My assignment is to address the Passover lamb. And I want to begin, if you have your Bibles, to read from Exodus chapter 12. Exodus chapter 12. Before we do that, let's have a word of prayer asking for the Lord's help for our meditation. Most gracious Lord, we come before Thee on this morning asking for Thy help as we open up Thy word together. We are thankful already for the words that we have been singing together from thy holy word. And we pray now that as we read it together, as we meditate upon it, that the spirit of the Lord might be in attendance with every word that is uttered, every thought that comes to mind. And we do pray that thou would give us that special vision and insight into the beauty and the wonder of Christ, the Lamb of God. So bless our thoughts now in our meditation. Make this a profitable time for us. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Exodus chapter 12. I'll read just the first 13 verses. This will set the context, a very familiar story for us all. And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year to you. Speak ye unto all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month shall they take to them every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for a house. And if the household be too little for the lamb, Let him and his neighbor next unto his house take it according to the number of the souls. Every man according to his eating shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. He shall take it out of the sheep or from the goats, and he shall keep it up unto the 14th day of the same month. And the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening. and they shall take the blood and strike it on the two posts, and on the upper doorpost of the houses wherein they shall eat. And they shall eat the flesh, and that night roast with fire, and unleavened bread, and with bitter herbs, they shall eat it, eat not of it raw, nor sodden it all with water, but roast with fire, his head with his legs, and the pertinence or the innards thereof. And ye shall let nothing of it remain until the morning, and that which remaineth of it until the morning ye shall burn with fire. And thus shall ye eat it, with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, your staff in your hand, and ye shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord's Passover. For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn of the land of Egypt, both man and beast, and against all the gods of Egypt, I will execute judgment. I am the Lord, and the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you when I smite the land of Egypt." So when John the Baptist saw the Lord Jesus coming, He said, behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. I submit to you that that statement that the Baptist made, behold the Lamb of God, would make no sense apart from the revelation and the instructions about the Lamb that we have in the Old Testament scriptures. All of Scripture, in one way or another, is drawing our attention and directing our thoughts to the coming of the Lord Jesus, the Old Testament looking forward to that. The New Testament records the actual history and significance of the work of Christ as an accomplished fact. But all of Scripture has as its principal aim, its principal focus, its principal message, the Lord Jesus Christ. a salvation message, a gospel message. Beginning in Genesis 3.15, remember, as soon as man fell, God promised that there was going to be a curse reverser. The curse had come. But the Lord said there's going to be a curse reversal, and it's going to be the seed of the woman. And there's going to be hostility between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, but you mark my words, the Lord says, that seed of the woman is going to come and is going to crush the head of the serpent. The curse is going to be reversed. Now that's the great message of salvation. And everything that we have in the scripture, and the Old Testament included, is teaching us something about that grand and glorious gospel of saving graves. But it's always amazing to me how the Lord knows our frailty, He knows our ignorance, our spiritual ignorance, and He reveals to us truth in ways, therefore, that we can begin to understand. Aren't you glad that the very first word that came out of God's mouth to man was not vicarious atonement, or penal substitution, or double imputation? If that's the first thing that God ever said to us, our response would be, huh? What does that mean? What does that mean? So God does not begin revealing these great gospel truths to us in express and detailed propositional declarations. Sometimes he tells a story, sometimes he tells us, he gives us some poetry, sometimes he gives us some pictures to look at, and that's what we're gonna be seeing in the text that we consider today. I remember, I may have told this story Before, I don't know. But I remember when my oldest son was just, I don't know, three, four years old, and I was working on my dissertation, and working at my desk, laboring, and my son comes, and he crawls underneath my desk, and he's playing with my feet, and I lose concentration trying to get this done. And I said, what are you doing? What are you doing? He said, I'm hiding. Okay, who are you hiding from? I'm hiding from God. The importance of the dissertation notwithstanding, I brought the kid on my lap and explained to him some very important truths. And I said to him, Chad, three, four years old, I said, Chad, listen, God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. That's the Westminster Shorter Catechism. I still have some Presbyterian blood in me. All right, so the Westminster Shorter Catechism was what I gave. And what I gave to that kid was absolutely orthodox. It was truth. It was an express, explicit statement of God. And I says, listen, God is infinite in regard to space. You can't hide from God. He's everywhere. You understand? Yeah. The next thing I know, I hear him yelling from his bedroom that he can't find God underneath his bed. He didn't see God under his bed. So I sent him to his mother, and his mother took care of the issue. Now, my point is this. What I told that kid was absolute truth. It was orthodox, and it was a beautiful statement of the infinity of God as it relates to space. he didn't have a clue. He didn't have a clue as to what that meant. When you teach children, when you teach children, you will very often use object lessons, and you'll say, look at this, look at this, and By looking at that, I want you to learn this principle. I remember when I was in Sunday school, just a kid, and the teacher brought a little glass of water and put some cake coloring or whatever in that water, and it turned the water that color. And the lesson was, a little bit of sin permeates the entire person. Okay, I could see that. But if all I got from that, if I went home and parents would ask me, what did you learn in church today? And I said, well, I learned that if you put cake coloring in water, it changes the color. If that's all I got of it, I missed the message. But look at this to learn this. Now that's exactly what God is doing so often in the Old Testament. He's giving us pictures and he's saying, look at this, something in the real world, something in the real world, look at this to learn this. Now that object lesson is not the reality. There are actually people, right? There are some theological systems out there that would argue that people in the Old Testament were saved by goat blood, by sheep blood, by lamb blood. they're missing the point. They're missing the point. Those that were saved in the Old Testament era were saved exactly the same way that people are saved today, by and through the faith that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ. And I'll have more to say about that here before we're finished today. But all of these animal sacrifices were just pictures. They were just pictures that God were giving to teach the people important spiritual truths about vicarious atonement, about penal substitution, and right on down the line. And that's the case that we're going to have as we come to the book of Exodus. In many ways the book of Exodus and this Exodus event is a great pattern of the gospel. So many gospel truths are revealed to us in this story. It happened. It happened. Happened in history. But what God was doing for Israel, bringing them out of the land of Egypt, was a great picture of the gospel, a demonstration of God's grace, a demonstration of God's faithfulness, a demonstration of God's And it becomes, I say, a type. That's the technical word. It becomes a picture. It becomes a picture with a prophetic fulfillment of what the Lord Jesus Christ was going to do. So it's not without significance that when we come to the New Testament Scriptures, so often the exodus is referred to over, I forget what it is, over 20 times, maybe over 30 times, that the exodus is referred to in the New Testament Scriptures. and very often in the context of the Passover celebration and in the passion of the Lord Jesus Christ in his final sufferings and the death that he died on Calvary. It's interesting that when, remember on the Mount of Transfiguration? when the Lord Jesus meets there with Moses and Elijah, and they're talking about the gospel, basically. And Luke puts it this way, that they talked about the exodus. They talked about the exodus. That's the Greek word that is used there, and it refers back then to this event, and Christ is looking at his whole atoning work as the fulfillment of this great exodus. So there are lessons here. There are lessons in this event for believers as we reflect upon what Christ has done for us in saving us. We look at the lamb and we see what God did and how God used that lamb as a means of delivering them from the bondage of Egypt. It's a message also for sinners that are still in the bondage of sin. It's a terrible picture here. As Israel was in captivity, they were in the land of Egypt and they were slaves and they were held in bondage by external forces from which they could not free themselves. Couldn't free themselves. Remember Moses tried it and messed things up. A bondage. And what a picture this is of the bondage that we have that every man and every woman, boy and girl, is born into. Alienated from God, haters of God, enemies of God, in the bondage of sin, held, held in a way that we cannot escape ourselves. And you can try what you will. And the Israelites tried what they would to escape from that bondage, but they couldn't do it. A bondage from which they could not But the Lord comes now in this message of grace. So as we come to this, I want to look at this really with under three heads. Do you have an outline? Do you have an outline? Yeah, I gave you an outline. I forget what the outline was I gave you. First point had to do with grace, right? That salvation is because of grace. It's by grace. And that's the first thing that we have to learn. When you read this text, it becomes clear as we put the whole narrative together, that on that night in Egypt, some people were going to die and some people were going to live. Some going to die, some going to live. Now that raises the question, what is the difference then between life and death? What is the difference between those that were going to live that night and those that were going to die that night? And the answer comes down ultimately to grace. The Passover marked a division. It marked a redemption between Israel and the Egyptians. But why? Why is it that God was going to redeem and save the Israelites, the firstborn of Israel, but sentenced to death the firstborn of Egypt? Why? Well, it wasn't because There was something good about Israel. I think we have the impression sometimes that Israel was there in Egypt suffering for righteousness sake, that they were the persecuted believers, that they were there because of their faithfulness to the Lord and whatever else, and they were persecuted as believers. That is far from the truth. That is far from the truth. The Israelites were guilty. And we can look at what the prophet Ezekiel says in chapter 23. In chapter 20, we can look at what Jerob or what's-his-name Joshua says in chapter 24. And it becomes clear that the Israelites were guilty of exactly the same idolatry, the same sins that the Egyptians were guilty of. So they were not going to be saved because of their righteousness. They had no righteousness. They were going to be saved because they were a great nation of multiple size? No, because they were small and puny. There was nothing in Israel, there was nothing about Israel that generated God's grace for them. Why is it? Why is it then that they were delivered? Not because of their afflictions, they deserved everything they got. Not because of their potential or inherent worth, they had none. But the bottom line is that they were delivered because of grace. God loved them simply because he loved them. And that's the first thing that we're going to have to learn about the gospel. And Exodus teaches that so remarkably clearly here. Salvation is all of grace. It's all of grace. What is grace? We know grace is that unmerited favor. that which God demonstrates to us irrespective of our merits, irrespective of our demerits. There's no man that is good enough to claim that God owes him grace. God doesn't owe grace to anybody. God is not obligated to be gracious. He is gracious because he is gracious. It's an interesting statement that Moses makes In Deuteronomy 7, as they're going through the wilderness and Moses is about to die, and they're going to enter into the promised land, and Moses warns them, don't you be self-righteous here. Don't you think that God is giving you this land of milk and honey, this land of prosperity, because you're righteous. You're not. You're not. And the only reason you're here is because I prayed for you and God spared your life. You're not righteous. Why is it then? Why is it? Not because you're a great nation or a righteous nation. He loved you because he loved you. That's the bottom line. He loved you because he loved you. The reason for God's love for sinners is not found within the sinner. It's found within the very heart of God himself. Now, that's hard for us to understand. That's hard for us to understand because when we look at love, right, when we look at love, There's something about the thing that we love. There's something about the thing that we love that's attractive to us, that draws us to that person. My wife is here someplace. Where's my, where's, there's my wife. There's my wife. I love her. Yeah, I do. And I remember, I remember to this day If I told you how long I have known my wife, how long we've been married, it would reflect upon her age, so I'm not going to say anything. But it's been a long time. But to this day, to this day, I remember the first time I saw her. The first time I saw her, I'm over here, we're in college, and I'm talking to one of my friends, and I see this girl over here, and she's got this gold coat on, and I look at her, and I tell my friend, you see that girl over there? I'm gonna marry her. Didn't know her name. Didn't, but there was something about her that just, I don't know, you know what I'm talking about? Right there? Sometimes this happens at youth camp, right? You start feeling this thing right here. I can't explain it. I can't explain it, but I saw her, and there was something, and it took me several months, because I'm shy, right? I'm shy, and it took me a long time to get up enough nerve to ask her for a date, and she turned me down. And I asked her again, and she turned me down. I said, I'm gonna give her one more chance. Give her one more chance. So I got up my nerve, I asked her out again, and here we are. Because to know her, to see her was to love her, and to know me is to love me. Nobody knows me. But there was something, you said, I forgot what I'm talking about here, because I love her, right? But there's something about her that generated the love. What is it that God sees in me? What is it that God sees in you that is love worthy, right? He sees someone that hates him. He sees someone that is alienated from him. There's nothing about any of us that generates the love of God. So God does not love us because we are what we are. He loves us in spite of what we are. but he loves, and we have here in Exodus a great demonstration of the grace of God that is now being shown to a people that did not deserve it. They were just as guilty and just as sinful as the Egyptians, but God loved them, and God was gonna demonstrate his grace. So that's the first thing, all right, that's the first thing that we have to remember about salvation. But the focus of the text and the focus of this youth conference is on the Lamb of God. And that's the second point, and that's really one of the focal pieces of information in this passage, is upon the Lamb. And we learn here, and I give you, I think, on the outline, the bottom line, that salvation then is because of Christ. Salvation is because of Christ. But the name of Christ is not mentioned here, right? You can read Exodus 12, the name of Jesus doesn't occur, the name of Christ. But God is giving us an object lesson. He's gonna give an object lesson, look at this, look at this, what's gonna happen to this lamb, what we can see about this lamb, and now we can start to understand something of the nature of these important truths that all come together when John then says, hey, look, here's the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. So here's something that we can still look at. No, we're not gonna do this, all right? We are not gonna repeat what they did on the Passover night. We're not going to get a bunch of lambs and kill them and sprinkle their blood here and there. No, that's the object lesson. But the truth of the object lesson, the reality that is being taught to us here, is exactly the same for us as it was for them. And those who believe certainly understood that. So grace notwithstanding its sovereignty, had to operate only within the sphere of atonement. Now, as we look at this lamb, there are various truths here about the lamb that I want us to focus on. First of all, this Passover lamb was an obvious substitute, was an obvious substitute. I think this was the theme primarily that you addressed last evening with Dr. Beeke. But you can't come to the Passover lamb, you're not gonna come to any of these views of the lamb without seeing the fact of substitution. It was an obvious substitution. The death sentence was given, particularly for the firstborn, yes? If you're the firstborn, If you're the firstborn in Egypt that night, you were under the sentence of death. Moses said, wherever the blood is not, the death angel's gonna come. And if you're the firstborn, if you're the firstborn, you're gonna die tonight. How many are the firstborn? Any of you the firstborn? Yeah, I'm the firstborn. I'm the firstborn in my family. Typically that's a position of honor, yeah, but I would have loved for my sister to have been the firstborn that night. To be the firstborn that night was not a place of honor, you were under the death sentence. You were under the sentence of death. And if anybody If anybody could understand the nature of substitution, the obvious substitution, it was the firstborn in Israel that night. Because Moses said, there's going to be death tonight. Death is going to come. It's either going to come to the firstborn, or it's going to come to the Lamb. One or the other. There's no escaping the death. There's going to be death. But it will be either the death of the Lamb, or it's going to be the death of the firstborn. Clear. Firstborn doomed to death. Firstborn could live only as the substitute died. Now what does this teach us? What does this teach us? It teaches us very simply and very obviously that the basis of life is found outside of ourselves. The basis of life is found outside of ourselves. Now that's a wonderful and important truth of the gospel. If you seek salvation by looking inside, if you try to gain favor with God by what you do yourself, it's never gonna work. It's never gonna work. Salvation and spiritual life must come from outside of ourselves. And so as this lamb is chosen, and as this lamb then is sacrificed, as the blood of this lamb is then sprinkled upon the doorpost, it became a very graphic lesson. Particularly, I say to the firstborn that night that I'm alive. I'm alive because the lamb, has died, an obvious substitute. The central truth of the gospel, that Jesus died for sinners. But it's my salvation that I can say Jesus died for me. My substitute. In my place, condemned, he stood. Hallelujah. What a Savior. The lamb was a substitute. But the lamb was a perfect substitute. You notice that they were to select this lamb, had to be free from any kind of blemish, any kind of defilement. Every man was to take a lamb, according to his house, whatever they needed. But it had to be without blemish. without blemish. Any kind of imperfection in that lamb would disqualify it from being a substitute. Now this thought is going to be developed in more detail in some of the more expressed types of sacrifices, but this is the first time God is giving them this picture in this way. But very clear, the lamb had to be without blemish. The lamb was chosen. You go out to your herd, you go to the pen where all the animals, and you look around and you select the lamb that is absolutely perfect, without any blemish, without any spot, and you select that lamb. Now, can you see the, that's the object lesson, but can you see how this points to Jesus? Can you see how this points to Jesus? This one that was holy, as the New Testament tells us, holy and undefiled, blameless in every way, the Lord Jesus who was made under the law. And what Paul says in Galatians about Jesus, that he was made of a woman, made under the law. The same law that you are made under, the same law that I am made under, Jesus was made under that law. The law demonstrates our imperfections, doesn't it? The law demonstrates how big a sinners we are, but we can't keep the law, we're transgressors of the law. The law demonstrates to us how absolutely imperfect we are. But the same law that we are made under, Jesus was made under that law, and the law vindicated him. He kept the law, he obeyed the law every day of his life. Every day of his life, submitting to his heavenly Father, submitting to the law of God, keeping the law of God absolutely perfectly without exceptions. All his life, even as a teenager, even as a teenager, yeah, keeping the law of God perfectly. Can you, as a parent, yeah, I think I was accused of this, Question, have any of you ever rolled your eyes at your parents? I'm not gonna ask for a show of hands. Because you're people, right? You have. Yeah. I did too. And my kids did it to me. And I must say, when my boys rolled their eyes at me, I wanted to poke them out. We roll our eyes in an act of rebellion, in an act of disgust. But Jesus, as a teenager, never rolled his eyes. at His parents, perfect, pure, and spotless, and undefiled. And the Lamb, this Passover Lamb that had to be chosen without blemish, speaks to us of that absolutely impeccable purity of Jesus Christ as the substitute for His people. But a Lamb that was tested. The Lamb that was tested. Did you notice that in our reading? On the 10th day, on the 10th day of this month, you take every man a lamb, and you separate that lamb from the rest of the herd. And then on the 14th day, on the 14th day, you're gonna kill the lamb. Now, why? Why the delay between the selection of the lamb and the killing of the lamb? Time of testing. You separate that lamb and you look at that lamb and you make sure that that lamb that appeared to be holy, that appeared to be without blemish, indeed is, that becomes that perfect sacrifice. And so here the Lord Jesus is also tested, isn't he? He comes, why is it that Jesus did not come one day and go to the cross the next day? Why did he live those 30 odd years? Why was he tempted by Satan in the wilderness? Why? Because he was in view of God, he was in view of the world, in view of the devil. And through that entire period, tested, proving himself, demonstrating himself to be the pure and the spotless and the perfect Lamb of God. The value, and here's an important Theological truth now that we can learn from this. That the value of the death was determined by the value of the life. Understand what I'm saying? Can I put it this way? That Christ could die for his people because he didn't have to die for himself. We're under the sentence of death and justly so. We're under the law. The law condemns us. You must die. The law looked at Christ and said, hey, you can live. He earned life. He earned life. He earned, in a very real way, we can say that Christ earned by his life the right to die for his people. Because he was pure and spotless and he didn't have to die for himself. There was no sin that he was guilty of. He was perfect, so he lives this life of perfect obedience, of perfect obedience, becoming the perfect sacrifice for sin. This lamb was slain, a slain substitute, and becomes here a lesson in the necessity of death and in the necessity of the shedding of the blood. Death was necessary. Somebody in Egypt was going to die that night. Death is the execution of justice. What does Paul say? The wages of sin is death. To be in your own sin is to be under condemnation, is to earn, rightly so, death. It's the wages of sin. It's the debt that we owe. Justice demands it. But you know, justice doesn't really care how you die. Justice doesn't care how you pay that penalty, just so that penalty is paid. And Christ, as our substitute, took the penalty of our sin, took the penalty of our transgressions upon himself. And he died in our place, and his death was the execution of the justice of God. For our sins, the sins of his people, were now laid upon him. There were no sins of his own, no, no, no. But the sins of his people, now God imputed, God regarded the sins of his people to be now upon Christ. And Christ is upon the cross, not as a sinner. But bearing the guilt of sin, bearing the guilt of sin, I've heard it say sometimes that Christ was the greatest sinner on the cross. Well, I've got a little bit of problem with that statement myself. For Christ was never a sinner. But judicially, God imputed, God regarded, God dealt with Christ in terms of our sin. And He paid and He exacted justice. But death itself, Death by itself, while it's the penalty, while it's the penalty, doesn't save. There had to be the shedding of blood. Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission. Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission. Death satisfied justice. But the shedding of the blood was the means whereby God's wrath against sin was satisfied. The shedding of the blood became the means whereby sin could be cleansed and washed away. Death, I say, was the necessary satisfaction of justice, but blood was necessary to satisfy the wrath of God, and they're inseparable. You couldn't have death without the shedding of blood if there's atonement. You could not have death without the shedding of blood. And it was not just the shedding of blood. You just couldn't prick yourself and take the blood. No, there had to be that combination. There had to be the shedding of blood through death and death through the shedding of blood. The two go together inseparably linked. Yet there's going to be an atonement. That's why the blood of Christ that we see in the Passover lamb pictured for us, So precious. That's why for believers the blood of Jesus is so very, very precious, isn't it? Foolishness to the world, but how precious is that blood to believers. It appeases God's wrath, it quenches the fire of judgment, it washes away every guilt and stain. But the Lamb was also a successful substitute. Here's the beauty of the Passover. It worked. It worked. Where the blood was shed and where the blood was applied, there was life. There was not a home in Egypt that night that had the blood over the doorpost and on the lintels where death occurred. Everywhere the blood had been applied, there was life. Where the blood was not applied, there was no life. The difference between life and death was the blood. But there was power in that blood. And when the death angel came, it would leap over. It would pass over. Oh, there's the blood. God said, I see the blood. I see the blood. It's the Lord that says, I see the blood. And when I see the blood, I'll pass over. No death, no execution of judgment now. when the Lord saw the blood. It worked. And this is no maybe gospel. I love being a gospel preacher. We don't talk in maybe terms, all right? This is not a maybe gospel. This is a gospel that worked, and I can tell any sinner, I can tell any sinner, you get under the blood of Jesus Christ and there's no wrath, no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus. It works. It's not maybe, it's not sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. No, the blood of Jesus works. It's successful in dealing with sin. And the Passover becomes clear, wherever the blood was, wherever the blood was, there was life. And all of that, I say, points, all of that points to the Lord Jesus Christ. Our substitute who shed His blood because of our sins. And there's life, there's life, life because of His death. That's the Lamb. But one final lesson, I think. How long, Ben, did you say I have? So five more minutes? Bummer. So I like teaching at the seminary, we don't have any bells, right? There's no bells, you just go. Very quickly, and this is important, but the next lesson is that this salvation is through faith. It's through faith. Faith is that gift of God. Again, the Westminster. Shorter catechism defines saving faith as that gift of God's free grace whereby we receive and rest upon Christ alone. A receiving and a resting upon Christ alone. But if we get nothing, all right, if we get nothing else from what I'm saying here in little time I have left, I want you to get this. that the value of faith is determined by the object of faith. It is the object of faith that determines the value of faith. Saving faith is saving faith, not because we just exercise whatever we think faith is, but because the object of saving faith is Christ. The object of faith determines the value of faith. It's not the amount of faith. It's not the sincerity of faith. It's not the fervency of faith. It's the object of faith that saves. Faith does not save me. Christ saves. Faith becomes the means by which we resting upon Christ. There was a bunch of blood was shed in Egypt that night. Gallons and gallons and gallons of blood shed in Egypt that night. But it was only where the blood was applied that there was salvation. Again can you imagine you firstborn that are here can relate to this, but all of us can think of it, right? What would it have been like as the firstborn? And this is not just talking about kids, right? I'm still the firstborn, and if I had been in Egypt that night, even as an old coot, I would still have been under the sentence of death, right? Not just kids. Not just kids. We get the idea this was just the kids in the home. If you were the firstborn, I don't care how old you were, under the sentence of death. You heard Moses say that. Moses said, if you're the firstborn, you're going to die tonight unless the lamb is slain and the blood is sprinkled. You heard that. And you saw the lamb being sacrificed, and you saw the lamb blood being applied, and you go to bed that night. I wonder how you would have slept. How would you have slept that night as the firstborn? My guess is that there were some that heard what Moses said, they saw it, they believed that this is the way, but they tossed and turned. They tossed and turned all night long. Fearful, doubting, they tossed and turned. And there were others that heard and they saw and they believed and they went to bed and they just slept like a log. They slept like a log. Now, question. The next morning, which of those two were still alive? They both were. They both were. It wasn't the amount of their faith. It wasn't... It was the blood. It was the blood. It was the object of what they were believing that made all the difference. Oh, I want my faith to grow. I want my faith to be strong. I want my faith to be fervent. And the more we know, the more we understand, the more we come to rest. But how much faith? How much faith do you need to be saved? How much faith? Yeah? Yeah, if I have faith the size of a grain of mustard seed, I can move a mountain. If I have that little bit of faith, I can tell this tree, get there, over there. I'm telling you right now. I don't have enough faith to move a mountain. I don't have enough faith to get my grass cut, let alone move a tree. I don't have that much faith. And Jesus tells us how much faith we need to move mountains or trees, but he never says how much faith you need to be saved. because it's not the degree of faith, the amount, it's the object of faith. And the power of faith and the value of faith is because God looks at Jesus and God is satisfied with what Christ has done. And God sees the blood in all as well. What did Moses say the Lord said? Not when you see the blood. Not when you see the blood. And I can imagine, I often think of being the firstborn, and maybe all night long you're sticking your head out the window to see what you can see. But it's not when you see the blood. The Lord says, when I see the blood. When I see the blood, so we get under the blood. We get under the blood, and Christ is the Savior. Oh, I want my faith to grow. How does faith grow? Well, we learn that because they were to then eat. You eat this, and eating the lamb became a means of getting nourishment, getting strength, getting sustenance from the lamb. You are what you eat, they say. Well, we feast on Christ. We feast on the lamb, we eat Christ. How do we eat Christ? That's a strange expression, but Christ says, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood. I'm not talking that literally, right? But unless you feast on me, unless you feast on me in the word that I've given, and the more we learn of Christ, the more we know of Christ, the more we see Christ, the more confidence that we have, our faith then begins to grow, and we are strengthened in faith, and the Lord gives us all these means of grace to help us. to become stronger and more fervent and more, I want my faith to grow. And I think I can honestly say to you, I think I can honestly say in the grace of God, I was converted young in life. I can say to you that I believe, I believe the gospel more today than the day I was converted. I believe it more. Am I any more saved? No. But I believe it more because I know it more. I could even spell propitiation, you know, when I was converted. But I knew that Jesus died and Jesus died for me and my sins and the gospel. So we grow in understanding, we grow in grace, and the Lord will help us. And the last thing I'll say very quickly before I get pulled off, Faith becomes the beginning of life. This is the first of the year. Did you see that? This month shall be unto you the beginning of months. It's the beginning of months. Faith starts something. All right, that's the point. Faith begins something. It's not the end of something. Faith is not a one-time operation. begins as a life, I think it was, Tozer had his problem, but I think it was Tozer that said something that faith is a journey, it's not a destination, right? It's a life of faith. But in this life of faith, we are constantly, if we can come back to how we started, look to the Lamb. We look to the Lamb. And as we look to the Lamb and we see all that he is and all that he has done, That faith begins to grow, and our confidence, and our assurance, and our enjoyment, and our relaxing in that faith begins to increase. And I pray that the Lord will do that in your hearts. If some of you, if you will, are still Egyptians tonight, even Egyptians, had you been an Egyptian that night, and heard Moses and put the blood there, you'd wake up the next day alive, right? There's hope for Egyptians. And when you see who left, when you left Egypt, there were Egyptians that went with them. I trust that the Lord will save you if you need to be saved. If you are, that the Lord will increase your understanding, your love, your dependence, your reliance. upon the Lamb.