Exodus 13:21

I hope that you are enjoying this journey about Jesus in the Old Testament. Recently, I have been seeing a few short videos where this fellow reads Old Testament passages like Isaiah 2, 9, 53, or Zechariah 12 to Jewish people, and they assume, because it mentions a Son, that it is the New Testament. When they find out it is the Old Testament, they are astonished; some are still in disbelief.

But over the years, I have met a few conservative Jews who have come to see and know Jesus as their Messiah. I love talking to these Jewish brothers and exploring the stories of the Old Testament. Some are astonished that I know the Old Testament, understand the picture of the feasts, and other things that we chat about. This is not to boast; I am surrounded by Godly men who love the Bible, and we discuss it as often as we can.

The point is that the Bible is about Jesus. It is about His plan of redemption for us and for Israel, and for the whole world.

Today, we are going to see Jesus in another part of the Bible that many of us have read through, but we do not think that Jesus is the story and the picture here. He is!! I did not put the reading in the text as usual because it would take up a large part of the lesson space. Rather, I encourage you to read the passage maybe once or twice to get the details.

There are two parts to what we will observe today; one is the actual configuration of the tribes as they assembled after each trip that they took. If you will recall, they journeyed from place to place for 40 years in the Wilderness. God provided them with a cloud by day to guide them and a pillar of fire by night to provide light and protection.

Exodus 13:21, “The LORD went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to lead them on their way during the day and in a pillar of fire to give them light at night, so that they could travel day or night.”

Once the cloud stopped in a place, the task of setting up camp began. God had laid out a specific way that they were encamped; it was not a haphazard just set your tent up kind of system. The tabernacle was the center of the camp; it was set up by the Levites and the families entrusted with the care and transportation of the Tabernacle. Then the tribes would set up in order. There were three tribes each to the north, east, west, and south. They never swapped; the order was the same each time.

Once they were set up, if one were to go up on a hill or a mountain and look down on them, they would see the form of a cross. Yes, the place for sacrificing is at the center, and the picture of a cross is there. There was never a doubt, never hesitation as to what would be happening to Jesus. The cross was there even in the wilderness. The cross was there at the Passover, and it was there every time they set up the camp.

The second part of what we will be looking at is the standards or the flags that were visible at the site of each encampment to the north, south, east, and west. Each tribe had their own standard, but over the 4 divisions, there was a ‘superior’ standard that marked each collective encampment. The Rabbinical tradition tells us that there were 4 standards or flags that were shown by the 4 leading tribes for each section as they set up. At the website, Biblefragrances.com, we see this laid out for us.

Neither the Mosaic law, nor the Old Testament generally, gives us any intimation as to the form or character of the standard (degel). According to rabbinical tradition, the standard of Judah bore the figure of a lion, that of Reuben the likeness of a man or of a man’s head, that of Ephraim the figure of anox, and that of Dan the figure of an eagle; so that the four living creatures united in the cherubic forms described by Ezekiel were represented upon these four standards.

Jewish tradition says the “four standards” under which Israel encamped in the wilderness, to the east, Judah, to the north, Dan, to the west, Ephraim, to the south, Reuben, were respectively a lion, an eagle, an ox, and a man, while in the midst was the tabernacle containing the Shekinah symbol of the Divine Presence.

These four images are repeated for us in the scriptures in Ezekiel and in Revelation; in Ezekiel 1:5 and 10, we see these verses: “And out of its midst [is] a likeness of four living creatures, and this [is] their appearance; a likeness of man [is] to them,” ….. “¹⁰ As to the likeness of their faces, the face of a man, and the face of a lion, toward the right [are] to them four, and the face of an ox on the left [are] to them four, and the face of an eagle [are] to them four.’

Then in Revelation we see this reference: Revelation 4: 6-7, “and before the throne [is] a sea of glass like to crystal, and in the midst of the throne, and round the throne, [are] four living creatures, full of eyes before and behind; and the first living creature [is] like a lion, and the second living creature [is] like a calf, and the third living creature hath the face as a man, and the fourth living creature [is] like an eagle flying.

These images are repeated over and over again in the scriptures, and they all paint a picture of an aspect of who Jesus is. Jesus is the Lion of Judah: in Revelation 5:5, we see Jesus called the Lion of Judah. “Then one of the elders said to me, ‘Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.”

Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophecy that Jacob gave to his children in Genesis 49:9-10. Judah is promised an eternal lawgiver, and that their sceptre would never depart from the tribe; it has not in Jesus and the oldest living male of the tribe of Judah from the line through Mary, who still has the right to sit on the throne of David.

The tribe of Reuben had the image of a man on his standard; this was the reminder that Jesus would come as a Man. In Romans, He is called the Second Adam. Romans 5:12-15, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned— (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man’s offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many.”

The standard of Ephraim was the Ox, and of course, Jesus is our sacrifice, the one whose blood washes away our sins. 1 John 1:7, “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” Also see Acts 20:28, Colossians 1:20, Ephesians 1:7, and Hebrews 9:14; these are just a few of the verses about Jesus’ blood washing away our sins.

The last standard is that of Dan, the eagle. This one threw me for a bit, and in Numbers 2:25, see that Dan is situated to the North of the camp. The eagle is a sign of judgment. In Acts 17:31, we see this verse: “For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” The judge is the one whom God has raised from the dead. Other verses that show Jesus as the judge: Acts 10:24, Matthew 25:31-32, John 5:22, and Matthew 16:27. These are just a few of the verses that show Jesus as the Judge of the earth.

Jesus is the story and central character of the Bible. The Jews had the pictures in the wilderness, but they refused to see, and they are still blind today.

Open your eyes; Jesus is the entire main and central character of the Bible. Is He the main character of your life and mine?

Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Bethany Baptist Church
70 Victoria Street, Elora, Ontario

Exodus 12:1-13

“Now the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, ² ‘This month shall be your beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you. ³ Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: “On the tenth of this month every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father, a lamb for a household. ⁴ And if the household is too small for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take it according to the number of the persons; according to each man’s need you shall make your count for the lamb. ⁵ Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats.

⁶ Now you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month. Then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at twilight. ⁷ And they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses where they eat it. ⁸ Then they shall eat the flesh on that night; roasted in fire, with unleavened bread and with bitter herbs they shall eat it. ⁹ Do not eat it raw, nor boiled at all with water, but roasted in fire—its head with its legs and its entrails. ¹⁰ You shall let none of it remain until morning, and what remains of it until morning you shall burn with fire. ¹¹ And thus you shall eat it: with a belt on your waist, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. So, you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord’s Passover.”

¹² ‘For I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night, and will strike 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. ¹³ Now the blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you; and the plague shall not be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.’”

Jesus is the central character of the whole Bible. This story of the Passover is one of the most famous stories of the Bible up there with David and Goliath, and of course Christmas as we celebrate at this time of the year. Movies like The Ten Commandments have burned this into the minds of millions of viewers over the years. We have worked to show Jesus through the Old Testament in our previous lessons. In Genesis, we saw Him with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We saw Him in the person of Joseph, and now we are hundreds of years later, and He is in the Passover. Let’s get caught up.

Joseph is dead, and the new Pharaoh, the new king of Egypt, does not know about him and his reputation. This new Pharaoh does not know what Joseph did and how the Jews are seen in the land. He just knows that they are having a lot of kids and soon they will outnumber the Egyptians. This new Pharaoh brings in new laws that allow the midwives to kill all of the Hebrew boys upon birth, but God intervenes, and as far as we can tell, none of the boys are killed.

Then we see the birth of Moses; he is hidden until he is 3 months old, then set in a little ark in the river. He is rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter, and he is fundamentally adopted and lives as an Egyptian prince until he is 40 years old.

One day, while out and about, he sees an Egyptian guard hurting one of his Hebrew brothers, and he kills the guard and hides his body, or so he thought. Soon, it is clear that his sin is known, and he runs to the land of Midian and ends up marrying a lady named Zipporah and becomes a shepherd for his father-in-law. Forty years later, Moses has an encounter with God that we all know as the ‘Burning Bush’ encounter, and God then sends him and his older brother Aaron back to Egypt to demand that Pharaoh let the Jews go.

While there in Egypt, God performs one miracle after another known as the Ten Plagues, each attacking one of the false deities that the Egyptians worshipped. The last plague, the one we will explore, is an attack on Pharaoh himself and his bloodline. The Egyptians worshipped Pharaoh as a god; the son of Ra, the sun god. As such, his son would also be a god and, of course, the next Pharaoh. God uses this belief of the Egyptians to attack one of the gods of Egypt and, at the same time, establish the Passover feast, one of the permanent feasts of Israel, as established in Leviticus 23.

In this Passover, a perfect lamb is killed in the evening, its blood is caught in a basin, and then the man of the household would paint the doorposts and the lintel at the top with the blood. The blood would drip and pool at the threshold, forming the sign of the cross in blood. That night, God himself would pass through the land and kill the firstborn of man and beast.

Exodus 12:12-13, “For I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night, and will strike 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. ¹³ Now the blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you; and the plague shall not be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.”

The blood is all that protected the people. If you obeyed, killed the Passover lamb and put the blood on your doors, then waited inside as the Lord had commanded, no one of your family or livestock died. No death. The blood of the lamb kept the people safe. Jesus, we are told, is our Passover lamb. He is the Lamb slain before the ‘foundation of the world.’ Revelation 13:8, “All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”

We are told in Hebrews that there is no remission of sins, no removal of sin without blood. Hebrews 9:22, “And according to the law almost all things are purified with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no remission.” Jesus is our Passover lamb, killed at the Passover, that pure blood of the perfect Son of God that covers my sin and yours if you have put your trust in Him.

Colossians 1:20, “and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”

Ephesians 1:7, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace.”

Hebrews 9:14, “How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!”

We can go on, but I hope that you get the point. The whole world is about to celebrate the Christmas season and Jesus’ birth, BUT He was born to die. Most love the babe in a manger; few love the Man on the Middle Cross. Rather, they avoid Him and deny Him, they accuse Him of all manner of evil, and choose to live in their sinfulness. Jesus is the Passover lamb that takes away the sins of the world. But He is also the Holy God who will come and judge those that rejected His free offer of salvation. They will die like the thousands did that fateful night back in Egypt; they will die an eternal death.

Jesus is the story of the whole Bible. Rejoice if you know Him and His blood is covering your sins and transgressions. Sing loud this Christmas, those of us who are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb.

Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Bethany Baptist Church
70 Victoria Street, Elora, Ontario