Voice of the Kingfisher speaks out …from a different perspective
by Elinor Montgomery
From Planned Extinction to the Passover
(Exodus – Chapters One To Twelve)
Chapter Twelve (part two)
October 14- 17, 2005
The Lord instructed the people of Israel to keep the day of Passover as a memorial and a feast to Him. It was to be kept before the people’s understanding, for if the significance of the Passover for the church today were to be lost, then the church would flounder from lack of understanding. If we honor what God has done for His people with a feast to Him, then we can hardly lose the meaning and importance of the Passover for us, today. A feast, in the natural, points to a feast of truth in the spiritual. Unfortunately, religion has turned Passover into a religious holiday, where the practice is used for religion rather than for the purpose of gaining understanding. The institutional traditional Christian church understands very little at all about the Passover, other than having a false perception of it as a feast belonging to Judaism.
Judaism honors the Feast of Passover while, at the same time, it has lost the incredible gift of life given to God’s people at Passover by continuing to refuse to eat the flesh of the perfect sacrifice of the Lamb provided by God, Himself. By continuing in religion, instead of accepting the truth, the nation Israel refuses, to this day, to burn up the head, the legs, and the entrails. Christianity is no better with the Laodicean church lying dormant within the religious tomb of the institutions. Both Judaism and Christianity have failed to understand the message of unleavened bread, which the Lord gives us in this passage. Centuries later, Jesus identified that leaven as the leaven of the Pharisees, which represented their pride and the legalism of their religious practices, blinding them to the truth when He stood face to face with them as the Word made flesh. Jesus made it clear that He was the truth, and His flesh was as the flesh of the perfect spotless lamb, which Israel was to eat at the Passover before her exodus from the captivity of Egypt. What this passage is saying prophetically to the church is that she must feed only on the truth in order to build a wall of protection between herself and all of the religious systems, which will try to prevent her exodus from this world so that she can pass over to the kingdom of the next.
A week has seven days. The Lord says that there is not one of the seven days when leaven is an acceptable food, either on the first day, the last day or on any day in between. Church is not a religious occasion; it is a lifetime commitment of service. If we make it only a Sunday religious practice, then that is all we will have to carry with us for the rest of the week. This is what allows politicians to isolate their faith from action, and to relegate it to a Sunday religious practice, without it having any bearing on their moral conduct for the remainder of the week. The religion of Christianity in America perfectly suits Satan, for it means we will have what we deserve, which are religious leaders of no purity or strength when it comes to keeping God in our heritage. Instead of getting rid of the leaven, it resides with them every day of the week.
We are commanded to begin with the first day, when making the passover from captivity to liberty. This segment of chapter twelve points prophetically to the first day as being the day Jesus arose from the grave. From that moment on, religion had been defeated, and men were once again set free by the truth. But our freedom from slavery to the religious system of the world would depend on our feeding only on His truth from that first day forward. We are to never again return, or even desire to return, to what was the religion of the priesthood of the day (in Jesus’ day the priesthood was called the Pharisees). To make the departure, only to yearn for the pews again, where we can become laity instead of priests for Jesus, is comparable to Israel’s desire to return to the comforts and food of Egypt. The Israelites seemed to care less for the freedom found only in the truth of God’s Word than they cared about satisfying the flesh with the things of this world for which they lusted. The Lord was very strict in His message about leaven. Get it right on the first day so that all the other days will fall in line and leaven will be removed for the entire week, right up until the dawn of the seventh day.
If we miss the importance of the prophecy of Passover in Exodus, we are quite likely to feel comfortable in our religious pews and never partake of the blessing of the Passover of the Lord for His people. This is the moment in time when it became possible for the wickedness of man in the Garden to be reversed from the curse of death, giving him a second opportunity to have eternal life, as a child of spiritual Israel. We can wonder in disbelief at Adam and Eve’s incredible stupidity in disobeying God’s commandments, yet while seeing the speck of blindness in their eyes, we fail to see the log of spiritual blindness in our own eyes. The log will keep us, like the speck kept them, from obeying the Word, which declared there was to be no leaven on the first day, so that there might be none on the dawn of the final Day of Judgment, the dawn of the seventh day.
We need to get the importance of this message into our heads, or we will view the Passover as just another story in the history of the nation Israel, having no meaningful application to our lives today. Those who are being taught that Passover belongs to Judaism, are being greatly deceived, for nothing could be further from the truth. Judaism, which carried out the practices of the Passover, never received it when it rejected the Passover Lamb of God. Christianity, which ignores it, has led its adherents back to the captivity of Romanism (Babylonianism), as though the Passover of the cross had never really happened for them.
The Passover of Jesus, the Passover Lamb, is the defining moment in history when the curse of death is broken by God, Himself, so that man might once again have the breath of life within him. That is what the Passover is all about – restoring the breath of life, imparted by the Spirit of life to mankind, which had rejected it in the Garden, and was doomed to die without it. The control of religion, which was first introduced in the Garden as a belief system based on a lie, had to be broken, and only Jesus could remove that control. The purpose of the church is to feed the flesh of the Lamb to as many as have ears to hear the voice of the bride and the Spirit calling men to choose truth and to return to God. If we eat the flesh of Truth (Jesus), we will once again walk only in obedience to the Word and will never again move about this world, stumbling in the darkness and blindness of religion.
We will have no dependency upon the religious rules surrounding tithes, institutional church attendance, baptism, institutional priestly authority and tongues by believing that they have anything to do with salvation. Such doctrine is the product of religion and not of truth. Jesus has purchased us completely, as His servants, now meant to serve only Him in faithfulness to Him and His Word, and never to religious organizations. Everything we are and have belongs to Him. We are required to release it all to His authority to do as He will with our lives and possessions. We cannot serve two masters – both Him and the father of religion, called Satan. Our salvation has nothing to do with our ability to speak in tongues, but rather has everything to do with our relationship with Jesus, where we become as one flesh with Him in the truth. Those who speak in tongues often have no understanding of what the Lord is telling us here about eating no leaven and the significance of this message for the Passover. The Passover is the cut-off point for religion within the house of spiritual Israel when it comes out of its captivity to this world to enter into its inheritance in the family of God within the kingdom of heaven.
Take note it is always the Lord speaking here, and has been the Lord ever since Moses asked how he should describe this God to the Egyptians. God told Moses to refer to Him as ‘I AM WHO I AM’. This was the name He chose to use to describe Who He was to the Egyptians, but, to the Israelites He was the Lord God of the fathers – the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He was the Lord God of the Hebrew children, but from that moment forward, when Moses questioned whether or not the Egyptians and the Israelites would believe the voice of the messenger, He continued speaking as the Lord. All believers must recognize Jesus as the Lord of their lives and the true God, Who was also the same God as that of the fathers and of Moses.
There is no replacement theory here, but rather a message of the crossover that took place at the cross, when Israel was crossed over to become spiritual Israel. The Lord was with Israel from the day she saw the judgment coming upon Egypt, but not upon her. Her freedom from judgment depended upon keeping the commandments of the Passover, which speak today prophetically to the church of spiritual Israel. This is all about the Lord preparing a spiritual nation for that great and awesome day when she will pass over from this world to the kingdom of the next world. In all of this, the Lord of the Exodus is One and the same as the Lord of our salvation, Who came into the world as the Son of man and the Son of God to set the spiritual captives free from the curse of religion that leads to death.
Both first and seventh days are days of Holy Convocation. The day of rest in the Garden, the seventh day, becomes as one with the day of resurrection, the first day when the work of salvation is completed. There is nothing more that we can do to add to God’s work, for we worship the Creator Who has done it all. There is, however, one thing we are allowed to do on the Sabbath, or the seventh day of rest, which is to prepare spiritual food. There is no limitation when it comes to feeding on the flesh of Jesus, which represents feeding upon the truth. Did He not allow His disciples to eat the grain of the field on the Sabbath, much to the anger of the Pharisees? Jesus declared that the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath. Salvation in the truth knows no boundaries, nor does the preparation of spiritual food required for the benefit of others’ salvation.
Getting understanding into man is the most important thing the true church can do: And in all your getting, get understanding (Proverbs 4:7). It means, for instance, understanding the spiritual context in which the story of the Good Samaritan was told by Jesus. Satan will twist the message into a social one that makes the Samaritan into a ‘Martha’s-table’ type of caring for the body’s needs, rather than looking after and feeding the spiritual needs of man. The Lord is pointing out that understanding is needed here about what He considers important, and it most certainly will be at odds with what the world sees as being important. The secular world and the religious world of institutional Christianity, our Egypt of today, have no in-depth spiritual understanding of the difference between leaven and truth.
The Lord next jumps ahead to the future, to show that Israel, at the time of her spiritual Passover, will be a house made up of armies. It must be remembered that this event, as described in the book of Exodus, is but the pattern for a future event when a spiritual battle will take place. They are the spiritual armies of David, which will fight in this battle, as the voice of truth for spiritual Israel, against the wickedness of Satan’s armies of witchcraft. His armies will try, until the very end, to keep Israel from moving freely out of his control and into the kingdom of God. The world under Satan will come against the bride in an all-out-battle for the souls of men. The bride, being in the line of David, is part of his army fighting its way toward the inheritance of the Davidic, king-priest line, the keys of which were handed by Jesus to Peter, as the symbol of apostolic church custodianship. They were never handed to any religious system, even that which calls itself by the name of Christianity.
We are taken to the time of the fourteenth day, which speaks of the fourteen years Jacob worked for his brides, Leah and Rachel, who represent both the nation and the spiritual nation. The fourteen days speak of the work of Jesus being completed at the appointed time to bring forth His bride in the evening, when the Feast of Passover is to be eaten, in order to make her ready for entering the kingdom. She is required to eat only the pure food of the Flesh in this world that dishes out religion, as did Daniel and his friends eat in purity, millennia prior to the bride’s time. They had a better and healthier look than the others, who had not eaten as they had eaten of the better food.
Daniel’s choice of food is prophetic of the same kind of leaven-free food that the Lord commanded the Israelites to eat at the time of the Passover. This prophecy had been sealed in time, but is now opened to the bride’s understanding so that she, too, might eat as the Israelites ate, followed by Daniel and his three friends, who made the same good choice. The bride must choose to eat in purity, a command the Lord requires her to obey, just as it was once required of Adam and Eve when they knew nothing but truth. The consequences of death for this pair in the Garden were the same consequences as those among the Israelites who dared not to obey the Lord on the eve of Passover. They will be the same consequences for the church, which might choose to eat other than the food commanded for the evening before passing from this world into the kingdom of the next. Had Daniel not chosen as he did, it is questionable as to whether or not he would have survived the jaws and teeth of the lions in the den. After all, the lions represented the Babylonian Empire, the people of which fed only on religion, as would those serving under the other three empires of the Babylonian system yet to come, giving them no power against the sword of truth.
There is a seven-day period looming before us, known as the Great Tribulation, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first day, at evening time. It will be rich in fulfilled prophecy, for it is the culmination of twenty-one days of prophecy for Israel, ending with the tribulation. The tribulation period follows the bride’s separation from religion. If she does not make the break, which will see no leaven or religion in her houses, then the offending persons, whether of the nation or a stranger among them, will be cut off from the inheritance. No message could be stronger or clearer about leaven, or religion. The Lord mentions it ten times in this passage, at the same time He is completing the ten plagues upon the Egyptians in their religious idolatry with all their gods. The Lord will show no favoritism between native born and strangers who all must come before the cross. Emphasis upon emphasis have been written into Scripture – “You shall eat nothing leavened; in all your habitations you shall eat unleavened bread (Exodus 12:20).”
A very distinct pattern was given to the people surrounding Passover. It was an occasion named by the Lord, and it was specifically in connection with the firstborn of Israel, being passed over by the destroyer of firstborns. This is all about people who have been born once into the world being as the firstborns of Egypt, a distinction separating them from the born again sons of God who become new creations through the Spirit of life. It is the promise of a perfect Lamb, being supplied by the God of Israel, which must be killed so that the blood would bring salvation to the firstborn of spiritual Israel. The firstborn of Israel, spiritually speaking, is the new creation. Without evidence of the shed blood of the Lamb on the doorposts of the spiritual house, the body, death was to be a sure thing for the firstborn, no matter what the nation was to which the house or body belonged. Surely, the message of the Passover has been missed by a nation that knew its choosing but never understood what it meant to be in covenant with God.
The obedience of the nation at Passover was never in evidence again. Once the nation received her physical freedom within the boundaries of the Promised Land, as America has received today, it said “Thanks, but no thanks” to the Law and to keeping God as Ruler over His chosen domain. At the same time, it has said “Yes” to man’s ruler-ship in God’s place. The empires of the world always will demand the rights of liberalism or freedom to worship and to do as they please, regardless of what God’s Law says. Therefore the two become incompatible, with the spiritual battle becoming a battle to the point of annihilation. Liberalism produces multiculturalism and multiculturalism produces the death of a nation under God. Solomon was the father of multiculturalism within a covenanting nation that had no concept or understanding of the meaning of the Passover of God’s people from Egypt, before entering into the Promised Land. It is the most specific picture the Lord God could give of the work of Jesus on the cross, giving us the blood for the lintels of our lives along with the promise of salvation from the curse of death.
It was to be with the strike of hyssop that the blood would be applied to the doorpost. Hyssop is a small bush, the leaves and flowers of which were used in connection with purification and inner cleansing. The sour wine was given to Jesus with hyssop on the cross. It were as though the world thought it could compromise His purity with sour wine, the symbol of the impurity of the blood of man, which could never do the work He did on the cross. The burning bush that was not consumed might well have been a hyssop bush springing out of a rocky crag, showing the purity of truth as the antidote for judgment. The purity, combined with the blood, which is basic to escaping the fire judgment, speaks of the required purity of the bride, or the Jewish 144,000 witnesses to the truth, as described in Revelation. If the winds of judgment are to be held back until these witnesses receive the seal of God’s protection on their foreheads, then we need to take note that the winds are beginning to blow. We had better get our act together and get ourselves into the right place with God’s will for our lives – very quickly and very soon.
No one was to depart through the doors of their house until morning. The protection must be on the Israelites throughout the dark hours of the tribulation at which time the light of the Bridegroom and the bride will be seen no more in Babylon. It was the very same nation of Israel, which chose God’s protection at the time of the Passover, yet, rejected the blood of the Lamb of God, when He came to fulfill the spiritual reality of the Passover. They chose to be outside of His protection at that time, and both nation and spiritual nation are choosing to be outside of His protection at this time. They are failing to obey this very easy, simple-to-keep commandment of God in this darkest of times, the nighttime of the history of the world. The bride will never be caught outside God’s protection in the darkness when morning comes, or her position in the house of Israel will be lost to death forever.
This is an ordinance meant for all time, written in stone by the King of the universe and will be the plumb line forever. Being taken out of captivity and into the Promised Land is but the pattern of being taken out of captivity to death and into the eternal dwelling place of the kingdom. The rules of Passover apply today, in exactly the same way as they applied to the pattern of yesterday. It shall be repeated from generation to generation so that the service of the Israelites will not be lost upon you and me. Our service to others requires the passing on of this understanding so that, in preparing the way for Jesus, there might be the light of truth in their lives, instead of the darkness of religion by which they are ensnared without understanding.