I know–I skipped archiving an episode but it will go up next week. It occurred to me how stupid it was for me to be archiving the Passover program the day after the Passover just because of when it is airing. So, this is the episode airing throughout this week, but it is going up here first.
Since we were talking about Cain and Abel’s offerings last week, this is the perfect time to discuss this week’s Bible holiday—Passover. What does the Passover teach us about God and what does it tell us about Jesus?
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Hey howdy hey, Bible fans, this is a special week because it is Passover Week! If you celebrate the Feast of First fruits, aka Easter in English and Pasca just about everywhere else, then that’s next week if you are listening to this in 2021—if I replay it later, I have no idea what the dates will be. I am not a prophet. I could look and tell you but I am too lazy and you would be super bored. Passover is a holiday that Jesus and His family and all His disciples celebrated and it teaches us so much about Jesus and what He did for us that I want you to know about it and celebrate it too!
Passover started way back when the children of Israel were slaves in Egypt. They had been living there for a number of generations, in the Land of Goshen, when an evil Pharaoh (that’s what the Egyptians called their emperor or king—and he thought he was a god, never a good sign) decided that there were too many Israelites and he started forcing them to work as slaves. But the meaner they were to the Israelites, the more and more their numbers grew. The Pharaoh told the Midwives who delivered Hebrew babies to kill all the boy babies, but they wouldn’t do it. Why the boys? Because boys might grow up to be soldiers and take over the kingdom! Then, Pharaoh told all his people that if they saw a newborn Hebrew boy, to take it and toss it into the Nile. We have no idea how many Hebrew babies were killed but we do know that one survived and his name was Moses—and we’ll talk about him a whole lot in the future.
The Hebrew slaves cried out to God and He looked down at what was happening to them and was very angry. He sent Moses and his older brother Aaron to go talk some sense into Pharaoh. However, because Pharaoh considered himself to be a god, he figured he didn’t have to listen. God warned him and warned him to allow His people to leave and after each warning sent a plague to show Pharaoh who was more powerful and to make Pharaoh realize that he wasn’t really a god at all because he couldn’t do a thing to stop the plagues. First the water of the Nile turned to blood. Imagine thick, gooey blood running down a river that is almost two miles wide. Two miles would probably take you about 45 minutes to walk across—I mean, if you wouldn’t fall in and drown, so I don’t recommend trying to walk across the Nile. All the fish died, and that was stinky enough but that much blood is going to make you want to gag. But then God cleaned it up and gave Pharaoh another chance to behave himself. But nope. Then God made frogs hop out of the river and they were everywhere—even into the beds and ovens. And then they all died and that sure stunk up the place. But Pharaoh, he was really stubborn. The rest of the plagues were all just as bad or worse, just not all as stinky. Imagine lice, everywhere. Tiny little bugs crawling all over your body, under your clothes, in your hair, in your bed, jumping in your nose and mouth when you try to sleep. Not stinky but they would drive you nutty.
The fourth plague was flies. So, like lice but instead of crawling all over you they can fly and buzz and if you have had to deal with these things when you are outside, you know how annoying even a few can be. Or if you have had one in your room at night dive-bombing you. Don’t yawn or one might fly right in your mouth. But unlike the first three, the Israelites were protected from the flies so that Pharaoh could see that God was their god and that He was seriously going to protect them. The fifth plague killed all of the animals that belonged to the Egyptians. You think the frogs smelled bad? Think about rotting cows all over the place. You think you can pick up a dead cow and just move it away? There are no trucks or forklifts. And even if there was a wagon available, the mule you were using to pull it died too. Egypt became a land of death because God was showing them how He saw a country that was murdering little babies. The Egyptians probably felt as though the Israelites weren’t even hardly human because they were slaves but God knows different. He didn’t create some people to own other people. And He especially didn’t create some people to go around killing babies.
The sixth plague was just gross. I mean, they are all gross but this one was super gross. Boils broke out all over people—boils are sores that are filled with pus, like huge pimples but the Bible says that these ones were festering, which probably means they were bursting open and would have smelled horrible. Henry VIII had stuff like this on both his legs later in his life and people could barely stand to be around him because the stench would make you gag but they didn’t want their heads cut off either. The seventh plague would have been terrifying. I don’t know if you have ever been in a really bad hailstorm. I used to live in Texas and boy howdy sometimes it would come down big as your fist. Here in Idaho about three years ago we had hail so bad that it was actually coming down at 110 mph even though they were small they were putting holes in everyone’s houses and windows. But the hail God sent was worse, and with the hail was lightning, or some people say it was on fire. Either way, this was horrible. Everything that wasn’t indoors died. And Pharaoh still wouldn’t let the Israelites leave.
The eighth plague was locusts. I am going to link a video of a locust swarm in the transcript because it has to be seen to believed. When a swarm of locusts comes through, they eat absolutely stinking everything in sight. No food left. The skies are black with them and you don’t want to get caught in the swarm because as they whip by you and run into you, you can get hurt. Locusts look like grasshoppers because they are grasshoppers. And a few grasshoppers is annoying but imagine millions of them all flying in a huge group, stripping every plant down to the stalk. In the ancient world, you knew that after the locusts came through, people would have no food to eat and it isn’t like there were grocery stores. The ninth plague was three days of pitch-black darkness everywhere except for in the homes of the Israelites. But it wasn’t just dark, you could feel the darkness. I don’t know what that would feel like and I don’t want to know but the only thing people could do was to stay right where they were. There was no way to go outside to go to the bathroom because they would never find it.
But the tenth plague was the worst of all. You see, Pharaoh and his people had worked together to kill all the baby boys among the Hebrew slaves. It was a terrible act of wickedness. They threw them in the Nile, which is probably why God turned it to blood, to show them the blood of all the Hebrew babies they had killed there. God kept warning Pharaoh through Moses but it got to a point where God started hardening Pharaoh’s heart—making it impossible for Pharaoh to change his mind, which I don’t think he would have anyway. His people thought he was a god and if he backed down they might not follow him anymore. Because the people had done this terrible thing, God said that He would send the angel of death through the entire land of Egypt to kill every firstborn son, even the firstborn of the animals they had bought to replace the animals that died. However, anyone who obeyed and followed God would be spared and He gave them the instructions for the first Passover.
God told Moses to tell the people that on the tenth day of that month, that every family (or two families if the families were very small) was to take a lamb and bring it into their home and care for it. The lamb (or a goat but I will just keep calling it a lamb) had to be perfect and about a year old—it couldn’t be a broken-down, tough, stringy old sheep that they didn’t mind losing. It had to be a valuable sheep. A young sheep. At twilight, late in the day, they had to sacrifice the lambs and catch their blood in a bowl. They used hyssop, which is an herb that’s sort of like mint, as a sort of paintbrush to wipe the blood on the sides of their doorways and also up at the top. Not on the door but around it. God told Moses that when He saw the blood that He would pass over their homes and not enter inside to harm them. But any houses that didn’t do it, He would come inside looking for any firstborn son. But that wasn’t all, the lamb had to be roasted whole. They weren’t allowed to boil it, and they needed to all eat it with unleavened bread, that’s bread that is very flat and hasn’t raised at all, and bitter herbs. They had to eat every bite and anything that didn’t get eaten would have to be burned in the morning. God told them to wear their shoes and to have their staffs and to be ready to go but they weren’t allowed to even peek outside all night long. They were even supposed to eat the lamb and bread while standing up. That’s because God was about to deliver them out of the terrible slavery. No one would be able to force them to work anymore and no one would be able to kill their children. Although Passover was going to be a terrible final night of judgment against the country that held them captive and killed their babies, it would also be a night of freedom. Because Pharaoh would be so upset that he would finally allow them to leave.
And the children of Israel obeyed, and I think a lot of other people did too. The Bible tells us that many of the Egyptians believed Moses and when he would warn them about what was coming, they would be careful to do whatever he said—like bring their animals inside before the hail would start to fall. And we know that when the children of Israel left Egypt, they were joined by a “mixed multitude” who wanted to be God’s people too. That mixed multitude would have been Egyptian, Nubian, Ethiopian, and from other North African nations. They believed and they trusted God too and joined the children of Israel.
The Passover was a very sad day. The Bible says that every home in Egypt, everyone without the blood on their door and who didn’t eat the lamb, had someone in it who had died. And Pharaoh’s firstborn son died. Now, unlike what happened to the Israelites, this wasn’t just newborn babies. Whoever was a firstborn son died no matter how old they are. There were people crying in every home. Just like the Israelites cried when the Egyptians took their babies away and threw them into the Nile. And God had warned Pharaoh and all Pharaoh had to do was the right thing. But Pharaoh wanted his slaves and he didn’t want to listen to anyone. Slavery is a terrible thing. In the ancient world, if you had slaves then you didn’t have to work as hard. It’s hard for us to understand now because we have electricity and appliances and we don’t have to work very hard at all. But in a time when you had to make your own clothes and wash them by hand and just do an unbelievable amount of things that we take for granted, owning slaves to do those things for you starts looking really awesome. But it isn’t awesome. It makes us lazy and cruel and we start thinking we are better than other people—just because we own them. But really, God is the only one who owns anyone, so when we have slaves we are taking human beings that are made in the image of God and treating them like there are just animals.
Once his son was dead, Pharaoh told the Israelites to get out of his country. And so they left. I will save the rest of the story for when we get to Exodus. And God gave them a special commandment for all of His people for all time—to celebrate the Passover every year as a memorial feast and to eat only unleavened bread for the entire week afterward to remember how He faithfully guided them to freedom. Of course, they celebrated it differently after that first year and we celebrate it a lot differently now that there is no Temple and Jesus has served as our Passover Lamb. When we celebrate the Passover now, we remember the Last Supper and Jesus’s last Passover meal with His disciples on the night before he was killed. As He was breaking the unleavened bread and passing around the wine, He told His disciples to “do this in remembrance of me.” And because we are His disciples too, we keep the Passover each year in order to celebrate our Passover Lamb who died for the sins of the world, and then we also celebrate the day of His Resurrection on the Feast of Firstfruits. When we do this, it teaches us about who Jesus is and what He did and how He fulfilled everything about the Passover.
In Jesus’s day and until the destruction of the Temple, Jews would gather in the city of Jerusalem, where they would buy a perfect lamb and would have it sacrificed at the Temple so that the blood could be splashed on the altar. Then they would take it whole back to where they were staying and they would roast it on a stake, upright, not on a spit. So, it would be standing on its two back legs as it roasted. When the sun went down, they would lay on their sides around the feast that was laid out (like wealthy people did) and they would eat the lamb, and unleavened bread, and drink wine. They would tell the Passover story and sing certain psalms. It was such a happy holiday as they remembered that once, long ago, their ancestors were slaves in Egypt, but that God had worked many miracles to free them. And every year at this time they looked for the Messiah to come and save them from the Romans, who were oppressing them. In fact, every year at Passover, the Romans would bring extra soldiers into the city of Jerusalem because sometimes fake Messiahs would try to start a revolt and innocent people would get hurt and killed.
But this year, the Messiah was right there with them. Of course, He wasn’t the Messiah they wanted—a Messiah who would lead a revolt and kill the Romans and be king over them and lead them to glory like in the days of David, Solomon, and Hezekiah. He was a Messiah who wanted to save His people, the Jews, but also the Romans too and the Parthians and the Scythians and the Africans and the “everybody else’s” too. And He was going to do it by dying at the Passover, just like that Lamb in Egypt. He was perfect because He had never sinned, just like that lamb. He was going to be killed because of the sins of others, just like that lamb in Egypt. This time, the enemy wasn’t just a petty tyrant with delusions of godhood, but the powers of sin and death that held the whole world hostage since Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Did you know that the Gospels, the stories of Jesus’s life and ministry and death and resurrection, were written as Exodus accounts, just like the Passover story? The word “exodus” means that a whole bunch of people have left a place—like the Israelites and the mixed multitude leaving Egypt. Especially in the Gospel of Mark, the Gospels tell the story of people who are slaves to the terrible Pharaoh of sin and death, and about the battles that the Messiah, Jesus, fought against demons and sickness just like the plagues God sent to punish Egypt, and about a Lamb whose blood saved everyone who put their faith in Him. When the Israelites killed the lamb they had been caring for, for four days, and used the hyssop to put the blood all around their doors, and eating that lamb exactly the way God told them to, it sounded crazy but they trusted Him. Sometimes, when we think about the story of Jesus and how He came to earth as God’s powerful creative Word, and how He never sinned and did all those wonderful things and then died as a criminal, even though He was totally innocent, and that He rose from the dead three days later—well, that can seem a bit crazy too but God makes it real to us because (1) it’s true and (2) He wants us to believe what He did for us. If you really want to understand it, I have another broadcast I did about who Jesus is and what the Gospel is, and why we need to believe it.
But the Passover, of course, is just the beginning. Jesus died for our sins on the Passover but three days later, He rose from the grave. That’s why we celebrate His resurrection on the first Sunday after the Passover Sabbath. It isn’t always three days later, but during the year that Jesus died, it was. That was the day of the year that the priests cut the first sheaf of barley from a special field and presented it to God in the temple. After they did that, the people celebrated because it meant that they could eat the new harvest of grain—first the barley and then later the wheat. It was like there was new life. Out with the old and in with the new—just like our lives when we believe Jesus rose from the dead and is now our king.
Did you know that one of the things that Jesus came to do was fulfill the prophecies in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible? He hasn’t fulfilled them all yet—we’ll have to wait until He returns for that—but he has fulfilled the Spring festivals of Passover, First Fruits, and Pentecost (called Pesach, Bikkurim, and Shavuot in Hebrew). They painted the Israelites a picture of what the Messiah would look like, which is why God told His people to celebrate them forever. That’s why my family celebrates them because they teach us all sorts of things about Jesus. We will talk more about that throughout the year as we come to all of the festivals that Jesus celebrated during His life.
From the Passover we learn something very important about God. God isn’t on the side of the rich and powerful. God is on the side of the people who are being hurt by the rich and powerful. Don’t get me wrong—God doesn’t hate rich people either but He expects people with power to use it wisely. No one ever had more power than Jesus and He used that power to heal people, to cast demons out of them, to feed them, to teach them, and to save them. He didn’t use His power and authority to get rich, or to spoil Himself, or to live in a palace surrounded by servants. In fact, He lived a life of serving other people so He could show us what God’s Kingdom is like. Now, a whole lot of people think that the Kingdom is far away or in the future but that is a big mistake. Jesus died to free us from the Kingdoms of this world so that we could be part of God’s Kingdom now. As Jesus did everything that He saw His Father doing, we need to be doing the things Jesus did. We need to serve people by caring for their needs so that they can come to know Him and love Him too, just like we do. Jesus didn’t come and save us so that we could sit on our butts playing video games and watching television. Just like He went after me when I was that one lost sheep that we talked about last week, it’s also my job to go looking for lost sheep too. And looking for lost sheep looks different depending on what our talents are and where God has us living and what kind of people are around us. He made me a teacher and so I study every day except on the Sabbath and I do everything I can to teach people about God and why He can be trusted, and why all the Gospel stories about Jesus are true.
Maybe you are a good cook and someday you will have a restaurant, and you will feed homeless people. But you can also help to do that right now, with your family. Maybe you are an artist. Drawing or painting pictures that glorify God and giving them to lonely people can be a real blessing. Are you a musician? You can reach people through music. Are you really good with learning languages? Perhaps God will send you to another country to help people there learn all about Him. Policemen and firemen can really help the world to become a safer place, and if they know God they will put their lives on the line for anyone and everyone sort of like how Jesus did. Do you like to read? Maybe you can visit people in nursing homes and read to them when they can’t see well enough anymore. Do you love to do gardening? There are people who can’t do their yard work anymore. There honestly have to be a million ways that we can use the talents God has given us to help teach people about God’s love. Some of them look like being a pastor or a teacher or a missionary, but most don’t. When we love people, we help to set them free from the evil of the world. When people feel loved by us, they are willing to listen to us tell them about God’s Son who loves them all the time, perfectly and who gave His life so that they could be forgiven and go on to love others. But why should they care about what we have to say if we aren’t kind to them? If they don’t know God’s love through what we do for them? Would you care if a stranger came up to you and told you the Gospel story? Jesus said that people would know we are His disciples because of how we love others. We know He loves us because He died for us on the Passover.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.