In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the significance of the sacrificial lamb in the Bible. He explains that the lamb's death was necessary for the nation and the world, as it symbolized the need for something to die in order for life to be given. The speaker also highlights the importance of the specific day and month on which the lamb was taken, which led to a change in the calendar. He draws parallels between the lamb's observation period and Jesus' three and a half years of public ministry, emphasizing Jesus' sinlessness and his role as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The speaker concludes by emphasizing the need for a deep understanding of our own depravity and the consciousness of our need for the blood of Jesus in order to truly appreciate its significance.

Hope in our hearts to hear, to receive the word, not only as instruction, but as event. Something that goes into our deeps and performs a work there. Thank you again, Lord, for this privileged time. Enjoy yourself, Lord, take your liberty. Receive our gratitude, inexpressible gratitude, Lord, in Jesus' name. And maybe look over the familiar text of Exodus 12 together. The Lord wants to open dimensions there that we have not glimpsed before. Because the word is always infinite and unlimited. So, at any point where something stirs in you, raise your hand. And we welcome that, as we want to draw out, exegete, draw out the meaning of these verses. Verse 1 of chapter 12, the Lord spoke unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt. I'm glad that Aaron was not excluded. Because he's symbolic of what is prophetic as Moses. He's symbolic of what is apostolic. And both need to hear and to express what comes from God. This month shall be unto you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year to you. Speaking unto all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month they shall take to them every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for a house. Ten is a significant number. Ten commandments. Ten days in the upper room. Ten has kind of a resonance of judgment. And if the household be too little for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next unto his house take it according to the number of the souls. Every man according to his heeding shall make account for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. You shall take it out from the sheep or from the goats. You shall keep it up until the fourteenth day of the same month. And the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening. They shall take of the blood and strike it on the two side posts and on the upper door post of the houses wherein they shall eat it. They shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire and unleavened bread, and with bitter herbs they shall eat it. Eat not of it raw, no satin at all with water, but roast with fire each head with his legs and with the pertinence thereof. And you shall let nothing of it remain until the morning, and that which remaineth of it until the morning you shall burn with fire. Thus shall you eat it with your wounds girded, your shoes on your feet, your staff in your hands, and you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord's Passover. For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast, and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment. I am the Lord. And the blood shall beat you for a token upon the houses where you are. When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon me to destroy you when I smite the land of Egypt. And this day shall be unto you for a memorial, and you shall keep it a feast to the Lord throughout your generations. You shall keep it a feast by an ordinance forever. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. Even the first day you shall put away leaven out of your houses. For whosoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel. And on the first day there shall be a holy convocation, and on the seventh day there shall be a holy convocation to you. No manner of work shall be done in them, except that which every man must eat, that only may be done of you. And you shall observe the feast of unleavened bread. For in the selfsame day have I brought your armies out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day in your generations by an ordinance forever. In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread until the twenty-first day of the month at evening. Seven days shall there be no leaven found in your houses. And whosoever eats that which is leavened, even that soul shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he be a stranger or born in the land. You shall eat nothing leavened in all your habitations, shall you eat unleavened bread. And 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. And you shall take a bunch of hyssop, and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel in the two side posts with the blood that is in the basin. And none of you shall go out at the door of his house until the morning. For the Lord will pass through to his mighty Egyptians. And when he sees 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 into your houses to smite you. And you shall observe this thing for an ordinance to be given to thy sons forever. And it comes to pass when you are in the land, which the Lord will give you, as he has promised you shall keep his service. Verse 26, it comes to pass when your children shall say unto you, what do you mean by this service? You shall say, it is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, which passed over the houses of the children of Israel and Egypt, when he smote these Egyptians and delivered our houses, and the people bowed their head and worshipped. And the children of Israel went away and did as the Lord commanded Moses, and Aaron so did they. Well, the door is a remarkable function, coming in and going out. Everything has to pass through. So it implies the totality of life needs to be under the protection of that blood. Jews post their little mezuzah on the door with a scrolled scripture, and touch it coming in and going out is but a faint reflection maybe of this early Advent. Something begins with God that is totally unheralded in human experience, and is even contrary to human sensibility and rationality. It's simply a provision and a requirement of God, a lamb and blood. But the unwillingness to defer to the foolish requirement of God means death, and obedience and submission to it means life. So from the very Advent of the history of the nation, there's an issue of God and his sovereignty being expressed through Moses and Aaron. And we need to reflect upon and take it to our own deeps of what is represented here. And not just any lamb, but a lamb taken on a specific day in a specific month, which will now be made the first month under you, a whole change of your calendar, and you keep that lamb on observation until the fourteenth day. Four days. The public ministry of Jesus was three and a half years, but in biblical reckoning, a half counts for the whole. So he was on observation, and when he was apprehended, he would say to his accusers, which of you can accuse me of sin? Will you find blemish or fault? For if you can, I forfeit my identity as the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. So something was being established here from the first that is so deep that we need to look, before we go into any other consideration, the Lord wants us to go back to the beginnings of the sounding of this very thing as a theme. I can't get Beethoven's Fifth Symphony out of my mind. Something is sounded, and then it goes on. It plays its way all the way through until it ends on that same majestic, massive, great notes. So we have to have that reinserted. The symphonic weight of God's wisdom and counsel from the beginning with the blood of the lamb out of the flock in the first year, perfect, without blemish. Hold it for four days, examine it, make sure it has no defect, or it will be a disqualified provision, and then on the 14th day, all the congregation of Israel will slay it. If you've never slain a lamb, I can recommend it for you. Because I've had that experience. We had a Passover here, and the brothers were dragging the lamb to be executed with a rifle, and I was on the top of my landing looking down, and, Arch, you want to join us? He says, not me. I walked back in and the Lord said, you go down, and you do it, not with the rifle, with a knife. I'm a kid who grew up in cellophane wrapped meat. Let alone that I should slay, and I asked the brother for a knife, we hitched that lamb up by its hind feet onto a limb, and I slit its throat. I watched that blood. So all the nation was being instructed that something must die for the nation and for the world, and that without the death, the life cannot issue, for the life of the flesh is in the blood, and as we said this morning, it's more than its biological activity. We know that the life expires when blood subsides, but life is far more comprehensive than its biological nature. That this lamb, symbolized by the lamb slain, that life was holy, and only the blood of that holy life was a sufficient expiation for the sins of the nation and of all mankind, and only one could bring that, and that was the Lord himself. So there is a precedent of cutting and bleeding and walking through the cut parts in Genesis 15 and the establishing of covenant, and later on in Sinai, Moses sprinkles the blood of sacrifice upon the covenant Israel is making with God upon the nation itself, and then of course in the New Testament, Jesus said, this is my blood shed for you in the New Covenant. So the theme of blood from the beginning, that red theme runs all the way through, even to the present hour. So don't let the important, I'll call you in just a moment Scott, before I escape you, this is the issue of the primacy of God. The issue of God overlaps against the issue of man. What Israel might have done to effect its own salvation is hard to imagine, to be imagined, but only God could set in motion the deliverance of the nationhood by the expediency of the Lamb's blood, nothing that man could ever have conceived. So something is being inserted or asserted from the very beginning about God as God over as against man in presumption and human will that needs to be deeply recognized, for that's the principal issue even today. Not only for Israel, but for the Church. The primacy of God in what He chooses and our deference, one statement of the degree of the loss of this, I meet any number of cases of homes that are being deranged and ravished and I ask the man, do you invoke the blood in your morning prayer to cover your family and your house? And he looks at me wide-eyed like, what am I supposed to do? That has efficacy still. And my own practice in the morning prayer and evening prayer is to invoke the blood. Upon anger, upon the children, upon the household, upon the Ben Israel community, we have a priestly function to perform much more than we ought and leaving ourselves exposed to the ravages of the enemy. Not only does the Lord not see the blood, but the enemy doesn't see the blood. When he sees the blood, he's terrified and flees, contrary, access to the blood that your husband, erroneously avoiding the prayer, and that it doesn't become on the other side, by mindless frequency. We're somewhere between a chant and we're invoking a little mimic phrase that has lost currency. And this is not easy to do. So, struggle to keep the purity, the privacy of the blood that's real and priestly and see the difference in the way in which we're spared is part of the privilege of our so great atonement that we're called to share. So, don't allow yourself to be cheated because of some kind of sense of embarrassment. It's yours, not by any virtue of yours. It's yours by gift, by impartation, by, in fact, everything. Wouldn't it change everything? The mundane, everyday halo, the ordinary, that enhances, that is a blessing, that communicates authority, would be brought into the aspect. So, Vassalia Schling, the royal priesthood, and she cries out, where are the priests today? The world is dying for the want of blessing. It's under judgment, but someone has got to bend over to dip the lowliest scrub as his brush. Which, by the way, is a natural color. If it's all charged with remorse, and in Psalm 51, David employs a scrub name, you know, with hyssop, an analogy, if we're unwilling for the humiliation of confession, the blood has no efficacy at all. It's only when we come clean, hyssop, when we strip and put before the Lord, if we hide, if we justify ourselves, we benefit from the cleansing. So, there are many applications. Much has been lost, much needs to be restored. And if we don't restore this, where do we go from this? If we don't restore the priestly function, of what else shall we be capable of? If we forfeit this most basic identity, which itself rests upon our own spiritual understanding and appropriation of the blood. If we have not been grounded here, the blood, run into your very deeps, the blood, the quintessence of your being, to fight against sin. The uttermost of the blood here, where we know it in our own experience, in the battle against sin, the blood, when we're talking about more than just corpuscles, we're talking about the uttermost dimension of being, of will, of consciousness, of life, of being given over. That's what Jesus gave. And we're invited, equally, to give and live out from the uttermost of our being. But very few of us do. We're not giving out from our blood. We're giving out from our surface. We're giving from the superficial aspect of our life, that doesn't cost us that much. Resisting, you've not tasted blood in the depth of your intent. Blood is a symbol, a statement of His blood. He was giving the uttermost of what He is, both as God and as man. That's why that sacrifice was acceptable and why the quality of it is holy, holy, holy. So we will not be giving out of our uttermost until we comprehend. While He was shedding blood at Calvary, great clots of it had swept His disciples to sleep. The blood of Jesus began before it was from within by the groaning in His soul of the depths of what was before Him that made blood to come out as clots of it. Here's the High Priest himself who is not only the sacrifice but the groaning and travail unto blood that is extra, of that impending sacrifice. To approach a Gethsemane in our own experience was prostrating myself over the rock that was twisted and inside the sanctuary was a prostrated himself and extruded sweat that had dropped. So I took myself over that place and made a covenant with God. The author of Isaiah who was given more revelation on the suffering servant himself saw something in the Lord high and lifted up that evoked a cry that he saw something about atonement. He didn't just see the Lord but a revelation that left him undone and showed that he's a man of unclean lips for such a cry to come from a prophet indicates that he's seen a depth of blood and its meaning about the human condition that he had not previously understood. And until we cry out I'm undone there's no sending. So we wait for a revelation that came to him in the year that Uzziah died for this very thing that except we see it and receive it as revelation we do not see it and receive it adequately at all. We just convert it into doctrine into acceptable statements of faith and credo but it does not quantify us to be sent. The qualification was a deep cry that Isaiah saw in a flash if this sacrifice now that I'm glimpsing it was for the sins of mankind of which I'm concluding how deep is the depravity of our condition that requires it. I did not recognize that before but I'm seeing it now and I'm undone. So our appreciation for the blood is relative to the consciousness of our need and if we see ourselves as more or less circumspect saints acceptable keeping our noses clean we'll give to the blood a token appreciation but it will not qualify us to be sent and the object of being sent is to be sent to Israel because the word that came to them brought judgment made their ears thick their hearts heavy they could not hear could not believe could not understand but it waits for another sending in which their ears will be opened and that they can believe because they're hearing the word from one who is sent because he can be sent he has seen the heart of the mystery of the faith in a way that has registered in the deeps of his own soul because it says the pillars of the church move at the cry of the seraphim holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts the whole earth is full of his glory and when I preach it I say it was not only the temple out of which the foundations were moved it was in the life of the prophet himself all of his pert and correct categories of faith were moved out of joint and who welcomes being upset like that and having our foundations lurch and topple will it ever come together again but that's the impact of the revelation of the heart of this mystery of blood of sacrifice of the lamb it's the statement not only of God it's the statement of the truth of man as man and until that is registered our faith in every category will suffer loss this has got to be restored and we need to pray for the revelation of it as it came to Isaiah and raises the question why did it happen in the year that King Uzziah died was that death a critical key for the release of the revelation did Isaiah have some kind of umbilical attachment to this king who had become leprous that would exclude the deeper revelation a death had to go first that freed him from attachments of a soulless kind that he would be free to receive the deeper revelation what is the Uzziah in our life what needs to die in some attachment that we have that is not evil it might be good it might even have served benevolent purposes previously in our life but it's gone on too long we mustn't fail to consider that the lamb is not only the enablement the provision through blood but the enablement for journeying to eat that lamb entirely with the legs and the pertinences thereof don't be fastidious and just pick about the places that you like you need the whole lamb and Paul boasted that I did not withhold from you the whole counsel of so it's remarkable first the blood to keep away death and then the consuming of the sacrifice to continue the life and the journey through the wilderness and so if we are fastidious eaters we're not eating adequately or at all we'll perish in the wilderness stagger and fall we need the whole lamb the sacrifice of the blood and the whole totality of what he is even in his appurtenances the kishkus as we say in Yiddish the inward coils intestines intestines the kinds of things that we would like well it shows that the eating in verse 11 is preparatory to the exodus and the remarkable wilderness journey that's ahead for these people and where does it say about eat of the whole in verse 9 verse 8 roast with fire and unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it these are the essential ingredients of today's Passover unleavened bread bitter herbs but there's no lamb on the Jewish table but the bitter herbs are not only the reminder of the bitterness of our past and history but most recent history and indeed there's a bitterness of things that are yet to come herbs are a reminder what do you make of roast with fire not sodden or warm it's got to be consumed nothing made disciples to fear in that radical statement that Jesus himself as the lamb still available and except you eat of me what would that mean now give us blood to have the life of God which is not only of energy but the sum and substance of his divine life we can't fabricate this only that life is sacrificial by its very nature and anything less than other than that is imitated explicated so forth the Lord is to the degree in which his life is our life it's become our life and we're living by that life because we're being fed by that life if we have settled down where we have lost our pilgrimage and we're not in the process of attending or of making it's only of value to those who are girded with staff in hand we mustn't lose this aspect the provision given in the very first statement for what is given at the first a paradigm of something that carries us to the end and probably not only has there been neglect of the appurtenances there's been the neglect of the staff and of being girded that we don't have a stomach for journeying we've settled in to a charismatic mode of life that's quite comfortable and we don't realize that we're on a quest that's demanding that's ultimately demanding and when those things have been restored we'll receive the value we'll welcome it all the way both of which have suffered loss in our time baptism ceremonial form baptized in the cloud the baptism of the spirit even by Pentecostals it shows that we're not following the path what is the journey to which we're what is the thing to which we need to be girded with staff in hand we're enabled by the land and then we pass through water of separation a true baptism and a true baptism in the cloud to the taking of the land and the establishing the neglect of these great sacraments shows that we have moved greatly away from the pattern of things given as in Wales on my land churches involved in the Welsh of the terrible neglect of the gifts of the spirit and the baptism of the descendants the Welsh descendants and their passion was for the return of the privacy of the Holy Spirit but will we have it will we seek it unless we know that we're in an earnest journey and we need all of the provision that God has established the neglect of these things is a terrible statement that we have settled upon our lease and we're not really journeying we want to settle in the benefits we have the conclusion of the age the blood the land the baptism through water the baptism in spirit covenant is a bond it's not some light contract if you fail in covenant there's a covenantal penalty or even a curse it's death that's signified by the animals that are cut up but Abraham didn't walk through those parts only God himself if the covenant is broken and the curse has to be paid God himself will pay him and his son to take upon the covenant is solemn and there's a bond unto death that the church has lost in significance is the frequency of the covenantal respect reverence of the belief of the God of covenant to be a threefold court a third cold court in however strange the relations be God to bring that dimension that will save an otherwise hopeless situation from divorce because he hates so covenant needs to be restored I'll read you a little bit here there's so much loss that needs to be regained the church is no longer covenant conscious we have failed to grasp the importance of covenant theology covenant thinking and covenant living so our part to suffer divorce not only in marriage but even from fellowship to find some other suitable environment because where we are is difficult strained and unhappy we don't want to eat the the the the the the the the the awaken our sense of gratitude to him and invigorate our sense of responsibility toward the God of Covenant, which is the issue of worship. Worship is relative to the recognition of Covenant and the God of Covenant and the God who makes himself the sacrifice for the curse of the Covenant and pays the penalty of death and restores us with an everlasting covenant in which he himself will be not a lord giver but the lord fulfiller. That this appreciation for God as the Covenant-making and keeping of a true note in our worship is proportionate to the missing dimension, a very serious omission. So the covenant that is eternal, the whole issue of eternity, we do not reckon that we lose moments. Eternity is not only a subject to be reckoned on in our present. It changes everything if you have an eternal perspective and that comes in proportion to the Covenant.