Introduction
A Real Event Remembered for all time
We come today to a core passage in the bible. If Genesis twelve was about Israel’s Creation in the faith of Abraham, here in Exodus 12 we see Israel’s Redemption, or Re-creation. This is a turning point, a watershed, in the Old Testament story of God’s people. In Genesis we saw God choose one man and create a special chosen people from him and his offspring. Now, after four hundred years in Egypt, the great nation they have become are languishing as slaves to Pharaoh. But God has not forgotten his promise, and he is about to redeem them, to buy them back out of slavery. Genesis 12 was the Creation of Israel. There God gave the blueprint for his plan for Israel. But here in Exodus 12 in the Redemption of Israel, God builds on that blueprint in a big way. 

Now some people doubt that these events ever happened, or that Moses was a real person. They think these are mere myths or folktales. But these are not made up stories. From earliest times, Israel believed this was their true history. This is a real event so momentous that it is to be marked by Israel and remembered forever after, because it is their defining moment as a people.

First things first.
Back in 1975, when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge began their reign of terror in Camodia, they destroyed everything associated with the old regime, and then reset the clock. They called it The Year Zero. This was to be a complete new order, and a complete new era needed a complete new calendar.

God does something similar for Israel. He is saying to them, first things first! The Passover is so important, that Israel’s whole calendar was re-arranged to acknowledge this event as the most important thing that defined them as a people:

“The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt,  ‘‘This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year.”
And He commands how from that time onwards they are to commemorate this great salvation from slavery by celebrating the Passover on the fourteenth day of the first month. 

1. The Celebration
A Family Celebration
The first thing about this celebration we notice is that it is a family celebration. Verse 3: “…on the tenth day of this month, each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household.”

The family has always been central to God’s purposes. There are all kinds of novel ways of defining a family these days. Now it is true that our traditional 20th century idea of family as dad and mum and 2.3 kids, was far too narrow. In the bible God deals with extended families, even blended families. Households included parents, children, and in many cases grandparents, maiden aunts and uncles, cousins, and servants. The ancient family was much more than just two people and their children. But! God never intended for a family to mean things like two people of the same sex co-habiting. This may not be a popular view, but in God’s sight to talk of a homosexual family is like talking of a car rally in which only motorbikes take part. There is just something essential that is missing. A family is built around the life long union of a man and a woman. That is how God intended it in Creation before the Fall. And even after the Fall, we see God at work in the family unit. It is to be the first place where the next generation are taught about the Lord and all that He has done for his people. That’s why Israel are always to celebrate the Passover in families. It is a true family celebration. 

A Community Celebration
But the Passover is more than a family Celebration. It is also a Community Celebration. In verse three God says “tell the whole community of Israel” to do this. And in verse four: “If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbour, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat.”
Isn’t that a lovely little detail? God cares for individuals. He knows that some will eat more than others. We are individuals, not just numbers, to God.

But did you notice also who it is that they are to invite? It doesn’t say, invite your relatives and your close friends. It doesn’t say invite those from your own tribe. It says simply invite your nearest neighbour. And isn’t it interesting how Paul the apostle, when he corrects the Corinthians for their appalling practices at the Lord’s Supper, has to remind them of a very similar principle. In their “love feasts” they were bringing food and wine for themselves and their friends, and bogging in without considering the needs of everyone there, and so some were going hungry.

This is a really, really important principle to grasp. Salvation is a community celebration. Folks, we are in this together, not just as a bunch of individuals or a collection of families and a few cliques of special friends. There’s nothing wrong with spending time with family and friends – I’m not saying that. But Christian community is wider and deeper and more authentic than that. The Israelites were not to show favouritism in whom they shared the Passover with – it was simply to be their neighbours who, like them, did not have a large enough household for a whole lamb. Never mind that these people might be bad neighbours, or smelly people who never washed, or had different interests and personalities. That was irrelevant. The important thing was that all were to be able to enjoy the Passover and fulfil its obligations completely.

Friends, it is the same in the kingdom of God under Jesus. We cannot pick and choose with whom we will celebrate the Christian life. We must help anyone and everyone in the church who needs our help in growing in Christ and worshipping him. We cannot discriminate or refuse to have fellowship with another Christian. When’s the last time you invited into your home for a meal someone from the church that is not in your immediate circle of friends? Do we show impartiality in our kingdom relationships with fellow believers in Christ? Do we try to encourage all equally? Or is our concept of fellowship a little like this poem that I found? It goes like this:
“Believe as I believe—no more, no less;
That I am right (and no one else) confess.
Feel as I feel, think only as I think;
Eat what I eat, and drink but what I drink. 
Look as I look, do always as I do;
And then—and only then—I’ll fellowship with you.”

A Cross-Cultural Celebration
Now as well as being a family and a community celebration, the Passover was also a cross-cultural celebration. It was not limited to Israelites.  Look at verse forty eight:

‘‘An alien living among you who wants to celebrate the LORD’s Passover must have all the males in his household circumcised; then he may take part like one born in the land. No uncircumcised male may eat of it.  The same law applies to the native-born and to the alien living among you.”

God does not favour one race over another. He was just as willing to save Egyptians as to save the descendants of Jacob. Aliens were allowed to celebrate the Passover – they were given an equal share in God’s salvation if they wanted it. There was no discrimination. The same law applied to Israel as to the foreigner. And what was that law? Well, those foreigners who wanted to be part of God’s salvation had to do so on God’s terms, not theirs. The price they had to pay was the same price that Israel paid. They and their households must be circumcised, to show that they too wanted to be part of the promises made to Abraham. This passage clearly shows that Old Covenant circumcision had nothing to do with physical descent from Abraham, and everything to do with faith in God’s promises. 

A Covenant Celebration
Because this is a Covenant Celebration. It is a celebration for those who are in the covenant by faith. And those who have faith in the God of Abraham accept the sign and seal of the covenant with Abraham. That seal is a sign of faith in God’s covenant, and so they were saved by their faith, shown in the action of having their households circumcised. An Israelite who was uncircumcised would suffer the same fate as an uncircumcised Egyptian. But an Egyptian who took on the sign of the covenant, would be saved as surely as any native born Jew.

2. The Sacrifice
For Sin - The Blood of the Lamb
The Passover, however, is more than just a community covenant celebration. It’s not just about having a nice roast around the table, with a bit of dress-up for the children. There is a darker aspect to it. The Passover, especially the first Passover, was a deadly serious business. Because the Passover fundamentally dealt with sin and its penalty. It was in fact a sacrifice for sin, as verse 27 declares: “It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites.” The life of the sacrificial lamb was taken in place of the life of the firstborn son in the final of the ten plagues that God brought on Egypt because of Pharaoh’s stubborn refusal to let his people go.

The final plague would be the most devastating of all. And while Egypt grieved, Israel would sleep peacefully. But that was only possible through the death of the sacrificial lamb. It wasn’t that the Israelites were better than the Egyptians. They simply obeyed his instructions for receiving his mercy. Eat the Passover lamb and the penalty will be taken away. The angel of death will pass over your houses when he sees the results of the sacrifice in the blood on the doorposts.

It is said that on his retreat from Greece after his great military expedition there, the Persian King Xerxes boarded a Phoenician ship along with a number of his troops. But a great storm came up, and the captain told Xerxes there was no hope unless the ship’s load was substantially lightened. The king turned to his fellow Persians on deck and said, “It is on you that my safety depends. Now let some of you show your regard for your king.” A number of the men bowed to Xerxes and threw themselves overboard!

Contrast the sacrifice that King Xerxes asked of his men with that which God asks his people to make. Xerxes men were asked to sacrifice their lives for that of their king. And all they got in exchange was a footnote in history that records their courage and honour but not even their names. But how different God is. God says to his guilty people, the sacrifice I want you to make is to give up your best lamb, then have a big spit roast with all your mates, down a few glasses of wine, and celebrate the salvation I am about to bring. If you obey me and make this sacrifice, then you will escape death. Jesus said, “take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for my yoke is easy and my load is light.” God has always been like that with his people. He has not changed. Here, one and half thousand years before Jesus, he treats his people in exactly that fashion. He provides a sacrifice for sin that is not burdensome or difficult, but is a pleasant community experience. And yet people who do not know God continually think of him as a cosmic killjoy and a harsh taskmaster. They think God is more like Xerxes or Pharaoh, instead of the merciful Father he really is. But that is because they do not know Jesus as their Passover Lamb.

Conclusion: Celebrating the Feast in Jesus
It is no accident that Jesus died at Passover. In fact, some have suggested that His death came at the very time the blood of all the lambs of Israel was being shed for the Passover feast. Jesus is the perfect lamb, without spot or blemish, because he is the only sinless human being. Earlier, John the Baptist had said of Jesus, "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29) His death fulfils the conditions of the Passover perfectly to the smallest detail. Like the Passover Lamb, none of Jesus’ bones were broken, because he was already dead when they broke the legs of the criminals on the other crosses to hasten their end. Peter wrote that we were redeemed not with gold or silver, but "with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect." And we saw when we looked at Revelation, how in John’s vision he sees Jesus on the very throne of God, “standing as a lamb that had been slain.”

God's love is shown in His willingness to send Christ to pay for our sin by the sacrifice of his precious life. R.C. Sproul writes,
The liberal view that God is just a big Santa Claus in the sky who overlooks sin has permeated our culture and infects the minds of Christian people. The good news of the gospel is not that God overlooks sin, but that he has dealt with it.

If God overlooked sin, he would be a God without moral standards, without character. But the true God is a holy God. He has integrity, and he will not overlook sin or clear the guilty in his court. Sin and guilt must be dealt with. [Sproul, Before the Face of God, Book 4 #16]

God's way of dealing with our sin was to provide a substitute (a sacrificial lamb) to take the penalty for us. That substitute is Jesus, who is God himself come in the flesh. If we trust Him we will be saved, and made whole.

The Passover, when you think about it, is about wholeness. The whole people of Israel were to celebrate it, by keeping the whole of God’s instructions. They were to sacrifice, cook and eat, the whole lamb, with its bones intact. A whole sacrifice, a whole fellowship, a whole community, and a wholesale deliverance for the people of God.

The message of the Passover is that God doesn’t do things by halves. And neither can we. He cannot accept anything less than complete trust in his way of salvation and his way alone. The Israelites were only saved by following God’s revealed way, and we are no different. 

God’s way is Jesus. You cannot have Jesus plus something else: it’s all Jesus or nothing. God’s people must be wholly committed to his whole way of salvation. But if we are, God will give us the world.

John Wesley put it this way. He once said:
I want the whole Christ for my Savior, 
the whole Bible for my book, 
the whole Church for my fellowship, 
and the whole world for my mission field 

For Purity – the Bread without Yeast
Finally, I want to leave you with this thought. As well as a sacrifice for sin, the Passover for Israel was also a sacrifice of holiness. The festival of unleavened bread, that they were to keep for seven days from Passover Eve, was a sacrifice that speaks of purity and dedication to the Lord. The yeast, we know from elsewhere in scripture, represents wickedness and impurity. And so this is a symbolic way of declaring that God has purified his people. He has cleansed them. It was supposed to remind Israel that after God had brought them out of slavery they were to live as different people. Purified people. This is why the New Testament compares our salvation experience to the Passover, when it says in 1 Corinthians 5:7, “Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.  Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.” 
As you come to celebrate the Lord’s Supper today, look beyond the symbols of bread and wine to what they represent. Does the sacrifice of Jesus for you result in a life that is different? Does your feasting by faith on Jesus, your Passover lamb, result in a life lived in sincerity and truth? May God grant us grace to live as sincere and true followers of him, in the fellowship of all who call on his name.




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