The Passover (Exodus): Very few things formed the identity of ancient Israel more than the story of the Lord's Passover. God brought divine judgment against Egypt and its gods in an unmistakable tenth plague. However, God also graciously made a way for salvation through the blood of a sacrificial lamb. Yahweh had done it. The Israelites were finally free. Recorded on Oct 27, 2024, on Exodus 12:1-13, 29-42 by Pastor David Parks.

This message is part of our Exodus series called Journey to Freedom. Exodus is a story of liberation — of God working to rescue and redeem a people for himself, freeing them from slavery and leading them to the land he promised to the family of Abraham and Sarah. Exodus is also a picture of the gospel and the Christian life. In Christ, we, too, are freed from captivity to sin and death and led through the wilderness of life by God’s Word and Presence as we make our way to the Promised Land of the world to come. Join us as we make this journey to find true and lasting freedom.

Sermon Transcript

We’re working through the book of Exodus in a sermon series called Journey to Freedom. And we’ve said that Exodus is a story of liberation, of God rescuing and redeeming a people for himself. The people God rescued were the ancient Israelites who suffered greatly as slaves in Egypt about 3,200-3,300 years ago. Egypt was the most powerful kingdom in the world. Despite the brutality of their situation, Yahweh, the God of their ancestors (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), had allowed them to grow in slavery from seventy people as an extended family to be large enough to be a nation within a nation. But the more they grew, the more the Pharaohs were threatened by them and oppressed them all the more. The Israelites cried out to the Lord, and Yahweh sent Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, just as he had promised Abraham 430 years earlier. Moses was a Hebrew but was adopted by the royal household of Egypt before spending 40 years in exile in Midian. So Moses and his brother Aaron went back to Pharaoh with miraculous signs and wonders, but Pharaoh didn’t believe in Yahweh and stubbornly refused to listen to his message. Last week, in chapters 7-11 in Exodus, we saw that Yahweh gave Pharaoh chance after chance to repent by sending a series of escalating plagues. But after the first five plagues, when Pharaoh only hardened his heart in response to each plague, the Lord, to quote Paul, “…gave [him] over in the sinful desires of [his] heart…” (Ro 1:24). So, as Yahweh sent five more plagues, he hardened Pharaoh’s heart to execute divine judgment in a way the world hadn’t seen since the flood. Moses warned Pharaoh that the tenth and final plague would bring the destruction of every firstborn of both people and animals in Egypt — from the greatest to the least, including Pharaoh’s own son. Would the Lord do such a thing? Would Pharaoh finally repent? Would this be the start of the Exodus and the liberation of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt? We’ll see. But this chapter and the story of the Lord’s Passover is one of the most important chapters in the whole of the Old Testament scriptures. Very few things served to form the identity of Israel more than the Passover. But for us today, few things serve to explain and point forward to the work of Jesus Christ more than the Passover. If you have your Bible/app, please open it to Exodus 12:1.

Exodus 12:1–13 (NIV), “1 The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, 2 “This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. 3 Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. 4 If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, 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.