Huj, oh, you are so good, Lord. You are so good, Lord. When we come to the end of ourselves and we have just nothing to offer you, God, we can always offer you a Hallelujah.
And just with a heart that is so grateful for what you have done in our lives, how you've called us to be Sons and Daughters of the King, the one and only King, Jesus. We are your sons and we are your daughters when we place our faith in you.
Father, as we continue in our worship today, as we've been inspired through the worship, let us be inspired through the word. We pray that you would open our hearts to receive everything that you would have, open our minds to understand, open our eyes to see, and our ears to hear.
Be with Pastor Joe in a few moments when he comes to deliver the message, and let us have great fellowship today. It's in your name that we pray, amen.
Amen. Well, would you turn and welcome someone today? You can point to your name tag if you don't know them and introduce yourself.
Well, good morning, Northgate! It is so great to see all of you out there. It was really wonderful to be up here and see you worshiping God with such heart and such enthusiasm. Are you glad to be here this morning? I said, are you glad to be here this morning?
I'm Pastor Mike, I'm one of the staff pastors here, Mike Patterson, and I am going to share some things that are happening here at the church. But before we do that, we're going to say our mission statement just to keep that in the forefront of our minds, what we're about as a church.
We have it up on the screen there. If you don't know it, let's say it together: Northgate Church exists to love God, love people, and teach others to do the same. Those ideas are really important to us, and we hope that you experience that this morning. If you're visiting for the first time, and if you're somebody who's here all the time, we hope that's your ongoing experience at Northgate.
Things that are happening: well, can you believe we're only two weeks away from Easter? Where did the year go? Right, it's already Easter! Just a couple of weeks, on March 31st, we'll have Easter services, of course. But before that, we're going to have Good Friday service on March 29th at 6 PM. That's Friday night, right here.
It's a powerful time of reflection. We have communion, our worship choir will be singing, Pastor Joe will be leading us through communion and through some reflection on Jesus' sacrifice, His sacrifice on the cross. It's a powerful time. I encourage you to come and experience Good Friday with us.
Then, two days later, we'll be celebrating the resurrection on Easter Sunday, March 31st. We will have our regular service times, 9:00 AM and 10:30 AM, right here. We will have kids ministry at 10:30 AM, as we usually do, and of course, that will include really uplifting worship and excitement. The worship choir will be doing a special number that morning as well.
Pastor Joe will bring an uplifting message of hope, and after our 10:30 service, we have a special thing that happens every year on Easter Sunday. We have what's called the balloon drop. This is a time, instead of an Easter egg hunt, we drop balloons from the ceiling right here in this room, and kids get to—well, you'll see what happens. It's fun!
So if you have kids, grandkids, or if you have people bringing kids, encourage them to stick around after the 10:30 service for that time. It's really special. Our Spanish ministry will also be having their service at 1 PM that day with kids ministry as well.
A couple more things we want you to know about: we have a really fun kids ministry event coming up on the 23rd, next Saturday at 6 PM, the Easter escape room. This is not your typical—some kids ministry fans in here—this is not your typical escape room. This is an experience for the whole family that is going to take the kids and parents through the realities of Jesus and who He is and His resurrection.
So we encourage you, they're going to be solving puzzles and cracking codes and doing some fun things that night. Folks, we encourage you to sign up and RSVP so that we know how many people are coming.
And then also, we have a men's breakfast. Men! Oh, come on, men! All right, all right. The men at the church always love to come out and have some great breakfast food and fellowship together, and they're also going to be continuing a Bible study that's been going on in our men's breakfasts previously on April 6th.
Gentlemen, sign up at the connection counter or online. You can sign up for all of these events at our connection counter in the lobby or online at ngcc.life.com/events.
Now we're going to receive your offerings in just a moment. We'd like to remind you that offering is an extension of worship. When we sing, we are lifting an offering of praise to God. When we serve, we're making an offering of our time, our energy, our resources. There are many things we can make an offering, but one of them is our finances.
And so we encourage you to give an offering this morning with glad hearts. If you are a guest here, though, we would encourage you just to be our guest. We're just so thankful that you're here. Don't feel obligated to give at this time.
And if you're joining us online or if you just prefer to give online, you can do that at our website as well. Let's pray.
God, we love you so much, and we have just sung some powerful words about how good you are to us and how our hearts are filled with gratitude for who you are and what you have done in our lives. And there's no denying that you have blessed every single one of us, no matter where we're at in life, what our circumstances are, you still give blessing. We know that.
And so, God, as an expression of thanks to you, we want to give back just a small token of what you've blessed us with. Lord, we pray that you'd fill our hearts with joy as we give, that you would use these gifts for ministry here at Northgate, in our community, and all over the world.
And God, we pray that you would be pleased as we give them. We love you so much, and all God's people said, amen.
It's time again to bring our blessing, to bring a blessing to our God. What mercy He has shown, causing us to be born again, born into a living hope because our Christ is raised, born into a family, born into a future treasure, endless and unfaith, held in Heaven's hands, hands that guard our hearts, hearts that trust in God, convinced that He will save us, confident He will show Himself.
We stand now rejoicing even in the trial. Our fire-tested faith grows hot, bringing glory to our God. We have never seen Him, and still we love Him. We don't see Him now, and still we rejoice. Joy without words, joy full of glory. We are being saved, have been saved, will be saved.
We bring a blessing now to the Father of our Savior, our one and living hope.
Let's begin with a word of prayer before we jump into the passage today.
Lord God, we do thank you for this chance to come together, Lord, to hear from your word, to be able to sing praise to your name. And God, as we look into your word, Lord, we pray that the Holy Spirit would give us wisdom and understanding. God, help us to focus on what you have for us today.
And Lord, may your word be presented boldly and clearly, Lord, that your people might be fed, Lord, and nursed, and really go out having something that will help them in their daily life to live for you. We pray this in Jesus Christ's name, amen.
Well, good morning! It's good to see you all. I'm glad to be here. My name is Joe Z, I'm the lead pastor at the church, and I was just thinking it feels like Easter comes up really fast this year, partly because it's early in the year, but just two weeks away. I just felt like we finished Christmas, but we're on to Easter now.
And so leading up to Easter, I wanted to do a short series that helps us understand more the symbolism and the beauty of what Christ really did for us on the cross. And so we're going to look at a couple of Old Testament stories that point toward Jesus and what He was going to do in His death.
The first one we're going to look at today is about the Passover Lamb. But first, a little humor: which army base is off-limits on Passover?
Anybody got it? Fort Lenworth! Right, you can't have leaven! If you don't get that because you don't know the Old Testament super well, you can't have it during Passover. You get rid of all the yeast in your house, and so Fort Lenworth would be off-limits.
But that's a bad one. Be glad I'm leaving that one. Before we look at Exodus 12, though, I want to give a little background on the passage. I realize not all of us come into the Old Testament knowing exactly what's going on and all these stories.
The Israelites have been slaves in Egypt for around 400 years at this point, and God has finally declared they are to be freed from slavery and saved. He's going to use Moses and Aaron to go to Pharaoh and deliver His message and tell Pharaoh to let my people go.
But Pharaoh is a very proud man, and so he's going to keep saying no. And God's going to send a plague each time he says no. In all, there are 10 plagues that God sends on Egypt before the Israelites are freed from slavery.
In fact, Pharaoh—if you know this about Egyptian history—the Egyptians believed Pharaoh was a god, and they also had a whole lot of gods. So part of what's going on in this story is God trying to declare to the Egyptians, "I am God of Egypt, not Pharaoh and not these other gods you have." But Pharaoh doesn't get it, and so he will not let the people go.
And so I do have one more joke, which is this: how many Pharaohs does it take to screw in a light bulb? Only one Pharaoh, because he won't let it go! There you go, yeah, that's that one. It's a little better.
So instead, though of letting the people go, he watches as his whole country really gets destroyed, and catastrophe after catastrophe happens. There are plagues, like plagues of frogs where there's frogs everywhere in Egypt, there's water turning to red like blood, and then the one right before the one we're going to look at, the whole land of Egypt turns dark for three days.
I was just thinking, how does the whole land just in Egypt turn dark? If I see that, I start to think maybe God's up to something, I hope, right? But Pharaoh still does not get it, and so still was a very, very proud man and will not let the people go.
And so then there's a final plague that God sends, and it's called Passover. It's the death of the firstborn children. And this is how God explained it to Pharaoh in Exodus 11:4-5. It says, "Moses had announced to Pharaoh, 'This is what the Lord says: At midnight tonight, I will pass through the heart of Egypt. All the firstborn sons will die in every family in Egypt, from the oldest son of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the oldest son of his lowliest servant girl who grinds the flour. Even the firstborn of all the livestock will die.'"
So you have all the firstborn sons dying, even all the firstborn livestock. It's interesting the animals are included in this. Why? Because Pharaoh will not listen to God, and he will not let the people go. And so God's going to send by far the worst plague, the very last one.
But you may be wondering why this seems like a pretty harsh judgment. Why does God proclaim the death of every firstborn son? There are a couple of reasons I believe that God says that. First of all, if you go to earlier in Exodus, you find the Egyptians—what were they doing to the Israelite boys? They decided there were too many boys, and if they got older, maybe they would rise up against the Egyptians and Pharaoh if there was a war. So they had all the boys being killed.
And so I don't think it's coincidence that God now is turning the justice on their own. You think it's fair to kill a bunch of children? How will you feel when you lose your own sons and daughters?
It's interesting how you see that in real life too. How many thieves do you know rob banks, and then one of their partners in crime takes all the money and runs off, right? That happens. How many people, like a woman or a man, love to gossip, love to spread rumors about people, and then one day it falls back on them when the rumors are all about them?
And so we see God tends to—and sin tends to—fall back on ourselves. And so here in the very country that was forcing the death of children, now God's going to require some of their own children to die.
But I think there's a reason why God chooses the firstborn son. It could have been the secondborn son or the third. I'm glad I'm the secondborn, so I would have been okay. But I do think there's a very specific reason God's going to strike down the firstborn sons, and it's because of Jesus.
Jesus is God's firstborn son, and we know in the future God's going to strike down His own firstborn son, isn't He, for the salvation of us? And here you have in Egypt this proud leader, this Pharaoh, who refuses to accept God's salvation for His people. He's going to fight it with everything he's got.
And I believe this is the message God had for Pharaoh: if you won't accept my plan for salvation—which He is freeing them from Egypt—but eventually will be the death of His firstborn, then I'm going to take your own.
There's a certain harshness to that, but here's something that's really clear in the Bible that I think sometimes we don't talk about enough: God in the Bible gives life, and He has a right to take it. That's clear from nature; it's clear from practical experience too.
I was at a funeral yesterday. A guy died at 58 years of age here in this church, and the person leading the service was talking about how he died young. And I thought, yeah, but God really decides how many years we get. There's no guarantee you're given 10 years or 20 years or 50 years.
And here in this story, God has decided that the firstborn sons are going to pass. But you know part of the story that's important here? God is warning Pharaoh. Why is He warning Pharaoh? Because God would prefer people repent and turn from their evil ways and do His plan than He sends judgment.
Anytime you see these strong warnings in Scripture, it's because God is a God who will send judgment, but He prefers to send mercy, and people have a chance to respond. Pharaoh could have said, "You're right, God. I'm going to let these people go. I've learned my lesson," and he and his people would not have suffered the way they're going to.
Rebellion always leads to consequences. And so here we see God has a high payment that's going to need to be paid here, but God spares His own people, and He has a very specific way that He's going to deliver His people from the plague, and it really all points to Jesus as well.
And that's what we want to turn to now. Exodus 12:6 tells us that in order for the Israelites to be spared this plague, they needed to kill a lamb or a goat. And then God says something that on its own sounds kind of strange if you don't know Jesus. It says they are to take some of the blood and smear it on the tops and on the sides and the top of the door frames of the houses where they eat the animal.
So they were to kill a lamb or a goat, and then they were to go outside their door and put some of the blood of that animal on the top of the door frame and on the sides. And we're told in verse 13 why that's so important. It says, "But the blood on your doorposts will serve as a sign marking the houses where you are staying. When I see the blood, I will pass over. This plague of death will not touch you when I strike the land of Egypt."
So God sends a plague on the Egyptians, and the Israelites are spared if they have blood on the sides of the door frames and the top. You know, our decorating team just finished putting up our Easter decorations. I thought they did a great job really helping us get to understand the spirit of Easter.
But if you look at the cross, something really interesting about this story: they were to put blood on the top of the door frame. If you know the Easter story well, you know Christ, when He died on the cross, they put a crown of thorns on His head, so He's bleeding from His head, which means the cross at the top would have been covered in blood.
Where are they to put blood on the door? On a piece of wood. They're supposed to put it on the top. Jesus' arms are outstretched, nails are going through His hands, meaning blood is flowing on each end of the cross.
And so when you see Passover and they put blood on the top of the door frame and they put it on the two sides, the Israelites had no idea why they're doing that. God could have said, "Put it under your rug." He could have said, "Put it on your forehead." He could have said a lot of things. Why does He have them put it on a piece of wood that enters their home in the very spots where we know Jesus one day is going to die and bleed for our redemption?
You see, there's a lot in this story that points to Jesus, and the Israelites had no idea about it. But when you look at the Old Testament and you start to see Jesus, you start to see, "Whoa, God has a plan," even when we have no idea why He's asking us to do what He's asking us to do or doing what He's doing in our lives. God's up to something, and to me, it gives me greater confidence in the Bible and in God's master plan when I see Scripture and I see how it all works together.
And there's really a lot of details in the story that help us appreciate Jesus all the more. The next detail I want to look at is the fact that Passover started a new year for the Israelites. Exodus 12:2 says, "From now on, this month will be the first month of the new year for you."
So Passover begins a new year for the Israelites. We aren't told why in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament, we see in both places with Passover, a new beginning starts for God's people. In the Old Testament, in this story, they're freed from slavery. They're finally able to worship God without being under the thumb of Pharaoh and the Egyptians.
In the New Testament, we see we get a new beginning in Christ, don't we? In fact, that's very much—we're a new creation in Christ. And so for us too, new calendar years usually signify a new start. That's why people do their goals; they're hoping to go to the gym and lose weight every year because they feel like it's a new chance to start over.
And God wanted the Israelites to know that really Passover is all about starting over. For them, it was starting over with a new relationship with God, and in the New Testament with Jesus, it's about starting over from sin. Your sin is cleansed; you are now free to worship God, to live for God.
All four gospels point out the fact that Jesus dies during Passover. That's not a coincidence. They want you to understand that Jesus is our Passover Lamb, that after Jesus celebrates Passover with His disciples, He becomes the Passover Lamb that we've always really needed.
Just as what happens in this story, the angel of death is going to pass over the houses of Israelites because of the blood on their door frames. So too, death passes over us—spiritual death—if we're marked by the blood of the cross.
And so just as Passover, it's 1400 years before Jesus that God already is working out the symbolism. I find it interesting how all the Scriptures point to the same kind of story, and the story really points toward Jesus.
Here's another detail about Passover that shows you something about Jesus. It says, "The animal you select must be one year old male, either a sheep or a goat with no defects." A one-year-old male sheep or lamb is not ready to die yet. It's really in the prime of life. It's something that if you kill it, then you really wouldn't normally—you'd usually let it live a little longer, mature more.
And God says, "What He's really saying here is I want your best. Don't give me the lamb you were planning to kill anyway if it only has three legs or two ears." I mean, I guess three ears or one ear—I don't want it either. It has to be without defect.
It needed to be perfect. And it's important for us to understand sacrifice in the Old Testament was always super costly to them. You're talking about future income for them, right? They could kill that animal or sell it for money, and each sacrifice represented that they understood at great cost they were right with God.
That angel's going to pass over the door because they were willing to give up something precious to themselves, and that's the heart of repentance to God too—that you're really willing to do what you need to do to start walking the path God set before us.
But it points to Jesus completely, this description, because Jesus too was in the prime of life, just like this lamb at one year of age was in the prime of life. Jesus wasn't ready to die yet at 33. That's kind of an ideal time. Some of you here are a little older than that; you probably like to get back to 33.
At the funeral yesterday, he was sharing how some people have been to Heaven say everyone's 30 years old. I think, yeah, maybe that's a pretty good time of life—20s to 30s. And Jesus dies at 33 because it's pointing to the fact He really is in the prime of life. He wasn't ready to die then.
He's male, just like the lamb or the goat had to be male. Why? Because Jesus is male. And then on top of it, you have without defect. In the New Testament, that's clearly a reference to sin. Christ didn't have the defect that we do, which is we tend to sin; we tend to make a mess of our life.
And so Jesus becomes that perfect sacrifice, the Passover Lamb. But let's jump down to verse 8 of Exodus 12. It tells us that same night they must roast the meat over a fire and eat it along with bitter salad greens and bread made without yeast.
Yeast in the whole Bible, the first symbol I want to look at is yeast. Yeast in the Bible is always a symbol for sin, probably because yeast, if you put it in bread, it expands, it puffs up, it affects the whole bread. And so kind of like our pride can puff us up and then cause sin and lead us away from God.
Yeast historically and in the Old Testament, clearly God's using it as a symbol to help them understand it's about sin. And if you're in Israel to this day during Passover, really one of the craziest parts of it is all the cleaning they have to do to get rid of all the yeast.
People will spend a whole week cleaning their house. They have to dust under every book; they go through every crack of their house to make sure there's no breadcrumbs, there's nothing of yeast anywhere in their home. It's quite the ordeal.
The Israelites, I'm sure, are kind of wondering, why is it such a big deal about yeast during Passover, right? The lamb died, and we're freed from slavery. What's all this deal about yeast? They understood the connection to sin, but why is this holiday really about sin?
Well, it makes a lot more sense when you understand Jesus, right? Jesus is going to die for our sin, and so now we are without sin because of Christ. Passover is the way God cleanses us from sin, gives us the Holy Spirit, allows us to get rid of our pride and arrogance, and humble ourselves at the feet of Jesus.
1 Corinthians 5:7-8, Paul connects yeast to sin, and he says, "Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us. So let us celebrate the festival not with the old bread of wickedness and evil but with the new bread of sincerity and truth."
Other translations talk about the yeast; it literally is the leaven in the bread. Before, the old bread had leaven in it that wasn't good; it was wicked, really pointing to sin. But with Jesus, now we have the bread of life.
And they would drink wine during that time. If you know communion, that's partly why we also either have wine or grape juice. But wine is an amazing symbol of Jesus. I didn't know that until this week. If you put yeast in wine to ferment it, but when wine becomes 15% alcohol, the yeast dies off.
If yeast is a symbol for sin, it means that if you put yeast in wine and wine's actually going to kill it off, what happens is Jesus is the wine; He kills off sin. Just like yeast in wine dies off, it's one of the few things—like you put it in bread, it affects it, but you put it in wine, it's going to die.
What happens in Jesus? Jesus' death, sin dies. Our sin is conquered; death has been overcome. And so you see a beautiful symbol even in the wine that we drink, the grape juice, whatever it is that we take.
But it's an important symbol that, again, they didn't understand about that, but we see it in Jesus. Take the bitter salad greens they were told to eat in verse 8. Why eat something bitter on a day of freedom?
Well, for the Israelites, they believed it's because they were slaves in Egypt. It was to remind them of the slavery they were under, and that probably is part of it. But I believe also all the way back, we have a Good Friday service. Why? Because the day Jesus dies, our Passover Lamb, is a bitter day.
It's a tough day; it's a sad day because we realize He died for you and I. And as we take time to reflect, we think, "Whoa, this is a serious thing." Sin is always costly because God hates sin. There's always a consequence for sin; somebody has to pay for it.
Verse 10, God says, "Do not leave any of it until the morning. Burn whatever is not eaten before morning." The lamb was to be totally consumed, just as Jesus is totally consumed for our sins. Jesus, I think, probably would have preferred to give up an arm or a leg, right? But He had to sacrifice all of Him. All of Him died on that cross.
Exodus 12:46 tells us not one bone of the lamb was to be broken. John 19:36 makes a point to make sure we understand these things happen in fulfillment of the Scriptures that say not one of His bones will be broken.
You see, again, the connection to the Passover. If you don't know the Old Testament, you have no idea why John's pointing out the fact that Jesus didn't have a bone broken while the two criminals on both sides of Him both have their legs broken. Jesus does not. Why? Because He's the symbolic Passover Lamb of the Old Testament that wasn't allowed to have His bones broken.
It was pre-planned by God to match the Passover. And even the date was pre-planned by God. Do you know three of the biggest events in the Bible all happen during Passover? The first is God makes His covenant with Abraham during the Passover. God promised to bless him with many descendants, with a piece of land, but He also promised them that all nations will be blessed through you. That comes through Jesus.
Exodus 12:41 tells us, in fact, it was on the last day of the 430th year that all God's forces left the land—430 years after God made His promise. On the very day that He made the promise to Abraham and made this covenant, the Israelites leave Egypt. That's not a coincidence either, right?
You start to put together all these pieces, and Jesus dies during Passover because God has a plan for when things are going to happen, how they're going to happen, and what ways they're going to happen. And when you look at that, you realize God has a plan.
So when your life is a mess and things are going the way you want, if you turn to the Lord and you say, "God, use this mess for Your glory," He can. He's a God who can orchestrate things, who can pre-plan things, who has good intentions for things.
But I want to return back to the central message of Passover, and it's this: something needed to die to save the Israelites from death. As humans, we tend to think, "Well, can't just be merciful?" More and more people in the world think, "What is this all about with animal sacrifice or Jesus' death? Isn't that barbaric?"
In fact, if you go to the Muslim world or the Jewish world today, both of them believe sacrifice was always just symbolic, which they're partly right. Animal sacrifice was symbolic; it was symbolic of the perfect sacrifice, Jesus.
But in Muslim and Jewish tradition now, they don't believe you need any kind of sacrifice. God can just have mercy. But what we see in the God of the Bible from the very beginning of the Bible all the way through, with the very first sin, Adam and Eve, the first animal dies. Here in this story, we see God couldn't just say, "Well, you're my people. I'll not take you."
Their sin would have killed them too without the death of the lamb. And so what we see is there are consequences for sin, and someone must pay for them. We live in a world that tends to think, "No, you don't need to do that."
But the God of the Bible demands a cost, and thank God that He sent Jesus to pay that cost because otherwise you and I would be paying that cost.
So here's the point: as you prepare for the Easter celebration, the Easter season, I hope you do take some time to really reflect on the fact that Christ died, He rose again, He is alive, and He did it out of great love for you and I.
That while we were still sinners, the Bible tells us, Christ died for us, that eternal death might pass over us. Those who are covered by Christ's blood, who have put their faith in Him, can be saved just as the Israelites were saved thousands of years ago through the death of the lambs.
Let's pray.
Lord God, I do thank you for the Easter season, Lord, for this holiday, God, to remember your sacrifice. And Lord, I do thank you for the Passover story in the Bible. Lord, it's a heavier one, God, and yet, Lord, it teaches us so much about Jesus, that Jesus, You are the one who could defeat sin, conquer it, who was not touched by sin but could overcome it.
And Lord, we do thank you that You died, and that through Your death, Lord, we could have death pass over us. And Lord, we do pray, Lord, may we have new life just as Christ was born again; He resurrected. Death could not hold Him.
Lord, as Christians, we do look forward to the day when death will be no more, when we will rise again and be with You forever. Lord God, may all Your people look forward to that day. May we put our treasure really in Heaven that will never fade and never be taken. May our hope really be in You, for You are the only sure.
And we pray this in Jesus Christ's name, amen.
If you would like some prayer after the service, we always have people over at the cross after the service. If you've never really given your life to the Lord or you're not sure you have, or you want to rededicate your life, or maybe there's just some events going on in your life, we always want to have people who you can pray with.
You know, sometimes it's really good to pray with other people, and so take advantage of that over at the cross after the service. There's always people over there.
And if you're a guest with us today, we're glad you're here. We know it's not always easy to come to church the first time, and so we have a gift we'd love to give you on your way out at the back table there—just our way of saying we're glad you're here.
For the benediction today, if you can stand with me, I always end with a scripture. And today I thought let's end by looking at Jesus' own words during Passover about Himself.
In Luke 22:19-20, we're told, "Jesus took some bread and then gave thanks to God for it. Then He broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, 'This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' After supper, He took another cup of wine and said, 'This cup is the new covenant between God and His people, an agreement confirmed with my blood, which is poured out as a sacrifice for you.'"
And so may you be blessed because our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed. God bless you as you go out today.
on Mar 21, 2024
