So it's Exodus chapter 12 and
we'll read from verse 1. And the Lord spake unto Moses
and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto
you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of
the year to you. speaking unto all the congregation
of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month they shall
take to them every man a lamb according to the house of their
fathers, a lamb for an house. And if the household be too little
for the lamb, let him and his neighbour next unto his house
take it according to the number of the souls. Every man according
to his eating shall make your count for the lamb. your lamb
shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. You shall
take it out of the sheep or from the goats, and you shall keep
it up until the fourteenth day of the same month. And the whole
assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the
evening. And they shall take of the blood
and strike it on the two side posts and on the upper door post
of the houses wherein they shall eat it. and they shall eat the
flesh in that night, roast with fire and unleavened bread, and
with bitter herbs they shall eat it. Eat not of it raw, nor
sodden at all with water, but roast with fire, his head with
his legs, and with the pertinence thereof. And ye shall let nothing
of it remain until the morning. and that which remaineth of it
until the morning ye shall burn with fire. And thus shall ye
eat it, with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and
your staff in your hand, and ye shall eat it in haste. It
is the Lord's Passover. For I will pass through the land
of Egypt this night, and will smite 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 the blood
shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are. And
when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague
shall not be upon you to destroy you when I smite the land of
Egypt. Amen. We'll just pause there
for a moment and consider some of these verses. We've seen over
the past weeks how the Lord purposed to bring judgment upon Pharaoh
and upon all Egypt. Judgment for the suffering inflicted
upon his people, Israel, and for the contempt shown by Pharaoh
and his followers against the word and the warnings of God,
personified, of course, in Moses and Aaron. And we've seen now
nine plagues being brought already on this nation of Egypt at great
cost to life and property. But still, Pharaoh refused to
let the children of Israel go and worship God And now we come
to a tenth and final plague that God would visit upon the land. We're told by the Lord that God
himself would go through the land and smite all the firstborn
in the land of Egypt, both man and beast. And Moses is instructed
to prepare the children of Israel for the coming of the Lord, or
what is called the destroyer. And they must, in preparation
for this night of destruction, this 10th plague of the smiting
of the firstborn, the children of Israel must prepare for that
event. in a way of protecting their
own homes and their own lives and family's lives. They must
slay an unblemished lamb or a goat that could be taken as a kid
from the goats. And they were to take the blood
of that lamb or that kid and daub the blood on the doorposts
and the lintel of their homes. and they're to prepare a meal
of the lamb and they are to eat that meal in their homes shut
in with their shoes on and with their coats on and with their
staff or their sticks in their hand. and they are to eat it,
ready to leave the land of Egypt quickly. And so the Lord has
set up this situation of anticipation and preparation prior to him
coming through the land in judgment. And this is the first time that
there has been any requirement placed upon the children of Israel
themselves for a plague. But now these specific instructions
are given for all the families and households of the people. A lamb and a kid must be without
blemish, it must be cooked in a special way, it must be eaten
in a special way with bitter herbs, and it must be completely
consumed overnight within the closed doors of the family. And anything that remains uneaten
in the morning must be burned with fire. This meal was to have
special significance, not only in the moment, but for the rest
of the history of the Jewish people for many, many years to
come. meal would be a testimony and
a memorial in the coming years and to coming generations of
God's mercy and his power and his deliverance of his people
from their enemies. And Moses told the people in
Exodus chapter 12 in verse 23. We didn't read it there, but
we will in a moment. For the Lord will pass through
to smite or to kill the Egyptians. And when he seeth the blood of
the lamb or the kid upon the lintel and on the two side posts,
The Lord will deliver or pass over, the Lord's destroyer will
pass over the door and will not suffer the destroyer to come
in unto the house to smite you. Israel would be safe under the
blood. And the Lord would pass through
the land and pass over the homes where these instructions had
been carried out. And the blood was visible on
the doorposts and lintels. And this feast would become known
as the Passover because God passed over the homes where he saw the
blood. And this destroyer or a destroying
angel, as it is sometimes called, a death angel, would not be permitted
to enter those homes or hurt those people. And this is what
Moses goes on to say in verse 29 of this same passage. He says this, And it came to
pass that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the
land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne
unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon, and
all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night,
he and all his servants, and all the Egyptians, and there
was a great cry in Egypt, We sometimes call this the midnight
cry. For there was not a house where
there was not one dead. And he called for Moses and Aaron,
that is Pharaoh, he called for Moses and Aaron by night, and
said, Rise up and get you forth from among my people, both ye
and the children of Israel, and go, serve the Lord as ye have
said. Also take your flocks and your
herds as ye have said, and be gone, and bless me also. So here
we find a distraught pharaoh. He didn't actually speak directly
to Moses and Aaron because he did not see their faces again,
we are told, from a previous encounter, but rather he sent
his servants to prostrate themselves, to lie on the floor before Moses
and Aaron and plead with them that they would leave his country. I thought a little bit about
this judgment that befell Egypt as I was preparing, obviously. And I wondered if perhaps with
the exception of the flood in Noah's time, there was ever such
a judgment as this. What a crippling wound was made
this night upon a nation and every individual family. From Pharaoh on the throne to
the captives in the prison, there was a great cry in Egypt, for
there was not a house where there was not one dead. Some people
have wondered if there would have been necessarily a firstborn
in every house. And yet it does say here that
there was not a house in the whole of Egypt where there was
not one dead. And it has also been suggested
that perhaps God ordered it to be so that no one was unaffected
by the destruction on this night. that there was weeping in every
family and in every home. Whatever the immediate circumstances,
the outpouring of grief must have been immense. There are
a couple of important applications that I want to make with you
here from this passage. One way or another, The whole of the Old Testament
scriptures point us to the Lord Jesus Christ. And we remember
that the Lord himself said that Moses spoke of him. And this is one of the key passages. This chapter is one of the key
passages where the substitutionary sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ
on the cross is most clearly portrayed in the Old Testament
writings. I have no doubt that this was
a central picture, or type, as we call it, of the coming Messiah
for the Old Testament believers. They looked at this ceremony,
they looked at this event in the life of Moses and the children
of Israel, and they saw in picture form the work of the Messiah,
what the Lord Jesus Christ would do. Indeed the book of the Hebrews
tells us, and of course Hebrews was written to the Hebrews, the
children of Israel, and the writer to the Hebrews tells us in chapter
11 and verse 28 that it was through faith that he, that's Moses,
kept the Passover and the sprinkling he that destroyed the firstborn
should touch them. So Moses understood and as Moses
understood so many of the children of Israel that had been granted
this gift of spiritual insight and understanding understood
the significance of this event and this memorial service by
faith. And by faith Old Testament believers
were saved in their souls, in their spirits, in the same ways
we are saved, by trusting in the atoning sacrifice of the
Messiah for them. And Paul tells us he joins these
two things up, this lamb that was slain and its blood placed
upon the doorposts and the lintel, and the Lamb of God, which the
Saviour is so often called in Scripture. And the Apostle Paul
in 1 Corinthians 5, verse 7, brings these two great works
together. the work of the Passover and
the work of Christ by declaring that Christ, our Passover, is
sacrificed for us. And as we've seen in some of
the recent sermons that we've shared together, there's a close
identification between the rituals of this Feast of the Passover
and the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, the Lord Jesus
was crucified during the Passover Feast as the antitype of the
fulfilment. And the spiritual and doctrinal
parallels show that Christ's death was to be that fulfilment
and a key event in the history of Israel and of the Lord's people. So it's good for us to understand
this overlap and this parallel, this type and anti-type, this
picture and fulfilment that we have in the person of Christ. Here's the second thing I want
us to notice. The unblemished lamb is a picture
of Christ's purity and worthiness to represent his people before
God so that not only is there in the general picture an application
to Christ and spiritual aspects of the Lord Jesus Christ. But
in the individual parts, there are also parallels to be found. And this is one of the beauties
of the Word of God, is that when we read these Old Testament scriptures,
we can, with spiritual eyes and understanding, discern and discover
the Lord Jesus Christ in them. The lamb was to be taken, and
it was to be examined, and it was to be shown to be without
blemish. And the Lord Jesus Christ must
be without sin. He must be pure to be the substitute
for his people, to be a worthy substitute to atone for our sins. And another picture is that the
slaying and roasting of the lamb speaks of the Lord being punished
under the fiery judgment of God's wrath. Once again, the blood
on the doorposts and the lintel speaks of being covered and protected
by the shed blood of the Saviour. Remember, it was the absence
of blood that brought disaster at the hand of God's destroying
angel. Wherever the Lord did not see
the blood, death was imposed and the family was afflicted.
But where the Lord saw the blood, where God saw the blood, he passed
over. And that speaks to us of being
under the benefits of the blood of the Lord Jesus. Once again,
the sprinkling of blood on the doorposts and lintel is a picture
of the sprinkling of Christ's cleansing blood in our consciences
and for our sin. And it's a reminder that not
only must the blood of Christ be shed, it must also be applied
individually through personal repentance and faith. and the
unleavened bread, it speaks about the sincere and truthful worship
of God's people as they meditate and think upon the death of Christ. That we have that benefit and
that blessing of the work of Christ afforded to us. The bitter
herbs that were eaten along with the roast lamb speak of the trials
of God's people in this life, that we're beset with troubles.
The lamb for a household and nothing being allowed to remain
in the morning points to the sufficiency of Christ, but also
the particularity of Christ's death for his elect people alone. And the eating of the lamb, roasted
in preparation of this feast, with shoes on and with coats
on and with a staff in hand, reminds us that this world is
not our home. And just as the children of Israel
were about to be led out of the land of Egypt, so we should not
be content to remain here, but rather be eagerly looking forward
to our eternal home. and a better land and an inheritance
that is laid up for us in heaven. And just finally one more little
point. Let us remember this in the history
of the plagues and in the account that is given here by Moses,
a first-hand account, remember. Let us remember what Moses was
told concerning Pharaoh in the land of Egypt. When God says
he is going to do something, he will do it. Pharaoh is an
example. He was an example to Israel,
he was an example to the world and he is an example to us all. God has promised that he is going
to judge this world in a day to come and someday every man
and woman and boy and girl will stand before the judgment seat
of God, the judgment seat of Christ. And yet God has set up
a way of escape and a means of deliverance and salvation. by the death of the Lord Jesus
Christ as a substitute for sinners. Just as the lamb in Egypt was
slain and its blood applied, and that was the salvation for
the firstborn in every home of the children of Israel. So by
the slaying and shedding of blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, All
of God's chosen people, all of God's firstborn sons and daughters
are saved by the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is our
substitute and he died in our place. Our deliverance and safety
is assured as we are under the blood of Jesus Christ. So may
God grant us faith to believe and give us ears to hear the
warnings and eyes to see the grace that we may flee to Christ
for mercy. Amen. May the Lord bless you.