Luke 22:1-2
As a
Jew both Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread are reminders of God’s
faithfulness to His chosen people. These
two events had become almost interchangeable by the time Jesus showed up on
planet earth. For the Jews Passover was
a meal commemorating the night the death angel passed over the homes of all the
Jewish people who by faith had put the blood of a lamb on the doorpost of their
homes as instructed by Moses while still in Egypt. On that night the first born of both man and
animals where the blood was not on the doorpost died, and there was great
sadness in Egypt. God set a time and a
place for the Jewish people to recall His faithfulness, you can read all about
it in Exodus 12, but let’s pay close attention to these verses; “This day shall be
for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD;
throughout your generations, as a statute forever, you shall keep it as a
feast. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall
remove leaven out of your houses, for if anyone eats what is leavened, from the
first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel. On
the first day you shall hold a holy assembly, and on the seventh day a holy
assembly. No work shall be done on those days. But what everyone needs to eat,
that alone may be prepared by you. And you shall observe the Feast of
Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your hosts out of the land of
Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day, throughout your generations, as a
statute forever.” (Exodus
12:14-17 ESV)
Not being Jewish, but having experienced slavery, for you and
I have been held in bondage by sin, Satan was our master and it was the blood
of the Lamb, our LORD Jesus Christ that has given each of us the choice to
choose freedom or slavery. So this is a
special day for the Jew as is Easter for each of us, and at Oakwood where Jan
and I worship it is a big day, much planning goes into the services and it is
all to recall what God has done for each of us.
You would think Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread
would be a consuming time of preparation but that is not what is taking
place. I have stated often that
Religions end game always ends in death.
It is as true today as it was in the time of Jesus, take a stand for
Jesus and the world will hate you, for Jesus is not tolerant to the killing of
babies, He is not tolerant to a man having sex with a man or a woman having sex
with a woman, in fact Jesus is not tolerant when you or I put self before God
or others. As a follower of Christ we
must learn from Jesus, and this is what Jesus said about how the world would
treat us; "If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before
it hated you. "If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but
because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of
this the world hates you.” (John 15:18-19)
So
this is how the religious leaders were planning for these two great times; “And the chief
priests and the scribes were seeking how to put him to death, for they feared
the people.” (Luke 22:2 ESV) It could be said that the religious leaders
were a mite intolerant desiring to kill Jesus, but as stated above death is
always the end game of religion. A
couple of quotes from Blaise Pascal; “Men never do
evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious
conviction.”
“In faith there is enough light
for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.”
From
the Back Porch,
Bob Rice
No comments:
Post a Comment