It’s Thursday the week of the Cross. What was Jesus doing? “As they were eating, Jesus took some bread and blessed it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, “Take it, for this is my body.” And he took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it. He gave it to them, and they all drank from it. And he said to them, “This is my blood, which confirms the covenant between God and his people. It is poured out as a sacrifice for many. I tell you the truth, I will not drink wine again until the day I drink it new in the Kingdom of God.” Then they sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives.” Mark 14:22 Jesus is in the upper room with His disciples, his friends. They are enjoying a meal together. It wasn’t just any meal but a meal of celebration and remembrance known as the Passover. The Passover meal is like the fourth of July and Thanksgiving all rolled up in one holiday dinner. It is a strange combination of good food and bitter eats. This meal isn’t about filling your stomachs’ until you have to undo the top button of your pants; no it is a time to consider all that God had done. This meal stands as an annual reminder of a time when things were as bad as they could get and hopelessness filled the land. Then God moved and changed everything. This was a time to remember God’s greatest deliverance of God’s people in the history of the world. To understand this meal we have to go back in time to hear the crack of the slave drivers whip and listen to the screams, moans, and tears of a people driven to death in slavery. The Israelites were the workers of the Egyptians. Their lives had been exploited for hundreds of years at this point. They were no longer seen as people but as tools. The heartless, cruel treatment and insane deadlines in constructing the Pyramid monuments to the Egyptian demi gods had become a trail of tears for the Hebrew people. Daily they were faced with death and hardship, at times so cruel it would have made Hitler seem like a compassionate leader. But something began to happen, something that would change everything. They began to pray. What’s more God listened. He enlisted a very special man to lead this rag tag group of slaves to freedom. A man named Moses. Moses was born during a time of trouble and turbulence in the land of Egypt. The Hebrew people had grown so strong in number even under the hardship of slavery that the Egyptians began to be afraid they would revolt. To curb their population the Egyptians determined to kill their babies as they were born. Moses was born during this time. Yet under God’s provision and protection Moses was spared and what’s more he found a place in the care of the Pharaoh’s daughter. God made sure he would miss the hands of the baby butchers. Moses grew up into a man with great convictions. The problem was Moses had conviction, but he had no direction. On one particular day he felt the treatment of a Hebrew slave was too harsh he fought and killed an Egyptian slave driver. This one act pushed Moses to leave Egypt and flee to the wilderness. It was there God would teach him to harness his conviction and care for wayward sheep, all of which would be needed when 40 years later he would be called back to the land he had once ran from to deliver God’s people. By the time Moses had taken on God’s mission of deliverance the Hebrew people had been in the land of Egypt for nearly 400 years. The Egyptians were a people of many gods. The Hebrew culture has incredible resilience yet they had begun to take on the false gods of the Egyptians. So when God began His plan of deliverance He knew He would not only have to deliver the Hebrew people from the hands of a tyrant, He also would have to deliver their hearts from false gods. So God called Moses to speak to the Pharaoh and issue this warning: let God’s people go or suffer the consequences of standing against the one true and living God. In the Egyptian culture Pharaoh was worshiped as a god himself, so at those words you can imagine how he responded. Pharaoh laughed at God’s command so God hardened his heart, and made him live with his decision until the end. Almost immediately God began dethroning every Egyptian god through a series of plagues. The first plague God dethroned the God of the Nile by turning the water to blood. Other plagues would follow; gnats, frogs, cattle, blotting out the sun and so on—all were God exercising His position as the only God. With each movement of God’s plan and power He was delivering physically a people, and spiritually a nation. The final act was the act of the death angel. The final plague would be the death of the first born in all of Egypt. On a particular night God would send His Death Angle into the land and he would kill every first-born male. So God gave this instruction to the Hebrew people He told them that at twilight they would kill a lamb and have a very special meal. It is important to understand that killing a lamb was normal for them, they had no refrigeration so to kill a lamb was nothing extraordinary. It’d be like talking on a cell phone for you or me. But what God would ask them to do next would confuse them. God asked them to wipe blood around the doors of their homes. God told them when the Death Angel sees the blood he would skip their house. The wiping of blood was weird. It was abnormal. And many would have asked why does God ask us to do something like that? It serves no purpose. The answer is simple, faith. To trust God, you must exercise faith in many things that you don’t understand. Regardless if you are a scholar of the Old Testament or New, coming to God is always done in the same way. It is by faith. Faith isn’t an exercise in understanding it is an exercise in trust. God simply says, “trust me, I will deliver you.” After this night the Hebrew people were to observe this special meal each year as a memorial and a time of remembrance of what God had done, but also who God is. On this night Jesus and His disciples are observing this meal. They are discussing God’s greatest deliverance of His people then at the end of the meal Jesus takes them into the deep end of the theological pool. After the Passover meal, Jesus took bread and wine and gave the greater truth of this meal. The Passover pointed back at a great work where God delivered, but on this night Jesus would teach them of an even greater deliverance—one that was about to take place by the shedding of blood. Just as God through one special man delivered Israel from the Egyptians through one special Man God would deliver all who come to Him by faith from their sin. Faith isn’t about fully understanding it is about trust. Coming to God has always been the same, by faith. God says “Trust me, and I will deliver you.”
Posted on: Thu, 17 Apr 2014 15:33:09 +0000
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