Building on the Foundation

  In Exodus 12:15, as it reads in most Bible versions, we find a puzzling statement. God commanded His people, “Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses. For whoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel” (NKJV). “On the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses.” This wording makes it sound as if we should deleaven our houses on the First Day of Unleavened Bread, a Holy Day! And yet, a few verses later, we discover, “For seven days no leaven shall be found in your houses, since whoever eats what is leavened, that same person shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a stranger or a native of the land” (Ex. 12:19). If no leaven is to be found in our houses for seven days, then obviously it cannot be found in our houses on the First Day, either! It must already be gone by then. So what’s the meaning of v. 15? It becomes a little...

  Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread mark the beginning of God’s plan of salvation. For ancient Israel, this feast launched a journey out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. For us today, it portrays the beginning of a journey out of this wicked world and into God’s Kingdom. This journey cannot begin without one vital step: separation. God separates and distinguishes His people from those around them. Had there been no separation or distinction between the Israelites and the Egyptians, there could have been no deliverance for Israel. If there’s no separation or distinction between us and the world around us, there can be no deliverance for us, either. Indeed, the whole Feast of Passover/Unleavened Bread, from beginning to end, is all about separation! We might go so far as to call it the feast of separation. Making a Difference For ancient Israel, the process of separation started during the months prior to Passover. After the first three plagues, God spoke through Moses a...

  In 1 Corinthians 11, the apostle Paul admonished us regarding the Passover, “Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (1 Cor. 11:27-28). This word “examine” is the same one translated “test” in 1 Thes. 5:21: “Test all things; hold fast what is good.” It’s Strong’s # G1381, dokimazo , and it means to try, test, examine, prove, or scrutinize. So before Passover, each one of us must scrutinize and examine his or her own heart, to avoid partaking in an unworthy manner. Among the Corinthians, failure to do this brought about God’s judgment: “For this reason many are weak and sick among you, and many sleep” (1 Cor. 11:30). Paul added, “For if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged” (v. 31). By this time, most of us have probably begun de-leavening our houses in anticipation of the Feast of Unleaven...

WARNING: Includes disturbing content. May not be appropriate for children. Parental discretion is advised. The world has gone mad. Men pretend to be women, and women to be men, going so far as to mutilate themselves and get their own genitals chopped off. Sick, twisted perverts in the public school system convince innocent children that they were born the wrong gender, and pressure them to be castrated and mutilated. These abominations are the natural outcome of the feminist movement. From the beginning, Satan has sought to blur the lines between men and women, to pervert the gender roles that God created, to convince men to be feminine and women to be masculine. When God finished creating the world, He looked on “everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). But Satan’s goal is, and always has been, to pervert and destroy God’s good creation. Thus, the cancer of perversion killing our society today has been around awhile. Neither human nature nor Satan’s natur...