Passover is almost here!
I love the Sabbath: it is a day of rest and of communion with God our Father, His Son, and His people. And I love all the seven annual feasts. But, Passover…. it is the focal point of my year. I do not think it a coincidence that both my children were born during the Passover season and share the Pesakh portion.
God instituted His religion with this Celebration, in contrast to the pagan religion out of which He extracted Israel. They had been in bondage to slavery, and had all but forgotten the Sabbath.
They knew Abraham was their father, and they knew that someone would come and deliver them. They knew there was a code of right living, since Abraham ‘trusted in God, and God accounted that unto him as righteousness,’ and ‘Abraham believed, and kept my commandments, my customs, my decrees, and my law[s]’.
But, when God chose Moses, one who had grown up as an Egyptian prince, separated from the people of Abraham, he sent him at this time of year. Right now, we would be creeping up on the tenth plague.
So, God gave Moses the ordinance of Passover. It would be a very momentous event, a surgical execution of the firstborn of anything born of a womb that was not under the cover of the blood of a lamb.
Abraham had foreseen a lamb.
God had asked him to give up his ‘yakhid’, the son with whom his soul was ‘unified’, his ‘beloved’ son. When Isaac saw that they had everything for the sacrifice [wood, fire, etc] except an actual offering, he asked “Where is the lamb?” Abraham said, ” יהוה will see to it that there is a lamb”. He did not know he was the offering, until he volunteered to lay down on the altar they built. Abraham, we learn from Sha’ul [in the book of Hebrews] trusted that, if necessary, God would raise Isaac from the dead. But, he was also trusting in a coming “Lamb”. He looked forward and ‘saw’ Jerusalem, and the Lamb of God. [Jerusalem means ‘He will see to it that there is Peace’, much like our phrase about the Lamb] When the sacrifice that God provided in the place of Isaac was heard rumbling in the bushes, it was not a Lamb: it was a ‘ram’. But, the springtime offering is a Lamb! And this was springtime. And it was on the Temple Mount.
The first thing that Yokhanan HaMatbil said concerning Yeshua when trying to get his students to follow Him was, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”
Yeshua is seen at the beginning of the Revelation has a “Lamb that had been slain,” when he receives the ‘End Time’ scroll from the Father, and opens it.
He died on the day after the night of the actual Passover as God commanded Israel, and not on the Rabbinic Passover of the 15th night of the first month. Yeshua and many of the ordinary Jews kept the Passover in their homes on the 14th night [days begin at night], as God instructed. The Rabbis had moved it. Today, they moved it further, by recalculating [or better, ‘pre-calculating’] the month as well. But Yeshua kept it on the 14th night. He was thus buried at the end of that day, with the tomb closed on the night of the 15th, the night of “Unleavened Bread”, when they began their journey out of Egypt by the light of the full moon. He rose from the dead very late on Saturday night, marking that ‘sunday’, the first day of the week, as the day of the first Omer of the Firstfruits [the very first firstfruits offering]. And He showed Himself to His Emissaries that very day, proving to them that He was flesh and bone, risen from the dead, and NOT a ghost, an apparition, or a figment of their imagination.
This is the bedrock and foundation of our faith. And I have always been a ‘foundations’ person. Truth cannot exist in the whims and fancies of men. Yeshua is the SON of God, who DIED. God cannot die. His Father raised Him from the dead, giving us the way to have our sins dealt with, covered over, ‘atoned for’ and ‘forgiven’. Without it, we are utterly lost.
It has been my mission for 37 years to try to communicate that message to people, and to equip people to live a life worthy of being one who confesses the Name of Yeshua.
Fifty days after Yeshua rose from the dead, and he had visited His followers in various places, one time fixing them breakfast on the shore of the lake, eating with them, ‘communing’ with them, a week after He ascended back to heaven in the sight of 100s of those few faithful who still followed Him, He sent to them the very Breath of God, His ‘ru’akh’, or Spirit, about which I have spoken in my bi-weekly blog for the last few weeks. Today, the anchor verse for that discussion is Ezekiel 36:25-28.
“And I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean; from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Ru’akh [Breath/Spirit] within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you shall keep My ordinances, and do them. And you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers.”
This is clearly the description of Salvation; in particular, it is the same Salvation that we have, that is finally given to all of Israel at the End of Days, after their time of obstinate disobedience comes to an end. That has not happened yet. Messianic believers are too afraid to address the elephant in the room: The Rabbis are LOST! And they teach false doctrine. Yet most of the Messianic Jewish community follows them and protects their doctrine. Paul did not. He revoked his own Rabbinic degree. He never used the title again.
Passover, the whole seven day season, is the celebration of the death, burial, and resurrection of the man, Yeshua the Nazarene, the Son of God. The night of Passover itself, which is this coming Saturday night, April 12, is the commemoration of the death of our Messiah, the night He was arrested, followed by His trial by the Rabbis and by the world leaders; His flogging, carrying a beam up a hill after having His body marred by the whip, and then finally being nailed to a tree in cruciform fashion. If He did not die, we are telling a lie. If He is not a man risen from the dead, then we are playing a fool’s game.
But, He DID die, after having been betrayed. And after having descended into the place of the dead, suffering in ways we cannot understand, being separated from His Father for the first time since eternity past, He rose from the dead.
That is worth celebrating, in detail. And that is what our Seder does for us. We relive this. We employ all our physical senses to commemorate it. We engage our spiritual nature as well, to embed it in us and our children.
I wish all of you could be there for it. It is life changing. It keeps me longing for the salvation of souls.
“Messiah died not only for our sins, but for the sins of the whole world.”
