How did Jesus fulfill Passover? Part 3

According to Exodus 12 there were five basic requirements for celebrating Passover.

1. Set aside a lamb on the 10th of Nisan- one without defect 
2. Slaughter the lamb on the 14th - but don’t break any bones 
3. Put some of the lamb’s blood on the sides and top of the doorframe 
4. Finish the Passover on the 14th - don't let it spill over into the next day 
5. Celebrate the Passover perpetually

In this post I'll show you how Jesus fulfilled requirement #3.

The third requirement of Passover was that some of the slaughter lamb's blood be put on the sides and top of each Israelite doorframe.

Notice the first parallel between the Passover lamb and Jesus...

1. As some of the blood of the Passover lamb stained the top of the doorframe, so Jesus' blood stained the top of the cross. We read in Matthew 27:29 that they "...twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head."

Notice the second parallel between the Passover lamb and Jesus...

2. As some of the blood of the Passover lamb stained each side of the doorframe, so Jesus' blood stained each side of the cross. We learn from John 20:25 that when they crucified Jesus they drove nails through his hands to fasten him to the cross.

Notice: Apart from Jesus the blood on the top and sides of the door frame has no significance whatsoever. But when Jesus' crucifixion is seen as the fulfillment of the Passover lamb's slaughter, the blood on the top and sides of the doorframe takes on great significance.

To Summarize: By applying the blood of the lamb the Israelites were spared from death. When the angel God sent to judge the Egyptians came to the door and saw the blood, he passed over that house. (this is how we got the name Passover). In the same way today, by faith we apply the blood of the lamb Jesus to the door frame of our heart - and in so doing we are spared from the penalty of our sins, which is death (Romans 6:23). 

So we see that Jesus passed the third requirement of Passover. 

Gift Giving

Biblically, there are five ways God expresses his love for us. And these are the five ways that we are to express love to our spouse (and others). In this post we'll unpackage God's third expression of love.

3. Gift Giving

Romans 6:23 says "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

From these verses we see another way that God expresses his love for us - through gift giving. While gift giving should never replace the gift of time, there is a place for gift giving, because it’s one of the ways that God shows his love for us.

Gift giving means a lot to my wife. In light of this, months before her birthday or Christmas I begin making a list of things I overhear Kristin saying that she wants. The gift means more to her when she hasn’t directly asked for it. She likes it when I pay attention to her and make notes on my own and then surprise her with things she’s mentioned but may not have explicitly asked for. So that’s what I do. And since gifts means so much to her, I set a big budget for her birthday and Christmas presents. Gifts don't mean that much to me (and my favorite gift is actually 100% free) so I can assign most of the money in the budget for gifts to her.

Now why do gifts mean so much? Have you ever thought about that? Well, it's because a gift is a symbol that your spouse was thinking of you. You can’t get someone a gift without thinking about them. And your spouse will probably appreciate the fact that you were thinking about them just as much as (if not more than) the actual gift.

And here’s the good news. You don’t need to spend a ton of money! Even a one dollar gift can speak a million dollars worth of love. With that said, if you have a million dollars you might not want to buy a one dollar gift.

True love gives! The Bible says that God so loved the world that he gave... (John 3:16). There’s just no way around it. At the heart of love is the spirit of giving. So from time to time be sure to express your love for your spouse through the giving of gifts.

Keep the Tank Full

To have a healthy and happy marriage, it's important to learn how to keep your spouse's love tank full. 

Christian author Gary Chapman, in his book The Five Love Languages writes "...inside your spouse is an ‘emotional tank’ that is waiting to be filled with love. At the heart of mankind’s existence is the desire to be intimate and loved by another. And God designed marriage to meet this need for intimacy and love. That being the case, keeping your spouse’s emotional love tank full is as important to a marriage as maintaining the proper oil level is to an automobile. Running your marriage on an empty love tank may be even more costly than running your car without oil."

So how do we do it? 

Well, Jesus gives us some insight in Mark 12:29-31 when he said: The most important commandment is this…Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

From these verses it's clear that we're to love God and love others, but what does biblical love look like? Fortunately, God hasn't left us hanging. The Bible lays out at least five ways that God expresses his love for us - and these in turn are the five ways that we are to love each other.

Here are five biblical expressions of love that we'll unpackage in the following posts. 

1. Words of Affirmation
Matthew 3:16-17 says: As soon as Jesus was baptized...a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” God showed Jesus he loved him by speaking kindly to him. 

2. Quality Time
Genesis 3:8-9 reveals that God took time daily to walk and talk with Adam and Eve. God showed Adam and Eve he loved them by spending time with them.

3. Gift Giving
Romans 6:23 says "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." God has shown us how much he loves us by giving us the gift of eternal life (through faith in his Son Jesus).

4. Acts of Service
John 13:4-5 says, "Jesus took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him." Jesus showed his love for his disciples by serving them, and then instructed them to follow his example.

5. Physical Touch
In Mark 10:16 Jesus took the children in his arms and placed his hands on their heads and blessed them. When Jesus' disciples assumed Jesus was too important to bother with children, Jesus showed his love for the children with appropriate, loving touch. 

These are five ways that God loves us and five great ways that we can express love to our spouse.

What are Disputable Matters?

Romans 14:1 says, "Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters." NIV 

If the Bible neither condones nor condemns a certain activity, it falls under the category of a disputable matter. Here are several examples of disputable matters: drinking alcohol in moderation, smoking a cigarette, watching an R rated movie, listening to secular music, going to a beach where there's mixed bathing, playing cards, getting a tattoo, getting a piercing, buying a lottery ticket or participating in Halloween. 

If the Bible specifically condemns a certain attitude or action, there's nothing to dispute - it's wrong. Here are several examples of activities considered universally wrong: murder, adultery, stealing, lying, coveting, gossip, pride, sorcery and drunkenness. 

Concerning disputable matters, a Christian may or may not feel at liberty to participate, depending on his/her personal convictions (which may change over time). But a Christian should never feel at liberty to participate in something the Bible expressly condemns as sinful. 

Who's Really Responsible?

When skeptics angrily ask "How can a good God allow so much evil and suffering?" you don't even have to be listening closely to hear the accusation behind the question. In other words, skeptics blame God for evil and suffering. But is God really responsible? 

We have a gross misunderstanding regarding who's really responsible for evil and suffering. And the misunderstanding comes from lack of information. Let me illustrate it this way. If you picked up watching a movie halfway through, could you make sense of what's happening without someone telling you what you've missed? And if you picked up a book and started reading at page 100, could you make sense of what's happening without someone telling you what you've missed? Of course not! To make sense of the story, you have to understand the beginning. 

Well, history is His-story (God's story). And history has a beginning, middle and end. We're in the middle and the middle is filled with evil and suffering, so many people naturally conclude that God is responsible because he must have made the world this way. But that would be a mistake, for in the book of Genesis (the book of beginnings) we read that the world God created was good and that God made man good, for man was created in God's image and likeness. God knew we'd be tempted to blame him for evil and suffering so he made a point to have it recorded seven times that when he made the world, it was good (see Genesis 1). 

If God made the world and man good, then we have to ask ourselves: What happened? Well, though God told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:16-17), they did so anyway (Genesis 3:6-7). And when sin entered the world so did death for God had told Adam and Eve that disobedience would bring death. As Romans 5:12 teaches us, sin entered the world through Adam and death entered the world through sin. 

Friends - sickness, disease, suffering, pain, evil and death are all consequences of man's rebellion against God. So who's really to blame? God or man? God may have made evil possible, but it was man who made evil actual. 

Understanding Romans 8:28

Romans 8:28, "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."

This is one of the most encouraging verses in the Bible and also one of the most misunderstood. I love Mark Mittelberg's commentary on this verse...

First, it does not say that everything that happens is good. Rather, it acknowledges the reality that many things that happen in our lives are bad, but it assures us that God can use them for good or bring good out of them.

Second, it does not promise that God will always let us see the good right away; many suffering people strain for a long time to see anything positive about their suffering, and even then only glimpse it from a distance - if at all. In other words, God can bring out good that we don't recognize.

Third, the verse does not promise that God will bring good out of bad for everybody, but only for those who love God and are called according to his purpose - that is, for true Christians who are sincerely walking with Christ.

With those qualifiers understood, it is encouraging when we take this promise to heart and realize that God is always at work in our lives as followers of Jesus, taking the things that are bad and bringing good out of their wake, and realize that he offers to do this for everyone we talk to if they'll just turn and follow him as well.

Note: It's rarely appropriate to quote Romans 8:28 to people in pain. Yes, if they are followers of Christ, then it's true that God will cause it all to work together for the good, but they're probably not in the position to see, feel, or appreciate that truth at this point. At first, just try to encourage them, love them, support them, serve them, be there for them and assure them of your sympathies and prayers. 

The Evidence of Morality

There are four basic evidences of God's existence: 1) Creation, 2) Design, 3) Morality and 4) Fine Tuning. In this post we'll look at the evidence of morality.

The fact that we all have a moral standard powerfully points to the existence of God. Exact ethical codes vary from person to person and culture to culture, but every human being is born with a moral standard.

Even if you’re not a Christian - How many times have you started to do something, and an alarm in your head went off saying “Don’t do that!” How many times have you opened your mouth and your conscience said, “Don’t say it!”? You know what the right thing is, even if you don’t always do it, right? Well, where did that universal sense of “right” come from? Have you ever thought about that?

On what basis is something considered good or evil, right or wrong? And where did this basis come from? No one really believes that these metaphysical morals came from a physical explosion (like the Big Bang). That is, even if the Big Bang could account for the origin of the universe, you still need to account for the origin of morality. We have, then, what is sometimes referred to as the problem of “good”.

Think about it... If there were a culture that killed their firstborn male babies by burning them to death in a fire in order to gain the favor of their gods, we would consider this a morally dreadful act. If there were a culture in which men kept females as slaves and beat and raped them at will, we would be morally outraged. If there were a culture that locked up people with certain skin colors or people of certain ethnicities or people who were left-handed, we would decry these actions as moral abominations.

Well, where did this sense of right and wrong come from? How is it that we all know intrinsically that murder and rape and bigotry and racism are wrong? It’s because of this knowledge that we could boldly tell the Nazis that exterminating Jews was wrong and that they deserved to be punished for such wicked acts. It’s because of this knowledge that we knew Saddam Hussein was doing evil when he oppressed the Iraqi people, murdered his own family members, tortured and killed those he considered political threats, and ordered the gassing of thousands of Kurds. But again, where did we get this knowledge of right and wrong?

While atheists have no answer to this question, Christians do. We believe that a Moral Lawgiver actually knit these moral standards, along with the ability to understand and operate by them, into the very fabric of what it means to be human. This is exactly what the apostle Paul taught in...

Romans 2:14-15, “Even Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it. They demonstrate that God’s law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right.” NLT

The Bible says your internal moral compass was put there by God AND that you should listen to it. It’s like a spiritual version of the “check engine” indicator in your car. When you sense it going off, you better listen or there’s going to be trouble (either now or later). Apart from God, there’s really no good answer as to how every human from every culture on every continent has this internal moral compass. 

And in the same way that creation points towards a creator and design points towards a designer, so our sense of morality points towards a Moral Standard Giver (who Christians call God).