Ok, so, before we get into today’s message, Who fasted from something this week? If you did, did you see just how tied to that thing your heart is? Was it difficult?
If you weren’t here, we alkyd about idols, and how much God hates them because they rob Him of Glory and they rob us of true Joy. We talked about what that matters and why it is right that God would want to destroy the idols in our lives.
Today, we look at how he culminated his extraction of Egypt’s idols in the killing of the firstborn sone of the Egyptians, while simultaneously saving the children of the Israelites, and setting up the pattern of redemption that will culminate in Christ’s death on the cross.
Before I get into the text, let me ask you a question. If you call yourself a Christian, you might refer to yourself as “saved”. My question is this, from whom are you saved? Hopefully I will answer that question Biblically today.

read Exodus 11:1-12:50

So there is a lot we need to understand in this text if we are going to answer the question that I posed, as well as the questions that arise when we answer that question.
Who Why How

Who: God Saves us from God: The angel of death was sent by God to execute God’s Judgment on His creation that refused to worship Him as God.

Why: Because He is a covenant Keeper. The people of Israel had broken the covenant with God. They were idolators, and were wandering from God. Ezekiel 16:1-26;59-63. This is talking about how Israel behaved in Egypt, and God uses this incredibly strong language to describe the sin of His people, the ones who He had made a covenant with, and they broke it. But even though we are covenant breakers, God is a covenant keeper, and because He will be faithful be provides yet again for His people.

How: There are two hows that I want to answer. 1. is how does God distinguish between His people and the Egyptians? Is it the bumper sticks on their car? The political signs in their lawn? Church attendance, scholing method? Did he look through the window to see what channels they were watching? did he have the people list their list of rules by the door for the angel of death to examine? No. He passed over the doors that had been painted with blood. The blood of a lamb. The reality that we see from the Ezekiel passage and others is that the hebrews, some of them were worshipping the same idols of egypt… 12:13
The second How is “how does He do it?” The answer is by faith in the blood…
Now, the reality is that this blood applied by faith is merely a shadow of the True passover lamb that is Jesus. Why is that? well, again, because God is a covenant keeper, the terms of the covenant must be upheld, and if they are not upheld, then the party that did not uphold its end must be destroyed. So Israel broke the covenant with God, but who walked through for both parties?…
So, to bring this into the realm of Advent, that is what the people of israel were waiting for, and expecting, they may not have known it fully, but the shadow was about to be made real in Jesus Christ…
1 Peter 18-19
Romans 3:23-25
Rom 5:8