Christ Our Passover: From Captives to Kings

One month from now, we will observe the annual festival of the Passover. Described in detail in the Exodus story, commanded as a festival in the Law in Leviticus, Leviticus 23, observed by Jesus Christ and His disciples, and clearly understood by the New Testament Church to be a symbol of the Messiah Himself, Passover and its symbols allow us to understand the true sacrifice that Jesus Christ made, and is the ultimate Christian observance that is not observed by the vast majority of Christians. Formally replaced by the Catholic Church in 325 AD at the Council of Nicaea with the celebration of Easter, the Passover and the meeting of Passover with its symbolism of a lamb slain for a household was shifted to focus instead on the resurrection. This man-made change from the suffering and death, which became secondary to the resurrection, and our response to this grace by needing to put sin out of our lives as pictured by the days of unleavened bread, created a distancing from the Jewish faith, which is what their intention was, and created a disconnection then between the old and the new covenants. But it is not so for the Church of God. It is not so for us. We begin, as did the Apostle Paul, with the recognition that the suffering and death of our Savior allowed all other things to follow. Let's look over in 1 Corinthians 5, and let's see this very specifically described. 1 Corinthians 5 and verses 7 and 8 should be a memory verse for us in the Church of God. A lot of times we want to go to Leviticus 23 and talk about the festivals there, but here we have the Apostle Paul in the New Testament commanding Christians to keep the feast of unleavened bread. 1 Corinthians 5 verse 7, Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened.

For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. What Paul is saying is, look, don't forget, Christ, our Passover, died for us. Therefore, your response to that death should be to put out that old way of thinking, not party the way you used to party, but celebrate in this new way, celebrate in this new way, this feast. And therefore, he says, verse 8, Therefore let us keep the feast, the feast here clearly, the feast of unleavened bread, not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Let us keep the feast, the feast that he kept, as is recorded in Acts 20. It's the feast that the New Testament church kept, and it's the feast that we keep as a response to the grace that was given us through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, our Passover, as Paul calls it here. Today, I want to discuss the Passover, and I want to put it in the context of the Greco-Roman world of first century Palestine, to understand a little bit more about what people might have been thinking at that time, to help us understand the Bible, to understand their context, so we can understand our context better. And specifically, as we contemplate how Christ's suffering and death as our Passover mirrors our own suffering, our own brokenness, as he said an example for us to look to. Not that we keep the Passover, or we think about that suffering with despair, but with hope. But with hope. Because what begins on the Passover in death ends with the first triumph over death, and paves the way for us to follow.

The suffering and death of Jesus Christ, which redeems us from brokenness and death. The suffering and death of our Messiah, which ultimately leads to His resurrection, making possible our resurrection from the dead. The title of today's message is Christ our Passover from captives to kings.

Let's start by reading 1 Corinthians 15. It's only a couple pages over from where you are right now.

Go over to 1 Corinthians 15, and let's read the first part of this. We often tend to focus, when we read 1 Corinthians 15, on the latter part of 1 Corinthians 15, and we call 1 Corinthians 15 the resurrection chapter. We often talk about it on the Feast of Trumpets. But in the beginning, Paul lays the groundwork for understanding the resurrection, and he outlines it as such here in verse 1. Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, and in which you stand. Now, this gospel here is probably gospel small g. It's a key pillar of the gospel. We know the gospel is the gospel that Jesus Christ came preaching when he came into Judea, as described in Mark 1, where he says he came preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God. And we know that because the last verse of Acts also says that Paul preached Jesus Christ and the gospel of the kingdom. And so we know that this is a key part of the gospel, and he's now going to share what he received himself. He's going to now share with the Corinthian church. He says, by which also you are saved. If you hold fast that word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. So he's going to say, listen up. I'm going to tell you something important that you need to hang on to if you're going to endure, if you're going to live and walk in this way of life. Verse 3, For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received from that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. This is the beginning. This is the Passover that we celebrate, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. And what scriptures are these? Well, these are the Old Testament scriptures. That's the scriptures that he's referring to. He might have been thinking about Psalm 16. He might have been thinking about Isaiah 53.

And so let's go to Isaiah 53. We could go to several, but he says that according to the scriptures. So let's go over to Isaiah 53 and let's read these scriptures. We'll come back to 1 Corinthians 15. But this is the first thing that he's going to tell them to lay the groundwork for everything else. That Christ died. And not only did he die, we'll understand that he suffered. Isaiah 53. Let's start on verse 1. Who has believed our report and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness, and when we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. Now it's interesting here we read through this, but if you just pause for a second at the beginning of verse 2, it says, for he, and he there is Christ, he grew up before him. He is capitalized, and him is capitalized, and him here is Yahweh.

So we understand that there are two beings discussed in this verse. For he grew up before him as a tender plant. So this is a very interesting verse to understand this relationship that they had. In verse 3, he is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised, and we did not esteem him.

And we read these verses on the evening of Passover, and we should be reading these verses as we lead up to Passover, and we think about the incredible suffering that he went through.

But I'll tell you, there's a lot of suffering in the world today. A lot of us are suffering. A lot of people are suffering. And this is not here just to say, oh, look at his suffering. This is here for us to be able to say he can relate to our suffering, and we can relate to his suffering. How many times have we been despised? How many times have people looked away from us? How many times have we felt ashamed or people felt ashamed? Verse 4, surely he has borne our griefs. This is the point is we have griefs. We have griefs, and he has borne them and carried our sorrows.

And yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities, and chastisement for our peace was upon him.

And by his stripes we are healed. And this is interesting because this is not talking about death right here. This is talking about terrible torture. Chastisement. That's a very sort of that's a euphemism for torture. Chastisement is a euphemism for that. That means being beaten with those cords, right? That the flesh is ripped from your back and so forth. All we like sheep have gone astray.

We have turned every one to his own way. And the Lord has laid on him, here we have again, Yahweh has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. He was led as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. And now we have this connection between Exodus 12 and the Passover lambs and now the prophecy of a lamb to come that would be led to the slaughter.

Exodus 12 talks about how the lamb was brought into the home several days in advance of being slain. And now you had this lamb in your midst. You were feeding it. You were getting to know it. It was an unblemished lamb and it relied upon you completely to take care of it. And soon you were going to slaughter it. He was taken from prison and from judgment and who will declare his generation? For he was cut off from the land of the living for the transgressions of my people.

He was stricken and they made his grave with the wicked but with the rich at his death because he had done no violence nor was any deceit in his mouth. And now skipping down to verse 12, therefore I will divide him a portion with the great and he shall divide the spoil with the strong because he poured out his soul unto death and he was numbered with the transgressors and he bore the sin of many and made intercession for transgressors.

Surely Paul understood this prophecy. He understood this. I find it interesting because if you read modern scholarship they'll say that the the church discovered these passages in the middle ages and begin to make connections, which I find just stunning to think that they would they would believe that when true clearly Paul makes reference to his death as foretold and prophesied in the scriptures.

And so this is what he was referring to. Now let's go back to 1 Corinthians 15 and continue because this is what we celebrate. We celebrate this Passover which begins everything. 1 Corinthians 15. And so if we continue now in verse 4, and he was buried, comma, he was buried. Let's pause here because he was not taken up in a whirlwind. He did not suffer and then carry this cross and then die and then disappear or taken away or stolen on the way to being buried. No, he was buried. And this is significant because this burial is truly the completeness of that process of death. He's taken down and he's buried.

He's buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man, as was foretold in Isaiah 53. His dead body was taken down from the cross. It had clearly been burned from the sun, being out in the sun all day. It was no doubt covered in blood from the piercing in his side, from his hands being nailed to the beam, from his feet being nailed to the beam.

If there was ever a picture of brokenness, this pile of flesh that was taken down and carried away to the tomb is that picture. It was nothing to look at. You could imagine just nothing as you saw him taken down. And he was taken down and he was carried to the tomb and the blood and the dirt would have been washed from his body and the splinters that would have been embedded in his back as he pushed up against that cross for hours at a time trying to breathe would have been removed to the degree that they could have been.

And there wasn't much time before sunset, before the first day of Unleavened Bread was beginning. And so they did what they could to kind of clean up this pile of bones and lay them out and wrap them in linen. And then they left. And you can imagine the feeling when that stone was rolled across his tomb. The apostles, the disciples, Mary, all the people there, they must have just been destitute. This was the end.

They had watched these events unfold. They had heard he was taken. They had heard he was beaten. They had heard he had been put on the cross. They had heard that he had died. And now here they have his body in the tomb wrapped and now closed. Done. The story was over.

But we know the story was not over. But that is what we celebrate with the Passover.

That is what begins it all. Verse 4, though, continues the story. And Paul says then, and then he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. According to the Scriptures. Now, this is an actually interesting point. There's various debate of what Scripture this is. A lot of people point to Hosea 6. You might put that as a reference in your Bible, Hosea 6.

I think the most clear reference is in Matthew 12. And there's a lot of debate among scholars as to when Matthew wrote his gospel. The current thinking right now is that Matthew didn't write it and it was written between 80 and 100 AD. But the scholarship ranges from 40 AD to about 100 AD.

And I find it interesting to imagine that perhaps Matthew had already written the gospel when Paul was writing to the Corinthians in 55 AD. And perhaps that gospel had circulated and the discussion of how Jesus had prophesied his own death and that he would be in the heart of the earth as Jonah was in the heart of the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. I find that interesting. But he uses this parallel. And so he says he was risen. And now in verse 5 he's going to point out to all of the witnesses and that he was seen by Cephas and then by the 12. And by the way, the 12 is a general term for the 12 disciples, even though clearly one had been committed suicide by that point. But it's a description of those 12. And then it says in verse 6, And that he was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remained to the present, but some have fallen asleep. And after that he was seen by James the other, who was a prominent figure at that time that Paul was writing this to the Corinthians.

And then by all the apostles, which is also a very interesting reference because now there's a distinction made between the 12 and the apostles, which might imply that there were other people who were considered apostles at that time besides the 12. And then last of all, he was seen by me also as one born out of due time. For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. And by the grace of God I am what I am. And that is such a powerful phrase. By the grace of God I am what I am. And I think we all should do well to think about that. By the grace of God we are who we are, but we don't accept that in just in that space. And he says, and his grace toward me was not in vain, but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. Therefore whether it was I or they, so we preached and so you believed. So the Passover allows then this resurrection to take place. And this is where this confusion enters in because the Catholic Church then puts the emphasis on Easter and the resurrection as opposed to the death and suffering of Jesus Christ. And then Paul continues in verse 12. He says, if Christ is preached that he has been risen from the dead, how do some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is also in vain. And I think I've asked this question before. If they found the tomb of Jesus Christ and they could provide surety to the degree that people can have provided surety today that it was his body in that tomb, would you still come to church or would you abandon this faith? And Paul makes it clear that you should abandon the faith because it's not faith, because everything I'm saying is worthless. That's what vain means. It means worthless. Because the very foundation of our faith is that Christ died, was buried, and then was resurrected.

It's a very powerful statement. He's putting the gauntlet down to the Corinthians to say, you don't think there's a resurrection? Well, you better think again, because Jesus Christ's own resurrection is the very foundation of what our beliefs are. And so this is where the Passover leads us. It leads then ultimately to that. Now, to understand the Greco-Roman context for this for this verse, because there was this debate that said some did not believe in the resurrection, that was actually a fairly common viewpoint. According to the professor of New Testament studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Bart Ehrman, who is an agnostic, but a scholar on these topics, many people at this time did not believe in an afterlife.

You see, life was so hard at the time that people prayed to the gods, small g, people prayed to the gods for help in this life. That's all they really wanted help with. If they could just get through this life, right? Most people, the life expectancy at Rome at the time this was written was about 30.

Okay? If you lived beyond 30, you were doing pretty well. People died of a tooth abscess.

People died of tooth abscesses at that time. It was not uncommon for many children to die in childbirth, along with their moms, or to die before the age of one. In fact, at that time, the statistic is that a woman needed to have five children just to replace the couple, because of those five, so many would die and not be able to actually continue to have children. So most people just wanted help in this life. But Paul comes along and says, no, that's actually not the point here of what Christ was telling us. And that's not what happened in Christianity. So he is beginning to give them now hope that is far beyond just this life. It's more than just this life. Christ is not some figure we pray to just to help us in this life. He's going to help us in the next life. So he's going to help us with our challenges today, our brokenness today, and he's going to help us in the future, in the next life. And so this is the foundation of what Paul describes as our faith.

Jesus Christ had to die for our sins, and God had to resurrect him for his plan to work.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is so important that without it, our faith is empty.

Now let's see the foreshadowing of this resurrection in the Passover ceremony itself, Mark 14.

And I hope you're getting the emphasis here, because the point of the Passover is to focus on his suffering and his death. That we might have grace to be forgiven and to walk a newness of life.

And then the resurrection then follows. Mark 14, verse 22. And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it and broke it, and gave it to them, and said, Take, eat, this is my body. Then he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it. And he said to them, This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many. And now notice, verse 25, Assuredly I say to you, I will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God. He was looking forward to keeping the Passover in the kingdom of God with them after his resurrection. After his resurrection. And Paul uses this same sort of language when he discusses the Passover in 1 Corinthians 11, which we don't need to turn to, but he says, as often as you take it, this annual festival, you proclaim the Lord's death till he comes. Passover is about proclaiming the death of Jesus Christ until he comes.

Passover is a sober time. And as we contemplate the death of Jesus Christ, it's just like going to a funeral of a loved one. We are very sad, because we are going to miss that person. But just as we are sad, we have a hope that there is a resurrection, and that hope is made possible by Jesus Christ. So with this context in mind, let's understand about what this means about redemption and our brokenness. Because I think we understand this story. We rehearse it. I think it's important to read Isaiah 53. It's important to read in Mark. It's important to read in Corinthians. But let's go over to Luke 4 and verse 16. Now let's talk about the implications of Passover, his death, and suffering on our lives. Let's examine our own suffering, and indeed our own brokenness in the context of the Passover. Luke 4 verse 16. So he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And he was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah, and when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written. And now he's going to read from the book of Isaiah.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. He came to heal the brokenhearted. He came to release the captives. He came to let the oppressed go free, and to give sight to the blind. Isn't that nice for all those other people?

No. He's talking about us. He's talking about me. He's talking about you. He's talking about everyone in this room. And if you can't see it, well, then you're blind. Like the Laodiceans were blind. They thought they were rich, but they were poor, naked, and blind.

You see, Luke 14 is talking about us. He's talking about us as the brokenhearted, the captives, and the oppressed. We are the captives. We are suffering brokenness in this life.

We didn't ask for it. We were born into it. We were born into that. And some of us have easier lives than others. That's true. You could come with me to Benin next Friday. You'd see life is a little harder. But you know what? We suffer here, too. I'm amazed at the incredible abundance that we have. I was reading a story about the founder of Square. Square is one of the these big hot tech companies in San Francisco. It does payment readers. The co-founder of Square committed suicide last month. Suffering from addiction. Multi, multi, multi-millionaire. Just could not keep his life together. Committed suicide. And this story is just told over and over and over again with people. The depression, the anxiety, or the physical ailments, the physical difficulties. We read these prayer announcements from various people. We have so many things that we suffer from in this life. But Christ came for us. By his stripes, we were healed. That's a promise.

By his stripes, we were healed. We can claim the promise of healing because Christ suffered for us. That's why we ask for an anointing. And the minister, during that anointing, should make reference to Christ's sacrifice and his suffering and his stripes that give us that opportunity for healing. And healing does happen. I've heard the stories. I've experienced it directly myself.

He came to deliver us. And there's a term that's used in Scripture that sort of gathers all of these ideas together, and it's called redemption. It's called redemption. So what is redemption?

I'm going to bring a prop out here for a moment. Today, when we think about redemption, we generally think about these. I mean, unless you go to a church, you don't really hear redemption unless you're going to go put a bottle in and get five cents back, right? I'm going to go redeem this.

I think it might even say the word redeem on here. Let's see. I didn't check that before.

So this is good for five cents. Ten cents if you're an organ. So good for you, an organ. That's right. So this bottle has been used. Now, it used to be we had glass bottles, and if you break a bottle, you certainly don't want to use it, right? It's broken. You cannot reuse that bottle.

Now, I guess you could technically refill this, but I've heard this is very bad for your health if you put water back in this plastic bottle and keep drinking it, right? Now, that's one thing.

But if I were to put a hole in this, like that, that bottle's pretty useless, right? There's no way that bottle is going to hold any water. This bottle is useless. It's really ready to be thrown away. It's trash. But guess what? Organ's going to give you 10 cents for this, right? So hang on to it, because if you save it, then you can redeem it. That's the modern concept of redemption.

Let's go over to Galatians 3 and verse 13, because this bottle, this bottle with a hole in it that can't hold water anymore, or a broken bottle, that's us. We're that broken container that doesn't hold water, right? But life just flows out of us. It just flows out of us. Every day that goes by, just life just flows out. And eventually, we're going to be done, and we're not going to live again. But Galatians 3 verse 13 gives us hope, because here we see Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law. He's redeemed us from the curse of the law. What's the curse of the law? The curse of the law is death. He's redeemed us from death, having become a curse for us. For it is written, cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. See, he died on that stake and was cursed to take that curse onto himself and away from us, so that we might be redeemed. So that that life that's flowing through us in that hole in that bottle, it stopped. And we can then be resurrected, following him to eternal life. Every single one of us is broken. In this life, there is no hope. And in fact, I just want to bring to you another prop here. This is from one of the most famous books on atheism, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. And Mr. Dawkins has no belief in an afterlife, because he has no belief in God. And he basically tries to console people. And there's a whole actual section on consolation and being consoled with death in here. And I just, there's several parts I could read, but I, he just quotes Mark Twain. I'll just, I'll just read you Mark Twain's quote here. This is on page 396. Mark Twain's dismissal of the fear of death is as follows.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Okay, well that's, that's kind of humorous, isn't it?

So basically he says, hey, you were dead before. Nobody knew you existed before you were born.

You had no existence. And after you die, you will have no existence. And no one will ever remember you. Wow, okay. I mean, you know, and I could, I could keep going, but basically what Richard Dawkins shares is, hey, we can deal with this as humans. It's okay. And that's what the Corinthians were saying too. It's amazing how this stuff goes around. I can deal with it. That's okay. I'll have no existence forever. I didn't have existence before. And in a way, it's true. Without the sacrifice of Jesus Christ being redeemed, that's exactly the case. The life flows through us. We didn't exist before. We won't exist after. And that's it. But that's not the case. With Jesus Christ's sacrifice, with God's plan for all humanity, with his suffering and death, we have been redeemed from this curse of the law. Peter wrote that Christ took our sins onto himself on the cross. And those sins, if they had not been paid for with his life, would lead us to death.

God cannot compromise his own law. He cannot compromise his own law. Go over to Galatians 4 verse 4. It's just across the page. It says, and when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law. He was born under that penalty to redeem those who were under the law, that's us, that we might receive the adoption as sons, that we might become sons of God. And because you are sons of God, has sent forth the Spirit of his son into our hearts, crying out, Abba, Father. Therefore, you are no longer a slave, or might I add, a captive, or blind, or brokenhearted, but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ. That's what God has in store for us. He didn't have to die, yet he chose to die, to redeem us. He was completely innocent of any crime, and yet he gave his life.

One of the most famous scenes in Steven Spielberg's powerful film about the Holocaust, called Schindler's List, came out in 1992. It's amazing. It's coming up almost 30 years now.

One of the most famous scenes in the movie is the depiction of the clearing of the Krakow Poland Jewish Ghetto on March 13th and 14th, 1943. It was on those two days that the remaining inhabitants of the ghetto were triaged. They were triaged. Those that could work, and there were about 8,000 of them, were put on trains and sent to concentration camps. Those who could not were murdered in the streets. Approximately 2,000 people were murdered in the course of about 24 hours.

Spielberg chose to convey the movie in black and white, but he allowed for four scenes in color.

And one of those scenes was the scene of this clearing of the ghetto. Oscar Schindler is riding his horse one afternoon on the hills overlooking the ghetto. He and his mistress had just had a wonderful breakfast, and they were riding in the hills. And they looked out over the scene of the chaos in the ghetto. Soldiers were keeping residents in orderly lines as they were marched from their homes into the street, lined up and shot. Chaos. Gut-wrenching chaos all around.

And in the midst of this chaos, we see a small child, a little girl of three years old. We see her because what Spielberg did was he colorized her red coat so that when we looked in the scene of the chaos, and it was just chaos, we see this little three-year-old girl walking through, separated from her parents, trying to flee the chaos. And we see Schindler see this red coat, and then we see this red coat disappear into a building. And then we see the scene change, and the little girl in the red coat goes and hides underneath the bed. And then the scene changes back to the chaos of the Warsaw ghetto. This little innocent girl. Later in the film, we see the end result. We see when the Nazis decide that they need to hide the atrocities that they had committed in Poland as the war was coming to an end, they had to exhume all the bodies that had been shot. And they exhume them all, and then they took and they burned them.

And we see this old man carrying a cart, and on this cart is a heap of bodies, and in the midst of the heap of bodies, we see a colorized red coat. And we realize what happened to this little girl. Olia Dawoski was the little girl who is actually from Krakow. She was three years old when she played this little girl, and she didn't understand the meaning of her role. And Spielberg, when he contracted with her parents to have her play this little girl, he told her parents, do not let her watch this film until she turns 18, because she won't understand it.

She didn't listen. She watched it when she was 11 years old. She watched herself play this little girl in this scene, and she was traumatized for years. She watched it again when she was 18, when she was old enough to understand, and she realized how powerful it was and how important it was that she played this figure. This little figure represented the millions of Jews who were slaughtered, and it was designed to show the innocence of these people who were slaughtered by the Nazis. And I think it's a very apt picture of the innocence of a little lamb that comes into your home on the 10th day of this month coming up, that you feed and care for, that looks to you that then is slaughtered, that your family might be saved. Jesus Christ, though, knew what he was doing. That little girl didn't know what was going on. She was just a victim of all the things going on. But Jesus Christ knew he was innocent. He knew what was going to happen. When he took that passover with his disciples, he understood what was going to happen next. He was going to be tortured, and he was going to die in a terrible, terrible way. He was innocent. He was taken and killed, but he went willingly and knowingly. He was a lamb to the slaughter, that we might have life, that we might have life, and that we might have it more abundantly, that we might be redeemed from our brokenness. Whatever it might be, we might be able to take that brokenness and put it on him for his yoke is easy and his burden is light. That we might be set free from addiction or whatever suffering or whatever pain we might be in and whatever blindness engulfs us. That is what this Passover and his death is all about. He offered himself freely for us, and this is the gift that we celebrate on the Passover. In conclusion, I'd like to turn over to Revelation 5 and verse 6, and read verses 6 through 10. I think this summarizes so well. We can go from Exodus to Isaiah to Mark to 1 Corinthians and over to Revelation and read the same theme of the Lamb of God. Revelation 5 verse 6, and I looked, and behold, in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, Revelation 5 verse 6, stood a lamb as though it had been slain. What a picture is that! A lamb as though it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. And then he came and took the scroll out of the right hand of him who sat on the throne, and now he had taken the scroll, and the four living creatures and the 24 elders fell down before the lamb, each having a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song.

This is the song they sing for us, and for him you are worthy to take the scroll, to open its seals, for you were slain, and have redeemed us to God by your blood, out of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation, and have made us kings and priests to our God, and we shall reign on the earth.

The beginning is Passover, and it leads to the resurrection, and it leads to the giving of the Holy Spirit, and it leads to the return of Jesus Christ as King of kings and Lord of lords, and the restoration of all things, which is ultimately that we shall be kings and priests and rule with Jesus Christ. Let us consider this Passover coming up next month, and prepare for it through understanding our brokenness, through understanding our issues, and seeking repentance for what we have learned about ourselves in that last year. And I look forward to seeing you again when I return after the Passover.