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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