of the Passover completely changed. They came to believe that Jesus was the true Passover Lamb. They explicitly stated so, 1 Corinthians 5:7, Jesus, our Passover Lamb, has been slain.
That’s explicit, but it’s implicit everywhere. John records none of Jesus’ bones were broken because the Passover lamb could not have spot or blemish. Matthew records the time of day that Jesus died because that’s the time of day that the Passover lamb was supposed to be slain. And then Jesus, on the night He was betrayed, we say this every month, we said it last week, on the night Jesus was betrayed, He met with His disciples for a final meal. But that wasn’t just any meal.
It was the Passover meal. It was the traditional Jewish Passover. It’s the same meal these men had been celebrating with their families for their entire lives. And they would have been accustomed to someone like Jesus, like a father or leadership figure, getting up and speaking after the meal like Jesus did, taking the bread like Jesus took the bread after the meal. And then they would have been expecting Him to rehearse the story.
This is the bread that we ate as God liberated us out of slavery. Let us give thanks that He passed over our houses. It happened every year. So, it was not odd that Jesus began speaking. It was not odd that Jesus picked up the bread.
What is odd is that at this Passover meal, there was no lamb on the table because that’s a pretty important part in the tradition. It’s Passover. We have lamb. So, where is Jesus told His disciples to make preparations for the meal, but there is no indication in any of the accounts that they had lamb for dinner like God mandates you need to have. Why?
Why wouldn’t they have it? Because Jesus is the Lamb. The Lamb that we all need is Jesus. Jesus picks up the bread and said, this is My body. He picks up the cup and says, this is my blood.
There is a lamb at the table and it’s me. There is a lamb to be sacrificed. There is a lamb who will shed his blood for your freedom. There is a lamb who will experience death so that you can escape it. There is a lamb who will pay your debt and it’s me.
I’m the Passover lamb. This bread is my body. Body, this cup is my blood. Eat this in remembrance of me. No longer will you eat the Passover in remembrance of escape from Egypt.
You will eat Passover in remembrance of me. Jesus says, I’m the one who all the years of tradition are about. All those years of families sitting around tables every spring rehearsing the story of the escape from Egypt, all of that was about me.
That’s a big claim. And if someone talks like that, if someone claims that much importance, you have 2 choices. You should either run away as fast as you can because this is the biggest megalomaniac who has ever lived, or you should fall down and worship.
You really can’t remain indifferent to somebody who makes that kind of claim. Jesus either was who he said he was, or we should banish him from all record books. If he wasn’t who he said he was, the last thing we should do is give him any sort of platform in our hearts or minds or media. He would be terribly self-absorbed, and the worst thing you can do with someone like that is give him a microphone.
But if He was who He said He was, then He deserves our full allegiance and worship.
And He was. He is the Passover Lamb we all need to pay our debt, to buy our freedom, to take our death in our place. Jesus is the one who all the stories are about. He is the one who broke us free from our true slavery to sin. He is the one who substituted himself to free us from the wrath that we deserve.
And he is the one that we celebrate and remember. Not that we totally forget the first Passover. That was one instance of God’s faithfulness, and it’s important, but the real meaning of that lamb back then was to point to this Lamb, to point to God Himself paying the price we owe for our redemption. God doesn’t take our firstborn sons.
Instead, He pays the price with His firstborn Son. So, any animosity you have lingering toward God because He demands payment for your debt. You have to balance that with the fact that he pays the debt for you. You may still struggle with concepts like wrath and owing debt, conscious of that with you, but as you work through those struggles, you can’t dismiss or ignore God himself pays our debt for us. So he both demands payment, which you might struggle with, but he also pays it.
No one else does that. No other God does that. Go look at all the other religions. Most of them, nearly all of them in fact, have a concept of debt that needs to be paid, even bad karma. What is that?
It’s debt and you need to make up for it. So nearly all religions have a concept of we owe a debt, but there is only one of them where God pays the debt for you. Every god says you owe. Every god. There’s only one God who says, I will pay.
So when you’re shaking your fist at heaven and telling God that He’s unfair and unjust, just temper your anger with the fact that He pays your debt for you. Jesus is the Passover Lamb we all need. We all need Him. Need Him. Every one of us.
And when we trust Him, our debt before God is totally, completely, fully, and forever paid.
Let’s pray. Father, thank You so much for Jesus. Thank You for speaking to a culture, an ancient culture, in a way that they would understand, Lord. Perhaps it’s not unreasonable for You to speak to a culture such as Egypt in a way that they would understand. You speak to us as well.
I pray that we would hear the message, Lord, that we all owe a debt, but through Jesus and faith in Him, that debt is paid forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. We look to Him, we trust Him, and we thank You for Him. It’s in His name we pray. Amen.
