"Why is this night different from all other nights?" Does the answer to that question—the question at the heart of every Passover Seder of the Jewish people throughout the world for approximately 3,500 years lie at the heart of the salvation of not only the Jewish people but the entire world ?
You would have been hard pressed, 2000 years ago, to find anyone—Jew or Gentile—who did not look upon Christians as Jews who had formed a new sect within Judaism. Christianity was Jewish. Its followers were not converts; they were Jews WHO HAD DONE what Jews had been waiting to do for 2,000 years: welcome their Messiah, the long-expected hope of Israel.
On the eve of the tenth plague, God instructed the Jewish nation, while slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, to slay a pure, unblemished lamb, which they would then consume, whose blood, painted on the lintels of the doorposts of their houses in Egypt, would take the place of the firstborn of every Israelite family and free them from the death of the tenth plague (cf. Ex. 12). In remembrance of that deliverance, the Israelites were instructed to celebrate anew and annually that first Passover (the night the angel of death "passed over" the houses of Egypt) with the death of a spotless lamb whose shed blood was the cause of their deliverance.
Approximately 1,500 years later, Jesus and his Jewish disciples celebrated that same Passover—also with a slain lamb at their table—to be eaten in remembrance of that first Passover. Could any of the twelve have imagined the answer to the "routine" question "Why is this night different from all other nights?" Could they have understood that what was prefigured in the lambs of Egypt would be fulfilled in the Lamb of God, the Lamb to which all other lambs pointed, the Lamb who would deliver them not from temporal bondage to slavery from Egypt but from eternal bondage to slavery from sin?
Salvation from the Jews, through whom the Messiah came, was not only for the Jews but for the whole world. Following his Resurrection and prior to his Ascension, Jesus gave instructions to the twelve (Jewish) disciples to take the gospel (the "good news" of salvation) to the ends of the earth: "You shall receive power when the Holy Sprit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth" (Acts 1:8). And, again, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Matt. 28:19–20).
Did the Jews fulfil their God-given mission to evangelize and preach to the whole world before the end ? Through the christians the God of Israel has become known to the whole wide world ?
2007-05-14
18:52:22
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