Exodus 12:21-32

When we feel that sense of discomfort when reading the Bible, I find it sometimes helpful not to run away from it, but instead to lean into it a bit.

So we're going to be looking at the passage under three headings this morning.

And the first one's mainly thinking about the discomfort.

The first one is the idea of judgment.

It's worth asking why this whole passage around the Passover and the death of the firstborn feels uncomfortable to us.

After all, lots of people in history, maybe even a majority of people in history, would see this as cause for celebration.

Wouldn't have a problem with it.

I think it feels uncomfortable because it jars with the picture we often have of God as gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.

And here he seems to kill an awful lot of people.

Sometimes people try solving that problem by imagining a gap between God in the Old Testament and God in the New Testament and what we see with Jesus.

But that doesn't really work, because God being gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, is a quote from a couple of chapters later in Exodus.

God famously saying he doesn't desire the death of the wicked, but rather that they might turn from their wickedness and live.

That's from the Old Testament too, that's Ezekiel.

We can't get rid of the discomfort by setting the Old Testament against Jesus.

But I think our instinct that there's something off here is right.

In Isaiah 28, God describes judgment as his strange work and his alien task.

meaning he sees it doesn't really fit with his character.

At the midweek service on Thursday this last week, we were in Hosea 11, where God has been telling his people that he would judge them for the way they've been unfaithful to him, that he would cut them off.

And by chapter 11, he gets to the point where he says, although they richly deserve it, he can't bring himself to finish them off.

Instead, he will restore them and purify them and bring them back to him.

Judgment doesn't fit easily with God's character.

But what we see here in Exodus 11-12 is one of the times he does judge.

So we need to look at it in a bit more detail.

An interesting angle to take on it, which may or may not float your boat, is there's a whole lot of theory out there about just war and whether violence is ever right.

It was in the news a lot when America invaded Iran that failed almost all the criteria.