The feast instituted by God in the Old Testament and the Lord’s Supper instituted by Christ in the New Testament are purposeful remembrances that point to God’s mighty acts of deliverance. Moses said to Israel, “Remember this day in which you came out from Egypt, out of house of slavery, for by a strong hand the Lord brought you out from this place.” He repeats that twice more, “For with a strong hand the Lord has brought you out of Egypt.” They did not leave. They were brought out. 

Jesus said the same to His disciples as He gave them the Lord’s Supper for the first time. “Do this in remembrance of Me.” In other words, We did not find a way to salvation. We did not find God. We were not even looking for Him. God found us. God delivered us. With a strong hand, God brought us out to bring us in!

That’s what Moses tells the people of God, that He was taking them out of Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. It is a good place. We know the story and all the troubles and trials and dangers and disobedience the people of Israel faced over the next 40 years. God knew it too but promised them they would get there. It reminded me of the time Jesus told His disciples as they stood on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, “Let us go across to the other side.” They piled in and started across and suddenly a great storm came up, as can happen on that sea, and the disciples were terrified. Especially when they looked around and saw Jesus fast asleep in the back of the boat! They woke him up and basically asked Him if He didn’t care that they were all getting ready to die. The Lord rebuked the storm, and it became perfectly calm immediately, and then He said to the disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” Jesus told His disciples, “Let’s go to the other side.” You can trust Me, Jesus spoke into their fears. And Jesus has promised all who believe in Him, “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” We will get to the other side. 

God gave Moses other instructions about how the Passover Feast would be remembered and repeated year after year. I would argue that a powerfully important part of God’s instructions on the Passover is about discipleship, particularly of our children. He made it known that the language of our faith and the truth of God’s Word would be passed down from one generation to the next. So that a hundred years from that night, a father would say to his children, “It was your great, great, great, great grandfather who was brought out of Egypt by the mighty hand of God. If God had not kept His promises, you would not be here. Let me tell you about God and His salvation.” Fathers and mothers today, and all people of faith who follow the Lord and want to be conformed more and more to His character, are very intentional about the Word, to know it and to love it and to follow it and to share it. And to remove even the slightest hint of leaven, of false teaching, that the world has added to or taken away from the Word of God. 

We make disciples one day at a time. We grow as disciples one day at a time. By the grace of our great God.

According to a 2022 article in Time magazine, we have really wasted a lot of time over the past several weeks talking about an omnipotent and sovereign God who brought 10 plagues on Egypt to force Pharaoh’s hand and deliver God’s people from 430 years of slavery. Nope. Didn’t happen, and Olvia Waxman, the author of the article clears it all up very simply with three alternate theories. I will just bless your sanctified imaginations with her first one. The so-called plagues, she wrote, were a result of a volcanic eruption in Greece around that time.  Yep. The ash from the eruption landed in Egypt, turned the water of the Nile a reddish color, causing all the frogs to jump out and look for clean water. The dead bodies from the volcano collected insects which bred by the millions and swarmed the country. Oh, and the volcanic ash caused acid rain which caused boils on peoples’ skin. The grass was contaminated so the livestock died. Should I go on? Ok, one more. The desperation of the people during all this mayhem led them to sacrifice their own firstborns. How many agree that it takes a lot more faith to believe that version than the truth of God’s Word? 

Moses warned Pharaoh that God would kill all the firstborn of Egypt and the cry that would go up in the nation would be like none that had ever been or ever would be again. Moses even told Pharaoh when it would happen: “about midnight.” It is hard to understand a leader of a nation who had seen his nation destroyed by 9 plagues, each one worse than the one before, and each one happening exactly as predicted, sitting on his hands and yawning at the latest promise: you will all lose your firstborn. Your firstborn son, the prince of Egypt, will die, Pharaoh. Also, the most miserable criminal sitting in a dungeon, a pit, like Joseph once did, will lose his firstborn. Finally, even your livestock will lose their firstborn. That was the promise and Pharaoh’s hard heart, made even more resolute by our Sovereign God, was unmoved. 

I would guess that each of you have suffered loss. But there is no loss as painful and as tragic, I am told, as the loss of a child. Some of you can say, “I know how that feels.” I remember one of the first times I went to Haiti, around 1983 or so, and we visited a hospital in Port au Prince one evening. As we walked onto the grounds, we heard and saw a woman wailing, unconsolable, her screams of anguish piercing the night, her face racked with agony. The Haitian guide told us, “Her child has just died.” 

And as I read this passage, I imagine that scene being played out in every household in an entire nation. “There was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead.” The estimate of historians is there were about one million households in Egypt. One million firstborn children died that night. We cannot even imagine it. But, it was not that way in the land of Goshen, where the Israelites lived.

The 600,000 households of the people of God were not touched. The angel of death passed over their houses because there was blood on their doorposts. Believer, it is the same for us. The people who trust in the blood of Jesus Christ will be spared and not only that, will be welcomed into the joy of fellowship with the Father and the Son for eternity. The people who do not trust in Jesus and care nothing for His perfect blood sacrifice for sin, and broad is that road and many there are who find it, will be weeping and gnashing teeth as they are cast into darkness and eternal torment.

Jesus, our Passover Lamb, died as “the firstborn among many brothers.” That is good news, indeed.

God ordained the Passover as an annual celebration for Israel after the first one in Egypt right before the people of God were delivered from bondage. This meal would become part of a Feast of Unleavened Bread.  Here are a few observations on this story in Exodus 12. First, notice that God says this is a memorial day. God commanded it in order to remind them forever of God’s great deliverance from slavery in Egypt. God set up a memorial stone, as it were, for their good and for God’s glory.

Second, it was a feast to the Lord. This was a time when the whole nation of Israel, all of God’s people, stopped what they were doing to gather and worship God. We don’t celebrate week-long feasts as Christians now, Sunday is supposed to be a weekly feast! It is a gathering of God’s people to go hard after God, to worship Him with all that we are and all that we have. When we come into this place on Sundays with every intention to give ourselves to God, to worship Him in spirit and truth, what happens? We are blessed. We taste and see that God is good. We see Him and hear His voice and grow in our faith. 

Third, it was to be a statute forever. They were to keep this reminder before them continuously so they did not grow proud or complacent, thinking they didn’t need God. He says it again: “You shall observe this day throughout your generations.” And Moses again tells the people they are to keep this feast as a way of reminding themselves and teaching their children of how great God is. “And the people bowed their heads and worshiped.”

There are only a handful of times the Old Testament when the Feast of Unleavened and the Passover are written about being observed after the Exodus. Maybe there were many times, but only 6 or so are mentioned. Remember during Josiah’s reign when the Book of the Law was found by Hilkiah and then it was read to Josiah? He tore his clothes saying, “Our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book.” He then began reforms in the nation, including restoring the Passover to Israel, saying, “For no such Passover had been kept since the days of the judges…” That was a 400-year lapse! Despite the meticulous instructions God had given His people about keeping this feast, they forgot to do it, failed to do it, and ultimately forgot the Lord and did what was right in their own eyes. 

If there are only 6 mentions of the Passover being observed in the Old Testament, the seventh mention is in the New Testament. Jesus kept the Passover with His disciples on the day before His crucifixion, and that was the last time He did. That was the last Passover meal and on that same evening Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper which became a permanent sacrament for the church. There is no religious significance for the Passover now because it was fulfilled finally and forever in Christ. The Passover looks back to the deliverance of Israel from slavery. The Lord’s Supper looks back to the death of Christ on the cross and our deliverance from sin, death, and the grave. And the Lord’s Supper looks forward to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb which we have been invited to by virtue of our salvation.

Our Passover? Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life.” 

That is our daily celebration of deliverance.

When Ernest Shackleton and his crew on the ship Endurance set out on December 5, 1914, they were bound for Antarctica. On January 15 their ship got hopelessly stuck in an ice pack east of Antarctica in the Weddell Sea. From then on, their goal was simply to survive. The freezing temperatures and the near starvation were horrible, but when winter approached in late April, the crew of the ship grew more nervous. The sun disappeared in early May and was not seen again until late July. Shackleton’s biographer wrote, “In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. It is a return to the Ice Age— no warmth, no life, no movement. Only those who have experienced it can fully appreciate what it means to be without the sun day after day and week after week. Few men unaccustomed to it can fight off its effects altogether, and it has driven some men mad.” (adapted from Philip Ryken’s book, Exodus: Saved for God’s Glory)

Darkness was the ninth plague God brought to Egypt. It was the last of the three sets of three and as has been His custom with plagues 3 and 6, God gave Pharaoh no warning for number nine.  He simply told Moses to stretch out his hand toward heaven and there would be darkness over the land of Egypt. Let me remind you of the creation of all things, how God spoke on the first day, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And it was good. And in or around 1450 B.C., God spoke again and with a word turned out the light in the land of Egypt. And as God said, this was “a darkness to be felt.” The boils brought physical pain and the hailstones and locusts brought death and destruction to animals, people, and the land. But darkness brought a different kind of pain, a suffering that was felt in hearts and souls. It must have been terrifying for the Egyptians who worshiped the sun and praised Ra the sun god every morning when they saw the sun and because of the sun were able to see everything else. But they were worshiping the wrong god, so God took it away for three days! One of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes is this one: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” The Egyptians, most of them, were living in utter spiritual darkness all the time, and God made it plain to any who had eyes to see and understand that He alone is our light and our life. 

Three days of darkness. There is no mistaking the foreshadowing here, is there? This may have been the darkest three days in Egypt’s history, but the darkest three hours in the world’s history started on a Friday at noon, about 1480 years later, as Jesus hung on a bloody cross: Matthew wrote, “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.” And though the sun may have shone after that, there was three days of darkness as the Savior lay dead in a borrowed tomb. The disciples mourned and the world rejoiced that Jesus of Nazareth was dead and gone. They thought. Then the glorious Resurrected Savior, the light of the world, burst forth from death and grave and conquered hell for all who believe! Isaiah wrote, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.”  For those of us who know Jesus, our joy is just beginning.

The darkness continues for all who do not believe.