Well, good morning and welcome. It is man.
It's good to be together today. It's great to see you.
If we haven't met, my name is Josh.
I have the the joy of serving as pastor here at the garden and
I'm glad to see you welcome. We're we're we're glad that
you're here. The garden is this community of
individuals and families and groups that are all bound
together by this shared journey to become people who are changed
by the love of Jesus and not just individually or for us, but
but for the sake of our neighbors, our coworkers, our
friends, our families, to extend that love into the world.
I think personally, I'm, I'm biased, but I, I believe that
that's the most important journey you could possibly
undertake. If you would like help or
support in that journey, that's why we exist.
And so I would love to to meet you to help you to just have a
conversation. If we haven't met, please come
grab me or anybody with a lanyard in the lobby after the
gathering. I'd love to get to know you.
And again, just glad, glad to be together today.
Well, as Nicole mentioned, we are continuing this series on
the story. Over the last 10 weeks, we've
been on this journey together, moving from the very beginning
of Scripture in the Garden all the way to Revelation and
tracking how this crazy story, this this library of stories
really written across cultures and continents and centuries,
all has this single and incredible narrative about how
we are reconnected to God. And this morning I'm super
excited because we have finally reached the climax.
Like this is the peak of the story, the moment where all of
these threads that we've been tracking finally come together
in a single knot. This is the biggest climax, the
biggest plot twist in all of history.
It is the brightest moment in history and also the darkest at
the same time. So small job for me today.
It's also really familiar, and because of that, sometimes it's
easy to just blow past things that we know so well.
Of course, I'm talking this morning about the death and
resurrection of Jesus, the very heart of the Christian story.
So this morning I want to try to tell the story, and I also want
to attempt to answer a few questions, questions that maybe
you've asked at some point. Questions like why did Jesus
have to die? Or perhaps really what you want
to know is why do Christians talk about blood so much?
Like does anybody else find that a little weird?
Like the washed in the blood that sounds gross, right?
So like, why? What is this?
What is this blood fixation that Christians appear to have?
Or how do all of these things, this events that transpired
thousands of years ago, matter for you and me today?
Our text this morning that Nicole Redsfora sets the scene
in Jerusalem, Jesus and his disciples are sitting down for
the Passover meal. And this is a ritual that we
introduced earlier in this series, 1500 years earlier.
This meal, this ritual was introduced a God on the cusp of
delivering his people from slavery, sparing them from
death, making them from his family.
He gave them this meal to commemorate everything that he
had done and was about to do. And so they sit down, they begin
to go through this, this Passover ritual that they've
been celebrating since childhood each year.
And the disciples pretty quickly get the sense that something is
up like this is this is not the usual way of going through these
rituals because Jesus early on says, I have desired to eat this
Passover with you before I suffer.
I don't know if you've ever had a dinner guest like, bust
something out like that. It sounds very ominous, right?
They're like, what is happening here?
And then he goes on to say, this is basically the last time I'm
going to eat this before the Kingdom of God.
The disciples are sitting here and trying to make sense of
Jesus claims like, Jesus, what are you talking about?
And that's when he makes a breathtaking claim.
Jesus picks up the bread, the unleavened matzo bread that's
there on the table. Of course, they know this bread
to represent the hurried exit from Egypt, the the bread that
didn't even have time to rise. And Jesus takes the bread and he
says, this is my body given for you.
He takes the wine on the table. And he says this cup is a new
covenant for you, in my blood, poured out for you.
Jesus is taking familiar symbols, a familiar story, and
he is repurposing it, giving it new meaning.
Jesus is taking Israel's history and he he's saying that
everything that happened then on that first Passover night is
only an echo of what is about to go down now.
Jesus is saying that he is the Passover in person.
If I asked you this morning what your biggest problem in life
was, I suspect we would get some different answers.
Maybe somebody would say, hey, I'm struggling with anxiety
right now. Somebody might say, I'm having a
hard time paying bills. I've got this chronic illness
that's really been bothering me. Or, or maybe some of you would
would zoom out and you would say like rising authoritarianism and
lawlessness is a big problem or, or racism or, or some kind of
environmental catastrophe, nuclear war right there.
There are all these different concerns that we might look at
and say this is the problem or a problem.
And all of those would be true. But underneath all of them,
according to Scripture, lies a single root.
If every expression of evil that we see across our lives and our
world is a leaf almost on a on a diseased tree.
And at the root of that tree is something that the Bible calls
sin. And sin is very simply, as we
found in week two of the series, that the disordered desire to to
go our own way, to seize control, to, to, to doggedly and
determinedly insist that we'll structure our lives according to
our own preferences, that we will be our own authority.
According to Scripture, sin always ends in disconnection and
death. It's what we've seen from the
very beginning. Romans 623 puts it this way.
The wages of sin is death. This sin has fractured
everything in our world, and it's fractured us in all sorts
of ways, from God, from one another, even from creation and
ourselves. Unfortunately, according to
Scripture, the disease is hereditary.
I'm infected. You are too.
We've all come under this disease.
Sin lives in us as individuals. It also lives in our society and
structures. It lives in our planet, and
surely, consistently, inevitably, it produces death
from Adam on. The Bible imagines sin as this
ruler. Because of our false choice to
submit not to God in his ways, but to sin, it has taken
dominion over us. It has enslaved us and shackled
us and inevitably draws us away to death.
Enter Jesus. Last week we talked about Jesus
entering the scene. He comes into the world and
Jesus does something startling. He challenges the dominion of
sin and death not just in the things that he says, but also in
what he does. Everywhere that Jesus goes, he
proclaims that God's Kingdom is near.
God's Kingdom is almost like an alternate dimension, right?
It's a place where everything is as it ought to be.
There's no sin, there's no disease, there's no racism,
there's no death, there's no brokenness.
In God's world, all is well. And Jesus not only talks about
this, but he demonstrates it like almost an alien invasion.
Right when when Jesus touches down, everything starts to
shift. As we look around at the fruits
of Jesus ministry, we see that the blind received sight, the
lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf
here the dead are raised, The good news is preached to the
poor. In the words of Scripture and
Jesus, God's rule and reign isn't just theoretical, it's
actual. For the first time in human
history, the dominion of sin and death has a real challenger.
But of course, like any tyrant, things don't tend to roll over
right. The bosses want to hold on to
their power and control and so things quickly escalate.
Sin, death and the devil are are not prepared to go down with a
fight. And here as we reach this
section of the story, the tension which has been building
throughout finally reaches its crescendo.
The religious leaders oppose Jesus, and they enroll the
political leaders based on their self-interest to to to bring him
on false accusations and create a sham trial.
The mob that had cheered him only days before now jeers him,
and there's a secret arrest, an unjucked verdict, and ultimately
we know the empire murders God. You can almost hear at this
point in the story the devil laughing maniacally, like if
there was ever a darkest moment, this is it.
I love the quote by historian Bruce Shelley who says the
Christianity is the only major relevant religion to have as its
central event the humiliation of its God.
On Good Friday. Jesus is murdered, and it feels
at this point that the shackles which have balanced humanity are
now completely unbreakable. From the very beginning of the
story, sin had been Satan had been attempting to convince
humanity to go their own way, and in doing so had cut them off
from life itself, introducing death.
But now here life itself comes in human form, and we kill it.
I mean, talk about some Stockholm syndrome.
Like this is a whole mess. It feels on this dark night like
evil has finally and decisively won.
And yet this is incredible because none of this catches God
off guard. What we see here, clearly in
this text today, is that Passover always pointed here.
So many of the threads that we've been tracing throughout
the first six weeks of this journey have been all leading up
to this moment. And Jesus is he's about to go to
the cross in his final meal with his friends, not at all
accidentally on the eve of Passover brings this imagery
front and center. You may remember that in
Passover, that first night, there were things that the
Jewish people were instructed to do along with anyone who is God
fearing. Actually.
They were to take a a branch, a leafy branch, and dip it in a
bowl full of blood, blood from a freshly slaughtered lamb.
And then they were to take this, this blood and they were to use
the leaves of this branch to paint on the door frame of their
house. Blood on each side post on the
door frame, all around until the blood dripped down across the
threshold. Blood would cover this, this the
the entry to this house. It would mark out the house.
And and it wasn't just any lamb. Exodus specifically specified.
Moses instructed them to select a young lamb, a lamb with no
broken bones, a land that was perfect, unblemished.
Have you thought about why this is?
See, the lamb was a symbol of an uncorrupted life, a life that
was innocent, a life that hadn't been touched in any way by sin.
Death didn't really have any rights to this lamb.
The lamb didn't deserve to die. But when the lamb was
slaughtered, when it was killed as its blood was spilled, it
became a representation of the innocent for the guilty right.
The lamb dies so that death would pass over.
You may remember on that same night when, when the Jewish
families took the blood of the lamb and marked out the
doorposts of their home, something else happened.
That was the very night that the war between God and the evil
Egyptian ruler who had enslaved God's people reached its
crescendo. And on that night, God
demonstrated his power decisively by sending an awful
plague, the last in the line of 10 plagues.
It was a plague of death, and it visited every home across Egypt.
Now again, we got to think back to the beginning of the story.
At the beginning of the story we see that because of sin, all of
us, every person, man and woman, Jew and Gentile, are enslaved
and shackled to death. And in Egypt, God's people were
also in in physical slavery, being oppressed by this king,
this evil ruler, Pharaoh. So on this night what happens?
Death comes and it visits each house.
Stealing life, of course, stole both Jewish life and Egyptian
life. All that it passed, except for
the houses where the blood marked the mantle where blood
had been indicated. The house the blood instead
passed over because the blood served as a cleansing, as a a
purifying agent, almost like you would take a, a, a, a, a Clorox
wipe and wipe down your counters right, to avoid affection or
germs. The blood was a symbol of
innocent life that had paid the price for sin.
And so these houses were marked out and when death visited, the
debt was already paid. Not only that, but these houses
had been might marked out for identity as God's people
reclaimed God all as we talked about several weeks ago.
They were gods and not deaths any longer.
Ownership had been transferred and so death passed over and
they were spared. If you were to participate in a
Passover Seder today, you would find that there were four cups
of wine that are drank throughout the seder.
And each of these has symbolism. They represents a message around
deliverance. The first cup represents a
promise I will bring you out of suffering in Egypt.
The second cup represents God's promise to save from
enslavement. The third to deliver.
And finally, God's promise that I will take you for me as a
nation and I will be for you as Lord.
The blood both cleansed from sin and marked out as a symbol of
identity, like a wedding ring, that these people are mine.
The blood satisfied death's demand and served as a transfer
of ownership. So Jesus comes celebrating this
same meal, taking this same cup, and saying the Passover lamb was
just a shadow. I am the real thing, the one
true Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, not just
for a while, not just temporarily, but fully and
finally. There have been images that have
pointed towards this throughout the story that we've been
tracing. In the Garden, a lamb died to
cover over Adam and Eve's nakedness.
Right here at Passover, a lamb dies.
With Abraham and Isaac, we find that a lamb is provided to
rescue. Throughout the sacrificial
system of the Old Testament, we see the innocent for the guilty,
the blood of the innocent shed to protect and to cover over the
ones who are bound by death. And here Jesus comes and he
says, just like a lamb, innocent, unblemished, willing,
I will give my life for you to cleanse you, and to buy you back
from the slavery of sin and death, to be my people.
Throughout the course of the story, we've seen all kinds of
half measures, various plot twists or attempts to solve for
this fundamental problem of sin. Perhaps a righteous family could
chart a new courts. Perhaps a law could restrain sin
and and keep the people in line. And maybe righteous rulers would
curtail the impact of evil. Or perhaps the prophets could
steer God's people towards faithfulness and over again,
over again. In every case, these acts, while
good, while they mitigated for the symptoms, failed to address
the fundamental disease. They were simply stop gaps and
short term measures that had no power to cure.
One day Jim Monroe's leg began to hurt.
He had some pain underneath his right knee.
I took a couple Advil and honestly didn't think all that
much of it. There were plenty of reasons to
keep going. Jim was super busy.
He had a three-year old at home, his marriage wasn't doing great
and work was busy. But the pain didn't stop.
It kept getting worse until one day Jim found that he couldn't
even get out of the car and walk up to his step.
His wife said that's it, you've got to go to the doctor.
And so Jim finally drags himself to the hospital.
It was there that an ER doc looked him in the eye and said,
you have cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
The pain that Jim had been feeling in his leg were the
white blood cells, which had begin to attack his own body.
They had exploded out of control.
And we're literally breaking the bones from inside his leg.
Two months, the doctor said. Without treatment, you've only
got 2 months. Everything changed immediately.
Chemo, the bone marrow registry. The treatment was absolutely
brutal. Jim's hair fell out and his body
began to break down. And yet, as awful as all of the
treatment was, it it wasn't a cure.
It couldn't solve for the problem.
It could only slow the pace of the disease.
Without a transplant, Jim would be dead in a matter of weeks.
Then, on his way to another round of chemo, Jim's phone
rang. We found someone.
The voice on the other end of the line said out of 8 million
people on the registry, there was just one match.
Someone who would be perfect. And not only that, she was
willing. Six months earlier, a young
woman, Janelle Jenny, had signed up to be a donor at a rock
concert. She was having fun at the
festival and there was a booth and felt like a good thing to
do. She put her name on the list and
didn't honestly think all that much of it.
But now the doctors and geneticists had identified that
Janelle was Jim's only hope. The bone marrow transplant would
take Janelle's healthy immune system and quite literally place
it into Jim's body. The immune system is, of course,
the part of us that distinguishes me from not me.
It had to be a perfect match. For hours, the doctors extracted
blood, bone marrow and stem cells from Jenelle.
And then on April 23rd, nurses wheeled Jim into a procedure
room and asked, Are you ready to put your boxing gloves on?
They administered a cocktail of drugs that were designed to
completely wipe out everything that remained of Jim's immune
system. It was such a violent cocktail
that the nurses had nicknamed it the Shake and Bake because of
the convulsions that it was likely to trigger.
The risk was real. Jim could sort, short circuit
and die right there on the table.
Moments before the transplant, the doctor explained what was
about to happen with this transfusion.
He said you'll be like a baby inside your mother's womb born
again a a a new other life will come and begin to live inside of
you and this new system of blood will literally save your life.
The transfusion worked. Jen L cells entered Jim's marrow
and within a couple of months Jim was cancer free.
Real story. Let's do it on Radiolab.
Friends. What a picture of the gospel.
This is what Jesus does for us. We suffer from an infection,
every one of us, an infection that we cannot cure ourselves.
Every new habit and and willpower, every attempt that we
make to be better. Is it best to stop gap that can
limit the damage and delay the inevitable result?
Without a cure, the disease continues to deform us and
ultimately will kill us. But Jesus is our perfect match,
the only one. He alone became one of us, and
no tempted never became infected with sin.
He allowed himself to be subject to the full force of the
disease, enduring its pain and suffering, even death, it's
fiercest blow. As Tom Wright puts it, evil did
its worst to Jesus, and he took it meeting in it full exhausted
meeting it in full exhausted its power.
Jesus heals our illness, giving his very life to take up
residence inside of us. This is what happened on the
first night of Passover. The people who are marked out by
the blood, we're not. The people who had lived a great
life or were really character, they weren't even.
We often think of it as well, it was the Jewish people.
It wasn't just the Jewish people.
It was anyone who trusted God and allowed themselves to be
marked out by the blood. Those houses were spared from
the evil of death. They were saved.
Friends, this is the craziest plot twist of all.
Because Jesus death, the worst moment that we've ever
experienced in the history of the world, is not a detour.
It's not an accident. It is the central event where
the victory of God shines through.
A stroke of genius, a holy ambush.
Death swallows up life and chokes on it.
This is like Voldemort killing Harry and destroying the
Horcrux, right? It's like the witch slaying
Aslan and triggering the deeper magic.
We've told so many stories ever since and they're all saying the
same thing. Death did its worst and at its
moment of victory was defeated In the Passover dinner.
There's this crazy tradition, you may know about it.
There's a, a, a piece of matzo bread called the, the afikomen,
the afikomen. And basically during the dinner,
there's three pieces of matzo, the bread that are taken and
wrapped up. And the second one in particular
has a, a, a unique meaning and, and, and ritual that's present
in the, in the, in the Seder. It's taken and broken and then
it's actually wrapped in a cloth and hidden until later in the
meal. And towards the end of the meal,
the kids are dispatched to go in and find this afikomen, this
piece of matzo bread, which has been broken.
It it's brought back to the table and revealed.
And then each person is invited to partake of the bread.
This is crazy. This is a a contemporary Jewish
tradition. What a picture of what Jesus
does for us. Jesus is the bread of life,
broken and shattered, wrapped in burial cloth and hidden away.
And yet he does not stay defeated.
Jesus rises from the tomb because on the cross he bore our
sin as the spotless lamb. But when the penalty was paid,
the powers of sin, death, and the devil were disarmed.
The judge vindicated him. Life itself entered death and
broke it from the inside out, and healed our mortal sin
wounded nature, uniting it to his incorruptible life.
Friends, this is so familiar. And yet, because of this story,
there's hope. There's hope for you and me.
There's hope whether you're dealing with anxiety or
addiction, whether you're wondering where your next meal
is going to come from, you're wrestling with the evil in the
world or even in the church. There's hope because death did
not have the final word. Jesus absorbed the evil of us
and our world and still rose victorious, as Paul puts it.
Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed, as the prophet
Isaiah says, by his wounds. We are healed.
Friends, I'm so thankful that Jesus has taken up residence in
me, that his life lives in me, that that my life, that my
household has been marked off by the blood in a way where I know
that I belong to him. My question for you is, do you
have that same confidence this morning?
Is that true in your life as well?
Are you part of the family of God in kind of more of a general
sense, like you've grown up around church, you're Christian,
you know the stories about Jesus?
Or have you actually taken the moment to allow the blood to
mark the threshold of your life to say, I will pass through, I
will enter into the protection that he offers?
There's a moment by faith where we have to make a call about who
we will trust and who we will follow.
It's not because we're good people or have the right culture
or from the right place. Those who are spared, those who
are saved, those who become the new people of God are the people
who have surrendered their life to His, who have allowed what
Jesus has done to take up residence in our life by faith.
That is available for you. It's available for me.
It's available for every one of us.
Have you been marked out by the blood?
Maybe you've never made that call.
You've never made that decision. Today could be the day when you
cross that threshold and say yes to Jesus, asking him for his
rescue and redemption. Maybe this morning.
The story that I've told this morning is familiar to you.
You say, yeah, of course, Of course, Josh, Of course I'm part
of God's family. My life is marked out by the
blood. And yet when you look around
your life, you see a bunch of evidence that there's still some
Pharaohs running the show, there's still some bondage in
one area or another. I wish I could talk to this
morning about the in between moment that we live in, the fact
that Christ has come, victory has been assured, and yet that
victory is not yet fully present, right?
There's a lot that's broken in my life, in our lives, and in
the world. Things are not as they should
be. Have you reached for Jesus?
Have you asked Him to be your rescue in this moment?
Maybe you did a long time ago. What about right now?
Where are there parts of your life that have gone back into
bondage? Where you feel the slavery?
Jesus wants to rescue and redeem.
He's made you part of his family.
He wants to teach you what it means to live as part of His
family. The shackles don't have to say
on because of Jesus. What do you need to renounce?
What do you need to run to this morning?
Or maybe you're clear and this morning is just an opportunity
to say a fresh yes, a wholehearted yes.
It's a re ground in the identity because of what Jesus has done
for you. Friends, as we look at this
Passover moment, what Jesus has done in his death and
resurrection, it changes everything.
Isn't that the very core of our self understanding of our
identity? Are you living free?
Are you living like part of God's family, rescued in the joy
of that, even in the already and not yet tension that we sang
about earlier? Friends, if not, I want to
invite you to take the blood to mark the doorway, to crossover
the threshold, to say yes to the love of Jesus, his life
willingly poured out for you so that you could have life, so
that you could be free. Fleming Rutledge says it is the
crucifixion that marks out Christianity as something
definitively different. It is the crucifixion in which
the nature of God is truly revealed.
This is who He is. He loves you.
He's willing to give his very life for your freedom.
It's not just ancient history, it's an invitation into
liberation for you today.