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| Why the Passover is Said to Be that of the “Jews.” Its Institution: and the Distinction Between “Feasts of the Lord” And Feasts Not So Spoken of.
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11. Why the Passover
is Said to Be that of the “Jews.” Its
Institution: and the Distinction Between “Feasts of the
Lord” And Feasts Not So Spoken of.
“And the passover of the Jews was at
hand.”5018
Inquiring
into the accuracy of the most wise John (on this passage), I put myself
the question, What is indicated by the addition “of the
Jews”? Of what other nation was the passover a
festival? Would it not have been enough to say, “And the
passover was at hand”? It may, however, be the case that
the human passover is one thing when kept by men not as Scripture
intended, and that the divine passover is another thing, the true
passover, observed in spirit and truth by those who worship God in
spirit and in truth; and then the distinction indicated in the text may
be that between the divine passover and that said to be of the
Jews. We should attend to the passover law and observe what the
Lord says of it when it is first mentioned in Scripture.5019
“And the Lord spake unto Moses
and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month is to you the
beginning of months, it is the first for you among the months of the
year. Speak thou to all the congregation of the children of
Israel, saying, On the tenth of this month shall every man take a
sheep, according to the houses of your families;” then after some
directions in which the word passover does not occur again, he
adds,5020
“Thus shall ye eat it, your loins girt
and your shoes on your feet, and your staves in your hands, and ye
shall eat it with haste. It is the passover of the
Lord.” He does not say, “It is your
passover.” And a little further on He names the festival
again in the same way,5021
“And it shall
come to pass, when your sons say to you, What is this service? And ye shall
say to them, It is the sacrifice, the passover of the Lord, how He
guarded the houses of the children of Israel.” And again, a
little further on,5022
“And the Lord
spake to Moses and Aaron, saying, This is the law of the
passover. No alien shall eat of it.” And again in a
little,5023
“But if a
proselyte come to you, and keep the passover of the Lord, every male of
him shall be circumcised.” Observe that in the law we never
find it said, “Your passover;” but in all the passages
quoted the phrase occurs once without any adjunct, while we have three
times “The passover of the Lord.” To make sure that
there is such a distinction between the passover of the Lord and the
passover of the Jews, we may consider the way in which Isaiah speaks of
the matter:5024
“Your
new moons and your Sabbaths and your great day I cannot bear; your fast
and your holiday and your new moons and your feasts my soul
hateth.” The Lord does not call them His own, these
observances of sinners (they are hated of His soul, if such there be);
neither the new moons, nor the Sabbaths, nor the great day, nor the
fast, nor the festivals. And in the legislation about the Sabbath
in Exodus, we read,5025
“And Moses
said unto them, This is the word which the Lord spake, The Sabbath is a
holy rest unto the Lord.” And a little further on,
“And Moses said, Eat ye; for to-day is a Sabbath unto the
Lord.” And in Numbers,5026
before the
sacrifices which are offered at each festival, as if all the festivals
came under the law of the continuous and daily sacrifice, we find it
written, “And the Lord spake unto Moses, Announce to the children
of Israel, and thus shalt thou say unto them, My gifts, My offerings,
My fruits for a smell of sweet savour, ye shall observe to offer unto
Me at My festivals. And thou shalt say unto them, These are the
offerings which ye shall offer unto the Lord.” The festival
set forth in Scripture He calls His own, not those of the people
receiving the law, He speaks of His gifts, His
offerings. A similar way of speaking is that in Exodus with
regard to the people; it is said by God to be His own people, when it
does not sin; but in the section about the calf He abjures it and calls
it the people of Moses.5027
On the one
hand, “Thou shalt say to Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord, Let My
people go, that they may serve Me in the wilderness. But if thou
wilt not let My people go, behold, I will send against thee and against
thy servants, and against thy people and against thy houses, the
dog-fly; and the houses of the Egyptians shall be full of the dog-fly,
and on the land on which they are, against it will I send them.
And I will glorify on that day the land of Gesem, on which My people
are; on it there shall be no dog-fly, that thou mayest know that I am
the Lord, the Lord of all the earth. And I will make a
distinction between My people and thy people.” To Moses, on
the other hand, He says,5028
“Go, descend
quickly, for thy people hath transgressed, which thou leddest out of
the land of Egypt.” As, then, the people when it does not
sin is the people of God, but when it sins is no longer spoken of as
His, thus, also, the feasts when they are hated by the Lord’s
soul are said to be feasts of sinners, but when the law is given
regarding them, they are called feasts of the Lord. Now of these
feasts passover is one, which in the passage before us is said to be
that not of the Lord, but of the Jews. In another passage,
too,5029
we find it said, “These are the feasts
of the Lord, which ye shall call chosen, holy.” From the
mouth of the Lord Himself, then, we see that there is no gainsaying our
statement on this point. Some one, no doubt, will ask about the
words of the Apostle, where he writes to the Corinthians:5030
“For our Passover also was
sacrificed for us, namely, Christ;” he does not say, “The
Passover of the Lord was sacrificed, even Christ.” To this
we must say, either that the Apostle simply calls the passover our
passover because it was sacrificed for us, or that every sacrifice
which is really the Lord’s, and the passover is one of these,
awaits its consummation not in this age nor upon earth, but in the
coming age and in heaven when the kingdom of heaven appears. As
for those feasts, one of the twelve prophets says,5031
“What will ye do in the days of
assembly, and in the days of the feast of the Lord?” But
Paul says in the Epistle to the Hebrews:5032
“But ye are come unto Mount
Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to
ten thousands of angels, the assembly and church of the firstborn, who
are written in heaven.” And in the Epistle to the
Colossians:5033
“Let no
one judge you in meat and in drink, or in respect of a feast-day or a
new moon, or a sabbath-day; which are a shadow of the things to
come.”E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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