Sin disconnected him from God, so his spirit did not carry the glory and life of God. His soul becomes filled with fear, guilt, shame and then he began to conceal, cover and hide himself, and all his relationships became shattered. And of course there were further consequences physically. Eventually he died. A curse came into the earth, and we face the problem that we have. It's a serious and a big problem. It's not going to go away easily, but God has given a remedy for it, so we saw - the last thing that we looked at last week was that God established a remedy for sin. God established a remedy for sin. We saw in Hebrews 9:22 that without the shedding of blood, there can be no cleansing of sin, so if God said here's the law and here's the consequence, He also provided the remedy, and we saw the remedy was the shedding of blood. So I want to pick that up now and go a little bit further now, and look at how the blood of Jesus is applied. I can't do it all in one session. I will spread it out over two because the work of the cross is absolutely stunning in its completion to help us. It's absolutely stunning in its completion to help us, so I thought I'd start to talk about the application just at this point, and some foundational things to applying the blood of Jesus.
First of all we look in Exodus, Chapter 12. Now this is the first place in the Bible where it talks about a particular feast or a particular occasion, when God required the people of Israel to shed blood, the blood of a lamb. It says in Exodus, Chapter 12, Verse 21, pick out and take lambs for yourself according to your families, kill the Passover lamb. And you shall take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood in the basin, strike the lintel, strike the doorposts, put blood on it. Now He said, and when you put the blood on it, stay in behind that covering that's provided, and when the Angel of Death comes through you will be protected, you will not be harmed, because he will see the blood.
Now imagine you were a Hebrew on that day and you knew, having watched all the miracles and plagues that had come through, that God is well able to do what He said, and then shortly a plague is going to come. It's going to take out the members of the family, eldest members of all the families. Now you've got a loved son, he's the eldest first born, and you also are the first born. You are going to do something. Now what are you going to do? Are you going to do it because, you know, this is oh well, you know, God loves us and he's asked us to do this? You're not going to do it for that reason. You're going to do it for one reason alone; you're absolutely convinced that there's consequences if you don't. Think about that.
You see if we pretend there's no consequences, we won't see the need for the remedy, but when you see the consequences - here's the consequences. If they did not apply the blood, death came into the home, and they didn't have windows in those days so what would have happened then is they would have heard the screams and shouts as family after family were hit by God's judgement on each of them, and the only thing that stood between them and that judgement was the blood, which they had to apply. Now I think you would be pretty keen to do a good job of applying the blood. I reckon you'd make sure you got all the blood you could out of that lamb. You'd get it in a big basin, you wouldn't let any of it go, get that hyssop there, and dad would go out there - notice dad, the head of the home had to apply the blood for the whole family. And you get out there, you'd make sure there's a heap of blood on that lintel! And you'd make sure there's a heap of blood on the door-posts! And you know who'd be helping you make sure? Your family and particularly your eldest son! [Laughter] Dad! You do a good job. I don't think there's enough! I don't think the Angel of Death... Put more on! Get the blood on the lintel and the door-posts!