Perhaps you will notice a similarity between Day Four‘s Calendar piece and today’s:
December 10th | Our Passover Lamb
Bible Background: When God called Moses to set the Hebrews free (the burning bush in Exodus 3) He revealed a specific name, “I AM”. This name shares the same root with YHWH (transliteration: Jehovah, translation: LORD). YHWH, the LORD, means “Self Existing One” and emphasizes not only God’s existence but his immutable nature (Arthur, Kay. Lord, I Want to Know You: A Devotional Study on the Names of God. Random House Digital, Inc., Nov 21, 2000. p.55); God is complete within Himself, He is dependent upon nothing but Himself. Nothing can change God, argue with Him, turn Him back or defeat Him, yet He is willing to love and care for beings like us who are easily changed, readily put back into our place, effortlessly moved, and frequently overcome. God sees our inferior nature in compassion and desires to compensate for our weakness with His own great strength: through covenant we receive some of His immutable, unshakable nature (i.e. it is to our benefit that God “Is that He Is”). Covenants bind us to God as a vine to a rod so that we can be imbued with His quintessential permanence. We were never created to stand or endure alone!
Bible Study Question: The Passover lamb was sacrificed the day BEFORE Passover. Who died on the day before Passover (see John 19 in the link above); what kind of Sabbath was this (see Leviticus 23 in the link above).
Today’s Main Idea: The Hebrews were slaves to the Egyptians, but that did not stop God from completing His promise to Abraham. Right on schedule, four centuries after the Abrahamic Covenant, God issued His judgment against the Egyptians who were keeping His people captive. In a similar way, God has issued His judgment against the Sin that keeps us all captive: we are all slaves to Sin.
Jesus came to set us free from Sin by becoming the Passover Lamb for the whole world. The blood of the passover lambs in the Old Testament did not cover everyone: only those who made a choice to follow God’s directions and put the blood on their doorways. In the same way, while Jesus died for everyone, His blood does not save everyone: only those who make a conscious choice to apply that blood to the doorposts of their hearts.
Application: What does it mean to apply His blood to our hearts?
- Admit we’re in trouble. Like the Hebrews hearing Moses’ instructions, we need to believe that there is a judgment for sin and a deliverance from sin. If they hadn’t believed judgment and deliverance was coming, the Hebrews wouldn’t have bothered with the Passover Lamb (historically, they were not a compliant people as Moses will attest!); likewise, if we don’t believe God is right to judge all sin, including ours, we won’t apply Jesus’ blood to our hearts. However, God wants to deliver us not only from judgment but also from enslavement. He wants to give us the power to overcome Sin as we learn to trust Him to change us from slaves into His adopted children. Perhaps this Christmas you are struggling with bitterness, rage, pornography, alcoholism, or judgmentalism: God doesn’t only want you to receive His forgiveness, He also wants to deliver you from your sin, your weakness, with a display of His own great strength!
- Admit we cannot save ourselves. Like the Hebrews, we need to submit to God’s method and acknowledge our inability to protect ourselves from death. In our culture it is popular for each person to make up his own way to get to heaven; we insist that we will reason with God when we see Him and we’re sure He’ll let us into heaven on a sliding scale or because we think He will act according to our perverted definition of “love”. God, in love, provided His Son to be brutally sacrificed for our sins: would He have done that to His Son if there were any other way? Would you have done that to your child if there were another way? Jesus cried out for His Father to find another way, to remove the cup of suffering from Him…but there was no other way. The penalty for sin is always death, so a perfect, spotless life had to be paid to deliver us from it (the Passover Lamb demonstrated this). God created the heavens and the earth with such substitutionary atonement in mind, knowing we would falter, knowing we would need to apply the blood of His own Son to ourselves in order to be free of His inevitable, prevailing judgment. We cannot play “chicken” with God. There is nothing more dangerous than gambling our eternity on the premise that God will stop being who He is just for us. This Christmas, let’s abandon compromising talk and remind our loved ones that if there were multiple paths to God, there would be no need for God to send Jesus at Christmas; without arguing any further, let’s leave that one thought in their minds and meditate on it in ours. If there had been any other way, why was Christ born and surrounded by the very shepherds who were about to be put out of business by his atoning work as our Passover Lamb?
- Call upon the LORD. Like the Hebrews, we need to make an open confession of faith in the Blood of the Lamb. The passover lamb’s blood was painted on the OUTSIDE of the Hebrew houses, not tucked away inside where only God could see it. When the Egyptians looked toward Goshen, there were all the slave’s dwellings covered with blood (I imagine several wise Egyptian homes had joined in too!) Faith is not a private matter: Jesus is not so nearly concerned as we are that we offend people for being open about our faith in Him. We don’t need to be obnoxious or pushy but there should be little or no doubt who we are and Whose we are: we should stand out like those Hebrew dwellings, impoverished in ourselves but dripping with the blood of the Lamb (Jesus). This Christmas, don’t hide what you believe from your loved ones. They may accuse you of being bigoted, small-minded, or of forcing your religion on them merely for the free exercise of your faith, but don’t let that dissuade you. The beauty of Christmas sometimes forces us to forget that Jesus came in incarnate form to help prepare us for His Second Coming; to give us all a chance to repent before God “cleans house”. If we are demonstrating a garbled message of what hope in Jesus means, how will our loved ones ever come to realize they need to apply Jesus’ blood to their hearts also?
Prayer: Father God, thank You for sending Jesus as my Passover Lamb. Because He shed His blood for me, Your judgment against Sin can “pass-over” me. Help me to accept His sacrifice so I can leave my personal Egypt. I have sinned against You; help me to overcome my sin so I will no longer be a slave to it. In Jesus’ Name; Amen.
Family Activity: Toilet paper tube lamb. Help your children to use a sharp pencil to poke four holes in the bottom of a toilet paper tube (for the legs) and two holes in the top of the tube (for the neck and tail). Use one pipe cleaner for the front two legs; repeat for the back legs. Push a third pipe cleaner into the top holes for the neck and tail. Loop the neck end into a circle and glue cotton balls to it. Stick cotton balls to the tube and one ball to the tail. Finish off your lamb with “googly” eyes by gluing them to the head. Remind your children that Jesus is your Passover Lamb! (Knowing my children, they will pretend their lambs are giant sheep that stomp over our little resin Nativity and send the shepherds and wise men screaming… 🙂 )
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