Bo
Torah: Bo (Go), Sh’mot (Exodus) 10.1-13.16
Haftorah: Yirmeyahu (Jeremiah) 46.13-28
Suggested Messianic Writings reading: Romans 9.14-29
Shalom,
Difficult situations have arisen coming into this parashah. Pharaoh has repeatedly refused to let Israel go on a “worship journey,” and the worst of calamities are yet to come. Some may find it difficult to understand why ADONI has done such a thing as to make Pharaoh’s heart hard, so that His (ADONI’s) will can be accomplished. Scripture tells us in many locations that rulers rule only because ADONI places them into power. Free will is very much an aspect in an individual’s life, and ADONI will deal with that in His time, but when it comes to corporate and national leadership, free will that is against the will of the Creator will only last for X amount of time. Leaders and nations may get by with evil for decades, even centuries, but there comes a point when the Creator says, “Enough!” And that is what has happened in Egypt at this time.
It is not so much that ADONI turned Pharaoh’s heart into a heart of stone, but rather that ADONI empowered, or gave freedom to, Pharaoh to continue along the route his heart was leading him – that of slavery, cruelty and harsh treatment of the children of Abraham, resulting in destruction both to the nation he was leading and to himself. But the children of Israel had been crying out for a long time; ADONI had heard, and now ADONI began to act.
The plagues continued; even the servants of Pharaoh were pleading with him to relent. The next to last plague was the plague of darkness (10.21-23). This was a darkness that was so thick it could be felt. The Egyptians worshiped the sun, and this was a slam on their sun-god. I believe that there may be another aspect here. You may have experienced, or heard of the experience of others, of going to a particular land or city and feeling the heaviness of spiritual warfare. That is, there is a spiritual darkness that is brought on by evil, and only the light of the Creator can penetrate that darkness. This is precisely what Yeshua was referring to when He would say, “To him who has ears, let him hear.” Yeshua can only be truly understood with “spiritual” ears. Sha’ul’s thought was the same when he wrote that the preaching of the message of Yeshua was foolishness to those who do not understand. I would be more inclined therefore to think that this darkness brought upon Egypt was the removal of the omnipresence of ADONI for three days, so that the evil spirit realm was free to do what they do. The Hebrew word for darkness in 10.21 is חשׁך, kho-shek, one definition of which is “wickedness”. We can be certain that there was fire and lamps in Egypt, so there was something distinct about this darkness, where people could not see each other, and no one left home. This was a foreboding darkness. In a sense, this darkness is prevalent upon the earth today. There are those who walk in the Light of the knowledge of the Creator and can see (spiritual) truth, and there are those who, though seeing, are blind, without that Holy Light, and are essentially walking about in a (spiritual) fog.
Then came the death of all firstborn in the land of Egypt. From creation, the firstborn has had some sort of special rank in the kingdom of ADONI. The first usage of the word is found in B’resheet (Genesis) 4.4, where Hevel (Abel) brought an offering of the firstborn of his flock before ADONI. Earlier in our current book of Sh’mot (4.22), Moshe was instructed to inform Pharaoh that Israel was His (ADONI’s) firstborn. Because Pharaoh had mistreated the firstborn of the Creator, the firstborn of Egypt would have to be dealt with. And with this punishment was instituted the festival known as Pesakh, or Passover. In Sh’mot 13, Moshe is instructed to set aside for ADONI all of the firstborn of Israel, for they belong to ADONI; this was the original plan for the priesthood of Israel.
The lamb (or a goat was acceptable) slain at Pesakh was not slain to forgive the sins of the people; the blood was simply placed on the doorposts (מְּזוּזֹת, m’zuzot) or each home so that whoever was “covered” by this blood would escape death. To narrow it down, it was only the firstborn in each home who was to be either destroyed or spared; no one else would be touched. And by the way, this was not Mary’s little curled up cuddly lamb that was slain; the Passover lamb was to be a year old; by then probably the majority of his growth had been attained, he would be a little aggressive, and was to be the best yearling owned by the family.
We can get somewhat of a fuller picture of Yeshua, THE Passover Lamb, when we consider His blood covering that is available for us. By looking at Yesha’yahu (Isaiah) 53, we see what the Messiah underwent. “He was wounded for our transgressions (spiritual revolt); He was crushed for our iniquities (moral perversities).” You see, it is therefore not so much that Yeshua took on all of our individual sins, but rather that He carried the corporate burden upon Himself. Oswald Chambers points this out in My Utmost for His Highest (10/7): “The revealed truth of the Bible is not that [Yeshua the Messiah] took on Himself our fleshly sins, but that He took on Himself the heredity of sin that no man can even touch… It is revealed throughout the Bible that our Lord took on Himself the sin of the world through identification with us, not through sympathy for us. He deliberately took on His own shoulders, and endured in His own body, the complete, cumulative sin of the human race. ‘He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us…’ and by so doing He placed salvation for the entire human race solely on the basis of redemption. [Yeshua the Messiah] reconciled the human race, putting it back to where God designed it to be. And now anyone can experience that reconciliation, being brought into oneness with God, on the basis of what our Lord has done on the [execution tree].”
So Pesakh is observed every year, and through the celebration we are to understand the release from the captivity of slavery. That is what Yeshua did for us. Passover is not a celebration of salvation from sin; the sin offerings in Israel came at a later time. Yeshua, as we noted, did carry the burden of the sin nature of humanity but that is not what Pesakh is about. We can know Yeshua as THE Passover Lamb, because His blood covering on our “doorposts, מְּזוּזֹת, m’zuzot” is what brought us out of the abode of slavery, out of Egypt. And as the paradoxes of ADONI typically go, when we are released from being in slavery to evil bondages, we are set free to be a slave to His righteousness (Romans 6.18).
שַׁאֲלוּ שְׁלוֹם יְרוּשָׁלִָם – Sha’alu shalom Yerushalayim – Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!