Thank you, Lord, for the day you have made! Good morning everyone and welcome to another Biblit! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, ate tons of food, spent time with loved ones, maintained a spirit of gratitude, and maybe got some killer deals!
If you recall a couple of weeks ago we ended with Exodus 11 where God warned Pharaoh about the upcoming final plague. That passage also sets us up perfectly for Exodus 12 where we are going to dive into the Passover. This is a long chapter packed with tons of stuff, so we are going to spend a couple of weeks reading through it. Let’s jump into part 1 of this commentary on Exodus 12.
Context
The first part of our Exodus 12 study (vs 1-28) shows God breaking down what Passover is and all the rules/rituals around it. This might sound boring at first, but it’s actually really really cool!
First of all, if we look at this passage in a broad overview, we see it’s broken into 3 sections. The first is a description of the Passover and its rules, the second is the description of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, and the third was Moses relaying how to take part in the Passover that very day.
Therefore, we’ll take it each part one at a time.
The Creation of a New Holiday
God created a new holiday right then and there. More than that, though, He actually changed Israel’s entire calendar system around that one holiday!
He told them that the month they were in would now forever be the first month of the year. Commentaries tell us it was probably around March/April...so springtime for those in the Northern Hemisphere. For our brothers and sisters down south, Autumn :)
Even to this day, Passover is celebrated around March/April.
After God instituted this new holiday, he began to explain all the rituals that would occur in celebration.
Each household would take a male lamb 1 year old and without blemish. The without blemish was the most important part. In fact, to ensure it didn’t have a blemish, they had to take it on the 10th day and keep it until the 14th...to make sure it didn’t grow a third eyeball or something like that.
After that, they would sacrifice the perfect, innocent lamb at twilight.
Using a hyssop branch (a bunch of leaves commonly used in sacrificial rituals that smelled good and would offset the blood stench), they would wipe the lamb’s blood on their doorpost.
This would mark their faith in God and He would “pass over” their household when He sent this final plague.
The next set of instructions described how to eat the lamb. Israel was commanded to cook the entire lamb, never break a bone, and eat it with unleavened bread. They were also to be dressed and ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
We get a picture of haste, and that’s the point. They were to eat the lamb in haste to represent their hasty departure from Egypt that is coming up. It also represents a readiness to follow God on a whim.
One last piece that’s really cool is they were supposed to season the lamb with bitter herbs. This represented and acted as a reminder of the bitterness Israel felt during their bondage in Egypt.
After laying out what the Passover would look like from year to year, we move on to the Festival of Unleaved Bread.
Festival of Unleavened Bread
Once again, unleavened bread also symbolizes a hasty departure from Egypt. They didn’t give the bread time to rise. However, leaven is also used by both Jesus and Paul later to represent sin.
Here it represents this idea of cleansing Israel of sin.
The whole festival was to begin on the 14th day and last for 7 days. They were to celebrate this every year in the first month. The whole idea was to remove leaven completely from the house during that time. They were to use this as a time of remembrance of when God rescued them from Egypt. They were not to work during those days but rather just eat, worship, and observe the Festival of Unleavened Bread.
Final Commands
In the third section, we see Moses relaying all this info to the elders. He also tells them to go and find their sacrificial lambs for the Passover that very day.
If we remember, Moses told Pharaoh that it was that day at midnight the Lord would send the plague. Though the timeline is not 100% clear to me, I assume the instructions for the Passover came after that conversation with Pharaoh (on the same day).
This means the first section describing the future holiday was not to be practiced now.
Instead, Moses commands them to go kill the lamb, wipe the blood on their doorpost, and remain in their house all night. This would save them from the coming plague.
Moses then commands them a very important command we should not miss.
Since they are to celebrate Passover every year, their children would probably ask at some point what and why they were celebrating. The Lord commands them to answer in this way:
“It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses.” (Exodus 12:27 ESV).
Fun fact, today a lot of Jewish families celebrate Passover by having the youngest child ask “why are we doing this” and then the father will recite the story of the Exodus.
Something really cool happens after Israel hears this command. They worship God, fall on their faces in praise, and then get up and immediately obey Him!
Interpretation
Whoo! I know that was a lot. Now you see why I split it into 2 parts, haha!
Anyways, I actually have several takeaways from everything here. Let’s jump into those:
The creation of a new holiday
I think it’s incredible that God rearranged their calendar so that at the beginning of every new year, they would start with the Passover. This is cool for a couple of reasons. First is that the Passover had this special purpose of remembrance.
It was a time to remember the harshness of bondage and the mercy and grace God extended to them when he rescued them from that bondage.
Second, think about how we celebrate the new year today. Everyone sets new year’s resolutions, takes time to reflect on the previous, and all that good stuff. God is setting the Israelite’s calendar so that every year when they take time to reflect, they begin the new year with God as the central focus. I think that’s so beautiful.
All sorts of connections to Jesus
Like, wow, there are so many ways the Passover connects to Jesus, it’s insane. I’m just going to list some out, but I most likely missed several:
Blood in their time represented life. I mean, it still does today too. But anyway, they spread the blood of the lamb. This represents the fact that the lamb gave its life. Just as Jesus gave his life. That’s why he’s called the lamb.
The lamb was perfect, innocent, and without blemish. Jesus was too.
This one is pretty cool, but hang with me: The Israelites still had to wipe the blood on their doorposts. Simply killing the lamb was not enough. This sign of obedience showed their faith in God. It proved they believed the plague was coming and that they trusted God would save them if they only had faith and obeyed. This resembles our relationship to Christ. His death is for everyone, but it still has to be received by faith for you to be covered by His blood.
Because the blood marked a sign of life, when God saw the blood, he knew life had already been paid. The debt was paid; he didn’t even look inside the house to see if they were worthy. All of Israel was guilty and deserved the judgment just like Egypt. However, if God saw the blood, then that meant judgment had already been served.
Lead to worship
The last point I think is really beautiful is when the Israelites heard the command and recognized all that God had done for them. They saw the abundance of His mercy and immediately worshipped. They fell and praised God and then obeyed His words. What a cool scene!
Application
Ok...I had a hard time splitting the Interpretation and Application this week. Sometimes they are super similar, so I might repeat some stuff but make it more “applicable” (pun intended). Here we go:
God should be central
The key takeaway of the Passover holiday is not that we should all start celebrating the Passover. We kind of do through the Communion now, but we won’t go into that right now.
The takeaway and application are found when we look deeper. God created the holiday so Israel would remember God, put him first, and make him the central point. When they remembered, they worshipped.
We should always put God in our central focus. Every decision, everywhere we go, God should be the focus.
Let’s not lose focus of the amazing, beautiful picture of what Jesus did
Jesus is the main character of the entire Bible and its passages like Exodus 12 that remind of us that.
The number of connections to Jesus and our own lives is unavoidable. Just as the Israelites ate bitter herbs to remind them of the harshness of slavery, we too should be reminded of our harsh slavery to sin.
Thomas Watson says this: “Till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.”
Just as the innocent lamb loses its life for Israel, so did Jesus die for you and me! When God passes over the house and sees the blood, he doesn’t pass judgment on the household, He just sees the innocent lamb.
The same goes for us. God doesn’t see our sin and corruption, he sees the righteousness of Jesus Christ!
Cleanse ourselves of sin
The order of this passage is interesting but important.
A lot of theologians believe it shows us something cool in God’s message. If we look back, we talk about the Passover, then the Festival of Unleavened Bread, and then finally the Passover again. The Festival of Unleavened Bread is kind of sandwiched and thrown in there.
Remember, leaven and sin go together. We have a picture of removing the leaven of our own lives by the process of sanctification. Paul says this:
“Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little leaven leavens the whole batch of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new unleavened batch, as indeed you are. For Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us observe the feast, not with old leaven or with the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (1 Corinthians 5:6-8 CSB).
I love that passage! We are already the new batch of unleavened dough. We have been saved and made new through Christ. We just need to act like who we already are.