When I See the Blood

Transcript

I'd like to ask you to determine your Bibles to Exodus chapter 12 this morning as we continue through the book of Exodus, and we'll read verses 1 through 32. Exodus chapter 12, beginning in verse 1. Hear now the word of the Lord. The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, "This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you." "Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their father's houses, a lamb for a household. And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of persons.

According to what each can eat, you shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight. Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire, with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it.

Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted its head with its legs and its inner parts. And you shall let none of it remain until the morning, anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. In this manner, you shall eat it with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord's Passover.

For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast. And on all the gods of Egypt, I will execute judgments. I am the Lord. The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you.

And no plague shall befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. This day shall be for you a memorial day. And you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord throughout your generations, as a statute forever you shall keep it as a feast. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven out of your houses, for if anyone eats what is leavened, from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel.

On the first day you shall hold a holy assembly, and on the seventh day a holy assembly. No work shall be done on those days. But what everyone needs to eat, that alone may be prepared by you. And you shall observe the feast of the unleavened bread, for on this very day I brought your hosts out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day throughout your generations, as a statute forever.

In the first month, from the fourteenth day of the month that evening, you shall eat unleavened bread until the twenty-first day of the month that evening. For seven days no leaven is to be found in your houses. If anyone eats what is leavened, that person will be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a sojourner or the native of the land. You shall eat nothing leavened in all your dwelling place. You shall eat unleavened bread.

Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, "Go and select lambs for yourselves according to your clans, and kill the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning. For the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you. You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and for your sons forever.

And when you come to the land that the Lord will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this service. And when your children say to you, "What do you mean by this service?" You shall say it is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel and Egypt when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses. And the people bowed their heads and worshipped. Then the people of Israel went and did so, as the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron, so they did. At midnight, the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock.

And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians, and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead. Then he summoned Moses and Aaron by night and said, "Up, go out from among my people, both you and the people of Israel, and go, serve the Lord as you have said. Take your flocks and your herds as you have said, and be gone, and bless me also." This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.

Father, I pray that as we look at this text this morning that we would see that there is nothing in us deserving of redemption, that we are counted among all the sinners of the earth, but that only those who trust in the blood of the sacrificial lamb can be saved. I pray that if there's anyone here this morning who is not yet trusted in Christ alone for his or her salvation, that this morning they would look to the blood of Christ, and that we who believe we would recognize that this redemption that you have secured through the blood of your Son is what restructures the entirety of our lives for your glory. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. You may be seated.

For several weeks now we have watched as God has dismantled the most powerful empire on earth. Nine plagues in three cycles, each one answering a different dimension of Pharaoh's arrogant question from chapter five, "Who is Yahweh that I should obey his voice?" In cycle one of the plagues we saw that God demolished every rival-claimed spiritual power. The magicians went from imitators to confessors forced to admit this is the finger of God. In cycle two, as Pastor Matt showed us, God drew a line between his people and his enemies where judgment fell on Egypt, but Israel was untouched. And then last week in cycle three, as Pastor Dylan traced for us, the judgment escalated to cosmic proportions, hail shattering the sky, locust devouring the land, and darkness swallowing up the very sun.

And Pharaoh's own court was fractured against him. Nine plagues, nine answers, and still Pharaoh's heart remains as hard as the bricks his slaves were forced to make without straw. But now the pattern breaks. The tenth plague does not fit neatly into one of those cycles. There's no morning warning at the Nile, no announcement in the palace, no gradual escalation from nuance to catastrophe.

This tenth plague is the climax. This is the blow that the entire narrative has been driving toward since God first said to Moses at the burning bush, "I will stretch out my hand against Egypt." But with this climactic plague, Israel can't just sit in Goshen and be protected any longer by geography. The Goshen distinctive shielded them from the flies and from the hail and from the darkness, but this tenth plague is not aimed at a place. This tenth plague is aimed at persons, the firstborn. The firstborn die because of the judgment of a holy God, which raises a question that the first nine plagues never really asked, and the question is this.

If God is executing righteous judgment on the firstborn of the land, why should Israel's firstborn be spared? This is the central question that this last plague answers, and it is in many ways the fundamental question that the entire book of Exodus is asking. Remember, the theme of this book is the redemption of God's people, and when we think of redemption, we naturally think of it with reference to their bondage in Egypt, and that is true. They were redeemed from the slavery of Egypt. But what the tenth plague emphasizes is that the redemption of Israel is not only their redemption from their bondage in Egypt, but their redemption is also a redemption from the wrath and judgment of a holy God.

And that is true also of the redemption of God's people today. Yes, it is true that God's people are freed from the bondage of sin, and that is a wonderful blessing of our redemption. But we are also delivered, not only from the bondage of sin, we are delivered from the just judgment of the holy God who cannot tolerate sin. And when we consider that aspect of redemption, the question that we need to ask, the question that every person in this room needs to ask is this. Why were we redeemed from the wrath of God and not others?

That is what this task answers this morning with vivid clarity. Because what we see in this narrative first is that the judgment of God is falling upon every single house. This judgment strikes persons, every firstborn in the land, from the throne to the dungeon to the mill. No status is exempt from this judgment. No wall protects.

This is a judgment on persons, and persons are judged for sin. And so, the distinction can no longer be a line on the map. Something else must stand between Israel's firstborn and the angel of death. Something that addresses the deeper problem, not the problem of living in the wrong neighborhood, but the problem of standing guilty before a holy God. And in this respect, Israel is no different from Egypt.

Israel is filled with sinners. Joshua 24 verse 14 tells us that the Israelites worshipped the false gods of Egypt. They turned on Moses, as we saw a couple chapters ago, when the obedience got difficult. They called down God's judgment on his own messenger. The Israelites are sinners living in the midst of sinners.

If the angel of death is coming for the guilty, then Israel has no inherent claim for exemption. And this morning, every person in this room shares that same problem. We are not spectators watching an ancient drama in this text. We are participants in the same reality. Each one of us stands before the same holy, perfect, and righteous God.

And the question is whether we deserve exemption from his judgment. And the answer for Israel and for us is no. We don't deserve any exemption from judgment. The ninth plague reveals who God is. And the tenth plague reveals what God requires.

What God requires is death for sin. And so what then differentiates the Israelite houses from the Egyptian houses when the angel of death comes to meet out God's just judgment? Well, the instructions given to God's people in this text, as we just read, are very specific, and the specificity matters. Each household, as we read, selects a lamb on the tenth day of the month and then keeps that lamb until the fourteenth. Four days.

The family lives with that animal for four days. The children play with it. They feed it. They name it. It becomes their lamb, not a random animal pulled from the herd at the last moment, but a known loved creature that is eaten from their hands and slapped by their fire.

God is not being arbitrary here. He is ensuring that when the knife falls on the fourteenth day, the family feels the cost of it. Substitution is not some sort of abstraction. It's not a theological concept that you can affirm from a comfortable distance. No, it is a specific life given in place of a specific life.

The lamb you know dies so that the son you love can live. At the end, the text says, the lamb must be without blemish, not a cast off, not the runt of the flock that no one will miss, the best animal that they have, because the quality of the substitute declares the seriousness of the judgment. A damaged lamb would say that God's wrath can be satisfied with something broken, but an unblemished lamb declares that only perfection can stand in the place of the guilty. And then we read in verse 6 that at twilight, on the fourteenth day, the whole assembly does what God commands. They kill their lambs.

And notice, this is not priests killing the lambs. There aren't even any priests yet. No, the head of the household, the fathers kill the lamb. The head of the household takes the knife in one hand. He places his hand upon the animal, feeling the beat of his heart.

And then he feels the blood on his hands, and he understands in his bones what it cost for his son to live. But the lamb's death alone is not enough. The blood must be applied, taken from the basin and placed on the door frame, publicly and visibly and deliberately. And this is faith made tangible. By putting the blood on your door, you are declaring to God and to your neighbors, and even to the angel of death, a substitute died here.

A life has been given in place of another, and I am trusting in the blood. And notice where the blood goes. It's on the outside of the door. The family is on the inside eating the meal. They can't see the blood.

They're not staring at the doorpost all night, checking to make sure that it's still there. No, they are resting inside the house, trusting the promise of the one who said, and these are probably the most important words in the entire chapter, "When I see the blood, I will pass over you." Notice, "Not when I see your sincerity." Not when I see your track record. Not when I see that your heart is soft enough. No, when I see the blood. The ground of Israel's salvation on this night is not the worthiness of the family inside of the house.

The ground of Israel's salvation is the blood on the door. Now, try to put yourself inside one of those homes on the evening of the 14th. The sun is going down over Goshen. Somewhere outside, you can hear the bleeding of the lambs across the settlement, hundreds of them, and then silence, one by one, as the knives do their work. The innocent lamb is slaughtered, and you watch as the fathers dip their branches into the basin and strike the doorpost and the lintel, the left side, the right side, the top, and the blood is running down the wood in dark streaks.

And then he comes inside and he closes the door. Now the lamb is roasting over the fire. The smell fills the room. Your mother has set out the unleavened bread, flat, hurried, no time for leaven, and the bitter herbs that no one enjoys but everyone eats because you're supposed to taste the bitterness of what you are being saved from. And everyone is dressed very strangely.

Your father is wearing his sandals indoors. His belt is singed tight. His staff is leaning against the wall within an arm's reach. Your mother has bundled everything you own into a sack and is ready by the door. The children are dressed for travel.

You eat standing up. No one sits down. The whole posture of the meal says we are not staying here. Something is about to happen. Tonight we leave.

And then the meal is finished. And you wait. The fire burns low. The children fall asleep in their travel clothes. The house is quiet.

Outside the night is quiet. Egypt is quiet. The blood is drying on your doorpost. You can't see it from inside. You're trusting that it's still there.

You're trusting that the God who commanded it will do what he has promised. And then midnight comes. You don't see the angel of death. You don't hear the footsteps. But you do hear what follows.

It starts somewhere distant. A single whale sharp and sudden cutting through the darkness from the Egyptian quarter. And then there's another. And then another. And the sound multiplies spreading across the settlement like a wave house after house after house until the whole land of Egypt is screaming.

Mothers clutching their sons. Fathers staring at the stillness that was not there an hour ago. Servants and prisoners and families of soldiers and merchants and priests. Every house. Every single house.

There was not a house the text told us. Where someone was not dead. And you're inside your house with the blood on the door. And every one of your children is alive. The cry is everywhere outside but you are untouched.

Why? You know in your heart of hearts you are not better than the Egyptians. You are not more righteous. You are not more deserving. You are not more faithful.

But because there is blood on your doorpost. A lamb died so that your son could live. That is the only difference between your house and theirs. And so Pharaoh as he read summons Moses and Aaron by night and the words that come out of his mouth are the final devastating answer to his arrogant question of chapter 5. The man who said who is Yahweh that I should obey his voice now says go serve Yahweh.

The man who said I do not know Yahweh now knows him. He knows him in judgment. He learned him in the worst possible way. And then the final phrase two words that contain more theological weight than even Pharaoh could have understood. He says bless me also.

This serpent king, this dragon of Egypt, this man who defied the I Am through nine plagues and hardened his heart against every sign is now asking for a blessing from the God that he denied. This is the total irreversible collapse of autonomous rebellion under the judgment of God. But here is what we need to see as we stand back from this night and we take it in its full scope. The same midnight that destroyed Egypt also is what delivers Israel. The same hour that killed the firstborn freed the slaves.

You see what we're seeing here in this text is that wrath and mercy fall simultaneously. They're not opposites pulling in different directions. They are two dimensions of the same act of God. Judgment on the one who will not shelter under the blood and salvation for the one who will. The only difference between a grieving Egyptian home and a celebrating Israelite home is the blood of the lamb on the doorpost.

And this inseparability of judgment and salvation, this single night where wrath and mercy meet, that is a pattern that holds all the way to Calvary. Every thread in this passage runs to one person and one night. The lamb without blemish, that is Christ. Peter writes in 1 Peter 1 18 you were ransomed not with perishable things such as silver or gold but with the precious blood of Christ like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. Every unblemished lamb that bled on the Israelites doorpost was a shadow of the lamb that God himself would provide.

The lamb taken on the 10th day and killed on the 14th? That is clearly Christ. Jesus entered Jerusalem on the 10th day of Nisan. The crowds waved palm branches. The city watched him for four days.

He taught in the temple. He answered every challenge and was examined by every faction. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians and he was found without blemish. And on the 14th of Nisan, at the very hour the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in the temple, the Son of God was nailed to a cross. The blood on the doorposts?

That is the cross. The blood that shielded Israel from the destroyer is the blood that shields every believer from the wrath of God. And just as the Israelite father had to take the hyssop and dip it in the basin and strike it on the doorposts so that every sinner would be rescued in his house in the same way, every sinner must receive the blood of Christ by faith. The sacrifice is complete. The lamb has been slain.

But the blood has to be applied. The blood has to be trusted, has to be received, has to be claimed as your own. And the great cry of Egypt? That cry finds its echo in the great cry of Calvary. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" On the afternoon of Good Friday, the firstborn Son of God died so that the guilty sons of Adam might live.

The cry of despair from the cross is the cry of the ultimate firstborn bearing the judgment that should have fallen on each one of us. Christ was not passed over. He was struck. And because He was struck, we are spared. Paul says it with breathtaking simplicity in 1 Corinthians 5-7, "Christ, our Passover lamb has been sacrificed." This is what the Passover was always pointing to.

Every lamb that bled in Egypt, every lamb that bled on every altar for the next 15 centuries was a finger pointing forward to the one sacrifice that would finally, fully, and forever satisfy. The lambs in Egypt were just the shadow. The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world is the substance. And so the question that this passage puts to each one of us is the simplest and most urgent question in the whole world. And it's this.

Are you trusting the blood? On the night of the Passover, there were only two kinds of homes in Egypt, homes with blood on the door and homes without. Inside the blood-marked house, the family ate in peace, trusting the promise. But outside, judgment fell. There's no third option.

There's no neutral ground, and the same is true today. There is no third option. If you are here this morning and you have never come to Christ, if you have never trusted in the blood of the lamb, then you are standing in an unmarked house, and the judgment of God remains upon you. The provision has been made. The lamb has been slain.

His blood is sufficient for every sin that you ever committed. But it must be received. It must be trusted. It must be claimed as your own. And the promise of God to you is the same promise he made to Israel in that terrible, glorious night.

"When I see the blood, I will pass over you." Not when I see your effort. Not when I see your improvement. When I see the blood. I want to speak specifically this morning to many of you older children and teenagers here. You have heard the gospel all of your life, and some of you have not yet trusted Christ because you are waiting until your heart is sincere enough.

You are waiting until your faith is strong enough. But no, that is not what saves you. If you're waiting for your heart to be sincere enough or soft enough, then you're going to be waiting forever. No, just look at the blood. Don't look at yourself.

Your heart is no different from Pharaoh's. Your heart is not what will free you from the wrath of God. Only the blood of Christ will do that. So look to the blood. Acknowledge that there is nothing that you can do that will make you worthy of salvation and simply trust in the sacrificial death of Christ.

And if you are a believer this morning, if the blood is already on your door, then I want you to notice something about this passage that might seem like a small detail but is actually one of the most significant commands. Before God gave a single instruction about the Lamb, he reset the calendar. Did you notice in verse 2? "This month shall be for you a beginning of months." Until this moment, Israel measured time by Pharaoh's schedule. Quotas of bricks, rhythms of labor, the oppressor's clock.

But God is saying in this moment, that calendar, that worldly calendar, that calendar of the oppressor, that calendar is over. From tonight, you measure time by what I have done for you. Your first month, your first day begins with redemption. And then in verse 24, God commands them to observe this night as a memorial forever. Every year the Lamb is slaughtered, the story is retold, and the family remembers.

You see, God knows something about us, even those of us who believe whose hearts are regenerate, God knows something about us that we are slow to admit. We forget. We drift. We are people with short memories. And without regular, rhythmic, embodied acts of remembrance, the redemption that saved us just fades into background noise.

Memorials are not nostalgia. That's not what God is commanding here. No, in biblical thinking, in ancient thinking, a memorial is something that reorders your life by the rhythms of redemption. And notice how God designs the memorial to work, verses 26 and 27. When your children say to you, "What do you mean by this service?" you shall say, "It is a sacrifice of the Lord's Passover." God builds the question into the ritual.

He wants the children to ask. He wants the meal to provoke curiosity, because curiosity opens the door for the story, and the story is the means by which redemption is passed from one generation to the next. The Passover is not just a national holiday. It is a catechetical event. It is a meal that teaches.

It is a rhythm that remembers. A tradition that transmits the most important truth in the world. We were under judgment, and a lamb died, and God saw the blood, and he passed over. We were spared. This is why Jesus, on the night that he was betrayed, took the bread and the cup, the elements of the Passover meal, and he said, "Do this in memorial of me." The Lord's Table is the new covenant Passover.

The weekly rhythm by which we, as believers, declare we are people defined by the blood of the lamb. We refuse to let the world schedule its holidays, its commercial seasons, its relentless demand for productivity. None of that defines the rhythms of our lives. No, the church gathers on the Lord's Day and orders our year around the birth and death and resurrection and return of Christ, because the redeemed are not measured by the world's calendar. The redeemed are not measured by Hallmark.

The redeemed measure time by the lamb. And every Christian in this room, particularly Christian parents, carry the same assignment that God gave the Israelite fathers. When your children ask, and they will ask, "What do you mean by this?" Tell them. Tell them every day. Tell them until they can tell their own children, because the Passover was not designed to be observed once, just like the Last Supper was not designed to be observed once.

It was designed to be proclaimed across every generation until the lamb himself returns. This table proclaims the central message, "When I see the blood, I will pass over you." And so this morning, if you are still on the side of judgment, I plead with you, trust the blood of the lamb. And if you are one of the redeemed, let that reality govern every aspect of your life. Let's pray. Father, we acknowledge and marvel this morning that in our very core, we are no different than our neighbors, than our co-workers, than those around us who are under your just wrath and judgment.

There is nothing in us that deserves your grace and love and mercy. But we praise you that out of the eternal love that existed before time between your triune persons, that you chose us, that you sent your son to be the lamb who would die in our place, and that because we have trusted in the blood of the Lamb of God, that you have passed over us in judgment. That we no longer fear, and that one day we will spend eternity free in the house of the Lord forever. I pray that if there be any child here this morning, teenager, adult, who is not yet trusted in the blood of Christ, that they would look to Christ alone for their salvation, that they wouldn't wait until they're better, they wouldn't wait until their faith is strong enough, know that they would cast the feeble faith that they have upon the blood of their Savior. And I pray for all of us that this redemption, this redemption that we are about to celebrate in the breaking of bread and in the cup, that this would reorder and restructure every single thing about our lives for your glory.

We pray this in the name of our Savior, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Amen.