GATEWAY TO FREEDOM

[Exodus 11:1 - 12:30 (17)]

          Introduction to the Scriptures: [Read Exodus 11:1-3] All right, we are back to the conversation. Moses has asked for his people’s freedom, Pharaoh has said, Get out of my sight, and Moses replies in verse 4, There is something else you need to know. “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. But among the Israelites not a dog will bark at any man or animal.’ Then you will know that the LORD makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel. All these officials of yours will come to me, bowing down before me and saying, ‘Go, you and all the people who follow you!’ After that I will leave. Then Moses, hot with anger, left Pharaoh.”

          Pharaoh had said, Get out of my sight! Moses said, I’m going, but you’ll see that you haven’t stopped God from doing what He set out to do. [Read Exodus 11:9-10]

          Well, Pharaoh is about to let the Israelites go, however. He is about to change his mind. Chapter 12 introduces us to what’s about to happen. [Read Exodus 12:1-17.] I’m going to end the reading of God’s word there. God does continue to explain it, and then it describes the actual events themselves. It happens as God had planned, but we’re going to look more closely at it and see what He has for us.

Prayer for Illumination – Father, as we look into your word now I pray that your Spirit would illumine it for us. This is a familiar story, but we have much to learn, and it must make a difference in our lives. We know this is a significant event, because it became the formative event in the identity and life of the people of Israel and continues to this day over 3000 years later. But it also points to the formative event in our lives as Christians. I pray that we might see what you are doing here, because you want us to know it and understand it, and you want us as well to celebrate the deliverance that you offer us through the death of the Lamb of God, even Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, AMEN.

Message

          If you have been following this lead-up to the Exodus, you know that there is a huge and decisive contest going on. The contest is between God and Pharaoh. Between YHWH – the God Who Is, who we explored earlier – and truly the most powerful man on earth at the time. Between Heaven, if you will, and worldly powers. That is the contest.

          Now that should be obvious in everything that has happened so far. But equally obvious is the goal of this contest. We need to be sure we see that. Here we encounter a peculiar thing which the world still has not figured out – I want to make sure that you and I have figured it out. God’s goal in this contest is to set us free. The world’s goal is to enslave us. It is as simple as that. I don’t think it could it be stated more starkly or more clearly. What an astounding deception continues to prevail in our world – the notion that the world’s goal is to grant us freedom and God’s goal is somehow to restrict and enslave us is a deception of unprecedented proportion. In fact the very opposite is true.

          People, if you hear nothing else today, I want you to hear as clearly as possible that everything God demands of us is geared to set us free, and, no matter what they say, everything the world demands is geared to enslave us. We see it as if it were the opposite, but this is the way it is. I wonder sometimes how this could be any more obvious to us than it is today? The attitude we have that “I want to be free to do anything I want to do” sounds like freedom, but it is an infallible formula for slavery, for in doing anything we want to do, we enslave ourselves to our own corrupt and distorted desires. I remember reading in Scott Peck’s book, The Road Less Traveled, how one of his clients who was just destroying her life finally “got it” and said, “You mean I don’t have to do everything I want to do.” You see, we become enslaved to our own desires. And we know this better now than perhaps it has ever been known in history. We have come to call that slavery by another name. We call it an addiction, and it seems like everything is addicting today, doesn’t it? It is the same thing as slavery. My own better judgment and will have become enslaved to my desires. That is what an addiction is all about.

          And every sin is addicting. It is not just drug or alcohol abuse, one of the first places where we discovered it. It applies equally to our sexual fantasies and practices, to our loss of temper, to our lack of personal discipline, to our self-indulgence, to our laziness, to our pride. All of these things are addictive behavior. The problem with doing whatever we feel like doing is that a lot of things we feel like doing are not good for us, and will ultimately destroy us. But we become their slaves. We can even see it happening, and we continue to walk down that road led by our slave master, the desires of our own corrupted hearts.

          Meanwhile, whatever attitudes or behavior God requires of us is ultimately intended to free us, to enable us to escape the tyranny of those habitual desires so we may be free to become all He created us to be, all He ever intended for us to be. That’s the whole story, and it is your story, and my story. And if we do not learn it, and trust God enough to take His ex hodos, His “path out” of this slavery, then we are condemned to remain in and ultimately to die in our slavery. Increasingly discouraging, increasingly debilitating, we are walking only toward death.

          My friends, if you think the slavery to which the children of Israel were subjected was a horrendous thing, depressing and destructive, you have seen nothing compared to our own slavery to sin in our world. This is where the message takes root for us. So this story of slavery, of judgment, of death, and of deliverance is our story, and we need to be paying attention.

          God vs. Pharaoh. That’s history. Slavery vs. Freedom. That involves us. It could not be stated more concisely than it is in the first two verses of Exodus 5. Here’s the contest: “This is what [Yahweh] the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Let my people go.’” And Pharaoh replies, “Who is Yahweh, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know Yahweh and I will not let Israel go.” There’s the contest. God says, Let my people go. Pharaoh says, I’m not listening.

          Well, in the intervening chapters, the Pharaoh has come to know Yahweh, even though he didn’t want to know Yahweh that well. He’s come to know the God Who Is, the God who is behind the judgments that have been visited upon Pharaoh and upon his people. You and I, as we have followed this story, are sometimes troubled by the phrase, “The LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” but I want you to see how the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Pharaoh has had to face God’s judgment nine times, and nine times he has been given the opportunity to repent. By refusing to do so nine times in a row, his heart has become hardened. By his refusal to accept God’s grace his heart has been hardened. God is culpable in the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart by offering him grace; Pharaoh is culpable by establishing this pattern of resisting that grace. Proverbs 29:1 says, “A man who remains stiff-necked after many rebukes will suddenly be destroyed – [and that] without remedy.” Harsh words from the Proverbs. That is what is about to happen here. And, if we are not paying attention, it could be our fate as well.

          So at the end of our text last week, we heard the pharaoh’s final outburst at Moses and Aaron [Exodus 10:28], “Get out of my sight! Make sure you do not appear before me again! The day you see my face you will die.”

          “Just as you say,” Moses replies, “I will never appear before you again.” But, just so you know, God has promised one more plague, and I think it may change your mind. (11:4ff.)

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. But among the Israelites not a dog will bark at any man or animal.”

If you’ve been in the near East, by the way, you know the dogs are prone to bark any time they are stirred up at all. That will not happen here. God is totally protective of His children. Moses continues,

Then you will know that the LORD makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel. All these officials of yours will come to me, bowing down before me and saying, “Go, you and all the people who follow you!” After that I will leave.

You are sending me out of your presence? I think you missed who is sending whom, Moses says. God will accomplish this. And Moses storms out of the pharaoh’s presence.

          So the final plague is about to fall. They have received their warning, and that final plague certainly seems more harsh and personal than any that have gone before. A measure of grace was always introduced into those earlier plagues. But there is more to it than simply tearing the hearts of these Egyptian people. For the fact is, the firstborn son represented something very powerful and significant to those people. The firstborn son represented their natural strength and vitality, in fact their hope for the future. They believed their hope lay in themselves – in each new generation doing its best. Thus in striking down all the firstborn sons, God is saying, “You do not have the strength in yourself to resist me and to build your own future. What you are depending upon cannot save you.” It is a fundamental lesson we need to learn as well. When we are depending upon ourselves and our own strength, it cannot save us.

          The death of the firstborn, then, represents the inevitable failure of all our natural efforts and powers. We will never achieve our goals, we will never gain our freedom, we will never find life through our own natural human efforts. You are not going to be good enough to do that. So this is God’s judgment on a fallen and corrupted world, a fallen and corrupted nature. Thus our stubborn persistence in resisting God, resisting His deliverance, depending upon our own natural powers, must ultimately be our undoing. We must give this up; it has to be gone, it has to be out of the way before God can do anything with us.

          In other words, our fundamental sin, the sin which keeps us from life and from freedom, really is our pride – our belief that we can handle this; God; we don’t need you. It was true in the Garden of Eden – “you can be your own god,” – it was true of the pharaoh – “I have no intention of obeying your God; I am my own god,” – and it is true of each of us – “I don’t want God interfering with my life and telling me what to do. I want to be my own god.” And the death of the firstborn is the death of that pride that says, We can do it on our own strength. You understand, we cannot achieve our freedom on our own strength. There will be no freedom until our pride, until this force which has held us in bondage, is dead. So God is going to destroy that force that has held His people in bondage.

          (But now comes the good news!) Once that force which has held us in bondage has been dealt with, we can receive the powerful gift that our hearts have been longing for, namely, a brand new beginning! That is what chapter 12 is all about. It introduces us to an entirely new beginning.

          I don’t know about you, but I am sort of obsessed with new beginnings. I know the reason why. It’s because I am so prone to mess up things in my life. Whatever resolutions I’ve made, whatever promises I’ve made, I’m so prone to mess it up. I get so upset with myself, and I say again and again to God, “Can we just erase that and start over with a clean slate?” Have you felt that way? I love a new beginning. New Year’s Day is that for me. Okay, the last year is gone. I didn’t get done what I wanted to get done, but this new year is going to be different. Birthdays are the same. Any time I can get a fresh start, I’m happy.

          Well, God says, I’m going to give you a fresh start. This is really going to be the first day for you of a new life. Chapter 12, verse 2, “This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year.” A whole new life was about to begin for them, since the force which had held them in slavery for so many generations was about to be wiped out. What a great thing it would be for them, every year when that first day of the first month came around again, to remember that on that date God had set them free to begin to become all He had intended all along they might become. Their year would begin, their new life would begin, with God’s mighty act of deliverance.

          Appropriately, and perhaps symbolically from God’s perspective, this first month of their new year also fell at about the equivalent of the break between March and April on our calendar when the new life of spring was bursting forth after the long, dead winter. This, too, would be a reminder of God’s great grace and power in giving them new life. Every year when they came to their new year celebration, there would be new life bursting forth all around them.

          And now God initiates the great Passover Festival which would for all future generations mark the birth of this new nation of God’s people. All of this is coming to a climax right here. The festival, just like their initial deliverance from Egypt, would always fall on the 14^th day of this first month of their new year. I know you lost an hour of sleep last night, so maybe you’re not quick with your math at the moment, but there are some interesting things with the numbers that I think it’s worth knowing. The Jewish calendar, like those of the surrounding peoples, roughly followed a lunar month, beginning with the first sliver of the new moon – okay, we’re beginning again, right here; we can see it in the heavens. Since the lunar cycle is 29.5 days, their months generally were either 29 or 30 days long, alternating one or the other with an eventual adjustment to coordinate it with the annual solar calendar. That was always the problem in making calendars. What this means here for this celebration is that the evening of the 14^th day of the month (halfway through the lunar cycle) would always fall precisely at the full moon, reminding them, I am sure, of the fullness of God’s promised care for them. What had started out as just a trace of a promise had now come to fruition for them at this moment of the Passover. And it would constantly be a reminder for Israel throughout its entire history as that full moon appeared in the springtime with new life bursting forth. This is what God did for you!

          It is not coincidental that Christians have worked out our calendar to reflect the same mighty acts of God. And we ought to have that same experience as we come to the highlight of the church’s year as well – our ultimate deliverance came with the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. The death of God’s only-begotten (or we might say firstborn) son was an act of judgment against sin, just like the death of the firstborn in Egypt. So we have that parallel. This death offers us deliverance from the enslaving power of sin, just as God was about to deliver them from the enslaving power of the people of Egypt. But that was followed immediately, as there in Egypt, with an opportunity for new life – in our case the new life is the resurrection itself. So we set our Easter celebration, the highlight of our year as Passover was the highlight for the Jew, we set our Easter celebration of the resurrection on a Sunday, the first day of the week, and then we have to make it fit with everything else. So more precisely, Easter is set the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. In other words, we are trying to get as close as we can to the Passover moon, the time when new life is bursting forth around us, when we ourselves have been offered deliverance and grace by our God, the God of the resurrection. So our Easter celebration and the Passover celebration are both intended not only to remind us but to celebrate God’s mighty acts of deliverance.

          So let’s look, finally, at the Passover festival itself and see what we may learn from it. As we have said repeatedly during this study of Exodus, the whole gospel of redemption is contained in this remarkable historical event of the exodus and its focus right here with the Passover. God gives the Israelites very precise instructions for the celebration of the Passover, and it was important that they follow those instructions precisely because every aspect of this celebration would be a dramatic re-enactment and reminder of exactly what God was doing to accomplish their deliverance and salvation. So it was a form of instruction, it was a matter of encouraging their memory to focus on the central things of their faith.

          The first thing they were to do was to select a lamb from their flock. It is an interesting thing here that there would be one per household. This is different from the other sacrifices in Israel where there were sacrifices made for the people generally and the priest did that. But this event made it clear that God was not simply going to offer Israel a blanket deliverance or salvation that some professional priests somewhere could maintain for them. No, this was very personal. This was about each family, each household. They had to make a choice about whether or not they would participate, whether they would in fact submit to the Lord who wanted to deliver them. My salvation would not be dependent upon my neighbor’s salvation, it would not be dependent upon my community’s salvation. This would be my own choice. But even that isn’t quite right. That is the way we would say it here in America at this point in history. But yet it is interesting that God vested so much of His promise not in the individual but in the individual’s family.

          In our society today, the individual is king. I am who I am and no one speaks for me! Each of us expects to act independently, and we can hardly wait as we begin to grow up to separate ourselves from our families. In fact, I have to say, I think this is an important thing for us to be aware of, it is policy in many of our public schools, whether it’s official or not, to actually separate our children from the values they were learning in their families. I have in the past been an advocate for the public schools, and they are still a very important part of our educational system. There are many teachers and some administrators who resist this trend, but in my estimation it is a sinister trend, perpetrated by Satan to cut our children off from what should be the primary arena where our values are learned and lived out. And we as Christian parents and as a church need to be eternally vigilant and proactive in resisting this trend. I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I am not saying we need to exit from the public schools. We need to be salt and light in the public schools, but we need to know what is going on. We cannot let the schools take away from us the responsibility that we have to pass along the fundamental values that God has given us to pass along from generation to generation.

          It is also worth noting in that discussion of the family, that in this celebration, unlike any of the other celebrations for Israel, the father would act as the priest for his family, making intercession before the Lord on their behalf, and making this sacrifice. In the annual re-enactment of the historic event which was used as a teaching tool for future generations, the children were to ask, What is the meaning of this? The father who had done it was to explain it to them. It is very much worth noting, by the way, that this is also the motivation behind our Reformed practice of baptizing infants, based not on their individual profession of faith, but on the commitment of the family to follow the Lord. God made a covenant with us as families, and He said, I want you to do this within your families. I want you to pass this faith along within your families, and that is what is happening here as a family accepted that covenant with God. At confirmation time, of course, approaching adulthood for themselves, each young person is challenged to commit personally to follow the Lord. But you see the emphasis on family here, and we want to maintain that in our faith as well.

          So they chose a lamb, one for each household. The particular choice was extremely important, because they were to select a one-year old male without defect – as perfect a specimen as they could find. The reason for that is that the lamb will give up its life for them. If the lamb were defective, that might be considered the reason for it’s death. But this lamb would die in their place, as Jesus Christ would later die in our place, receiving in his own body the penalty of death for our sins.

          And then there was the blood, obviously central to this Passover celebration. God never tires of reminding us in the Old Testament that “the life is in the blood.” All kinds of things follow from that truth – “the life is in the blood.” For that reason, both life and death are intimately bound up in this powerful symbol of blood, for if that lifeblood is spilled, the inevitable result will be death. Nevertheless, our God never displays His power more vividly than when He turns death into life! That is what He is doing here and that is what He does in an even more vivid way from the cross to the tomb and the resurrection.

          Here they are to take that blood, and using a cluster of hyssop, dip it into the basin in which the blood was collected and spread it on the doorposts and the lintel of each of their homes – a configuration, by the way, which actually resembled the later Roman crosses. This was similar, and they were to collect that blood and put it on the doorway. Then they were to collect their family and enter their home through that doorway of blood where they would be for that night protected as the angel of death literally “passed over” them as he made his fatal rounds.

          Not only would the symbol of the lamb’s blood protect them from the judgment to which they would otherwise be exposed, but the lamb’s death actually provided life for them. They were to roast it and eat it together, along with bitter herbs, which would remind them of the bitterness of their lives as slaves in Egypt. So this is centered around a meal as well. Next Sunday we are going to be celebrating communion, and we are going to be drawing on what we’ve learned here for the Passover to truly get to the heart of that communion meal.

          Of course, as we read, they were to be prepared for the journey to freedom which God was launching on their behalf. They should be packed and ready to go. The unleavened bread, by the way, also has an interesting place in this celebration. The feast of unleavened bread continued for seven days following the Passover, but it was all a part of the same event. It was not only that they would not have time for the bread to rise, but there was a significant object lesson in this for the Israelites. You know how leaven, or yeast, works to leaven a loaf of bread. It’s a micro-organism used in the fermenting process. Just a small amount, introduced into dough for baking bread, multiplied and spread throughout the entire loaf. It would create carbon dioxide bubbles to lighten the finished product, so that was a good thing. But because it was used for fermentation, yeast, or leaven, was symbolic of a corrupting influence, only a little of which could contaminate the whole product. So you see what God is saying here – in Israel’s escape from oppression and slavery in Egypt, they were not to retain even the smallest particle of that corrupting influence of the godless culture in which they had been living and from which they were escaping.

          So in this entire dramatic event, God’s people were, first of all, protected by the blood of the lamb from the judgment which they too deserved. They were not saved because they had lived perfectly before the LORD. Rather, as we suggested in our opening discussion of slavery and freedom, they were saved because they were willing to take God at His word and follow His instructions. They realized their own strength or cleverness or willpower would not save them. They were at the mercy of the one perpetrating that judgment. They could not escape their slavery through their own strength. They would have to put themselves in the LORD’s hands through their trusting obedience to His call and command. If they did not do that, they would be struck down, just as the Egyptians who refused to submit to God were struck down.

          But their submission to God did not result in their oppression by God. This is where we began and where we are going to end today. Their submission to God did not result in their oppression by God, and that is where I think the world misunderstands what God is asking of us. This is the fundamental truth which we need to understand today. God had no interest in oppressing His people, and God has no interest in oppressing us. A world without God demands submission in order to oppress. God demands submission in order to set us free. That’s what it’s all about, and that’s what I want you to take away with you today.

          Of course it is what He did here. So the symbol is powerful, and as we explore it further, I trust that it will be a motivation for you when God asks you to submit to His will. That simple, rude doorway, with blood on it’s cross-piece, became the Israelites “gateway to freedom.” Like ours, their freedom had to be purchased with innocent blood, but it was a death that brought them life.

          That is where our story takes each of us today. We have a choice – as the Israelites had a choice, as the Pharaoh had a choice, as the people of Egypt had a choice. We can choose to continue to resist God’s rightful authority over our lives. But of course that road must lead inevitably to death, for we have separated ourselves from the God who is the author of Life. Or we may choose the path of conscious submission to the will of God. When He says, I want you to do this – you may not understand it, but I want you to do it – we will trust Him and we’ll do it because we know that’s the path that leads to the Author of Life, the path that leads to freedom.

          So we have a choice. As we come to the highlight of our Christian year, as we come to our Passover, God offers us escape from judgment, He offers us freedom and life. All of it comes with a simple willingness to take God at His word. What will you choose?

Closing prayer – Father, I want to thank you for object lessons. Every Sunday, (and sometimes it’s the greatest challenge), we try to take these grand and noble truths and in some way make an object lesson of them that we can all understand, that our children can even understand. In doing that we certainly take seriously what you’ve asked us to do here in your word, to pass along these truths to each new generation. But in doing that also we see the way you taught your people in the Old Testament, through these mighty historical acts, and the way Jesus taught us through his parables. So I pray that as we proceed through our celebration of Lent, as we come to our celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection, we might recognize in that the cost of our freedom and of our lives. And, Father, I pray that we may not continue our foolish resistance to your will. In that foolish resistance we find ourselves walking with Pharaoh, and we will find our own hearts hardened to your offers of grace. So I pray that we would let our hearts be malleable in your hands and, more than that, our wills be submitted to you. You are teaching us that we may trust you. May we be willing to submit to you and walk through the gateway to freedom. We pray it in Jesus’ name, AMEN.