We currently live in a world that in many ways is going completely mad. Prophecy, found in the words of Jesus from Mathew 24, seem to be jumping off the pages of the Bible into the reality of our daily lives. “You shall hear of wars and rumors of wars” “Nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, there shall be famines and pestilences and earthquakes in divers’ places” The Bible also mentions in the scriptures that there would be one nation that would be “a cup of trembling to the world” this nation is the nation of Israel and one city will be the city at the center of it all, the city of Jerusalem. Why this nation and this city? Again, the Bible tells us God created the nation of Israel, not man and God determined His city is Jerusalem. He then would make this nation and this city the time piece by which we shall see history coming to its climax and all men to their ultimate day of accountability.
If you will indulge me for a few moments I wish to share things I believe the God of the Passover, the God of the Jews has laid on my heart. Our world has begun to embrace relativism instead of absolutes, lies instead of truth, lust instead of compassion and evil instead of good.
What happens when our world divorces itself from the truth of the God of the Bible and the truth that is only found in His character, we end up in places we never thought we would go. Today it is okay for a 6’4” man weighing over 230 lbs. to declare I am a woman so that he can defeat a woman who has spent her whole life preparing for the opportunity to win a swimming championship, but when she ties the man who is larger, stronger, and by any sane person’s definition not a woman, he gets the trophy not her, because we do not want to be declared trans-gender phobic. This, in my humble opinion, is beyond insanity and throws all that makes a woman a woman aside so that at any time anyone can declare I want to be what I want to be, who cares about truth or facts, relativism wins.
We live in a world where young people (mostly Jewish) were celebrating only to be brutally attacked and murdered, babies burned alive, women brutally raped and their bodies mutilated, old men and women killed, families slaughtered and their crime -they were Jewish. After this horrific event the perpetrators of the crime are being exalted on many of our college campuses in America by the chanting of “From the River to the Sea let Palestine be free” even though there has never been a Palestinian nation. When they chant this, they are calling for the genocide of all the Jews between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Hamas, the perpetrator of the crime, has no respect for life, for women, for Jewish people, and they are a cult of death. Hamas is an extension of the Islamic religion and that is a religion that has no place for women as they are viewed as chattel or property by their husbands and male family members. It is interesting there are two groups of people that the Koran teaches should be put to death, the people of the book-the book is the Bible and the people are the Jews and the Christians.
What you see happening in our world is something much deeper that just physical confrontation or a battle of definitions as to what is real or not real, but this is a real spiritual battle. This battle is between truth and evil, between what is real and what is deception. I want to share with you about the Passover and significance of this and why today even non practicing Jewish people will celebrate it. The Jewish people are the descendants of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. Promises were given to all three of these men dealing with a land, a people, and a messiah. When Abraham and Isaac had died and Jacob was told by God to not fear to go down into Egypt for the Lord would make of him a great nation. Seventy souls went into Egypt with Jacob and they came out as a nation of over a million people-the nation God made -Israel. I encourage you to read Genesis and Exodus to see the powerful working of God in the lives of these people.
When in Egypt, the children of Israel became a great people and the scriptures tell us they were enslaved by Pharaoh. The Lord raised up Moses to lead the nation of Israel out of bondage into freedom. In doing this God preformed ten judgments against the Egyptians. Before each judgment, Moses would tell Pharaoh, let my people go to worship the LORD. He would say no and a judgment was sent. Every judgment came against a false god the Egyptians worshipped. The last judgment was that the first born of every man and animal would be slain by the angel of death, you see Pharoah claimed to be God but could not save his own son or the first born of the land..
The LORD told Moses to have all the Israelite families slay a lamb without blemish and place the blood of the lamb on the lintel and door posts of their homes. Where the blood was placed death would not occur. This was at the heart of the great spiritual battle between the God of the Bible and demonic gods of the Egyptians. It was by faith in the Word of the true God that the blood of the lamb would save the Israelite families from death. That night there was great wailing throughout Egypt as the Egyptian’s first born died but there was rejoicing in the Jewish homes as their first born lived. God redeemed Israel out enslavement into freedom to follow Him. This is why God never wanted the Jewish people to forget this deliverance and why they celebrate Passover today.
This redemption has a much deeper meaning and was a picture of a greater redemption that would come, a redemption enabling us to come out of the bondage and enslavement of rebellion and sin against our creator God. It is not by chance that in Jewish and Christian homes, if people are truly following the WORD of God, that women are honored, respected, cared for and loved, while in pagan religions and cultures women are used, abused, and treated often as less than human. The difference is the God of the Bible.
As I mentioned earlier there were three parts to promises given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
- The land. The land was the land of the Canaanite’s that would be given the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob or Israel. The land was never given to any other people and when Joshua led the people into the promised land, he was told to drive the Canaanites out. Why? They were much like Hamas is today a cult of death, they killed their own children, sexually used woman in the worship of their demonic gods, and did things that one does not even want to mention. God gave them over 400 years to repent but they did not. God is slow to anger but the day of judgement will come for those who do not repent. When the Israelites came into the land there were those who did repent. God gave them a special place among the Israelites. Rahab, a temple prostitute from Jericho, who by her faith in God was saved when the city was destroyed, became the wife of a prince of Israel, an ancestor of King David. The Gibeonites, an Amorite people who believed in God, and God allowed them to gather the wood for the fires of the alters used in the worship of the Lord. The land has always been God’s to give and God has given it to Israel. When Israel would rebel against God they were driven from the land-Assyrian captivity, the Babylonian captivity, the Roman dispersion. When the Jewish people were gone the land was not productive but the Lord promised that in the last days, He would hiss (or whistle) and Israel would return. In 1948 they returned. He also said the land would blossom as rose in the desert. Today if you go to Israel, you will find crops flourishing in what was once swamps and barren land.
- That He would make them an identifiable people and a mighty nation. Today the Jewish people are an identifiable people, and a great nation. If there ever were a people who should have wanted to be absorbed into other cultures and lose their identity, it should be the Jewish people because of antisemitism. They have had numerous men throughout history desiring to kill them -Haman, Hitler, Stalin, the Ayatollahs. The Jewish people will remain a definable people for God has chosen the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to be a special people unto him, and a people through whom He will reveal His power and glory.
- The whole world would be blessed through the messiah who would come through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, and David. This messiah would come as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world. As the blood was placed on the lintel and door posts so the angel of death would pass over during the redemption of Israel out of Egypt, so the blood of this Lamb would be placed to cover the sins of those who allow this messiah to come into their lives that He will become the propitiation for their sins. The amazing thing is that this propitiation was not just for Israel but for all both Jew and Gentile if they will but trust in this gift of deliverance from judgement and transformation from darkness to life, from deception to truth and forgiveness of sins that is found in the sacrificial blood of this lamb-the messiah.
What you are seeing happening in our world is a great spiritual battle being played out before us. At the heart of the battle are men’s souls. This is a battle between Truth and Lies, Reality and Deception. Are men men and women women? Does sex, religion, station in life determine a person’s value? Am I or can I become a mere machine? The answer is found in the God of truth.
I encourage you to read Mathew 1 and see that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah but not only the Jewish Messiah, the Messiah of the whole world. I encourage you to read Isaiah 53 and see how Isaiah speaks of how this Messiah came to take our sin and rebellion away. I encourage you to read the scriptures so that you can see why the Apostle Paul says that In Christ there is “neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, bond nor free but we are one in Christ” who redeemed us. Being one in Christ does not mean we do not have distinctions but it does mean we have been redeemed to serve and bring glory to the true and living God-the God of the Bible
There are four things that are true for every person- man or woman -that has ever lived and will ever live.
- We were born and came into the world with nothing.
- We will die and be able to take nothing from this world with us when we die.
- We are given a finite amount of time between birth and death to prepare for eternity.
- All men and women will live eternally either having their rebellion and sin covered by the blood of the Lamb or under God’s judgment condemned by our own words and actions of rebellion.
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