Moses fled Egypt after he murdered an Egyptian overseer, and he spent his exile in a place called Midian. He settled down there, married, and worked as a shepherd for his father-in-law, Jethro for the next 40 years. Then one day he was for the sheep on a mountain called Horeb when he saw a bush that was strange. It was burning but it wasn’t being consumed by the fire. Moses went for a closer look, and God spoke to him, saying, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground… I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:5-6 NIV).
Moses met God there in a very personal way, and it changed him for the rest of his life. It was one of those moments that mark a person with a before and an after. God reminded Moses that he was part of a bigger story. He may have thought his story was over when he fled Egypt, but it wasn’t.
God told Moses that He had heard the prayers of the Israelites and was aware of their suffering. He hadn’t spoken to them like He was to Moses, but He was listening all along. He does that for us, too. Sometimes it seems like God isn’t there, but He is. He knows our struggles. He listens to our prayers. He cares about us. God wants us to know that in times like those, He may not remove the pain, but He will redeem it. That’s what God told Moses He was going to do for the Israelites in slavery in Egypt. Even through the bad, God is good, and God is able to do good even with the bad.
God said, “I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt” (Exodus 3:10 NIV). When Pharaoh refused, as God had known he would, God sent a series of plagues as judgment against Egypt. The Nile River turned red, swarms of frogs, gnats, and locusts covered the land, boils appeared, hail struck, and darkness descended. After all those plagues, Pharaoh still refused to release his Hebrew slaves, so God warned Moses that He was going to send a final plague: death. At midnight, every firstborn son from every house would die, from the Pharaoh’s house down to the lowliest animal.
God told Moses that the only way to escape this death would be a lamb. Every Israelite family must take a spotless male lamb, without defect, and keep it until the 14th day of the month. On that day, they were to slit its throat, catch the blood in a basin, and mark the doorframes of the houses. Then they were to eat roasted lamb with unleavened bread, remaining fully dressed so they were ready to go at a moment’s notice. At midnight, when the plague swept through the land, it passed over the houses marked with lamb’s blood.
That was the origin of the Jewish celebration of Passover. Death had passed them over, and God brought them out of slavery and to the land He had promised them. Passover was repeated every year in memory of what God had done for them the night they left Egypt. It was a reminder that God knows and God cares. God hears our prayers and sees our tears. God can rescue us from tyranny and bring us to freedom. It’s a reminder that out of the sacrificial death of a lamb came life – the death of that lamb did for them what they could not do for themselves.
This was the context for the last supper Jesus shared with His apostles. They were gathered together, thinking about what God had done for Israel through Moses. They didn’t understand it at the time, but Jesus was telling them that He was going to the cross as God’s Passover lamb for His people. Indeed, when John the Baptist saw Jesus walking along the shore of the Jordan River, he had announced Jesus as, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29 NIV).
Jesus changed the meaning of Passover forever, though. When He took the unleavened bread and broke it, He said, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19 NIV). Then He took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you” (Luke 22:20 NIV). He was telling them that what He was about to do would demonstrate how far God was willing to go to win them back to Himself. The penalty of sin is death, and the only way to escape that penalty is the blood of a lamb. Jesus paid that price for all people.
Christmas isn’t just a time to remember that Jesus was born. His birth mattered because of what He did for us on the cross. Jesus died in our place so we can live. When we put our faith in Him, He brings us out of the kingdom of sin where we were enslaved and into the land of freedom.
