Not Yet Home - The Night That Changes Everything | Passover Part 3

Automated transcript, lightly edited for readability. Scripture appears as spoken; the video is the authoritative teaching.

Shabbat shalom, everybody. Welcome. Shabbat shalom. We are 4 days away from Passover, coming Wednesday evening, and this is the last message in the series that we started a few weeks ago called "The Night That Changes Everything." And I want to make sure before we go into Passover that we find ourselves somewhere that actually matters for what we're going to be participating in Wednesday night.

So just a quick recap of the first two messages we've already done—I'll move through them kind of fast. In part one it was called "Blood and Door Post," and we went, of course, over the story of the Passover in Egypt. We started at the very beginning in Genesis 1 where God creates the world. He places humanity in it, and the garden functions as a temple—the place where heaven and earth meet and overlap, and humans live inside the presence of God. Of course it doesn't take long to reach Genesis 3 where we mess it up. Mankind reaches for autonomy in the garden. They get expelled from the garden. The priests have to leave the temple garden, if you will. And from that moment on, the entire Bible is asking one question: How does the presence get back to the people? How does the presence of God get back in connection with his people?

We got to Egypt. We spoke on Pharaoh, the son of Ra, the living embodiment of the divine order in all of Egyptian theology. And the plagues were not just random disasters that occurred in Egypt. They were a systematic dismantling of the Egyptian pantheon, if you will—the theological worldview of Egypt. Each one targeting a specific deity, proving one by one that none of them held power in the face of Yahweh. And then Exodus 12, the blood on the door. In the ancient Near East, households marked their entrance to announce which deity governed their household, the threshold of their doorway. And the blood was Israel making the same declaration: This Yahweh governs this house. And we ended that message with the question: Is the blood on your door?

In part two, we spoke on leaving Egypt. Israel walks out of Egypt, and they don't walk into freedom. They walk into the wilderness. God deliberately avoided the short road into the promised land because Israel wasn't yet who they needed to become. And the short road would have sent them straight back to Egypt the moment they felt resistance and it got hard. The pillar of cloud by day, the fire by night—the glory, the Shekinah, the dwelling presence of God—was now mobile. It's moving around, walking out in front. The presence coming back before there was even a building to put it in, right?

We had the splitting of the sea, the crossing at night on dry ground. We read about how the Egyptian army was dismantled at the water's edge, and we read about a prophetess named Miriam with a tambourine making all kinds of noise on the beach. And we talked about what slavery does to a people. How freedom without formation tends to feel more dangerous than slavery with structure. Which is why the wilderness was not a detour. It was the curriculum for Israel. And we ended that message with a question: Do you trust the cloud?

In Every Generation

And so today we're going to find out where this whole story is going, and more importantly, where you are inside of it. The reason is because I think a lot of us—sometimes traditions are meant to breed reverence, of course, but repetition makes things boring. If we're honest. And sometimes we sit around the Seder table and we go through the motions every year and we say the dayenus and we do the drops of wine. And sometimes we forget that this is also our story.

And so Wednesday night we're going to open the Haggadah, and somewhere in it, probably near the end, we're going to read a sentence together. And we've probably said it so many times that we forget what it really means. It actually comes through the Passover liturgy and is rooted in the Mishnah Pesachim chapter 10. And it's been in the Seder for at least about 2,000 years. And here's what it says.

B'chol dor vador chayav adam l'rot et atzmo k'ilu yatzah mi Mitzrayim. In every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt. And we read this every year. We hear about it, right? It impacts us. Not your ancestors. Not the people in the story. You. Personally. As if you were there.

And when we read that every year, we tend to read it like a memory exercise, right? We try to imagine what it felt like. Like, put yourselves in their sandals. Really feel the emotion of it, right? And I'm going to submit that that's not what they're saying at all. It's not what the point of that tradition was. The rabbis are not merely asking you to imagine the past. They're making a theological claim about the present. Like, right now. The Exodus is not a past event that you commemorate once a year. It's the present reality you are living in right now. Sometimes we forget that the story—it didn't end. It's still going on. And you're very much in it. Very much so.

The Four Promises

And so when we continue, we also have in Exodus 6 a profound set of promises that are made. Moses just gets back from his first attempt with Pharaoh. It went very badly. And the people are now in worse shape than before he showed up. It's not a great start for Moses. And God speaks to Moses and he makes a promise—and he doesn't just make one promise, he makes four. Four consecutive statements, each beginning with the same two words: I will. And he says this in Exodus 6:6-7: "I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will deliver you from slavery. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I will take you as my people and I will be your God."

Four promises. As if you have ever sat at a Passover Seder and wondered why there's four cups of wine, right? That's why. Every cup of wine at the Passover Seder represents one of these claims of God, one of these promises of God. And one of the oldest and most meaningful rabbinic explanations is that the four cups of course reflect the pursuit. In the Jerusalem Talmud, Rabbi Yohanan makes this connection. And it's been woven into the Seder liturgy for centuries after.

Cup one: I will bring you out. Cup two: I will deliver you. Cup three: I will redeem you. And usually by this point in the Seder, no one really remembers what the fourth cup is, right? I will take you as my people. Look at those four promises. And look at what they're actually doing. See the first three—there are two different types of languages.

The first three promises have rescue language: I'm coming to get you. I'm getting you out. I'm breaking the chains. I'm defeating the empire. But the fourth one, it's different. It reads differently. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. That one's not rescue language, is it? No, that has to do with relationship. A little bit different. That's the destination. That's what the rescue was for. That's the prize.

And what's so cool about the fourth promise is that it's not something that just shows up in this story. It's one that doesn't stop showing up throughout the entire narrative of the story of the Bible. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. Jeremiah 31, new covenant: They will be my people, and I will be their God. Ezekiel 36, the same language. All the way to the very end of Revelation 21: They will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. So those are like the anchor points, the big ones in Scripture, but that's not the only place. Here's the full list if you want the full list. This is what we would call a hyperlink, right? Or an icon that transports. The reason it's mentioned in all these other places is because all these other places are talking about the same story. And the story doesn't just take place in Exodus. It's the story of God. It's the story of you. It's the story of the Bible. The fourth promise is the arc of the entire story from Exodus 6 to—and it's not finished yet.

Jerusalem in Ruins

Fast forward about 500 years from the Exodus. Israel is in Babylon. The temple is now demolished. It's rubble. The unimaginable, right? Imagine the temple. Imagine the temple being the security blanket of Judah during the time when they rose in power—both military power, economic power, just power even over their neighbors. And the prophets were dispatched one after another to warn them, saying, "Hey, you're showing up at church every week and you're singing the songs to God and you're celebrating Shabbat and Passover and Shavuot and you're not eating the pig and you're doing all these things on this checklist, but you're unrecognizable as the people of this God that brought you out of Egypt. You're unrecognizable. You're not reflecting the soul and heart and mission that God wanted you to portray. But you're dressing up and you're claiming that you are. You're wearing his jersey. Yeah, we could never imagine that happening, can we? You ever seen someone leverage their faith and weaponize it against someone else? Yeah, shouldn't be so easy to do.

So during this time, when the temple was still standing, that was the security blanket. They saw the temple—God's still with us because we have his house. We have the deed of his house, right? He can't go anywhere. So God destroyed it. The Babylonians came in and destroyed their security blanket, destroyed the infrastructure of who they were as a civilization. They destroyed Jerusalem. The city's rubble. The Davidic line is in exile. By every measure, the story of Israel and Judah is over.

Isaiah's Vision of Comfort

And Isaiah chapter 40 opens up with this. Comfort. Comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that her warfare is ended and that her iniquity is pardoned. Then two verses later, a voice cries, in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Wilderness. Highway. God is coming to his people. That's Exodus language. And Isaiah is not reaching for some type of poetic image here. He's saying what God did in Egypt, he's about to do again. Prepare yourselves. There's going to be a new Exodus that's going to occur and it's going to be the same God and it's going to be the same pattern, but the scale is going to be much bigger.

There's one scholar if you want to geek out—his name's GK Beale—and he specializes in this topic. He has extensive work establishing the pattern of Passover and the temple as Israel and finding that center in Christ. I highly recommend him. He's a great scholar, but he makes the argument that Yahweh establishes a pattern in the Exodus and then runs it again and again and again at larger and larger scale throughout the entire canon of the Bible. Egypt to Sinai, Sinai to the promised land, Babylon to the wilderness, the wilderness to restoration. And then death to resurrection and resurrection to new creation. The Exodus is not one story among many in the Bible. It is the template. It's the shape that God keeps returning to.

When Judah was sent into Babylon, Jerusalem was destroyed, they were uprooted, and transported to Babylon. They did not know they were inside the new Exodus. They had no idea. They knew they were in Babylon. They knew the temple was gone. What they could not see was the shape of what God was doing. Isaiah could see it. Prophets could see it, but the people living through it mostly just felt the weight of where they were. Is that a familiar feeling?

Stuck in the Middle of the Story

You don't usually get to see the whole shape of the thing while you're inside of it. Isn't that the irony and the curse of wisdom? Right? You can only take delivery of it in hindsight. The older I get, when I was younger, all these old people used to try to give me advice and give me wisdom. And they just sounded so dumb. I mean, it was what are you guys talking about, do you know? You don't know, you're just old. I'm an expert on life. I'm 15, 18 years old. And now looking back, I realize what it was. Physically, my brain was not developed. What do they say? 25 to 35 if you're neurodivergent, right? And how frustrating it was for all these old guys to try to impart lifetime invaluable direction and wisdom to me. I have a hack for you, a cheat code. You can avoid 20 years of regret if you just listen. The irony is the brain isn't developed enough to receive it. I'm going to ask him about that when I get to heaven. It doesn't make sense to me.

But I'm getting old enough to where I'm starting to understand. Sometimes you don't see things until you're out of them. But that doesn't mean that you have to deny the framework of understanding that you're going through something. That you're still on a mission. That if God is as big as you claim he is, you haven't been forgotten. He still has his eye on you and where you're at right now is part of the plan. Even if it's a bit boring or mundane. Sometimes you feel the wilderness, but you don't see the pattern. And that's a struggle in our faith sometimes. But in reality, that's just what it feels like to be stuck in the middle of the story.

When Israel was in the wilderness, they were stuck in the middle of the story. And so when John opens his gospel up quoting Isaiah 40 with a voice crying in the wilderness preparing the way for the Lord, he's not being poetic. He's telling you the pattern is now running again. It should get you excited. John does that. I love it. And this time, what's so significant about this run of the Passover pattern is it's running at full scale. Which means the new Exodus breaks into history in the Messiah in his death vindicated at the resurrection and it's still going. And that means that you're in it. Love that.

Yeshua in the Wilderness

So Yeshua gets baptized and then Yeshua goes out in the wilderness for 40 days and he embodies Israel and he overcomes the same temptations that Israel faced in the wilderness with the quotes. And we always love identifying Yeshua with Israel because Israel was in the wilderness for 40 years, so he was out in the wilderness for 40 days and he overcame the temptations. But we forget that there was another story in the Exodus where someone was out in the wilderness for 40 years, too. And it wasn't Israel; it happened before the Exodus. It was Moses. Moses was out in the wilderness. What was he doing out there? That's where God prepared him to be the prophet that came into Israel and wrecked the empire.

So you have Yeshua, I believe, doing both, playing both roles. He goes into the wilderness to embody and vindicate Israel through himself. But he also goes there to prepare himself to come back and wreck the empire that's holding people in slavery once again. And when he gets done, notice that his trajectory is not towards Egypt—it's towards Jerusalem. They killed him as a rebel, as a revolutionary because he was one.

Next Year in Jerusalem

So when we participate in the Passover Seder, we have lots of different traditions and they all hold meaning in some regard. But every Passover ends the same way. Right? With one line. L'shanah habah b'Yerushalayim. Right? Do I have it up here? Next year in Jerusalem. We're familiar with this. It's been a tradition for a very long time. At the end of the Seder, we all say: Next year in Jerusalem. People have been saying this at the end of their Seder for 2,000 years. In every language, in every kind of table—they said it in Spain before the expulsion in 1492, said it across the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, and we even find that those words were said in the concentration camps during the Holocaust for Passover.

These are documented accounts of Jewish prisoners holding makeshift Seders with whatever they could find. Scraps of matzah, a cup of something, a haggadah that's recited from memory because those books were gone now. And there they ended with those words: Next year in Jerusalem. Said by people who had every reason to believe they would not survive the week. That is a declaration made by people standing in the middle of the worst thing that had ever happened to them, insisting that the story is not over. That's why we say it. It's not over yet. That God had not lost the thread. That there was still a destination.

Standing in Jerusalem, Looking Further

And then there's this: even before and after, rabbis who actually lived in Jerusalem and may have been born there their entire lives said it, too. People who walked those streets every day and still do today, those who pray at the wall, they ended the Seder in the same way. Next year in Jerusalem is said today while standing in Jerusalem. That is a people who understands that the sentence was never about the coordinates. The physical city was never the full weight of what the longing was carrying. It was always pointing to something no city could contain. A restoration not just of land but of everything. The presence of God back with the people permanently. That's the full fourth cup.

You could also say, or in some variations you'll hear, "Today in Jerusalem" or the renewed Jerusalem. We can just say the new Jerusalem. That's what the concept is. The concept is that when everything is back, when God's presence is fully here, that is the city of gold. Yeah, it's not talking about, "Oh, it'd be nice. I'd like to be there in Jerusalem next year." And if we are, guess what we'll say at the end of the Seder? Next year in Jerusalem. Because we know the story's not done yet. It was always pointing to something that no city could contain. You cannot arrive at the destination of that sentence by getting on a plane. You cannot arrive at it at all. Not yet. And that's the point.

Not Yet Home

And that is where we live. The church, followers of Yeshua, followers of Jesus as their king. Not in Egypt, not at the sea, somewhere in the wilderness between what God has already done and what he is not yet finished. And the sentence that names that place honestly—I guess you could say—is not yet home. Not yet. You know where you are, you know where you're going. You're just not there yet.

Paul writes about this in Romans 8. He says: "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing, groaning for the revealing of the sons of God." Look at that. It's not just you waiting. It's all of creation. I thought it was just about me. All of creation is waiting, not just you. Not just the congregation. The whole created order is in the wilderness groaning, not yet home.

Groaning with All Creation

He continues: "For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies." First fruits. Paul chose that word on purpose, right? The first fruits offering in the Torah was the first portion of the harvest brought to the temple. It was not the whole harvest; it was the first portion. It was a declaration that more is on its way. The gift of the Spirit is not the end. It is the first fruits of what is coming.

The Down Payment of Something Larger

The down payment of something much larger. Which means the groaning Paul is describing is not a sign that something went wrong. It's a sign of the story not being finished. Creation knows it's not home yet. And creation is reading the situation correctly. That feeling that something is not yet resolved, not yet complete, not yet what it's supposed to be.

Sometimes we find ourselves in life so preoccupied with fear, with uncertainty, or with boredom with how God is using us that we think we may have been pushed to the sidelines. That we're watching everyone else walk through stories—what we believe is God's storyline. Guys, you're in the middle of the story, too. You're still participating. It's happening.

I feel like I've spoken to enough people here to know that a lot of us are carrying something right now that doesn't feel resolved. Especially in this chapter of humanity that we find ourselves in, right? Something in your family, something in your finances, something in your health, something in maybe your sense of calling that feels unfinished or you don't know when or if it will ever get resolved.

And the temptation—the real temptation—is to conclude that the unfinished thing, whatever that would be, means that you're outside of the story of God. You're outside of this story right now. That you look around and you see the people who have it together as being the ones that God is actually using right now. And maybe you just feel like you're in the waiting room, ready to participate. Anybody? Yeah, sometimes. When's God actually going to use me?

And that type of thinking is not simply backwards. It's completely backwards from the God that we read about in the Bible. Like completely. The wilderness generation was not in the waiting room. They were at the story. That was the story. And the unfinished thing that you may be carrying right now is not evidence that you're behind or you're not being used or that you're not functioning in the capacity that God has called you to. It's evidence that you're in the middle of something God is not finished yet. And that's a very different way to reframe yourself as what Paul calls a soldier of Christ. You're running the race. Run the race. He's wanting you to cross the finish line so you complete it.

You're Already in the Story

In every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt. And I think for a lot of people, especially people who have been around Torah stuff, Hebrew Roots stuff for any length of time, when I used to hear that I always kind of thought it functioned as a little bit of a guilt trip. You must imagine yourself as if you left Egypt. And that was me. Like, I wasn't taking Passover seriously enough. So I'm sitting at the Seder. And I had to like close my eyes and pretend like I was leaving Egypt. And I'm kind of holding my staff and I'm walking out of Egypt and the winds hit my legs a little bit because I'm all girded up, right? And that's the whole thing, right? And you got to take a deep breath because I'm leaving Egypt with the power of God and I have to take this thing really seriously because I'm a serious Christian and because if I don't look serious in front of all these other people beside me they might judge me for not being serious on such a serious thing.

Oh, we got a lot of people who have voices in their head, huh? Okay, good. It's a good company. That's not what this is doing, nor was it the purpose. The rabbis who imagined what this tradition would function as were not trying to guilt you into having a better commemoration of Passover. They are telling you something true about your actual situation right now. You are not being asked to imaginatively project yourself into a story that happened to someone else. You are being told that you're already in the story and that you've never been outside of it.

You are the wilderness generation. You have left Egypt and that means you're in the wilderness. The wilderness generation, the people between Egypt and the promised land. They were not the people who missed the real action and had to wander around for 40 years as a kind of divine timeout because they complained too much. Like, no, Yahweh did not put them in the wilderness because he needed somewhere to keep them to figure out whatever he needed to do next. It was the plan. It was the plan.

The Wilderness Is Where God Works

The covenant at Sinai happened where? The wilderness, not in the promised land. The tabernacle, the portable dwelling of God's presence, was built in the wilderness. The manna, the water from the rock, the pillar that never left them—all of it was in the wilderness. The people who never made it across the Jordan were not failures, if you will. They were the generation Yahweh needed between Egypt and the one that came next. And he was with them the whole way.

You are that generation. That is your calling. The new Exodus has begun. Messiah has come, the blood has been applied, the sea has been crossed at the resurrection. And we're in the wilderness between the resurrection and new creation. We're between the third cup and the fourth cup right now. Between what Yahweh has already done and what we know is not finished yet. That is not the waiting room. That is the place where Yahweh does some of his most important work. It's where identity gets formed through the mission. It's where the pillar leads. It's where manna falls every morning because yesterday's provision is not enough for today and God knows that and shows up anyway.

God gives his people rituals so they do not forget who they are while they are in the wilderness. Every element of the Seder—the matzah, the bitter herbs, the four cups, the questions, the answers—is God saying to his people, remember where you came from? Remember where you are and remember where you are going. Do not lose the thread.

You're Not Waiting to Be Part of the Story

I guess I just felt someone here today needed to hear the words: you're not waiting to be a part of the story. You're already in it. This congregation, this Saturday morning, 4 days before Passover, right? It's not an intermission. This is the actual story and God is still out front.

Revelation 21: John sees a new heaven and a new earth. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be with them as their God. That's Exodus 6:7. Word for word. The fourth promise, the fourth cup. The story that started with expulsion from the garden ends with the presence of God filling everything permanently.

John says he saw no temple in the city. And I love this detail. He says, because the Lord God almighty and the lamb are its temple. You don't need a building to contain the presence when the presence is everywhere. Heaven and earth overlapping again. Eden's restored. Except it's not a garden now. It's a city. Because God doesn't just restore what was lost, he always brings it forward to something larger than it was before. Some of us know that very intimately.

The Exodus Is Still Going

The Exodus that started in Egypt is still going. The pattern is still running. The new Exodus that broke into history in the death and the resurrection of Messiah is still going. And it ends there. In the fourth cup. In the fourth promise being kept. The fourth cup being poured. The presence back with the people. This is where we're going.

And so Wednesday night you are going to sit at a table, hopefully celebrating Passover with us or at home. You're going to read from the Haggadah. You're going to eat matzah and bitter herbs and you're going to go through the order of the Seder. And again, at some point we're going to say, in every generation, each person is obligated to. Don't let that be a ritual. Let it be true. You left Egypt.

Maybe not the Egypt of Pharaoh and brick quotas. But whatever system you had convinced that going back was safer than going forward. Whatever thing had you in the psychology of slavery. Reaching for the predictable scarcity when the unknown abundance was right in front of you the entire time. Whatever had you standing at the shore looking back at the water instead of following the pillar. The blood was put on the door. The declaration was made. The seas opened. And we walked out into the wilderness. And the pillar is still out in front.

Say It Like You Mean It

And at the very end of the Seder, after the songs, after the fourth cup, after everything, you're going to say the words *lashanah haba*. And when we say that, I encourage you to say it like you mean it. Not as a tradition. Not as a ritual closing line of the whole Seder. But as a people who know where their story's going, as a people who have the hope that scripture talks about in Yeshua, as a people who have read Revelation 21 and know the fourth cup gets poured. As a people who are not home yet and are completely sure that they're on their way.

That's who we're called to be. That's how we show our faithfulness on this journey. That's how we run the race. And the race is hard sometimes. The race has a lot of distractions and hills and stuff. The race has a lot of stuff that would convince you that maybe God's not working with me anymore, that God doesn't have me, or that God's not right. I'm outside of God's plan. I'm lost.

You're not lost. You're just going through the curriculum. You're just learning something right now that God is going to use in the next phase of your journey. Keep looking ahead. Do not let go of your hope. And together we will say.

Come to Prayer

Please stand with me as we conclude with worship today. And if you need prayer for anything during this time, guys, we have a prayer team on either side of the stage and you can just walk up and you will have someone with complete empathy to pray with you and lift you up before the Father. And it can be about something that maybe was involved in today's message or something else that's going on in your life. And maybe you have something you'd like to leave here today and not pick back up.

Come Down to the Altar

As it's appropriate to come down to this symbolic altar here. And if you feel compelled to come down and symbolically leave something there and stand back up and walk away, man, that's a big step and it's an appropriate time to do that. You can make a decision today to start that journey to get out of the rut and continue the story. Amen.

Avinu Malkeinu: A Prayer for Power

Avinu Malkeinu, our Father, our King. Father, we thank you for this opportunity to dive into your word and to prepare our hearts for Passover and the story and the pattern that we are in the middle of right now. Father, I ask that the Holy Spirit that you say is within us even now, the one that scripture says had the power to raise Yeshua from the dead—that it would give us power and authority to not only act boldly in a world that doesn't know it's in the story, too, but also be courageous enough to look at our own lives, to look at our own hearts, to look at the things that are blocking us from being the witnesses that we need to be and being who we need to be in this story. Father, I thank you for your grace and your mercy. I thank you for your love. And I thank you for the power to change and the power to grow. In Yeshua's name we pray. Amen.

Encounter and Blessing

Thank you, Lord.

Lord, we want to encounter you today.

Thank you, Father, that we know who you are. You are such a good and faithful God. That is who you are, God. Lord, we lift up our worship to you. Lord, we thank you for all that you do. Lord, no matter if we've run, Lord, you always find me. So Lord, we're going to fall down at the feet of you, Lord. Fall down at the glory of your glorious presence. Lord, we just thank you for this wonderful day. We just lift up our praise and our worship to you. In Yeshua's name, amen.

Come sing the Shema with me.

Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. Blessed is the name of his glorious kingdom for all eternity.

May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his countenance towards you and give you his peace.