"A sign for you"

If you have your Bible (and I hope you do), please turn with me to Exodus 12. If you’re able and willing, please stand for the reading of God’s Holy Word. Exodus 12—

Exodus 12:1–13 NIV

1 The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, 2 “This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. 3 Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. 4 If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. 5 The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats. 6 Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the members of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. 7 Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the doorframes of the houses where they eat the lambs. 8 That same night they are to eat the meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs, and bread made without yeast. 9 Do not eat the meat raw or boiled in water, but roast it over a fire—with the head, legs and internal organs. 10 Do not leave any of it till morning; if some is left till morning, you must burn it. 11 This is how you are to eat it: with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste; it is the Lord’s Passover. 12 “On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn of both people and animals, and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the Lord. 13 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.

May the Lord add His blessing to the reading of His Holy Word!

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Looking back on it now, it seems odd that we missed it—the significance, the gravity, the weight of it all. What the Lord was doing for us there in Egypt, how the Lord was working for us in that foreign land is hard to miss now. Hindsight, they say.

The Lord had chosen Moses as our leader, our deliverer. And, boy, we were not nice to him. At one point, we actually called down curses upon the poor guy.

“May the Lord look on you and judge you! You have made us obnoxious to Pharaoh and his officials and have put a sword in their hand to kill us.”

As if this was all Moses’ fault. Poor guy. But he carried on. He trusted the Lord and believed His promises:

Exodus 6:6–8 NIV

6 “Therefore, say to the Israelites: ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. 7 I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. 8 And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the Lord.’ ”

Moses believed the Lord. And he was faithful in relaying to us all that the Lord had said. When Moses came to us and told us what the Lord said He was going to do for us…I…well, I believed it but couldn’t believe it. You know what I mean?

It sounded too good to be true—to be brought out from under the thumb of the Egyptians after more than 400 years? No longer slaves? Redeemed? To finally be given a land that was promised so long ago? Freedom, salvation, adoption, inheritance—that’s unbelievable.

And yet, I believed it. I did. Somewhere down in the depths of me, I believed what Moses was saying. I believed the Lord was going to act to save us, to save me.

>I know you weren’t there, but you’ve heard about all the Lord did there in Egypt; His mighty acts of power and judgment? You’ve heard about the plagues, haven’t you? Of course you have. How could you not?

I mean the River Nile turning to blood; frogs, gnats, flies; their livestock dying, them being covered in boils; that hail storm and the locust; what about the darkness that covered the land for three days? This is front-page-of-the-paper kind of stuff; of course you’ve heard about all that.

Being there, having a front row seat to the work of the Lord, being spared the plagues simply because of who I am, because of who my family is, because we belong to the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob—that’s proof positive, incontrovertible evidence.

I wish I could have believed without seeing; I wish I had the faith to believe at the mere hearing of His Word…

As the Lord worked to bring us, His people, out of Egypt, He was doing something bigger than simply freeing us. He was instituting a holiday, a holy day to remember and celebrate and commemorate forever.

In fact, the Lord rearranged our calendar, scheduling some special days for us to observe. He took the calendar down off the wall, ripped out all the pages, and rearranged the months of the year. All this so that we, His people, would celebrate His final miracle in Egypt as our primary holiday—the holiday that anchors the entire year for us.

The Lord Yahweh decided our year should be theologically oriented. That is, at the beginning of each year—every year during the first month—we would remember God’s great salvation.

God is to be to at the center of our lives. The Lord—the One who saves and frees, rescues and redeems—is to be central to all we do. The change in our calendar is merely reflective of what is most important; it highlights the single most important moment in our lives.

God calls us to keep Him at the center of our lives. He might not switch the months of your calendar around, but you should switch-up your priorities; you should change your life around in order to focus on the Lord and His great salvation. His great salvation should be celebrated weekly, daily. It should be the event that anchors everything else; the very foundation of our lives, of your life.

>The last of the Lord’s plagues on the people of Egypt was devastating. He announced that He would go throughout Egypt and strike down every first born in Egypt, from top to bottom, Pharaoh’s house to the slave’s house; even the firstborn of their cattle would die.

When I heard about this last plague, my heart stopped. How Pharaoh and his people could be so stubborn as to not get it, I have no idea. You’d think the nine plagues before would have opened their eyes, but no.

At the announcement of the last plague, my heart stopped. You see, my dear wife and I have two boys—10 and 7. To think about losing one of them, either of them, is more than I can bear.

What God did to the Egyptians there in Egypt was no surprise. They refused to listen, refused to let us go. Over and over again, they hardened their hearts and treated us horribly.

So that the Lord would take their firstborn, I get that; it’s divine justice. But what took me a while to understand was this: the Lord was going to visit the home of every Israelite the same night He brought death to every house in Egypt.

He would come with the purpose of killing our firstborn sons, my firstborn son!

Through all of the previous plagues, we were spared—the frogs didn’t bother us, neither did the flies or gnats. Our livestock were just fine. No boils. No hail. No locusts. When it was pitch black in Egypt, we were tanning ourselves in the desert sun. We went completely unscathed. God had made a distinction between us and them.

I think some of us were tempted to believe that, though we were God’s people, we could do no wrong. We started to believe that we were more righteous than the Egyptians.

What we learned, quickly and clearly, was that we deserved to die every bit as much as our enemies.

In fact, if God had not provided a means for our salvation, we would have suffered the loss of every last one of our firstborn sons. I would have had to bury my son, my sweet boy…but for the grace of Yahweh.

The final plague taught me about my sin; about my sin and His salvation.

We rejected the word of God’s chosen prophet. I already told you about that, when we cursed the poor fella. The Egyptians wouldn’t listen to God’s Word, but neither did we.

We were guilty of idolatry. Far too many of us adopted the idols and gods of the Egyptians as our own. We even grew to love the gods of Egypt. We forgot Yahweh and gave our allegiance and worship to another.

Even more than rejecting His Word and being guilty of idolatry, we came to the staggering realization that we are sinners by nature. We really are no different than the Egyptians. This plague, the final plague, was going to affect us all.

All of us—you included—have sinned and fallen short. And sin brings death. Death is what you and I deserve. This became blatantly obvious to me. Until I realized that I was as guilty as them, I couldn’t see that I needed God to save me.

And save me He would.

I learned then and there in Egypt and continue to learn each day that God is great in mercy. In His great mercy, He provided us with a way to be safe from the last plague.

He was going to teach us about salvation. Like the Egyptians—just like them—we deserved judgment. Unlike the Egyptians, we were saved by grace through faith.

What we need was atonement. So the Lord had us take a lamb; He told us how to choose it, how to care for it, and how to kill it as a sacrifice.

We had to choose our own lamb—a yearling to be exact. We had to select the best one. It had to be perfect. It had to be pure, spotless. No defect, no blemish. No injuries or issues of any kind. We knew just the one. I took my sons with me and we found the lamb that would come to stay with us.

From the 10th of the month to the 14th of the month, that perfect little lamb lived in our small home. We took care of it, just as the Lord said. The boys played with it and fought over which of them the lamb liked more. We fed it pieces of bread from our table. For those four days, it was almost part of the family.

This lamb—this perfect little lamb—was what God required.

This is what He has always required. My father and grandfather recounted to me the history of our people, and told me all the stories they had been told.

They told me of the days of Adam and Eve, how their son Cain brought some grains and vegetables as an offering to the Lord, and how their son Abel brought sacrifices from the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel’s sacrifice, but did not look favorably upon Cain and his sacrifice.

Abel was the one who brought the lamb, and only his offering was accepted.

“God,” my grandfather taught, “required a lamb.”

God gives what God demands. Again and again throughout history, God always seems to provide a lamb or other sacrificial animal to save His people.

God told Abraham to go up and sacrifice his only son, Isaac, as a burnt offering. As Abraham and Isaac went up the mountain, Isaac—who, as dad put it, “weren’t no dummy”—realized something was missing.

Isaac asked his dad where the lamb for the burnt offering was. Even the boy Isaac knew what God required.

“God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering,” Abraham said, teaching his son.

And so it was. Just as Abraham took the knife to sacrifice his son, he was interrupted by an angel, directing Abraham to a ram caught in the thicket. Abraham sacrificed the ram instead of his son.

God provided what God required: “A lamb to die in the place of Abraham’s son.”

A lamb is what God has always required. And it’s what He required of us.

Blood had to be spilled. Moses relayed the command of God to us. We understood. We would have to slaughter the lamb we selected.

So at twilight on the 14th day of the month, we, along with every other believing household, sacrificed the lamb, collecting its blood.

We took a branch of hyssop, dipped it in the blood, and painted the doorframes crimson with the blood of the lamb.

When my youngest asked why we were doing this, why we used the blood of the lamb, I had only one thought; only one answer to give: “Because the blood represents the taking of a life.”

“This lamb is our substitute,” I told them. “The lamb died in our place. The Lord Yahweh is coming tonight in judgment. But, thanks to the lamb, when we look up and see the blood on the door, we know that we’re covered.”

When the red blood covered the lamb’s pure, white wool, and my sons cried out, “Why, Daddy?!?!” I explained with tears in my eyes that because this lamb died in his place, my son wouldn’t have to.

The Lord spoke:

Exodus 12:13 NIV

13 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.

“The blood will be a sign for you...”

A sign for me…that’s exactly right. How thankful I am for the blood of that lamb. I will never forget the blood on that doorframe. I will never forget that night. Not ever.

After spreading the blood on the door, we roasted the lamb over the fire (every part of it, guts and all), along with bitter herbs. We ate it with unleavened bread. We didn’t leave one bit of food uneaten.

We ate. Standing up, cloaks tucked into our belts, sandals on, staff in hand. The boys thought this was fun, some sort of game. I told them this was “go mode”—that we were ready to leave Egypt at a moment’s notice. So we ate. And ate. And ate...until it was all gone. This lamb, and all it signified, was too sacred, much too special for any of it to go to waste.

After dinner, we huddled together in our small home, waiting for God to come. That night, God would claim a life from every single household in Egypt.

We could hear the distant screaming and wailing from our enemies. We knew all of them were mourning the death of their firstborn sons.

I sat there holding my wife and boys, praising the Lord, rejoicing in the salvation we experienced by the blood of the lamb.

Death had passed over us.

Death had passed over us because we sat under the blood.

When God had come to our door, He saw the blood smeared on the top and sides.

And He knew: the penalty had been made.

His wrath was satisfied.

Justice was served.

Mercy was extended.

Grace was given.

That night—the Passover—is a sign for me and you, a sign for all generations. It speaks a powerful message.

The only way to be saved, the only way to be set free, the only way to be rescued from sin and death is to be covered by the blood of a lamb.

I, for one, believe that there is One coming, One from Abraham’s family, One from the line of Judah who will bless all nations—One who will come to save the day.

This promise from long ago will come true. Just like the Lord’s promises in Egypt all came to pass, just as He said.

There will come a day when someone will see the Promised One of God, the Messiah, the Christ. And they will say, pointing to the Christ: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!”

This One—the Christ—will meet the Lord’s standard for perfection. He will be spotless, sinless, unblemished: the perfect Lamb.

You see, I think God has been planning this all along: one Lamb to die for one world.

God provides what God requires. It was true for us in Egypt. And I know it to be true for you.

God calls everyone to trust in the blood of the lamb. This is what we did in Egypt. By faith, we chose a perfect lamb. By faith, we took its life and spread its blood on the door—this was a public confession of our faith, a sign that we trusted in the sacrifice of this substitute.

We were saved by grace through faith, just as you are. God provided the lamb—that’s grace. And we had to trust in the lamb—that’s faith.

If you were there for the first Passover, would you have sacrificed a lamb? Of course you would have!

This I believe: just as God provided me and my family with a lamb to cover us with blood, I believe He—gracious and good, merciful and just—will provide you with a perfect Lamb with blood to cover you and your sins, once and for all.

Don’t miss it. Don’t think that you’ll be okay all on your own. There is no one—not one of us—who can meet God’s standard alone. We all need a perfect lamb to stand in our place as our perfect substitute.

Praise the Lord! He provides what He requires!