Breathe

It is ironic that Passover and Easter are nearly upon us starting on Wednesday, April 8th, 2020 and Sunday, April 12^th, 2020 respectively. Passover is essentially the celebration of God delivering the Israelites out of the land of Egypt via the tenth and final plague in which the Destroyer is sent to strike/slaughter the first born of the land that do not have the blood of the Passover lamb over their doors. Make no mistake, the use of this language is meant to convey that not only was death coming…it would strike or be painful. It would be the destroyers plague (Exodus 12:13). We are not told the exact vehicle of death but it will need to move through the air in the land. I imagine suffocating to death is extremely uncomfortable and painful. 

Exodus 12:21-23 Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, “Go at once and select the animals for your families and slaughter the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it into the blood in the basin and put some of the blood on the top and on both sides of the door frame. None of you shall go out of the door of your house until morning. When the Lord goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the door frame and will pass over that doorway, and he will not permit the destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down.

Stealing one’s breath away…just as the cross robbed Jesus of oxygen. This happened because could no longer take breaths with his body weight being suspended from his arms. He would’ve needed to raise himself with his arms each time he needed to take a breath until exhaustion and final suffocation. The is how crucifixion kills.

Mark 15:37 With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last (breath).

As we see Passover approach this year, I see tens of thousands essentially dying through a similar mechanism. Inability to breathe. Breath. The very thing God breathed into man to give him life in Genesis 2:7.

Genesis 2:7 Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Breath of life or Rûach / רוּחַ in Hebrew or πνεῦμα / pneuma in Greek from which we get the word pneumatic and pneumonia. Pneumonia, the very thing inflicted upon those that contract the Coronavirus. The COVID-19 virus itself isn’t the thing killing people right now. It’s the pneumonia that is filling up their lungs and suffocating them by inhibitiing the exchange of CO2 waste with O2. Pneuma and rûach also refer to the spirit of God or the Holy Spirit.

These ironies are not lost on me today sitting in my home writing this under a State mandated quarantine. The paradox of sitting in our homes two weeks before Passover 2020 waiting for a plague of suffocation to pass over us. Do we need to paint the blood of a paschal lamb above our door frames? No, we don’t, Christ came to abrogate that need in the Jewish law. Jesus is the Passover Lamb or sacrifice that the Paschal lamb of Exodus foreshadowed. Enough of the ancient irony lets get back to the modern ones…

This year, perhaps nowhere so much as in Christian (and Jewish) homes –will we surely note, at least in our minds, how different this Passover/Easter is from all others in our lives. In the shadow of an airborne death a resurrection from death or slavery will be celebrated. Death brought by a destroyer of life…a plague. Celebrations of  freedom and renewed life brought back from death by the Spirit (pneuma/ruach) of God in both cases. God is reliable in His promises. If he has said it, it will come to pass.

For many, Passover and Easter will be a much smaller and intimate affair in 2020. Indeed, according to the latest US government directives aimed at fighting the COVID-19 coronavirus, gatherings of more than 10 people are strictly forbidden. In Pennsylvania where I live some counties aren't even allowing people to leave their homes just as the Lord told the Israelites in Egypt. 

With Americans not known for their prolific birth rates, that means about the number people that can easily constitute an small immediate family with perhaps one or two secondary relatives or grandparents. A family, the basic building block of a Church. It must just be a coincidence that we're so heavily focused now on the very unit that God told the Israelites to keep within the home during the time of the first Passover. A family during the 10th Plague. The death of the first-born. A plague that entered the unmarked homes of both non-believers and believers alike that did not obey God. A plague that entered through the air and then departed taking with it the breath of the first-born. The exact medium of transmission of a virus. A virus that inevitably stop one’s breath.

The irony that for at least a few weeks this virus is freeing at least some of us from labor/fiscal slavery or it frees us from life completely through death. It is temporarily relieving the burden of some of our debts in the postponing of taxes until July 15. The offsetting of a debt by the direct payment of an unearned income. Just as Christ did on the Cross. Settling a debt we could not pay nor did we deserve.

Many of us will cease to gather at least for the time of Passover and Easter to remain protected within our homes with our families. A large communal gathering won’t be safe this year. This modern-day plague is sending us back to olden days, back to our roots....house churches. It is literally making us go full-blown Old Testament and 1st Century Christianity. 

In keeping with this idea of revisiting our past and our roots I posit these last ideas. This year life and death will resonate. It will resonate with the story of the 10th plague that killed the first-born of the land. A plague inflicted by God via the Destroyer on the Egyptians. A plague that would force Pharaoh to free the Israelites. But that freedom came with a cost and started with what can only be viewed as a quarantine in the Jewish homes. What came after was the believer’s ultimate freedom and deliverance once the price was paid.

The story of Easter is the story of an imprisonment in sin that culminates in the death of Jesus only to be overturned in the freedom of the Resurrection. Death no longer holds sway over us. The prison that was death no longer has any control over the believer of the Resurrection. Jesus submitted His body to what looked like the prison of death on a tree to pay a debt we could not. It would've been a permanent terminal quarantine for a mere man but was but a temporary quarantine for Jesus’ physical body. A body that would then be placed in a what appeared to be a permanent grave only to be lifted on the third day by the Spirit. The Pneuma. The Breath of God.

Even an atheist can see that there are enough paradoxes here that it suggests there might have been a plan. A plan that would’ve taken the of power of a Sovereign Being to orchestrate as it affects people worldwide in the same way. I suggest that power was from a Sovereign loving God. A sovereign loving God that allows me to rest and breathe easy at night because I know He’s in control of all things good or bad. The Old and New Testament in the Bible told me as much. The Bible which is a book of words that were Divinely breathed out.

2 Timothy 3:16-17 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.