And so all of this was going on to say: wait a minute, this is the Passover lamb! So there was that aspect to it, but there's a specific imagery of blood and water, that I think really speaks to us today. This imagery goes all the way back to Genesis 2:10-12. It says this: A river watering the garden flowed from Eden, and from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first was called Pishon, and it wound through the entire land of Havilah, where there was gold, and the gold was perfect. Now there's a lot going on here. The word Pishon means hope, so it says this: out of Eden flowed a river called Hope, and that river wound through the entire land of Havilah. The word Havilah means suffering. So when a Hebrew person reads Genesis 2:10, what they read is: there's a river called Hope, that's always flowing in the land of Suffering.
In other words, if you're in the land of Suffering, there's a river called Hope flowing somewhere in it; you've just got to go find it. The Talmud says that Adam and Even spent 40 days with their feet in the river Pishon, after they were thrown out of the garden. Why? Because they were in the land of Suffering, and they needed to remind themselves that Hope was flowing through it. One of the ideas of the cross is that hope flows through suffering. Hope always flows through suffering. Any time you're in the land of suffering, the land of transition, the land of the wilderness/desert, any time you're in places like that, there's always a river called hope flowing somewhere in it - you've just got to go find it.
The problem is that there's more than one river in those places. There's a river called Give Up. There's a river called Blame Everybody Else. There's a river called Get Critical. There's a river called, you know, Just Spread as Much Turmoil and Chaos as You Possibly Can. There's a river called all of these things, but those aren't the rivers you're looking for. The river you're looking for is the river called Hope.
It says: you can know that you've found the river of Hope, because there's perfect gold there. Now this is so unbelievably cool. When you put gold, perfect gold in water, it makes a colloidal suspension, and it turns it all blood red. I was preaching something like this in Perth, and there was a scientist there, and he was moved to tears. He took me to his lab and he did it for me. He took four or five nanoparticles of gold - a nano-particle is a billionth of a gram - he took four or five nano-particles of gold, and he put it in a colloidal suspension of water, and he put it in a vial, and it looked like I was carrying my blood sample around with me. I used to carry it with me to preach something like this, but I was landing in a plane once, and the pressure blew it up. It just went poof, like this - but it looked like red cordial. It looked like a deep red Kool-Aid. It looked like a blood sample, so think about this. If the river called Hope is winding through the entire land of Suffering, how do you know which one is the river of Hope?
Well if the river of Hope has gold in the riverbed, what colour's the river? Red. The world gold is interesting. Every Hebrew letter is a picture, so every Hebrew word is a comic strip. There are three letters in the world gold. The first letter is an eyeball; the second letter is a man harvesting supply; and the third letter is a house, or a house of God. So you've got an eyeball, a man harvesting supply, and a house, or a house of God. So when a Hebrew person reads the world gold, this is what they read:
Behold, the one who brings us substance for survival, brings it to us in the house of God.
So when a Hebrew person reads Genesis 2:10, this is what they read: Hope flows through Suffering, because behold, the one who brings us substance for survival, brings it to us in the house of God, through a river of blood. Hope flows through suffering. When the water is turning red, it means that hope is flowing.
Fast forward - this same group of people end up going through a series of hugely unfortunate events. This same group of people end up as slaves in Egypt. There's a bunch of them, millions of them. They end up as slaves in Egypt. God decides to rescue them from their suffering, and it says: they cried out to God in their suffering, and God chose to rescue them from it. It says: they cried out to God in their suffering. What was the first plague? God puts 10 plagues on the Egyptians in order to let His people go. What was the first one? All the water turned to blood. To the Egyptians that was a curse, but to the Hebrew people there would have been a buzz in the camp; hey, did you hear? Water's turning red. Hope's fixing to flow in our situation! Hope is fixing to flow in suffering. Hope is fixing to flow in our transition. Hope's fixing to flow in our wilderness experience. Hold on a second, hope is on the way! Through a series of events, these people get out of Egypt. What do they have to walk through, to get out of Egypt? The red sea, hope flows through suffering. Red water, red sea - hope flows through suffering.