Those mysterious sphinxes, like Silent Destinies, with that passionless and inscrutable gaze that seems to reveal nothing but comprehend all things, have looked down on many strange events in the thousands of years daring which their calm, imperturbable faces have watched over Egypt; but on nothing more wonderful and dreadful than the tornado of judgments which swept down on that doomed country when Jehovah, with mighty hand and stretched out arm, enfranchised His people and crushed their oppressors.
Pharaoh had hardened himself, before God—by means of His forbearance—had hardened him still further, till there is now no chance of bending him he must be broken. The reed advised the oak to bow to the coming storm; but the oak haughtily scorned the advice: so the mighty wind flouted it, broke it, blasted it, tore it up by the roots and tossed, it aside in its anger, whilst it passed over the weak bending reed unharmingly.
There went forth the fiat, “Against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment!” Each blow insults and abases some amongst them. Serapis blushes till his Nile waters, erst so translucent, turn to a blood red: Ra, the sun-god, is compelled to smile on Israel and frown on Mizraim. The sacred frog and fly become objects of loathing. The bull-god, Apis, cannot protect. himself nor his fellow-cattle from the murrain. Seb, the earth, is covered with vermin. Osiris and Isis are extinguished in the sky; and Netpe, the vault of heaven, is covered with a shameful darkness as with a garment of mourning. The whole obscene brood are “hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky, In hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition.”
The priests had taught the people to look for another god yet to come for though, as the ancient Greek said, It was easier to find a god than a man in Egypt, yet to every human heart there was one still wanting. Had we as many as the Hindus yet there is One more—the Unknown God, as the Athenians called Him—that some principle in the heart mutely calls for. What Balder was to the Norseman, Hapi was to the Egyptians Him they ever looked for (as a possibility) in the firstborn in each family. Now as a last judgment of culminating horror the hand of the Lord is stretched out against Hapi, against the delusion of an earthly Messiah from a fleshly and evil source. Egypt had oppressed Jehovah's first-born: Egypt's first-born is slain: “Balder the beautiful is dead.” The expectation of Hapi is cut off forever!
From this hurricane of devouring punishments sweeping through the land, what is to protect Israel? Not their strength or intelligence, for they are enfeebled and abased; nor their innocence, for they are sinners like their neighbors. God must undertake it; He must not only deliver them from their enemies but deliver them from Himself. “A god all mercy is a god unjust,” and in some way His justice has to be satisfied if He intervenes to rescue them. Therefore it is we now come to that means of deliverance, and lo! here is a strange thing. The angel of destruction is approaching—to whose descending blows of Almighty power all that was fabled of Odin, and of giant Thor's crashing hammer, or Jötuns casting avalanches in the Asgard, or Gigantes throwing rocks and mountains at Olympus, is as the tales of children playing; and the agent appointed to protect them from this awful Omnipotence is—a lamb!
The important type of the paschal lamb is happily so well known that I will only say here: Its distinctly typical meaning as denoting the atoning and vicarious death of our blessed Redeemer permeates the New Testament, and is definitively affirmed in John 1:2929The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. (John 1:29), 1 Peter 1:1818Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; (1 Peter 1:18), &c. It must be a dead lamb; the death of Christ alone atones. It must become so by a non-natural death as evidenced by the blood-shedding; that is, something penal and repellent—for sin is the cause of it. (Those whose false delicacy is shocked when we speak of the blood are not shocked at the sin that causes its flow—that is merely “moral obliquity “: but if we deny the substitutional death of the Lamb of God, we must tear such passages as this out of the Bible and then we only have a mutilated fragment of it left.) The Israelites take shelter under the blood and eat of the victim inside the house, identifying themselves with, appropriating and assimilating, the Substitute. It is roast with fire; subjected to God's judgment. To be eaten with bitter herbs (the repentance of a contrite heart) and unleavened bread (“of sincerity and truth,” 1 Cor. 5:7, 87Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: 8Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. (1 Corinthians 5:7‑8)). It was to be no ordinary feast: they were to eat of it standing—with solemn reverence: with loins girt—the girdle of truth E ph. vi.: with shoes— “shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace “: a staff—the word of God—in their hands: in haste—a matter of urgency; the whole attitude betokening a journey away from Egypt—no thought of receiving Christ and remaining in the world. It commenced a new era and closed the old one; Nisan, the seventh month of the old year, becomes Abib the first of the new.
The lamb was taken on the 10th of Abib, the day when our Lord entered Jerusalem on the ass' colt and was slain on the 14th, the day He died. It was slain “between the two evenings” (Ex. 12:66And ye shall keep it up until the fourteenth day of the same month: and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening. (Exodus 12:6), marg.): the Jewish day would commence at sundown on the Thursday evening, at which time the Lord and His disciples took the passover, but the bulk of the people evidently took it before sundown on the Friday evening. The Lamb of God having been slain on the Friday “between the two evenings.”
The blood was to be sprinkled with hyssop, “From the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall:” it was like that sprig of Plantagenet bush that the earl of Anjou wore on his pilgrimage to Palestine; it was a symbol of humility. We may well doubt the reality of that conversion which asserts itself by a levity of flippant self-sufficiency and dogmatism: that is more likely to be real which shows itself in self-judgment, in a contrite heart and a lowly mind. “I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes,” said Job. “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips,” said Isaiah. “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord”! said Peter. The agonies of self-judgment and abasement which such men as Augustine, Luther, Cowper, and Bunyan (especially the last) endured for a time almost unsettled their reason, and dissolved their frames. Indeed this ordeal is meant to cause a practical dissolution of a nature that all things may become new. The autumn leaves that strew the ground must be withered and decomposed ere they can come up as flowers again: the black coal must be broken and dissolved in the retorts before it is spiritualized into that ethereal vapor that gives us so bright as light: the dirty rags are thrown into the vats, humbled, torn to pieces, turned into a very pulp, and then presently we see them rolled off in the new form on the “calendars” white, pure paper, on which may be inscribed the maxims of sages, seers. martyrs; yea, even the words of the living God Himself.
It is for this reason no doubt that the record of the exodus is here interrupted by chap. xiii. in which the command is given to associate man with the ass in redemption, ver. 12, 13; a principle most humbling and instructive. (The proud flesh that is shocked by the thought of blood, and speaks of “the dignity of humanity” will resent this humiliation; but I think I would rather be classed by God with the asses than by man with the apes.) After all the ass, though ceremoniously unclean, is no unworthy emblem of patient humility which has been crowned with supernal honor. Does it not carry a cross like the humble and wholesome plants of the cruciferae? And was it not bestrode on that eternally memorable 10th Abib by One Who in lowly pomp rode forth to die, what time “The angel armies in the sky, Looked down with sad and wondering eyes To see the approaching sacrifice.”