Hey, everybody. This is Father John Ricardo with Acts 29. And in the middle of all the craziness

and the uncertainty that's going on right now, it seems from our perspective as a team that it's

worth using these days to reflect in a more deliberate way on the scriptures every day, which

for many of us now is the only spiritual food that we're receiving. And so we're going to do a

special podcast series simply entitled, Be Not Afraid, God's Word in Uncertain Times. And we'll try to

post something every day, usually reflecting on the scriptures, so that we can listen in on what God

is trying to say to us in these days. So three things came to mind for me this morning

as I was sitting in the church here where I live in front of the Lord, praying and reflecting

on the scriptures that we have today. The first is a line that jumped out at me in the Psalms.

Second, perhaps a more common problem for us living today. And third, an opportunity

that this current crisis that we're living through right now might be affording many of us,

especially many families. So first, the Psalm, what jumped out at me, it's Psalm 106. And so most of us probably know that

during this time of year in Lent, the background of everything that the church is reflecting on in

the Old Testament comes from the book of Exodus in a particular way, because the Exodus,

that is to say, the liberation of the people of Israel from hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt,

that one event is the crucial, what we call technically a type.

It's the most crucial type for understanding what it is that Jesus has done for us.

What's a type?

A type is either a person or a place or an image or a thing in the Old Testament that prepares for, foreshadows, if you will, either another person or place or event or thing in the New Testament. So Scripture is a drama, and just like every other great drama, there's lots and lots of foreshadowing. And so there's things that happen in the Old Testament that

prepare for what's going to be the fulfillment of these in the New Testament. So the Exodus,

the story of liberation from slavery, is the foreshadowing of what it is that Jesus has done for us by his death and resurrection, which liberates us from the ultimate slavery, slavery of the power of sin and the slavery of death. Jesus's death and resurrection really has freed our race from those powers.

I'm going to die. You're going to die. But it can't hold me anymore because Jesus has crushed death by his resurrection.

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