4/4/26- Death Passed Over
Hey, there! It’s been a while. Things have been busy here- camping, sick baby, work, and Passover- but I’ve been working on a couple of projects this last month that I am looking forward to sharing very soon. The first is the next part to my study on what it means to be Christ, and the second is a look at Jude and how it applies to the epidemic of false teachers in the world today. I’ve realized while working on both of those that I may have bitten off more than I expected, but oh well! It may be another week or another month before I’m able to share either; my goal with the studies on this blog was never to be fast. I do, however, plan to be more regular in doing these shorter posts again; the last one was a full month ago, and I want to stay in the habit of sharing what I’m learning and writing about, not just writing.
Moving on, I want to take some time today to talk about Passover. My son (and now myself) have been sick this week, and, since we aren’t trying to get everyone else sick, this year was the first year since I was a child (we started when I was 10 or 11 if I remember correctly) that I have not spent Passover with my parents, and the first year that I led a seder. It was an interesting experience; in previous years, I have admittedly found it easy to be a passive or disinterested participant in the preparation for Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Growing up, I didn’t view it as a very fun holiday because it involved a lot of cleaning, and I’m just not a tidy person by nature. I was a selfish kid about it, like a lot of other things in my life. Additionally, my family has always done very irregular seders; I don’t think we ever properly finished one until we began to participate in more structured, corporate ones with our congregation or my in-laws. For much of my life, Passover has felt very unstable and unstructured; I knew the story, the elements, the rules, etc. but something was missing for me. There was an understanding that I was lacking, I think, until I got to lead my wife and our little 8-month old the other night.
We did not enter into Passover gracefully this year- as I’ve said, we were sick- and we did not spend a lot of time preparing in advance. In some ways, we limped into it; we didn’t even know that I would be leading our seder until the day before! When we got to the day of, my baby was coughing and desperately fussy, my wife was trying hard to get things pulled together, and I was coming in from a full day of landscaping on a humid spring day. We rushed to clear and set the table, get cleaned up and dressed, and print out the hagaddah (courtesy of my father-in-law). As we sat down, we prayed; we asked for a good seder, that God would be present with us as we recounted the story of the first Passover, and that He would be gracious with us in spite of our lack of preparation. I believe we got all three of those things.
I’ll continue under the assumption that most of the people that know me and are reading this are familiar with the rudiments of the Exodus story, so I won’t be going line-by-line through all of the elements here. Instead, I want to share a revelation that I had the other night and has been continuing today. To start, here are a couple of excerpts from Exodus: “4 Moses said, “Thus says the LORD, ‘About midnight I am going out into the midst of Egypt, 5 and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of the Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; all the firstborn of the cattle as well. 6 ‘Moreover, there shall be a great cry in all the land of Egypt, such as there has not been before and such as shall never be again.”; “25 “When you enter the land which the LORD will give you, as He has promised, you shall observe this rite. 26 “And when your children say to you, ‘What does this rite mean to you?’ 27 you shall say, ‘It is a Passover sacrifice to the LORD who passed over the homes of the sons of Israel in Egypt when He smote the Egyptians, but spared out homes.’” And the people bowed low and worshiped… 29 Now it came about at midnight that the LORD struck all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of cattle. 30 Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians, and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was no home where there was not someone dead.” (Exodus 11:4-6; 12:25-27;29-30) Every year this is discussed, and every year I am haunted by the thought of all the firstborns dying. It’s only natural, I think, given that I am the oldest in my family, that I would be particularly bothered by that. But this year, my wife and I thought about something else; that would include our little boy, too. Our precious little one, with his sweet little gurgling laugh and curious eyes that follow everything, his frantic calls of “mamamama” and his chubby little hands grabbing for everything- all of that would have been gone in an instant. And then she reminded me that her dad is also a firstborn. In just our house, out of the five people in it, three would have been named in that plague. There wasn’t a home in Egypt where someone didn’t die that night. “Morever, there shall be a great cry in all the land of Egypt, such as there has not been before and such as shall never be again.” As a father, I can suddenly appreciate the immense dread that comes with this plague in a way that I never did before. It hurts to think about in a way that most of the others don’t quite reach. Likewise, where it says, “And when your children say to you, ‘What does this rite mean to you?’” has more meaning to me now. I was never in physical slavery in Egypt, and neither was anyone reading this, and neither will my children be- but we all were, are, or have been in a spiritual Egypt, slaving away under a cruel taskmaster with nothing to look forward to but a wretched end. “But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Corinthians 15:57) I spent many years of my young life speaking like a free man and living as a slave, revelling in my sin until I was forced to my senses. The words I knew for so many years were suddenly much more real to me. Death passed over me, just as it has passed over everyone who has been covered by the blood of the Lamb and left Egypt to follow and worship the God of Israel.
As we went through the seder this year, I realized that it all had more meaning to me than it did before; it wasn't my parent’s story anymore, it was mine and my family’s. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of my father, the one who brought Egypt low and delivered His people from the house of slavery, is my God, too, and He is still delivering people today. I thoroughly enjoyed going through each of the seder elements with my family, discussing the scriptures we read and the ways that God has been good to us. It was a deeply moving experience, and I don’t intend for it to be a one-off. Revelation 22:17 says: “The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the water of life without cost.” I intend to remind my children each year- not just at Passover, but especially at Passover- that the water of life is available to them without cost, and that the blood of the Lamb of God is still more than sufficient to see death pass over them. I intend to teach them about the outcome of a life of slavery, and about the God who desires earnestly to deliver everyone from it.
In closing, I want to thank you for your time in reading this; it was not my longest post, but it was not the shortest, either. I also want to thank you for still checking in on this site- I appreciate it a lot. I know the actual day of Passover has now passed, but whether you celebrate it or not I would like to ask you to really consider this question: what does this rite mean to you? I’m 25 years old and in some ways only just realized what it means to me, even though I thought I already got it.
P.S. I am posting this on a Saturday, so Shabbat Shalom!
