To Encourage You

Hebrews 11:28 “By faith he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood, so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them.”

True saving faith accepts the provision of God for salvation.  But first, faith believes God regarding our need to be saved.  We see this in the verse above which speaks of the faith of Moses at the Passover.  It was the Passover that was God’s provision for Israel for a catastrophe that God had warned them would soon overtake the land of Egypt. God had sent Moses to Pharaoh to command him to free the Israelites from the slavery in which they had been bound for 430 years.  But Pharaoh’s heart was hard. His response to Moses was “Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover, I will not let Israel go” (Exodus 5:2). As a result, God began to send a series of plagues upon Egypt, things like turning all the water in the land into blood, sending frogs to swarm the land, then a plague of gnats, and then flies. Nine plagues of increasing severity afflicted the land, and yet Pharaoh still refused to obey God. And so God sent His last plague. It was the most severe. God warned that the firstborn child of every family and the firstborn animal of everyone’s livestock would die unless a lamb was killed and its blood placed on the lintel and the two doorposts of every home. This horrible plague would not only afflict the Egyptians, but every Israelite home as well unless the one and only provision that God had ordained for salvation had been made.  No other action would suffice. The gods of the Egyptians would be useless to avert this catastrophe. No amount of prayer or wishful thinking would help. Nor was ignorance an excuse – there was only one way provided for the salvation from the plague. There was only one way that the destroyer would pass over a home. It was the death of the lamb and the application of its blood to the door of each home that was the only hope. 

The Bible tells us that the Israelites believed this warning and obeyed. As a result, their children and livestock were saved. The Egyptians, on the other hand, disobeyed, and death touched each and every home that night, from the home of Pharaoh to the home of the lowest slave. 

So, what’s this have to do with you and me?  Everything! You see, the Passover Lamb that the Israelites killed that night pointed, as did so much else in the Old Testament, to the Lamb of God that would come to take away the sin of the world (John 1:29).  Just as death came to every house that didn’t apply God’s one and only provision for salvation in Egypt, death will come to the life of every person who is alive today.  The Bible tells us that “all have sinned” (Romans 3:23) and that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).  But it also tells us that “while were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Yet, the fact that Jesus has died is not enough. The blood of this Lamb, just like the blood of the lambs slaughtered on the night of the Passover, must be applied to each life.

Wonderfully, God has made a way for this for every one of us. It is by faith in the death and resurrection of His Son as the one and only provision for the death we deserve for our own sin that the blood is applied.  It is “in him (that) we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of (God’s) grace” (Ephesians 1:7).  We are told that we “are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Romans 3:24-25).  Outside of this, there is no hope. Outside of this one provision, the destroyer will take our life just as he did the lives of the Egyptians’ firstborn on that night thousands of years ago.  The question is, do we believe this?  Will we receive by faith the death of God’s own Lamb, and will we apply His blood to our “house” by faith.  It’s the way of salvation. It’s the one and only way that God has provided for us.  But it is only faith in that Way that will prove sufficient. It’s the one and only way to be saved.