February 9 – Exodus Week 6

Main Focus: The passover points us to the cross where God’s justice, wrath, love, and mercy meet..

Last week we moved through the first nine plagues rather quickly, but this week we’re slowing down to talk about the tenth and to see the culmination of God’s plan to save his people. In discussion, we’ll make the connection from the Passover to Jesus’s death, observing the sign and the signified as well as tracing the thread of remembrance from the Passover meal to the Lord’s Supper.

We’ll begin in Exodus 12 by reading verses 1-13, God giving Moses the instructions for the Passover, and verses 29-42, the actual liberation of Israel from Egypt (the stuff between is mostly a reiteration of the instructions part). We’ll have some opportunity in our first two questions to observe just how strange this whole thing was. God could’ve smote the Egyptians in a thousand different ways, but he freed his people in this particular way, with an invitation to trust him through participating in the Passover ritual.

Perhaps most interesting, he did it through a meal. All of it was anticipatory; they were meant to put the blood on their door with fear of God’s wrath and with faith in his mercy, and to eat the meal in haste with their belt and shoes on, ready for the journey out of Egypt. All of it was choreographed to help them anticipate their coming salvation and to trust that God would keep his word.

Our third question will help us get into their mindset: “What do you think all this was like for Israel and the “mixed crowd” (v.38)?” Remember, we know the end of the story, but they sure didn’t. All the actions of killing the lamb, painting their doorframe with its blood, and waiting until midnight were all done in faith. Surely this was a strange time for them, one-half fear for God’s destructive power moving through their city and one-half suspicion that, just like the first nine plagues, this too would fail to change Pharaoh’s mind. Would God really do what he said he would do? Odds are, they were wondering.

Also, don’t miss the way the question is worded and that phrase “mixed crowd” (or “mixed multitude,” ESV) in verse 38. When Israel was finally freed and on the move, people of various nationalities decided to join up with them and toss their lot in with this saving God of Israel. Once again we see that, throughout the Scriptures, God is in the business of calling a diverse group to follow him as a united people.

Before jumping to Luke 22 we’ll notice how God gave Israel instructions for remembering the Passover in years to come. By instituting the Passover celebration, God ensured that the story of their liberation from Egypt would be retold every year, passed on from generation to generation, and continue to shape his people. Among other things, it was important for his people to remember the Passover because it was, almost millennium and a half prior, the groundwork for understanding what God would do through his Son. We’ll also come back to that idea of remembering in the last question.

We’ll then read Luke 22:7-23 to see plainly the connection between the Passover and Jesus’s death. Jesus uses it as a way to explain his coming death to his disciples the night before his crucifixion. He took two standard components of the Passover meal, unleavened bread and wine, and described how his body would be broken just like the wafers between their teeth and his blood would be poured out just like the wine for the cup. Jesus showed how the Passover, particularly the Passover lamb, was there to instruct God’s people in what Christ would do for them. Under the curse of sin, God’s people were in jeopardy, but in their place the Lamb was killed. His blood would be the sign of their protection, he would be the first-born slain, and because of his faithfulness God’s people would be freed from slavery to their sin.

And just like God gave Israel the Passover to remember their redemption, now God’s people have the Lord’s Supper to do so. We’ll finish discussion talking about the ways we can actively remember Jesus’s death. This includes taking communion, but isn’t limited to it. This question will be best spent if you use it to unearth the ways we tend to resort to guilt when we think about Jesus’s death for us, as if he’s a kind old grandma we really should call more often. But there’s something about remembering Jesus’s death that can be more constructive than that; it can clear out the distractions and trivialities of our life and focus us on matters more weighty and eternal, it can warn us that our sin really is that big of a deal, it can convince us that we really are that precious to our Father. And it can remind us that the one who calls us lays a stark claim on our lives, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”