Chris Hill continues a short series exploring our relationship with our Father
(3) PASSED – OVER!
Easter 2020 was different wasn’t it? Family gatherings were put on ‘hold’, Services in church were muted and we found ourselves self-isolating and consequently shut up in our homes.
It’s easy to resent such restrictions and to consider them infringements of our liberties, but the ‘powers that be’ insisted they were for our good and so most of us agreed to comply; albeit, through gritted teeth! Freedom is what we value above all else, but freedom usually comes at a cost: sometimes at very great cost.
Being shut in with God is a personal choice we can make and some of the biblical examples speak not only of the cost but also of the astonishing consequences.
Take the great Feast of the Lord known as Passover for instance. The Israelites found themselves in a dreadful fix. They had been enslaved by the Egyptians and were being treated in a truly abominable fashion. One of their number, Moses, had managed to flee the country and he settled well to the east in the land of Midian.
He married and was working as a shepherd for his father-in-law. One day God spoke to Moses out of a bush that appeared to be burning but which was not disintegrating. It was a miracle. Moses went close and God spoke. He commissioned Moses to return to Egypt as His ambassador to demand that Pharaoh let the Israelites go to worship Him in the desert.
As might be expected, Pharaoh was not interested. Why would he be? Pharaoh’s Hebrew (Israelite) slaves provided thousands of workers to build his enormous civic and industrial buildings. Let the Israelites go? No way!
God sent a succession of plagues in order to show Pharaoh who he was dealing with. It made no difference. Pharaoh hardened his heart and inflicted even harsher conditions on his Israelite slaves.
The plagues were terrifying and disastrous and culminated in the death of all the first-born in Egypt, humans and animals. God directed the angel of death to pass through the land and to kill only Egyptians and to pass over the hovels in which Israelite slaves lived. The Israelite families would be spared because God instructed them to kill a lamb as a substitute for their first-born.
In Exodus 12:22, the Lord instructed the people of Israel through Moses. After lambs had been acquired and slaughtered in the doorway by the Israelite fathers on behalf of their families, the blood from the slaughtered animals poured down into a drainage channel (basin). This channel had been dug across the threshold to prevent silt-laden river water from the Nile from entering their homes in time of flooding. The blood that lay in the basins had then to be daubed with a hyssop brush all around the doorframe of their homes.
By the time that the angel of death passed over their homes, the Israelites were securely behind their blood-soaked doors and there they remained through the night while the angel of death brought havoc and judgement on Pharaoh and the people of Egypt.
In the morning, God’s people came out through the same blood-soaked door and into the freedom of God’s provision and rescue. In that case, the secret place was their own homes. Because of His omnipresence, their Sovereign Lord was in with them while death rampaged through the land.
Those doors were the key. They were ordinary doors made unique because they were soaked in the blood of the lambs. No shed blood: no rescue. With the shed blood applied, there was rescue: there was redemption!
No shed blood: no rescue. With the shed blood applied, there was rescue: there was redemption!
In John 10:9, our Lord Jesus, the perfect Lamb of God, the Person to whom all the types of Hebrew sacrifices point, declared, “I am the door”. The Greek word is THURA, which can only mean “door”. Jesus said, “Whoever enters through Me will be saved. He will come in and go out and find pasture”.
We see there the most wonderful linkage with Passover. It is Passover in a nutshell! Jesus is the door for His people only because of His shed blood. But His blood has been shed and applied by God Himself! We have come into Christ and we have come into the freedom of salvation through the crucified Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!
The prophetic linkage between the Passover lambs and Christ is nowhere made clearer than by Paul in 1 Corinthians 5:7, “For Christ our Passover lamb is sacrificed for us.”If we want to understand the death of Jesus on the cross, we can do no better than see it in terms of the Passover Lamb.
As the centuries passed, the ceremonies associated with the annual Passover Feast became more developed and the centre of activity shifted from the home to the Temple. It was so when our Saviour was born. Lambs were still required but it had become the responsibility of the Priests to slay the lambs on behalf of the families and not the fathers. Furthermore, these lambs were bred for the purpose and in the time of Jesus were born and raised in fields around Bethlehem, just a short distance south of the Jerusalem Temple. These Bethlehem farms were owned by the Temple authorities. The shepherds mentioned in the Nativity story were Temple employees who were responsible for the oversight of the lambing process and for the newly born lambs.
Small wonder, therefore, that the very first people to learn of the birth of our Saviour – the precious Lamb of God – were those very shepherds as they fell back in awe at the announcement by the angels! Luke 2:8-20 provides the detail. Jesus the Messiah was born to die: just like those lambs. In Him is our redemption.
When we consider the horrendous details of the crucifixion, we need to look not only at the Gospel accounts but also at the writings of the Hebrew prophets. The Gospels provide details of the dreadful practice of Roman crucifixion, but in order to grasp the full horror of our Lord’s crucifixion, we turn to Isaiah 52:13-42:12.
Handling Bible prophecy requires care. The passage in Isaiah is quoted many times in the New Testament as pointing to the death of Jesus. One example must suffice for now. Consider Acts 8:26-40. Philip the Evangelist had been led by the Holy Spirit into an encounter with an Ethiopian government official who was reading a Hebrew scroll of the Book of Isaiah. On enquiry, Philip was told by the Ethiopian that although he was reading the words on the scroll, he could not understand who the words were referring to. The passage was Isaiah 53:7-8. Philip, under inspiration by the Holy Spirit, told him that it was all about Jesus. We need no more to show quite plainly that Isaiah was given clear revelation of the cross of Jesus. The result of Philip’s explanation is that the Ethiopian placed his faith in the crucified Christ and was baptised.
Isaiah’s description in his prophecy is frightful. He speaks of the death of Christ as the most dreadful experience any human being has ever or could ever endure. He goes way beyond the physical torture and torment and enters one of the deepest recesses of biblical revelation. The entire passage makes grim reading, but consider these verses in particular:
“His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man: His form marred beyond human likeness.” (Isaiah 52:14)
“Like one from whom men hide their faces He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.” (Isaiah 53:3)
“The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6)
“Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer.” (Isaiah 53:10)
What could Isaiah possibly be saying here? Incredibly he is prophesying the shattering period between mid-day and three in the afternoon, when our precious Lord Jesus became 100% identified with our sin. Indeed, our Father in Heaven took all the sin of the world and piled it into and onto His Son, thus rendering Him sin-laden and unidentifiable as a human being. This is the cost of our sin as Jesus became the Passover Lamb in our place. The perfect Son of God no longer recognisable as a man, but becoming just a mass of putrefying flesh.
Small wonder that in His everlasting mercy, the Lord God our Father shrouded the scene in darkness to prevent a clearer image driving observers insane.
But it is not the end of the episode. Not by any means! The end of it is in the triumphant cry of our Saviour, “It is finished!”(John 19:30). The Greek word of which that is the translation is TETELESTHAI, and it means “PAID IN FULL!”
Our Lord Jesus Christ truly is the Door: the blood-soaked door: through which we have entered and out through which we have passed from death into life! Hallelujah!
Take five minutes of SILENCE to meditate on these amazing things. Allow them to penetrate your heart and rejoice that you are so loved by God.
Chris Hill has been a preacher for sixty years. He was a Minister in the Church of England but resigned to minister more widely. Chris was for a time Principal of the Christian Life College in London and Teaching Director at Pilgrims Hall and Mulberry House in Essex. Chris and Lindy live in Oxfordshire. For 40 years, Chris led Bible Tours of Israel. His lively Books and recordings are popular with folks devoted to God’s Word.
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