By Rev. David Andrew

Some things just don’t call for teaching. Ask any parent. Our babies are sweet and wonderful little people, but they are born knowing how to behave like the center of the universe. For a time we accept that their needs give them the right to our undivided attention – but our goal is to help them leave behind that particular mindset. Or take naughtiness – what parent has ever felt the need to teach that to a child Selfishness too is Natural. Sharing toys is a virtue learned usually after many scraps and as many tears and tantrums. Our toddlers play alongside each other – only with training and encouragement do they begin to play with other children. Like little computers, our kids arrive with a whole variety of default settings – most of which need to be changed, for their own good and that of society as a whole.

Of course, just as computer users have varying abilities, parents too are a mixed bag. We are not always successful in altering the default status of the youngsters in our care – any more than were our parents and their parents and… Worse still, there are many powerful – even wealthy _ voices who would tell us that the great sin is to stifle ‘self-expression’. If such people were better students of history they would know that every time my ‘self’ is given free expression it has a nasty habit of stifling someone else’s!

Like it or not, we start life as citizens of a world society which is on a collision course with its Creator and can say "No, Lord" without seeing the contradiction. Sin is congenital. We all set out on the same voyage in the same boat. We may each rearrange the deck-chairs to our own preferences. We may take some pride that our arrangement is better than the next man’s. We may imagine ourselves better than those who travel second or third class, but the name on the ship is still Titanic.

Strange, how so many people feel condemned at the mention of the name of Jesus. Condemnation is the default condition of humanity, and contrary to widespread belief, Messiah did not come so much to heal our bodies as to disinfect our hearts and heal our destinies (John 3:17). He is ‘our Passover Lamb’– and if Passover is about anything, it’s about changing the default, giving hope to the hopeless and help to the helpless. Although sometimes my computer seems to have a mind of its own, I know (really I do) that I’m in charge. It can’t change its own presets – nor can I. If there’s going to be any distinction between my destiny and the others on board, I need to move over – or more accurately, be moved over – to a ship with a better future. (John 5:24; Colossians 1:13)

After 430 years of ever more suffocating bondage, the Passover changed the default status of an entire nation. It made the difference between freedom and slavery, life and death – and it made a distinction between two groups of people, the condemned and the pardoned, the deceived and the delivered, the lost and the rescued. (Exodus 11:7).

Pesach is humiliating to the proud human spirit The lamb’s blood is the final word – no negotiation is possible. Those excluded from immunity are shown to be powerless (Exodus 12:12), but equally, those excluded from judgement and death can do nothing to help themselves. This is the only way into the Kingdom of God – any other route is a deception (John 10:1, 7-9). The New Covenant, inaugurated first for the Jews by the Blood of the Lamb of God is no less humiliating. It must always be this way. Isn’t it necessary to agree with God that our course is wrong before we can humbly accept His new destination for our lives?

LEARNING TO BLUSH

We may blush as we climb down the sides of the stately vessel into the little lifeboat God has sent to rescue us. We may have to bear the mockery and the taunts of our former fellow travelers, but the Pilot wastes no time once we’re on board and the lifeboat turns swiftly in the opposite direction.

But among the watchers at the rail are others, their faces a study of bewilderment and surprise. You see, until they saw us leaving, it had never occurred to them that there was any alternative – that there might be any reason to leave. Now they know. Now they will begin to consider…and the lifeboat may come again. Our humiliation can be as truly a lifeline to others as it is essential to our own deliverance – but then, Messiah’s humiliation was our lifeline, and we are the servants of others for His sake…(2 Corinthians 4:5).

Blushing is no bad thing. It’s the one thing which might have saved ancient Judah from Babylon’s armies (Jeremiah 6:15). Messiah’s true love in any age is a Blushing Bride. She is humble, she feels her unreadiness for the Bridegroom’s arrival and yet she is secure in grace and enthralled by His perfection. Her gospel is for the failures, and she tenderly draws to herself all who grieve over their sin and who know their own need of a Physician. In the fellowship she offers, Torah proves to be the wise guide who brings us to despair of ourselves, but points us towards the hope of glory, and Grace teaches us to submit gratefully to the plumb-line of God’s instruction.

Pesach echoes through the Sermon on the Mount. The rule of God belongs to the poor in spirit - their very helplessness is the cry which comes to the ears of El Shaddai.

Only those who can’t help themselves have any use for a Deliverer. Only helplessness truly reveals omnipotence – and the revelation of God to His blinded creation is the great aim of our new life (2 Corinthians 4:11; 1 Peter 2:9).

THE CHURCH FOR THE SUCCESSFUL

A fundamental characteristic of Jewish nationhood is this origin in helplessness, this utter dependence on the God of their Fathers. The nation’s wisdom is a beacon in a dark world when she walks with her God, and her folly is a byword among her enemies when she abandons the Rock from which she was cut (Deuteronomy 4:6-8; Isaiah 51:1).

It follows that the self-sufficient Church – like a self-sufficient Israel – is a contradiction in terms. One of the great advantages of the New Testament Church was the absence of any role models for evangelistic strategy and Church growth. They didn’t ‘know how to do it’! They could not be seduced by earlier successes into basing their strategies on "secondary authorities" – paperback competitors to the wisdom of God. Their very ignorance and lack of sophistication presented the Holy Spirit with clean vessels He could fill with divine wisdom and ability.

"It’s a sin to need grace!" This seems to be the ‘gospel’ of some churches, where it’s difficult – and unpopular – to be real, to admit to struggling with sin. Paul would never fit in such a Church. He struggled so much with pride that God had to make special provision to keep him humble! (2 Corinthians 12:7ff) In ‘Success Church’, no one admits to needing any! This is the Church where saints are so burdened by what they must do for God that they have neither time nor inclination to celebrate what God has done for them. Imperceptibly, they have ceased to draw attention to their God and have begun to draw attention to themselves. This Church – and she has many members – may well have a time of humiliation ahead, a time when her programs fail and her best efforts come to nothing. The Lord of the Passover may have to break the spirit of many of His clever, resourceful people. He may have to reduce some of His saints to poverty and helplessness in order to break them free from the grinding slavery of self-sufficiency.

MIGHTILY WEAK

Sha’ul of Tarsus, transformed by the mercy and grace of his former Enemy, would not be impressed by today’s worldly Church with her ‘gospel for the successful’.

‘No-one can see God and live’. Paul knew it. He had died and was now incapable of life apart from Yeshua. None of the things he had trusted before were now of any value to him. Highly educated, he was content to be considered ignorant; blessed with enviable Jewish credentials, and a Roman by birth, he endured statelessness – but made the world accountable to his gospel, and to his Lord. Paul met Messiah – and it left him blind and broke his pride. God healed his eyes but not his ego. He saw, with unclouded eyes, the majesty of Messiah’s shame among men, the wisdom that could name God a criminal and invest His oppressor with the moral authority of the victim.

Renamed for mission to foreigners, but Jewish-hearted and Jewish-minded, Paul became the apostle to the non-Jews, not because he despised his own people (his unjust arrest in Jerusalem happened in the context of his delivering Gentile charity to relieve Jewish hardship), but because he knew that salvation was - and is – of the Jews. It had always been the Redeemer’s intention that the Jewish people should carry – and model – his light to every other nation of the world – that was the meaning of being ‘chosen’. (Isaiah 51:4) [DA] (Messiah’s commission to the twelve – Jewish – disciples is fully continuous with the ancient calling of the Hebrews.)

Mightily weak, the new-born apostle established churches all over the known world. Not that he set out to build churches. Paul had only one passion – to proclaim Messiah and to preach His Cross. He remained true to his passion – and churches were the result. We are busy proving today that this formula does not work in reverse!

Thousands had died on Roman crosses long before Yeshua’s hands and feet were hammered to wood; it was not an uncommon sight. Whether or not they were all criminals was immaterial to that expedient version of ‘justice’ which maintained the Pax

Romana. To suggest that the crucifixion of any Jew might somehow be God’s gift to Israel – more, that the Nazarene was the longed for Yeshua Adonai to the Jews first but also to Gentile oppressors – must have seemed blasphemous treason.

"Christ our Passover has been sacrificed" (1 Corinthians 5:7). Passover was the greatest crisis in Hebrew history before Messiah’s virgin birth, and yet the Jewish apostles saw God’s promised New Covenant as the substance of which the first event was only the foreshadow. The blood that delivered each household is now the Blood of The Lamb of God, ‘who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). This Lamb is the atoning sacrifice not only for Jewish sins, "but also for the sins of the whole world". (1 John 2:2) Deliverance from Egypt’s slavery is now freedom from bondage to sin and the fear of death. Nationalistic slogans are silenced too, for this time the Lamb is for Egyptian as well as Jew. No-one of any race who grieves over his sin will be turned away.

Those who heard the apostolic message were generally offended in one of two ways: either they were offended by their own sin, or they took offence at the messenger. It was not unusual for the preaching to be followed by broken hearts – or broken heads. The apostles would be astounded by the inoffensive Western Christianity of today.

‘SUCCESS’ – MAN’S DEFINITION OR GOD’S DEFINITION

The Church’s first messengers presented a consistent theme to fellow Jews: "God had made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ." (Acts 2:36) Without the offence of discovering that they were on the wrong side of the Passover, they would not have been "cut to the heart" and saved from their "corrupt generation’. To those Gentiles who worshipped their own IQ, there was more offence. The Cross was presented, without shame, as the ultimate revelation of God'’ power and wisdom.

To proclaim the Cross as ‘success’ was to challenge every known and accepted definition of the word – then and now. To the doyens of ‘Do It Yourself’ righteousness, the message is a stumbling block. To the intelligentsia it’s nonsense. But to those who accept God’s definition of success, it’s rescue from the driving delusion that we are our own masters – that it’s possible to be ungodly and unsinkable.

Passover is a night unlike any other night. – A Night to Remember – a night to turn grief to joy. It is the LORD’s Passover.