will be in Exodus chapter 12. This is going to be what I call a repeat. For two reasons. When I saw that
text from Drew saying he couldn't make it today, I knew I had a message prepared. And so I said I would take it.
And then I looked and realized I was wrong. I had no message
prepared. But when I was studying, I found
one I had done many years ago. And I don't know how else to
say it, the Lord laid it on my heart to do that one again. And
it is out of Exodus 12, which speaks about the first Passover. And when I had originally prepared this message many years
ago, I was thinking about my own two
children and the other children who were in the church. They
just happened to be on my mind. And I wondered to myself what
they were hearing. Some of the material in the Bible
is very difficult to understand. A lot of it you know, scholars
still don't understand it. And we aren't told that we must
understand everything. There are things that are hidden
from us, and they will remain that way. But I remember thinking
back to when I was sitting in various, you know, gospel preaching
churches, just sitting in the pew, being all quiet. Right,
mom? But I remember listening to the
preacher's words and I didn't understand them all. Who could?
Nobody explained them to me. So I decided back when I was
preparing this that I wanted a child to be able to understand
what's in Exodus 12. So this message came out of that
determination. That doesn't mean you adults
get to tune out. This is good for everybody. But I wanted to
say a couple of things first. I wanted to tell you two things.
The first is the definition of a word that you won't find in
the story here, but it's very important. And it's very important
that you understand its meaning. is Slay. S-L-A-Y. Not Santa's Slay, but S-L-A-Y. And it is a violent killing. It means to hurt someone or something
so much that it makes them die. So keep that in mind. And the
second thing I want you to remember is related to that. It's that
in the book of Revelation, way at the back of your Bible, it says that Jesus Christ is
called the Lamb slain, that's just a form of the word slay,
is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. In other words,
Jesus is like the lambs that you will hear about in this story. We're gonna be talking a lot
about lambs. And these lambs were sacrificed. They were slain. They were killed
violently so that their blood could be put on the doorposts
of the Israelites as God instructed them. Now, you might be thinking
to yourselves already, why? That sounds crazy. But we'll get into that. But
God instructed them to do that. And if they did as God told them
to do, he would not kill the firstborn in that household. And we'll get to all that too.
That firstborn would live if the blood of the lamb was on
the doorposts. And when it says that Jesus was
slain from the foundation of the world, it means that someone
slayed Jesus a long time ago before you or I or Adam and Eve
were even born. So remember what it means to
slay something. And remember that someone slayed
our Christ Jesus. Now let's read starting in verse
one of Exodus 12. It says, the Lord spoke to Moses
and Aaron in the land of Egypt. saying, this month shall be your
beginning of months. It shall be the first month of
the year to you. Now speak to all the congregation
of Israel, that means everybody, everybody in Israel, of the Israelite
tribe that are in Egypt, saying, on the 10th of this month, every
man shall take for himself a lamb. According to the house of his
father, a lamb for household. So a lamb would represent one
house. And if the household is too small
for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take
it according to the number of the persons. According to each
man's need, you shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb,
this is important, your lamb shall be without blemish. That means without a mark, without
an imperfection, must be perfect. a male lamb of the first year. So not an old lamb, a young lamb. You may take it from the sheep
or from the goats and you shall keep it from that day until the
14th day of that same month. And then the whole assembly of
the congregation of Israel shall kill it at twilight. That's where
the slaying happens. and they shall take some of the
blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses
where they eat it. Now skip ahead to verse 12. And this is God still speaking.
For I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night and I
will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man
and beast, And against all the gods of Egypt, I will execute
judgment. I am the Lord. And now the blood
shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when
I see that blood, I will pass over you and the plague shall
not be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. So in this story, in Exodus,
God says that he will kill the firstborn male of every house,
man or beast, so man or animal, whether that house or whether
the people living in that house, I suppose, are Israelites or
Egyptians. So I'm not going to go too far
into this, but I wanted to make sure you understood what is a
firstborn male. And it is the first son that
is born to that mom and dad. Now back then, the firstborn
son of a household, he received everything that his father owned
at some point. He was the inheritor. He got
it all. So it was good to be the firstborn
son. And in this story, God was going to kill every one of the
firstborn sons. And we're not gonna talk, we're
not gonna get into that. There's a whole bunch in this
story, but I wanted to narrow it down to just the kernel of
it that is the story of the lamb. But I wanted you to understand
what that firstborn male was. So God then said to everyone
that if you put the blood of the perfect lamb upon your doorposts
on the outside of your house, he said, when I see that blood,
I will pass over you. Now that's a promise from God. That's a promise. That means
it will happen. But then you might ask yourself,
what does God care about blood so much? Blood is all throughout
the scripture. It started with blood. After Adam and Eve sinned, they
sowed fig leaves to hide their nakedness, and the Lord came
into the garden, saw that they were naked, and it says he took
the skin of an animal and covered them. There's your blood. And we get
all the way to when Jesus Christ came and he was crucified. So it started and it ended because
it said, Jesus said, it is finished. That was the last. So why does God care about blood
so much? Well, to answer that, we must
understand who and what God is. And I would say it's rough in
this day to get that truth through to some people because there's
so much untruth. But I'm sure there was just as
much untruth 2,000 years ago, three, whatever, as there is
today. But despite what you may hear
and see in other churches or the TV or on the radio, wherever
you find it, God is not an old man sitting in a chair watching
things happen. First of all, he doesn't watch
things happen. I've heard that phrase a lot.
God set the world spinning like a top and just let it go. God
is not a watcher, he is a doer. He makes things happen. He makes
things start and he can make things end. He created the stars
and the sun and the moon, the planets, the whole universe,
the earth, everything on it before there was anything. He didn't
take a lump of something and turn it into all that we see.
It came from nothing. He knows what has happened. He knows what will happen. He
knows what's happening right now. Because he is in control
of everything. And I always liked this analogy,
and we'll be talking about that too. He's like the author of
a story, of a book. And he's written what we call
life. He's written what the world is
like and what its rules are. He made light. Light has properties. He made gravity. These things
that scientists study, he's made it. Those are the rules that
apply to us. And in this book, he's written
what its characters do. That's us. We're the characters.
And what we do and what we say even knows what your thoughts
are. Even back when you thought mom and dad didn't see you. You
can't hide anything from God. And the God that you will see
in the Bible, he's king over everything and everyone. There
is no one better or more powerful than the God of the Bible. He's
at the top. You know, a lot of hierarchies
we see today, they're pyramid shaped. And you can go from weakest
to strongest or least powerful to most powerful, whatever you
want to call it. There's no pyramid here. There
is just God. And you can call everything else
just a flat line under there. That means that God, because
he is the most powerful, because he created everything, because
he is king, he gets to decide what is good and what is bad. That's not for you to decide. That's not for me to decide.
That's not even for people like the president to decide. or kings
in other countries or queens or whatever. It's for God alone
to decide. And when someone is good, God
says that person is righteous. You can even hear the word in
it, right. It's to be right. It's righteous. And when someone is bad, God
says that person is a sinner. They have sin in them. Now God
himself, of course, is righteous, which means that he is good,
all good. There's no sin in him at all.
He does not lie. He does not cheat. He doesn't
break a promise. He doesn't steal. Everything
that comes from God is righteous. And here's another thing, he
doesn't like sin. When God sees sin, he must destroy
it. even when that sin is in a person. Unfortunately for you and me,
it says in the Bible that all people are born as sinners. You can see our problem here. Since God hates sin, that means
we are all born as God's enemies, enemies. All people are born with sin.
the president, your teachers, church goers, all of us here,
this guy standing up in the pulpit talking now, mommies and daddies,
cute little babies. Everyone has been tainted by
sin, touched by sin. No one is perfect. It says that
in Ecclesiastes 7 and Psalm 14. If our lives were like a cartoon,
we would all be the bad guys, and God would be the only good
guy. We all have sin in us, and if
God says that he will destroy sin when he sees it, that means
God will have to destroy us too. But don't worry, calm your hearts. We're not destroyed, clearly.
Here we are. So allow me to explain it a little bit more. You have
all heard what happens if you die with sin, haven't you? Everybody's
heard what happens when you die in sin. If you die as a sinner,
you don't go to heaven, you go to hell. There's only two places
God has set up for after this body dies. and in hell, this is what he
set up, you will, it says, burn forever. That's God's wrath. Wrath. Because you must suffer the consequences
for your sins. That's the payment for sins.
The payment for sins is death. There's no second chances, no
timeouts, there's no forgiveness, there's no take backs. You don't
burn off all your sins in hell and then you go to heaven. Once
you're in hell, you're in hell forever. That's it. So why are we all alive right
now if one, we have sin and two, God must destroy sin? Why does God allow everyone to
live if everyone's a sinner? And for this reason, because
God loved a group of people, a group of people, and wanted
them to be with him. So instead of destroying everyone
as soon as Adam sinned, because that is when sin entered the
world, Adam had to sin. He made a I say as soon as, that's
not even a, we know God made plans before the foundation of
the world, but he had a plan to save some people and he would
change them from bad to good, from sinner to righteous. But the plan God made, the way
he designed it, needed a special person who was righteous already,
who was righteous to begin with, that excludes so many people. And that righteous person had
to give up his life for God's people, the people that God chose. Now that person was God's only
son, Jesus Christ. So what does this all have to
do with the blood of these lambs in our story at Exodus? How does that help God's people? It's because this story is about
Jesus Christ. Now he's not in this story. You
just heard me read it. You didn't hear the word Jesus
or Christ or Messiah or anything like that. But this story is all about Him. And He is the only one who can
save sinners. And there is no one else but
Him. Don't look to angels. Don't look to preachers. Look to Him for salvation. Now, sometimes the people or
the things in stories are, they're symbols. They are symbols to
show you something else. For example, you could say that
your dad is as strong as a horse. If your dad is strong, he could
be like a horse. He can pull heavy things through
the snow or he's got a lot of muscles like a horse does. That
horse is like a symbol to show people, all right, he's strong
like a horse or he's strong as an ox. Or you could say, your mom is
as sweet as sugar. She's not made of sugar, but
sugar is one of the sweetest things on earth. And mama, she's
really sweet. She's really kind. So we use sugar as a symbol to
show how sweet your mother is. And in this story in Exodus,
that lamb is a symbol of Jesus. And like the lamb that was slain
for its blood here, Jesus was slain, he was killed for his
blood. Because it says in 1 John, the
book of 1 John chapter one, verse seven, the blood of Jesus Christ,
his son, God's son, cleanses us from all sin. There is nothing
else in that sentence that cleanses us from sin, nothing else. It's just the blood of Jesus
Christ. So back in our story, can anything's
blood be put on the doorposts? Like perhaps a bird or a rodent
or a cat? No. It must be a particular animal
because God said it needs to be the blood of a lamb. Not only
a lamb, but God says that it must be blood from a perfect
lamb. Perfect lamb. One that doesn't
have any problems, any deformities. Again, this lamb is just like
Jesus Christ, who was born of a woman, just like we all are,
but whose father was God himself. He wasn't Adam. Anybody who is
a son or daughter of Adam carries sin with him. Jesus, his father
was God, and so he was not born with any sin. He was righteous
from the beginning. He was a perfect baby who grew
into a perfect child, became a perfect teenager, if you can
believe it, and a perfect adult. He did not sin at any time in
his life. which meant that he was righteous and like the lambs
in our story did not have any problems, any problems. Jesus
was even tempted to sin just as we are tempted to sin every
day. I've been tempted to sin and
I have sinned because of that temptation. You've been tempted
to sin and you sinned. He was tempted to sin and he
did not. So for example, like that time
you put your hand in the cookie jar when you weren't supposed
to, Jesus never did that. Now that's of course a small
little infraction, not exactly the sins that the Bible discusses,
but even sins of the heart were foreign to our Lord. He did not hate. Think how hard that is. He didn't cheat. He didn't steal. He didn't lie. And moreover,
he loved God, his father, from the very beginning. He was righteous. So God says in our story, when
I see the blood, I will pass over you. I will pass over you. In that sentence, who must see
the blood? Who is it? It is important that God sees
the blood. It doesn't matter if your neighbor
sees it, or your parents see it, or your friends see it. God must see the blood that was
put on the doorposts, and he must accept that it was righteous
blood, that it came from a perfect sacrifice, a substitute, and
we'll be getting into that real soon. It could not have anything wrong
with it or God will not pass over that house and someone will
die. Now, who or what provides the
blood that God wants to see? Well, I can tell you who does
not have to give the blood. It is not the sinner on whose
door the blood appears. People living in that household,
people that make up that house, their blood was not spilled to
put on the doorposts. Here's another interesting thing.
The sinner doesn't even suffer a scratch for this. The sinner's husband or wife,
and I call them all sinners because that's what they are. That's
important. The sinner's husband or wife, they're not hurt, nor
are the sinner's children hurt. That firstborn son, the one who
will die if the blood is not on the doorpost, not hurt. The sinner does not get hurt
at all, but the lamb gets hurt a lot. The lamb is slain so that it
loses its blood, all of it. The lamb dies instead of these
Israelites, instead of the firstborn. And that is what is called substitution,
substitution. The lamb dies instead of those
Israelites, just as Jesus Christ died instead of God's chosen
people. And we will get to the blood
of Jesus in a minute and how it saves sinners, but as you
can see in this story, God is not coming to Egypt as if to
visit a friend. He's not making a social call.
He's not bringing pie. He is coming in the power of
His wrath, W-R-A-T-H, wrath. Now wrath is a strong anger and
it's violent. God in His wrath is not trying
to just give everyone a bruise, just a little love tap. He's coming to destroy, sorry, He's coming to destroy
sin, even if that sin is in a person. And God's wrath intends to destroy
And this is stepping back from the story now. God's wrath, he
has it for all sin. And it is coming and it intends to destroy all
sinners until it causes their death. That's a very scary fact. So
how can God's wrath pass over you if it is coming for you and
you're a sinner? You ever heard of the word justice?
Well, God's justice, his sense of right and wrong, his sense
of right and wrong, will not be satisfied and it cannot be
satisfied if your sin is not punished and destroyed. The wrath won't stop. This is
where the blood of the lamb comes in. In our story about the Israelites
slaying a perfect lamb, it is the blood of that lamb that is
proof to God's justice that something that was once alive had been
killed. The blood, that blood from the
thing that was killed, that's the proof. That's the proof. So when we're all healthy, the
blood stays in, right? But when someone or something
is slain, the blood leaves the body. And the lamb's blood was
innocent blood. That lamb hadn't done anything. As a picture, it was perfect. As a symbol, it was perfect. That lamb had not sinned its
entire life. And that innocent blood that
was shed, that came out, that spilled out, for the Israelites, that was innocent blood for guilty
sinners. That was innocent blood for guilty
sinners. Just as their firstborn sons
should have died that night, for their sins, by the way. The
Israelites, even though they were the favored race that God
had chosen, at that time, they were still sinners. But just as their firstborn son
should have died that night for their sins, so should you and
I die for our sins. We should. You want to call something
natural order, that is the natural order, marching to hell in our
sins. Because that's who we are. But
if a perfect substitute, like that lamb, has died for you instead,
you get to live. That is the great analogy of
our story. That's the whole point. When God takes Jesus Christ's
innocent, perfect blood, like the Lamb's innocent blood, and
sets it on your soul or, I don't know the proper word for it,
your heart or your spirit, God's wrath sees that a death
has already occurred, has already happened, where your sin used
to be. And so, when God's wrath comes
by, it sees the blood. It sees that death instead of
yours. You don't die, and at the same
time, your sin is gone. In God's view, your sin is gone. When I see the blood, I will
pass over you. Do you believe Do you believe
that Jesus Christ is your perfect substitute? Is Christ's blood on your door
another symbol for your heart? Is his blood on your heart covering
your sins? Because if it is, you have nothing
to fear from God's wrath. You have nothing to fear from
hell because all that's been satisfied by the death of Jesus
Christ and God's wrath right over. It will never come back around
your way and you will not be asked to make sacrifices again. It's a one-time thing. When I see the blood, I will
pass over you. Those are sweet words, not from
a wrathful God, even though He is. He can be many things at
once. But from a God who loves mercy, who loves being gracious,
It's from, they're from a God who so loved his people that
he provided for himself a sacrifice for them. For them. May he be glorified today and
blessed be his name. Bruce, would you close us please?