Turn in your Bibles, please, to the book of Exodus, and we'll be looking at chapter 12 as we prepare this evening to come to the Lord's table next week. Exodus chapter 12, and the message will be coming from the first 13 verses and then just a few verses later on in the passage, 29 through 32. Exodus chapter 12, 1 through 13, and then 29 through 32. God's holy and errant, inspired, infallible, and unchangeable word. 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 one 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 14th day of the month, 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 roast it, its head with its legs and 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 will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. And then verse 29. At midnight, the Lord struck down all the firstborn of 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. Thus far the reading of God's word. May he write this word on our hearts and may he give us a true believing understanding. Congregation of the Lord Jesus, you may wonder if you're old enough or if you know something about American history, how it is that recent studies have concluded that only about 10% of Americans go to church regularly. The old numbers that we used to hear in years past that 40% of Americans went to church regularly were misleading because they were based on questions that were, let's say, not as precise. And so the old Gallup questions used to say, used to ask something like, do you go to church regularly? And people who, you know, attended weddings or went on Easter or Christmas would say yes. And so you got a very inflated number. But in recent years, sociologists have done more precise studies and have found out that only about 10 percent of Americans actually go to church regularly, meaning most Sundays out of the month. And of that, only half of those go twice on the Lord's Day. Now, there have been times in the history of this country where church attendance was rather higher than that. I can remember in my youth when it was considered somewhat scandalous not to go to church, and so we stayed in until after you could reasonably be expected to have gone to church and come home, and then you could go out on Sunday, and then people wouldn't know that you hadn't gone. Of course, that scandal has long since passed. Well, if we ask ourselves, how is it that things came to be that way? It's a long story. It would take more time than we have tonight. But there are some basic assumptions that Americans came to accept through the course, particularly of the 18th and 19th centuries, that changed the way they looked at the world and that fundamentally changed their theology, their religion, Their view of themselves, of God, and their place in the world, and the way they should live, and what they should worship. And there was a revolution in Western culture more broadly, beginning in the middle of the 17th century, but picking up steam in the 18th century, and then basically coming to dominance in the 19th century. And the creed of the modern period was a short creed. The first point of the creed is that God is everyone's father in precisely the same way, the universal fatherhood of God. And as I was growing up, particularly attending public school, if you wanted to start a fight, all you had to say was, God is not everyone's father in the same way. He loves some and he hates others. Those would be fighting words. I suspect those would still be fighting words in many places. The second point of the modern creed is that we are all, therefore, God's children in the same way, the universal brotherhood of man. We are all brothers, and we all worship the same God in different ways, mind you, but really it's the same God. And how many times have we seen political leaders stand up in times of crisis and say, in effect, All religions are the same, except someone forgot to tell the Muslims, at least some of them. And of course, if anyone who actually pays attention to what our Lord Jesus says, he apparently did not get the memo either. And so there are significant dissenting voices. And then the third point of the creed is human goodness or human perfectibility. We're getting better every way and every day. I had a teacher who used to say that on a regular basis. That's how I know that slogan. I think now, looking back, it was somewhat ironically, but nevertheless, I think to say that in a room full of fourth graders had to contain a certain amount of irony. But she would announce that we're getting better every way and every day, that we are all improving, we are conquering. And in my childhood and in some of yours, we heard about the triumph, for example, of Jonas Salk over polio. We were conquering. And as a young boy, I remember being taken out of bed in my PJs and made to watch a grainy black and white television as men landed on the moon. We conquered polio. We conquered space. We're getting better every way and every day. And hey, we have toasters. I say all that to help explain the scandal of Exodus 12. Because this narrative in God's word doesn't fit any of those points. This narrative, if we listen to it and take it on its own terms, is just plain shocking. The God who reveals himself in this passage is not a God who is tolerant, broad-minded, accepting of other people's beliefs and best efforts. He's not a God who is willing to live and let live. He's not a God who is willing to get along. He is a God of wrath, judgment, distinction, condemnation, salvation, and bloodshed. And that's the scandal of the Christian religion. And that's the real answer why, one part of the real answer why church attendance in North America is now 10%. It's the scandal of the cross. Because you see, in the 1960s, 50s and 60s, and less so in the 70s, there was some cultural benefit for being seen going to church. Today, there is no benefit. In fact, there is cost. And so things are getting back to the state in which they were before. Emperor Constantine ascended to the throne and was converted and didn't make Christianity right then the state religion. but did give us a somewhat protected status and then our station in the world began to change. In some ways for the good, in some ways not for the good. Now we're back in the same circumstances we were when the church first emerged into the ancient world. A minority, misunderstood, disliked, and distrusted. And that puts us on exactly the same footing as the Israelites in Egypt. A minority, distrusted, feared, and the object of public and official scorn. There is another scandal here in this passage, and that is, it is supernatural. The religion of the modern period is not supernatural. the modern religion is sweetly reasonable. The religion of the modern period seeks to find natural explanations for what seem to be supernatural phenomena. But this passage is so over the top that there's no way you can think of some natural explanation for not one plague, not two plagues, not three plagues, children, not four plagues, not five, not six, not seven, not eight, not nine, But ten plagues, you might be able to make one of them go away, but you can't make all ten. And you certainly can't make this one go away. And so there are three things about this passage that we need to see. And the first is that not only is this offensive and not only is it scandalous, not only is it supernatural and bloody and deadly and selective and downright primitive, but it's all part of Yahweh's plan. I forgot to send in the, when I sent in the bulletin information, I forgot to send the outline. So the first point is that there is a plan. The Lord had a plan, verses 1 through 11, and he lays out that plan for us in the first section of the passage. Yahweh is the name of the Lord, as you know here when you see the word Lord in small capital letters. That's his covenant name. Yahweh said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, that this month shall be for you the beginning of months. You ever thought about how calendars are made? Typically, we make calendars according to the moon and the sun. It's very interesting here, then, that Yahweh says, guess what? I'm putting you on a different calendar. You ever notice that we celebrate in the West Christmas children on December 25th, but in Eastern Orthodox churches, they celebrate it differently. And we celebrate Easter at one time, and Eastern churches celebrate it differently in a different time of the year. And that's because of the different ways that calendars are calculated. The interesting thing here that we should see is that the Lord not only laid out a plan, but he said, I'm going to accomplish something that's going to be so spectacular that it's going to reorient your entire calendar. That's an amazing thing. Did you know our calendar has been reoriented? How does the world think about the week? When does the world say that the week begins? What are Saturday and Sunday, children? Well, they're called the weekend. And what's Monday? Well, that's the beginning of the week. Except for us, who believe in Jesus, Monday is not the beginning of the week. Monday is the second day of the week. Today is the beginning of the week. We begin the week on this day. Have you ever asked yourself why that is? It's because on this day, the women and the disciples who would become apostles went to the tomb on the first part of the day, the first day of the week, and it was empty. In the same way that the Lord reoriented the entire calendar of the people of God with the Exodus, so he has reoriented our calendar. Now, we live in two worlds and we understand what the weekend means. We understand what people mean when they talk about Monday. But really, our calendar is different. We go along with the other calendar. We adapt. We improvise. We overcome, as the Marines say. But we belong to two calendars at the same time. And our first calendar, our most primary calendar, is God's calendar, which begins with his saving acts. And not only does he change the calendar, he says, I'm going to establish a ritual. And I want you to see what kind of a ritual it is, because it's kind of gory. This wasn't computerized, animated gore. This was the real thing. Tell all the congregation, it says in verse 3, of Israel, that on the tenth day of this month, every man shall take a lamb. A lamb is a young sheep. According to their father's house, it's a lamb for the household. And if it's too small, then work something out with your neighbor so that everybody has a little something. And if you look at verse 5, the lamb has to be without blemish. It has to be without any defect. It has to be spotless. You can take it from the sheep or you can take it from the goats because the most important thing is that the lamb is spotless. Why? Well, because that lamb is going to be a representative substitute for the people of Israel. And the representative substitute for the people of Israel, for the church as it was then, has to be perfect in order to fulfill the function for which the Lord had ordained. And then if you look at verse 6, you see what has to be done. We're not going to put, as they do in FFA, put the animal in a pen and pet it and feed it and give it its shots and trim it and fatten it and wait for the county fair, as they do back home where I was raised. Or the state fair, maybe, if you do really well at the county fair. And then you take it to the state fair, and judges walk by, and they look to see. My, that's a fine specimen. You've done an excellent job, Johnny. That's terrific. No, this lamb, innocent, harmless, unsuspecting, spotless, was to have its throat slit. With a sharp knife. I'm sorry to tell you that. Because it's kind of ugly. But there's a reason for that ugliness. Because we did something ugly. We provoked God. We violated his law. We brought upon ourselves judgment and condemnation for breaking his covenant that he made with us in the beginning. He said, the day you eat thereof, you shall surely die. We ate and spiritually we died. We were dead in sins and trespasses. But God came and he made a promise. And he said the seed of the woman will put his foot on the neck of the seed or of the serpent. And there's a battle through all of history between these two families, as it were. The family of God and the family, as it were, of the serpent. And for God to accept the one family, there had to be a substitute. And this lamb was a picture of that necessity, of what kind of substitute there had to be. And the Lord even stipulated when this would take place. It would take place at twilight. And then look at verse 7. And they'll take some of the blood and they'll put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the house. Now, there are three posts here, basically, two going up and one going across. And blood had to be on the vertical posts and on the horizontal post. And if you wanted to be safe, you needed to be under the blood or behind it. If you wanted to be safe, you had to be under the blood or behind it. And then, of course, he goes on to say that this all has to be eaten. It's like a divinely instituted barbecue. They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire with unleavened bread. That goes to the feast of unleavened bread that is part of the preparation. And then he says, don't you. You have to do it exactly the way I tell you. Don't eat any of it raw. Don't even boil it. I want you to roast it all, all the way through. And don't leave any of it. And in case, the Lord knowing how slack we are, in case any of it is left, I want it consumed. I want it all burned up. I don't want anything left. Because that barbecue wasn't just a barbecue. It was a living testimony of the holy wrath of God against sin. It all had to be consumed. But it also had to be eaten in haste. Now, we know about fast food. We are, according to a book and a movie, a fast food nation. But this is a different kind of fast food. This is a fast food that was slowly cooked. It was cooked slowly and deliberately, or at least it was meant to be. But then it was eaten in haste. Maybe your grandmother has come for a holiday and cooked something and slaved over the kitchen. And then you started because you wanted to go play, shoveling it in. And grandma said, no, slow down. Don't wolf your food. I want you to enjoy this. I worked hard. I want you to appreciate this. The Lord says, I want you to cook this slowly, but I want you to eat it in haste because you're going somewhere. I don't want you to get comfortable. This is not your home. I want you to put your sandals on, put your belt on and eat it with one and eat it with your staff in your hands. So you know what they were doing. They were eating with their fingers. The Lord had a plan. And he had a plan because if you look at verse 12, there was going to be a plague, the 10th plague, the final plague. For I will, he says in verse 12, 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 the gods of Egypt, I will execute judgment. And then look at this last statement. I am Yahweh. This is his reminder that he is the one who said, I am that I am. The gods of Egypt were made with hands. They don't hear, they don't see, they don't speak. But Yahweh is the God who is. He just is. There never was when he was not. He just is. We come, we go, he is. He was, he shall be. He will be what he will be. I am that I am. That is the Lord of the Bible. He just is. There is no other God like him. All the gods of the nations are figments of imagination. All the pictures you see, all the statues you see, all the stained glass windows you see, they're all figments of somebody's imagination. The God of Scripture cannot be pictured. He may not be pictured. He will not be pictured, except by those two representations that he has ordained. The holy table and holy baptism. Those are his pictures. He will not be worshipped with them, and most certainly we are never ever to worship them. I am the Lord, he says. I will pass through. People often say, if only I could get close to God, then I would know, then I would have comfort, if only I would be close to God. And I know what people mean, and I appreciate that. There are times when God does feel far away. But there are times when you do not want to be close to God. And those times are when you are not righteous, and he comes in judgment. In those cases, you do not want to be close to God. And he said, I'm going to come close to the Egyptians. And it's not going to be pretty. I'm going to pass through the Egyptian, Egypt, through the Egyptian cities, through their villages. And I'm going to bring with me death and destruction and grief. Pharaoh had nine previous opportunities to let my people go. Yahweh said to Pharaoh, let my people go so that they may worship me. When it says serve me in our English Bibles, it means worship. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall go into the desert and you shall worship me at the place where I have designated. We are to worship the God as he has revealed himself. And we are to worship him where he designates, when he designates, how he designates. And Pharaoh will make it happen or Pharaoh will pay. Let my son Israel go, Yahweh said to Pharaoh. And Pharaoh said, what is the God of the Jews, the God of the Israelites, next to the gods of the Egyptians? And so the Lord said, well, let me show you. And he sent one plague, and he sent another, and flies, and blood, and darkness, and frogs. And after a while, Pharaoh's magicians couldn't keep up. But still, Pharaoh wouldn't let the people go. Why? Well, the Lord said, Scripture says that Yahweh hardened his heart. And then, as a consequence of that, Exodus says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Pharaoh is the picture of the reprobate. In the face of all evidence, in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence, as the scientists say, Empirical evidence is stuff that you can smell and taste and touch and feel and hear. In the face of overwhelming evidence, Pharaoh would not submit. And so Yahweh made him submit. And you see that in verses 29 through 32. At midnight, Yahweh struck down all the firstborn of the land of Egypt. Now just pause there for a minute. God loves us all in the same way. He's a gentle, easy-going God. Now listen. At midnight, Yahweh struck down all the firstborn of the land of Egypt. But we're all God's children in the same way. At midnight, Yahweh struck down all the firstborn of the land of Egypt. From the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive, the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. And we get the most interesting report. Here Moses records, under the inspiration of the Spirit, things that he gives us a picture, an insight into what life was like that night in Pharaoh's house. How many times have you gotten up in the middle of the night because something weird, You heard a strange noise. We had to get up in the middle of the night a couple of weeks ago and didn't see anything. Heard strange noises, but didn't see anything. And then the next morning, we looked around the house on the outside, and sure enough, there was some things kicked over and some footprints and some unusual phenomena. How many times have we gotten up? No, it's nothing. But Pharaoh got up in the middle of the night, and it wasn't nothing. It was everything. And Pharaoh rose up in the night 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, including Pharaoh's house. God took Pharaoh's firstborn. You think you're a god? You think you have a successor? I am Yahweh. You have nothing. Let my people go. He passed through and he struck down. And now Pharaoh, broken, grieving, summons Moses and Aaron by night and said, Go up, go out from my people, both you and the people of Israel. Go and worship Yahweh as you have said. And he didn't say this with any joy, with any faith, With any submission, he said it with a bitter, hard, reprobate heart. This is a man who's been broken by the sovereign power of God. Take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone. And bless me also. In other words, make this stop. There's a third thing that we need to see in this passage, apart from the preparation and the passing through or the plague. And that is, there was, in verse 13, a pass over. The blood, it says in verse 13, 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 will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. Before the Lord came, he asked them, he required them, he called them to an act of faith. And that act of faith must have seemed somewhat ridiculous. There were and have always been and continue to be religions in the world that think that there is power in blood. And in a way there is, but not in the way that the pagans tend to think. In some of the ancient religions, people would dig a pit, and they would stand in it, and then someone would slit the throat of a bull, and they would try to drink the blood. And they thought thereby that they would get power and strength and maybe live forever. People thought in the ancient world, the pagans thought, that there was power in blood. They could get strength in blood, and people still think that way. People still eat disgusting things, not because they like it, but because they think it gives them power and strength. And there is power in the blood, but not in the way that they thought. And so the Israelites must have thought this is a very strange ritual. We can sort of see the roasting and the eating and even the ritual preparation for a journey. We get that. We understand about sacrifice. We even understand about bloodshed. But Father, the children must have asked, why must we put the blood of the lamb on the doorposts? And why did they need to do it year after year after year? This happened about 1,500 years before our Lord Jesus. And that means that 1,500 times before Jesus came, people slit the throats of lambs. Most of 1,500 times. and they painted doorposts. There were three pieces of wood, right? More or less as there are today. And they painted blood going up, and they painted blood going across. That blood would be a sign of blessing and a sign of curse. It would be a sign of blessing and salvation to those who hid by faith underneath that blood, Behind that blood. And for those who took refuge under the blood, there was safety. When Yahweh passed through Egypt in his mighty, fearsome wrath, they were saved from destruction. None of the firstborn of the herds, none of the firstborn in the house would be taken. But for all those outside the blood that had been spread and dripped on the wood, there was death and destruction. And for most of that time, it must have seemed like a strange thing. Until one day, a man came, children, and a prophet named John said, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And three years later, they would take that innocent lamb. They didn't slit his throat, but neither did they leave him unmolested. They beat him, they mocked him, they stripped him. And then they took him out to the place where they took the refuse. The place where they put that which is dirty, that which is unclean, that which is discarded. And they painted not three pieces, but two pieces of wood. One going up, one going across with his blood. Righteous blood, innocent blood, holy blood, powerful blood. The blood of the Lamb of God shed for the salvation as the substitute for sinners who know the wrath of Yahweh, who fear the wrath and holy justice of Almighty God. Tonight, if you put your trust in that Lamb, Yeshua, Jesus, Jesus, the Messiah, the Lamb of God, when God comes in his final and holy judgment, I promise you, in the name of Jesus, you will be spared. But if you do not put your trust in that land, then Yahweh will once more, one final time, pass through Egypt and there will be wailing. But tonight, we have all said, I believe in God the Father Almighty and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son. If that's your confession, when the elements are distributed next Sabbath day, You eat believing, then as surely as you taste the bread in your mouth and the wine, so surely are you saved by the finished work of Jesus from that final passing through. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Almighty God and merciful Father, we give you thanks for Jesus, who laid down his life for us as our substitute lamb. We know that you are not pleased with the blood of bulls and goats, but with obedience, and Jesus is our obedience. So hear our prayer this evening and accept our thanksgiving, where we come before you in the name of the lamb who laid down his life voluntarily for us, so that we may hide under and behind the blood on the lintel and the doorpost. Amen.