Passover (Communion message)

[0:00] Speak ye 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 a house.

[0:13] Then verse 12, the Lord says, 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.

[0:28] I am the Lord. Verse 13, And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are. And when I see the blood, when I see the blood, I will pass over you.

[0:43] And the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you when I smite the land of Egypt. Passover. You could call it the great escape.

[0:56] Godless Pharaoh. Stubbornly refused to let God's people go. He held them as his slaves. It was slave labour.

[1:07] They were doing important work. Building his edifices for his glory. And he didn't want the people of God to be let go. They were too useful to him.

[1:19] And God had to get Pharaoh's attention. And we know the Lord sent ten plagues. He turned the Nile to blood. The land was filled with frogs, gnats, flies, hail, locusts, and darkness.

[1:33] And in the ultimate plague, God sends a final devastation upon Egypt. Every firstborn of every household would be destroyed.

[1:44] The Passover commemorates this event. We look back to the Passover time. We look back to that time where every firstborn of every household would be destroyed.

[1:57] And the Passover commemorates this event in history and what had happened. So we're going to take a look at three truths we can learn from the Passover. Three truths of the Passover time.

[2:08] Number one, you are separated. You are separated. Before the Passover, God calls for a searching and a casting out of the leaven from the home.

[2:21] And leaven, as we know it, speaks of false doctrine in one instance and of sin. And the people of God had to go through their household, through their whole house, to have this cleansing ritual.

[2:38] And Jews relive this today, this ritual of cleansing. And what happens in Jewish households is the wife thoroughly cleans the house to get rid of all the leaven. But she deliberately leaves some small pieces in the house, some ten small pieces in the house.

[2:55] And then the father and the children go right through the house from top to bottom, checking all the nooks and crannies in the cupboards and spaces, searching high and low to find the leaven.

[3:06] They're careful to get rid of even the smallest breadcrumbs and specks of dirt from their homes. And the night before the Passover, they go through their home with a candle, searching in all those dark corners and places, to find those unnoticed bits of leaven, of leftover leaven.

[3:25] And next morning they burn them, they destroy them. And we know God's house, God's church, is called a spiritual house. In 1 Peter 2 verse 5, it's a spiritual house.

[3:36] The house of God. And individual believers, we know each one of us as God's people, individually we are temples of God. God dwells in us. As our bodies are likened to a temple.

[3:50] And in the Bible, leaven is a symbol, is symbolic of sin. So as Christians we can think, even as we recollect the Passover time, as we know the true fulfilment of the Passover as God's people, as believers in Christ, it's a good time for us likewise to check out our hearts, to get rid of any leaven.

[4:16] What is there in us of perhaps pride, vanity, sin, leaven? It's like the yeast that puffs up the bread. So it's like that puffing up, that sometimes we can have a puffing up of our ego.

[4:29] And we can get proud and prideful and vain. And yeast speaks of that puffing up. And it also speaks about sin.

[4:40] How we need to examine ourselves, as the Bible says, to search out, is there some sin in me? Is there some lack of faith, some neglect of spiritual things?

[4:52] Something I really need to get right with God about. And so we likewise, we can take the candle, as it were. The Word of God is likened to the light, isn't it?

[5:04] It's likened to light, that we can take the candle, as it were, and search ourselves. Trust the Lord and obey the Scriptures. God deals with the sin that is in our life.

[5:16] And it's only through God's Word that we are able to identify sin in our life. As we know, it says in Psalm 119, verse 105, that His Word is like a light unto our feet, a light unto our path.

[5:32] And so the Word of God is something, you know, it's like someone has said that the Word of God, it will keep us from sin, or sin will keep us from the Word of God.

[5:46] And so we need to find that lamp unto our feet, that light unto our path. And so they had to deal with sin, they had to separate themselves from the sin.

[5:58] As we know, the children of Israel had to separate themselves from Egypt. And Egypt, in the Scriptures, is likened to a symbol, a picture of the world. And so likewise for us, a separation happens, a salvation.

[6:12] We become God's separated chosen people, His own, His beloved. And as God's people, we are separated. We're parted from Egypt. We're taken out of that, which represents the world as a separation.

[6:26] You are separated. Secondly, you are safe. You are safe. The Passover tells us of this dread plague, of this destruction, of God's venting, of judgment, of wrath.

[6:40] He's pouring out of that rightful sentence, of condemnation. And in this last awful plague that Egypt suffered, the angel of death would visit the land.

[6:54] God's terrifying judgment would fall. The firstborn from every household was to die. God, in His grace, gave to Moses a way for anyone to be safe.

[7:10] There was a way of safety. If they would take and slaughter an unblemished one-year-old lamb, that was the way of escape.

[7:22] And God offered a shield to the household, a safeguard, a shield of the blood. The blood would protect.

[7:33] The blood would bring protection from the destruction that would pass over. And whilst destruction would abound, safety comes to us because of the Lamb.

[7:44] Amen? Because of the Lamb, the Lamb of God. And likewise even now for you, for me, the blood is a sign of His safeguard, of His safekeeping. The blood is a sign that in that house there had already been a death.

[8:01] Amen? Every household had to have a death. It was a blood-red mark on the doorpost, on the lintel, on the top part. The blood-red mark would signify that those within had availed themselves of the way that God had provided in order to escape the universal judgment that was sweeping across Egypt.

[8:23] And they were safe. Those ones were safe. If they had the blood, they were safe. God said, I will pass over. I will pass over those households that have the blood.

[8:39] The blood was between them and the angel of death. And it was the only safe way. The only way to be safe. Friends, today, souls are in danger.

[8:50] Souls are in danger. But there is great safety because of the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen? There is safety in the blood, under the shelter of the blood. So the lamb was to be killed between the evenings.

[9:03] It says in Exodus 12, verse 6, had to be killed between the evenings. And this refers to the ninth hour of the day, 3 p.m. 3 p.m. Which was exactly the moment that Christ died.

[9:16] God knew that moment, that time of day, the very moment when the lamb had to be slain.

[9:27] And to be safe, the believers had to smear the blood on the doorposts, on the lintel of their home. And you can imagine as it was painted above and on the sides, it was, as it were, the shape of the hands, the crown, and then the feet, as it would have dripped down.

[9:49] It was a picture of Christ the substitute, the lamb slain. So that those houses that had the blood, he passed over. And their firstborn was spared.

[10:02] They were spared from judgment. They were safe. And so are we. Brother, sister, you are safe because of the blood. You are safe, you that believe. The Israelites did as instructed and were safe.

[10:15] And likewise you, as a believer, you are safe and secure in the rock of all ages. And you can find the safety and peace with God Almighty due to the sacrifice of Christ on your behalf.

[10:28] So you are separated. We've come out of Egypt. We don't belong there anymore. That's not where we belong. We've been set apart as God's holy people. We've been made safe.

[10:40] From God's judgment, He will pass over us. And thirdly, we see, you are free. You are free. Set free. Free indeed. Free indeed.

[10:52] Passover declares Israel's passage from slavery to freedom. And it celebrates how God delivered the children of Israel from the bondage of Egypt and from the authority of Pharaoh.

[11:04] And so to be delivered from Egypt, God instructed the children of Israel to kill a lamb and apply its blood to the doorposts of their homes. And the ones who obeyed were set free.

[11:16] They were delivered. They were set free, redeemed, purchased, made safe. People today, Egypt, is a type, it's a kind of a picture, like a representation.

[11:30] We can be reminded of that symbol that Egypt is. It's a symbol of the world system. It's a symbol of slavery and corruption and bondage and captivity.

[11:44] And the ruler of Egypt is Pharaoh, who is a type, a picture, of Satan himself. The ruler of Egypt, Pharaoh, pictures for us Satan and his control and his captivity of people.

[12:01] He's the slave master. And sin is likened to bondage and slavery as the Egyptians were held captive in such a held hostage, held in the devil's control.

[12:20] under his domain. And yet, in contrast, we as believers, as God's people, we are called the house of God, as it talks about in 1 Peter 2, verse 5.

[12:31] We can think about these various pictures that we see right back at the time of the Passover. We see that the doorpost could speak to us of representing our heart.

[12:44] The doorpost, when you receive the Lord Jesus as your Saviour in your heart by faith, you spiritually apply the blood as it were. You make application of the blood.

[12:56] You say that you believe that the blood was shed for you. You believe that the Lord Jesus Christ, when he shed his blood, it was for you, for me. And you apply the blood by faith.

[13:07] you believe that that was what it truly was and is. That Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us. He's the full fulfilment of what the Passover was prophesying.

[13:22] And so, it's only by trusting in the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, your Passover, that you can be set free from the bondage of sin. The blood of Jesus redeems us.

[13:32] We know that there's much reference to redemption as we see in the Old Testament and then fulfilled in the New. Leviticus 17, 11.

[13:44] I'll just refer to that one. It says, For the life of the flesh is in the blood. The life of the flesh is in the blood. There's life in the blood today. Eternal life.

[13:56] We're set free. And the Passover, it celebrates our freedom. And so, around the world, around the globe, the people still remember the Passover.

[14:06] Sadly, many of them don't realise that Christ, our Passover, is the fulfilment of the Passover. He is the one. In vain they remember it because they don't know the fulfilment of it.

[14:19] But it's Christ. Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us. And yet, for us who, know the Lord, we have the true fulfilment of what it all means.

[14:31] That we've been redeemed from slavery. We've become priests and kings of God. And at Passover, it's interesting, at the Passover time, when in the traditional setting, they remember it as they would have done in the upper room.

[14:48] They didn't have blue chairs to sit on. So we've all got to sit on the floor, really, to do it properly. But there's a sense where there wasn't seats to sit on, but there was a reclining while eating.

[15:03] So they would all have, I think they leant on their elbows or they leaned over. They might have had some cushion thing. But they basically reclined as they partook of the Passover.

[15:14] Passover. And I'm told that this indicates another truth that we could kind of draw from this picture is that when someone reclines, it's indicating a person of freedom and royalty.

[15:30] You know, the servants would have waited on them and such. But the royalty, the honoured guests, would recline around this time of eating.

[15:42] And in a way, it's also a picture for us how we've got absolute and ultimate freedom. That we are royalty. We are kings and priests and queens and princes and princesses.

[15:55] Part of the royal family, God's royal family. That's what we are today. Amen? I know there's a real princess here. But we know that we are royalty today, aren't we?

[16:06] Amen? We are part of the royal family. We are children of God, the ultimate king. And yet, we reflected too about what actually happened that night.

[16:17] There had to be a death. There had to be a death in every home. Every home had to have a death. Either a dead lamb or a dead son.

[16:29] Someone had to, some payment had to be made. some death had to be given.

[16:41] And so we see that it's the same for us today. As I've heard it said, as the Bible says, the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.

[16:52] And the question for everybody is, who's going to pay for your sin? That is the question. Because without Christ, you will have to pay for your sin in hell.

[17:07] That's the payment. But in Christ, with Christ, he has made the payment. He has paid the penalty. And if you receive his death on your behalf, in your place, then he will pass over you.

[17:22] He won't judge. He's already judged Christ in your place. And so, the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world. That's the joy that we remember today.

[17:33] And in every life, in every individual, there has to be a death. A death. Either of the Lamb, as it were, as we believe, the Lamb of God who died for us, or at the last, without Christ, of the individual of eternal death.

[17:49] But we know for us that believe today, that trust him, God brings great deliverance and victory. I'm going to