Sermon Tone Analysis

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—

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:

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.