03.02. Blood Protects from Vengeance.
2. - BLOOD PROTECTS FROM VENGEANCE.
Some fourteen centuries B.C. God was dealing judicially with the richest and dominant nation on earth, the Egyptians. The visitor to the monuments of that period can see the damning records the people left of their vileness and cruelty. These make fully credible the account of Moses in Exodus of the enslavement and bitter oppression of Israel by Pharaoh, with the order to kill all infant boys. This is the judicial background for the severe penalties exacted from them by the Judge of all the earth. The culminating crime of Pharaoh and his people was this:The supreme and only God, the Creator of all men, had seen fit to choose one race to be to Him among the nations what a firstborn son is to the father of a family, even the senior member of the circle under the father. Pharaoh was enslaving that chosen race and had designed their absorption into hispeople, by killing the boys and marrying the girls to Egyptians. To this tyrant Jehovah sent the message:“Israel is My son, My firstborn:and. I have said unto thee, Let My son go that he may serve Me; and thou hast refused to let him go:behold, I will slay thy son, thy firstborn” (Exodus 4:22-23). The haughty monarch of the ruling nation on earth was not prepared to see his supremacy pass to this hated race of slaves and he doggedly rejected the demand. After much patience, and when it had become evident that the king and his people would not yield, the execution of the Divine decree was ordered, which Moses announced in these words, “Thus saith Jehovah, About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt:and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of cattle.” (Exodus 11:4-5).
1. God acts personally. It is to be noted that:A judgment so extensive and terrific was superintended by God personally:“I will go out into the midst of Egypt.” This had been the case at four earlier crises recorded:(a) God had Himself dealt with Cain:(b) “Jehovah sat as King at the Flood” (Psalms 29:10):(c) when at Babel the whole race was set on its own exaltation, “Jehovah came down to see the city and tower which the children of men builded” (Genesis 11:5), before He confounded their speech and scattered them:and (d) when two great cities were to be destroyed by fire from heaven jehovah said:“I will go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it [angelic report concerning it, with application for judgment], which is come unto Me; and if not, I will know” (Genesis 18:21).
Lesser situations on earth might be left to angel or human rulers in the execution of powers entrusted to them by God as the universal Sovereign, but on such solemn and fearful occasions He personally superintended for the securing of strict and impartial justice. See further Joshua 5:13-15; Joshua 6:1-2; Ezekiel 8:8; Ezekiel 8:9, esp. 3, 4: Revelation 5:5; Revelation 6:1; Revelation 19:11-16; Revelation 19:20; Revelation 19:11 :etc.
2. The Destroyer acts. The recognition of this personal presence of God is essential to a true understanding of the events in Egypt that fateful night, even as Jehovah said:“I will go out into the midst of Egypt,” and as Moses added, “Jehovah will pass through to smite the Egyptians,” but he adds, “Jehovah will pass over the door, and will not suffer the Destroyer to come into your houses to smite you” (Exodus 11:4; Exodus 12:23). This great Destroyer is a distinct figure in Holy Scripture.
He acts here; he smote Israel in the days of David (2 Samuel 24:15-16
It was therefore a terrible threat that this mighty Angel of Destruction should be let loose on Egypt and kill in every house. All the preceding plagues had been inflicted by angels, as it is said of God:“He cast upon them [the Egyptians] the fierceness of His anger, wrath and indignation and trouble, a sending of angels Of evil “ (Psalms 78:49); not merely “evil angels,” as A.V, but as R.V, “angels of evil,” angels who because evil by nature would eagerly inflict evil. This last judgment would be the culmination of the dread work of the Destroyer and his hosts.This is not past history only. Pharaoh and his servants had hardened their necks, and had not obeyed the truth as to the true God, Jehovah, and His will, brought to their knowledge by Moses. On the contrary they had obeyed unrighteousness; upon them had been poured out God’s “anger, wrath, indignation, and distress.” Romans 2:8 denounces against all in every age who so defy God “wrath and indignation, tribulation, and anguish,” the same solemn terms with which the Psalmist described the judgments on Egypt of old. And the agency is the same; for when the Lord comes down again for the judgment of His foes who have not acquainted themselves with God, nor obeyed the good tidings of the Lord Jesus, nor received the love of the truth that they might be saved, then shall the same supreme judge who dealt with Egypt be accompanied by “the angels of His power in flaming fire, rendering vengeance” (2 Thessalonians 1:7-9; 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12); even as He said, “so shall it be at the consummation of the age; the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire:there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth.” It was thus in Egypt that awful night of old when “there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead” (Matthew 13:41-42; Matthew 13:49-50 : Exodus 12:30).
3. Justice distinguishes. The words of our Lord just quoted from Matthew show that when God executes judgment His wrath is guided with strict discrimination. He distinguished between Abel and Cain:He saved Noah and his family:He delivered righteous Lot from the overthrow of Sodom. In the days of Ezekiel He set a mark upon each who sighed and cried over all the abominations that blighted Jerusalem, and He forbade the destroying angels to touch these, though no others were to be spared (Ezekiel 11:1-25). It must always be thus, and it was to be so that night in Egypt. But upon what ground in Divine law could the Israelites be rightly exempt? Morally and religiously they were no better than the Egyptians. The strict laws and severe penalties which Moses had to impose on them after their deliverance from Egypt show that their moral life was in general as low as that of their Egyptian tyrants. Slavery ever debases. Ere Joshua left the next generation, which he had led to victory in Canaan, he reminded them that their first ancestors had originally served false gods in Chaldea and that their immediate ancestors had worshipped the gods of Egypt. For a time there were exceptions, such as the parents of Moses and Moses himself (Hebrews 11:23-26). But forty years after his flight he had to remind the God of Abraham that the patriarch’s descendants in Egypt did not even know the name of Abraham’s God (Exodus 3:13). It is a natural tendency with slaves to accommodate themselves to the opinions and practices of their oppressors, if they may thereby gain a lightening of their lot. From Ezekiel 20:7-9 we learn the same:for God tells the Israelites of that time that, in the day when He made Himself known unto their fathers in Egypt, He had been obliged to say to them “Cast ye away every man the abominations of his eyes, and defile not yourselves with the idols of Egypt,” but that at first the people rebelled against the moral deprivations and the change of religion. Therefore they were legally under sentence of death with the Egyptians, and on what ground could they be justly spared?
4. The Passover Blood. The answer given in the famous account found in Exodus 12:1-51. is that for each house a lamb without blemish was to be killed, and “they shall take of the blood, and put it on the two side posts and on the lintel, upon the houses wherein they shall eat it... And the blood shall be to you a token upon the houses where ye are:and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and there shall no plague be upon you to destroy you when I smite the land of Egypt... ye shall take a bunch of hyssop, and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two side posts with the blood that is in the basin:and none of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning. For Jehovah will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when He seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, Jehovah will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come into your houses to smite you” (Exodus 12:5-7; Exodus 12:22-23).The term “pass over” in Exodus 12:13 is distinct from the “pass through” of Exodus 12:12 (A.V.), which distinction the R.V. indicates by its rendering “go through.” The latter means to go through in judgment; the former to pass over and preserve. Yet “passover” obscures the picture and the manner of deliverance. The real sense is found in Isaiah 31:5, which speaks of a deliverance of Jerusalem yet to come. Here Jehovah compares Himself and His preserving action to a mother bird fluttering over her young, darting to and fro, to defend them from some beast or reptile that would attack them:“As birds hovering, so will Jehovah of hosts protect Jerusalem; He will protect and deliver them, He will pass over and preserve” (A.S.V.); or as Darby:“As birds with outstretched wings, so will Jehovah of hosts cover Jerusalem covering, He will also deliver, passing over, He will rescue”; or Delitzsch:“Like fluttering birds, so will Jehovah of hosts screen Jerusalem; screening and delivering, sparing and setting free,” on which this learned commentator writes:“The word pasoach recalls to mind the deliverance from Egypt (as in ch. 30, 29) in a very significant manner. The sparing of the Israelites by the destroyer passing over their doors, from which the passover derived its name, would be repeated once more... Jehovah’s attitude [is]... one resembling the action of birds, as they soar round and above their threatened nests.” Upon this Hebrew word Canon Cook (Speaker’s Commentary in loco) says:“In Egyptian the word Pesh, which corresponds to it very nearly in form, means to ‘spread out the wings over,’ and ‘to protect’; see Brugsch, ‘D.H.’ p. 512. This gives significance to the phrase in verse 23 above that “Jehovah will not suffer the destroyer to come into your houses to smite you.” That great Destroyer, being an evil angel prince, would have gone into every house blood or no blood, but God Himself restrained him as to the houses sprinkled with blood. Hence the prophet as he recalls the past says of Jehovah, “So He was their Saviour” (Isaiah 63:8). And He spared and saved solely out of regard to the blood.
It must not be supposed that this striking method of preserving a house from danger of death was new at that time. On the contrary it was practised in early Babylonia, whence both the Hebrew and Egyptian races had migrated. Prof. Sayce writes, “Still more interesting it is to find in the ritual of the prophets instructions for the sacrifice of a lamb at the gate of the house, the blood of which is to be smeared on the lintels and doorposts, as well as on the colossal images that guarded the entrance.” And he shows that the most ancient customs may persist the ages through, long after their meaning may have been lost, by adding, “To this day in Egypt the same rite is practised, and when my dahabiah [sailing boat on the Nile], was launched I had to conform to it. On this occasion the blood of the lamb was allowed to fall over the sides of the lower deck.” (Religions 472).
It is evident that neither Moses, nor a supposed later redactor or imposter, invented this story to serve some imagined religious end. God on this occasion was reviving, purifying, and applying a primeval rite, one which we must presume had formed part of an original body of instructions given by Himself as to how sinful men could be granted Divine mercy without dereliction of Divine justice. This means of grace was that life must be sacrificed that life might be spared, an unblemished substitute dying in place of the death-doomed sinner. And in this history of the Passover there comes the heaviest possible emphasis upon the use of the blood as the agent of salvation:“When I see the blood” I will spare and preserve.
Thus in the one case the blood cries for just vengeance, yet in the other case protects from just vengeance.Abel’s blood for vengeance Pleadeth to the skies, But the blood of Jesus For our pardon cries. (E. Caswell). On July 21st, 1914, with the Egyptian summer sun at full blaze, I stood alone, in the stillness of the desert, amid the roofless, ruined houses of Pithom, the treasure city built by Pharaoh’s cruelly oppressed slaves of Israel. One could somewhat estimate the severity of their work in such heat; and also, gazing at the broken doorway of a small brick house, one pondered whether perhaps that was a lintel that had been splashed with blood and where Jehovah arrested the steps of that fierce Destroyer. Does my reader know in personal heart experience the meaning and power of the events of that far off stirring night? or is it all to him but one among other curious items of antiquity?