Today, I want for us to have eyes only for Jesus. I want us to look at the major events of passion week and see that they were fulfillment of types. They were the fleshing out of shadows from Israel’s past, that should have screamed out to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, “THIS IS THE PROMISED ONE! THIS IS THE MESSIAH!”
There will still be application for us. Today you won’t hear me saying ‘this is how Christians should live’, or ‘this is how Christians ought not to live’. But there will be significant application for us, nonetheless; and as they left Egypt with a whole new calendar ~ a whole new life, I believe that being reminded of these fundamental truths is a good way to enter the new year.
If you are here today and have never repented of your sin and recognized your need for a Savior; if you have never turned to God and believed on the shed blood of Christ for your salvation, then these things will have great significance for you.
Let’s turn to the 12th chapter of Exodus, and one by one, put flesh on the shadows.
(read vs 1-7)
We have read here, some of the instructions given by God for the first Passover. It was to be the night of the 10th plague; the death of the firstborn in Egypt; the tragic and devastating plague that would finally deliver God’s people out of bondage and set their feet toward the Promised Land.
We see here that God has given them a brand new calendar, and then has given them instruction to order their days according to that new calendar.
On the tenth day of the first month, they were to take a lamb, one for each household, and keep it until the 14th day, examining it to be sure that it was unblemished & clean of disease.
Approximately 1400 years later, early in the week and four days before the beginning of the Passover holy days, Jesus entered Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey.
The people didn’t know it, but they were even then selecting their Lamb.
They followed Him with cheers and palm leaves and garments laid in His path.
They shouted, “Hosanna”, meaning “Save us now”. They shouted, “Hosanna to the King”, because they were remembering His miracles and the recent raising of Lazarus, and they mistakenly thought that He had come to make Himself King and deliver them from Roman oppression.
They apparently did not catch the significance of the donkey.
In the ancient world, conquering kings would ride into the city on white stallions, with their armed troops and their prisoners and plunder being dragged behind them.
When a visiting king wanted it to be known that he came in peace, he would ride into the city on a donkey to show that he did not have battle on his mind.
As Jesus entered Jerusalem that day, the occupying Romans would have been put at ease by what they saw, because this surely was one who came in peace; not to cause insurrection.
On the other hand, the Jews themselves were missing a message from their own history. In Judges 5:10 and 12:14, it is indicated that Judges of Israel rode on white donkeys and their sons rode on donkey colts. Was there not a parallel here, with the Son of the Great Judge of all, coming to Israel on a donkey’s colt as the One who "for judgment came into this world" (Jn 9:39).
And judgment was about to begin at the house of God; but the people did not see.
For the next four days, the Lamb was in the public eye.
He purged the temple of the money changers, infuriating the Priests whose pockets were padded by that merchandising.
He taught in the temple, healed by the pool...
and the eyes of all were upon Him.
The children of Israel in Egypt examined their lamb for four days, and 1400 years later, the Lamb of God was arrested and examined closely.
The wife of the Roman governor came to her husband and advised him to have nothing to do with this innocent man, for she had suffered much in a dream because of Him that day; and Pilate set a precedent that husbands have followed down through the ages to this very day...he ignored her when he should have listened.
At the end of his own examination of the Lamb, even he, a pagan procurator, was compelled to announce, “I find no fault in this man”.
The Lamb was taken before the puppet king, Herod, who finally sent Him back to Pilate, having no accusations of his own to bring.
The Lamb was found without spot or blemish.
The children of Israel killed the lamb at twilight.
Now I want to point out to you here, that God’s instructions to them there in Exodus 12, were that the whole nation of Israel was to kill “it” at twilight.
They had each taken a lamb for their own household, but in God’s eyes it was as though there was one lamb between them. They were to kill “it” at twilight.
“The whole assembly is to kill “it” at twilight.
Each house represented the whole. They were to do it as an assembly. A congregation.
Each lamb represented the one sacrifice; the one act, ordained of God, that would provide their salvation.
The church of God is one. United by the Holy Spirit. Each individual local assembly is but a part, a representation of the completeness of the body of Christ; all gathered around the Lamb, slain before the foundation of the world; our Passover.
By the same token, the world is as one in its guilt in the slaying of the Lamb. Not the Jews as a people, not the Romans as an occupying force, not Judas as the traitor from the midst, but all of mankind, for all have sinned.
They were to kill it at twilight.
Have you ever wondered how the type fits, when they were commanded to kill the lamb at twilight, yet Christ was crucified in the morning hours?
Well I would remind you of the darkness that came over the land at mid day.
I would remind you that Jesus, teaching Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, pronounced the verdict that Light has come into the darkness, but men loved darkness rather than light, for their deeds were evil.
All of sinful mankind, represented by the Jews and Gentiles present that day, were given the darkness they so desperately demanded in which to completely fill up the cup of the Father’s wrath by the utter rejection of His Redeemer; the Light of the world.
At the death of His Lamb, God brought twilight and darkness. The light of His glory was at that moment taken from the Israeli nation, and spiritual darkness descended ever deeper on the hearts of those who insisted on the darkness in order to hide their evil deeds.
Our world remains in that darkness folks; a darkness that grows darker with the passing days and years. The children of this world who are “coming out of the closet”, so to speak, who are emboldened more and more with time to flaunt their sin and their evil before society’s eyes, are only emboldened because the world has finally grown darker than the closet!
“This is the verdict; that Light has come into the world, but men loved the darkness more than the light, for their deeds were evil”
The children of Israel killed the lamb at twilight, and the darkness descended on the land.
Their descendants killed the Lamb in mid day, and spiritual darkness descended on their nation and on their hearts.
God told the children of Israel to place the blood of the lamb on the door of their houses and go inside. He said, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you, to destroy you...”
The term used there in Exodus in the Hebrew language, was the same that would have been used to describe the actions of a hen who passes her wing over her chicks to protect them from predators and the elements.
He said, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you.”
They obediently applied the blood to their doors that night and went inside, and God passed His wing over their houses to protect them from the destroyer, whose instructions were to kill the firstborn of every house.
Exodus 12:30 tells us that there was not one house in the land of Egypt where there was not someone dead that night, because it is appointed for man once to die, then comes judgment. No house is untouched, because all have sinned, and the wages of sin is death.
But for those of faith, who went in under the blood and rested in God’s estimate of that blood, there was only peace and safety.
Fourteen hundred years later, God in the flesh lamented over His rejecting nation and cried, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you, how often I would have gathered you to me as a hen gathers her brood, and you would not have it.”
Fourteen hundred years later, their descendants stood in the Procurator’s court and screamed, “CRUCIFY HIM! CRUCIFY HIM! LET HIS BLOOD BE ON OUR HEADS, AND ON OUR CHILDREN’S!”
And they shed the blood of the Passover Lamb of God.
God’s instruction to the children of Israel in Egypt, was that they were to drain the blood in the basin at the foot of their door.
They were then to take a weed called hyssop, dip it in that blood, and apply it to the lintel and doorposts of their houses.
Somewhere between 1000 and 1300 years before the crucifixion style of execution was even introduced to the world, these children of Israel dipped the hyssop in the blood at the foot of their doors, splashed it on the lintel and on the doorposts, little knowing that by their very act of obedience and faith they were foreshadowing the song writer’s cry:
“See, from His head, his hands, his feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down”
Fourteen hundred years later, their descendants saw a crown of thorns viciously pressed down on the Lamb’s brow. They saw him nailed, hands and feet to a Roman cross, and watched as the blood He shed for THEM, poured out to the dirt atop Calvary’s hill.
“Did e’er such love and sorrow meet;
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?”
The children of Israel went inside and sat down to eat of the Lamb roasted with fire.
They were instructed to go in and not come out until morning.
Once inside, they could not see the blood; but only rested in God’s promise that HE saw the blood, and that when HE saw the blood, He would protect them from the destroyer.
They went inside to partake of the lamb, not to pray that they might escape the plague and be saved.
They went inside, not hoping to be saved, but assured that they were saved; it was an assured fact, on the authority of God’s own word.
They would not be partially saved and partly exposed to judgment, they were wholly saved.
They were not saved because of what they had done, or thought, or felt, but because God saw the blood.
They were not saved because of their own estimate of the blood and its worth, but because of God’s estimate of the worth of the shed blood of that innocent lamb.
And it wasn’t because of anything else, BUT that blood, that they were safe. God said, “When I see the blood”; not, when I see your obedience” or “When I see your adherence to the preparation of the meal”, or “When I see your continued faithfulness to Me afterward”...
...no, ...He said, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you and no plague will befall you to destroy you.
Fourteen hundred years later, their descendants watched the blood of the Passover Lamb pour down to the ground.
Their own estimation of the blood was wrong in every way.
They treated it with derision; a spectacle to be viewed with morbid interest.
They saw it’s spilling as a sort of vengeance for their shattered dream of a conquering Messiah.
But they had no concept of its worth to fully pay the penalty of sin for them.
They had no inkling of the worth of that blood to purchase them back from Satan’s grip and establish them in the kingdom of Light.
They could not see that as they forced the shedding of that blood in anger and hatred; He Himself was pouring it out willingly and deliberately for the eternal protection of all who would enter in under its cleansing flow.
He had not told the children of Israel in Egypt, “When YOU see the blood; and when YOUR estimate of the blood is accurate...”
But, “When I see the blood”.
The Lord Jesus Christ, having shed His precious blood as the perfect atonement for sin, has taken it and sprinkled it in the very presence of God.
Everything is settled there for the believer. Not settled by the believer’s estimate of the blood, nor by any small thing that the believer can add to the blood, but by the blood itself, which God estimates so highly, that because of it He can justly forgive all sin, and accept the sinner as perfectly righteous in Christ.
The children of Israel didn’t splash the blood and then walk away. They didn’t go back to the fields and the brick kilns of Egypt. They didn’t saunter nonchalantly back into bondage and the darkness of Egypt.
They went inside and rested safely, partaking of their Passover lamb until they saw the first rays of dawn.
Fourteen hundred years later, their descendants, most of them, turned away from the blood and went back home to their holiday celebrations.
They went back to their dead forms and rituals of religion.
They went back to the oppression of the enemy and the unbearable burden of the Law.
But not all went back.
Some saw by faith and entered into peace.
They placed their trust in that shed blood and God’s own estimate of its divine worth, and they rested there.
They entered in and began to partake of the One who for them had endured the roasting fire of God’s wrath.
And they stayed inside, under the safety of God’s wing, until they saw those first rays of dawn beam over the horizon of eternity, and stepped out to follow Him there.
Meet and greet each other with joy, believers, for you have entered in under the precious blood of the Passover Lamb, and you have partaken of His safety and His goodness, and YOU have seen the first rays of dawn...just a glimpse of the eternity that awaits you.
Friend, if you are here today and you have never recognized your perilous position, and your lost condition before God, then my invitation to you is that you come to His cross, and believe that His blood was shed to pay the penalty for your sin; to save you from the destroyer.
There is no safety outside; there is only destruction for a perishing, unbelieving, sin-darkened world.
But inside there is peace and safety as you partake of God’s Passover Lamb.
There you will have true fellowship with Him, and with those who are His, and you will know with a greater certainty than you’ve ever had about anything, that the destroyer will never come near your door.
You cannot understand it now. You stand outside in the darkness and you wonder how the application of this blood can possibly mean your salvation, but it is not your understanding or your estimation that counts. It is God’s, and His perpetual invitation to you, is “ENTER IN”.
The Lamb has been slain, the blood has been sprinkled, the veil has been torn, the way has been opened.
It is finished! It is finished!
ENTER IN. ENTER IN.
