Jews around the world are celebrating Passover in a different way this year. It’s not just the number of people at the event (immediate family only). It’s not just the distractions from the pandemic.
It’s the fact that, as Jim Beckerman writes in USA Today, “Passover is a remembrance of a plague.”
The tenth plague led Pharaoh to release the Jews from
captivity in Egypt. Prior to that night, they had been enslaved for four
hundred years (Acts 7:6).
Few in those centuries could have imagined that the Jews would become a nation through whom God would bless the world (Genesis 12:3) and would be a people still remembering their Passover twenty centuries later. Nor could they have imagined that God would bring through them a Messiah who would offer salvation to us all (John 3:16).
That’s because the past is no predictor of the future.
Consider another example.
The past is no predictor of the future
Acts 9 tells us that Saul of Tarsus was on his way to
persecute Christians in Damascus when he met the risen Christ and his life was
transformed. Nonetheless, his reputation for animosity against the people of
God so preceded him that when he went to Jerusalem and attempted to join the
disciples there, “they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe
that he was a disciple” (Acts 9:26).
It took Barnabas, a respected leader in their community, to
vouch for Saul and make possible his inclusion and ministry in the Holy City
and beyond (vv. 27–30). Later, when Barnabas brought Saul with him to Antioch
to teach the new Christians there, a prophet named Agabus predicted a
“great famine” to come (Acts 11:28). These Christians in Antioch then
chose “to send relief to the brothers living in Judea” (v. 29).
Note this: “And they did so, sending it to the elders
by the hands of Barnabas and Saul” (v. 30).
The former persecutor of Christians had become their teacher
and was even trusted with their finances….
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