A Time to Remember
Exodus 12:14 You will always remember tonight—it will be a special festival for you. Your descendants will honour the LORD with this festival forever.
Easter week comes around so quickly. And we seem to pass through it so quickly – often without much thought beyond, perhaps, the long weekend that it offers some. And yet Easter is packed with meaning.
That first Easter, when Jesus was nailed to a cross for the likes of you and me, happened during the Passover Festival; a time when God’s people cast their minds back to the night when God released Israel from centuries of slavery in Egypt. Slavery… now there’s an unhappy thought.
The Egyptians were brutal masters so God sent ten plagues on Egypt to convince Pharaoh to let His people go … which eventually he did, as the angel of death killed every firstborn in Egypt except the firstborn of the Israelites … no, the angel passed over their houses … hence the name, the Passover.
It was a dramatic escape through the Red Sea, followed by forty years in the wilderness before they finally were able to enter the Promised Land. But it was an escape from slavery nevertheless, and here’s what God commanded Israel to do with this Passover:
Exodus 12:14 You will always remember tonight—it will be a special festival for you. Your descendants will honour the LORD with this festival forever.
And then, a millennium and a half later, God sends His Son Jesus to die on a Cross during that Passover Festival, which had been celebrated for much of that intervening period.
That timing says a lot. That’s God telling us that Jesus, like the Passover lamb that we’ll talk about tomorrow, came to set us free from slavery; slavery to the brutality of our sin.
And that’s something He wants us not to race through, but to stop and remember. Because when we do, we honour the Lord.
That’s His Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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