Sunday, June 14, 2020

Exodus 12:21-28 comments: instructions for the Passover night





Exodus 12:21 ¶  Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel, and said unto them, Draw out and take you a lamb according to your families, and kill the passover. 22  And ye shall take a bunch of hyssop, and dip it in the blood that is in the bason, and strike the lintel and the two side posts with the blood that is in the bason; and none of you shall go out at the door of his house until the morning. 23  For the LORD will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, the LORD will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you. 24  And ye shall observe this thing for an ordinance to thee and to thy sons for ever. 25  And it shall come to pass, when ye be come to the land which the LORD will give you, according as he hath promised, that ye shall keep this service. 26  And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service? 27  That ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the LORD’S passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses. And the people bowed the head and worshipped. 28  And the children of Israel went away, and did as the LORD had commanded Moses and Aaron, so did they.
Moses summarizes the instructions to the elders and gives them a curious warning that has doctrinal implications for us. If they follow the instructions the LORD will pass over their door and will not suffer, which means permit, the destroyer to come into their homes.
Who or what is the destroyer? It is not capitalized as a proper name. There is some agent, an angel or spirit who destroys. But, who can that be?
Is this the angel of the LORD, the presence (Isaiah 63:9) of Jehovah God who devastated the Assyrian army?
2Kings 19:35  And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.
Or performed the slaughter at Jerusalem when David counted the people?
IChronicles 21:14  So the LORD sent pestilence upon Israel: and there fell of Israel seventy thousand men. 15  And God sent an angel unto Jerusalem to destroy it: and as he was destroying, the LORD beheld, and he repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed, It is enough, stay now thine hand. And the angel of the LORD stood by the threshingfloor of Ornan the Jebusite.
We will see in the next passage that the LORD, Jehovah, did smite the firstborn. We know from other passages that He often uses a spiritual agency or individual to accomplish His purpose yet He Himself is said to be the cause of it, hence the reference to the destroyer.
Judges 9:23  Then God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the men of Shechem; and the men of Shechem dealt treacherously with Abimelech:
1Samuel 16:14  But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him.
The complexity of reality, from our finite minds’ position, is that these kinds of things, God’s agency and exerting power on our physical universe, are happening so many times a second that it is impossible for us to fathom it. Here, though, is a very special event, a monumental moment in human history where God’s power, as God’s power, is being displayed to the world and to posterity after hundreds of years of the spiritual decay of mankind from the Fall of Adam. There was Creation of the physical universe, the fall of man introducing death into life, the Flood that reduced mankind to a few people, there was Babel that divided mankind into different languages and dispersed them around the earth, and there is the Exodus from Egypt where the world’s greatest superpower of the time was brought to its knees. In these actions and judgments, we see a big picture of God’s power and sovereignty.
Verse 28 shows us that this was one of the few times that the children of Israel did as they were told.

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