December 22, 2020
Please use the comment section on this page to share insights from today’s reading OR your own personal Bible reading.
Reading along with us in some Exodus? Here’s today’s reading:
Exodus 12 (NIV)
The Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread
1 The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, 2 “This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. ....Continue Reading
The Passover celebration is such a specific and detailed event. God knows how we are and how we can get comfortable and take things for granted that should be honored and remembered as significant. When we take communion it is a time to remember something life changing, life giving, and undeserved that happened in our lives. We can become too comfortable in the knowledge of the cross and forget the pain and torture that Jesus experienced on our behalf and this Passover celebration was set in place so the Israelites would not get too comfortable in the knowledge of what God did to free them from Egypt and the blood that was shed so that could be possible!
Exodus 12
What a great way to commemorate the significance of what God is doing when God tells them the month of the Passover is to be made the first month of their calendar year. This new chapter in their lives requires a new way of marking time. All the other requirements reenforce community, the prepared state they need to be in to leave and satisfying what is necessary for the angel of death to pass over them. And the significance of this event is to make it’s mark on future generations of Jews as well. God wants them to remember all He did to free them from slavery and show the greatness of His power over the false gods of the Egyptians. How important it is to reflect on God’s work in the past to encourage faith in the present. God constantly calls believers to remember and gives us tools to prompt our memories. Memory is at the core of faith and obedience.
How fitting that Jesus would use this ceremony to reenforce the new testament in His blood. In the same way the Jews applied the dead lamb’s blood to the doorpost to have the angel of death pass over them, applying the blood of Christ’s death through faith allows us to be freed from the final death of hell.
I was wondering if Israel still uses the Hebrew calendar. The very religious do and the schools use it to set the school year to accommodate feast days, etc. but otherwise everyone uses the Gregorian calendar. It looks to me like the keeping of time is important to God.
Remembering is important to Him too. I am grateful that he gives ordinances to help us remember, otherwise how quickly we (I!) would just let impractical things go as unimportant.
35The Israelites did as Moses instructed and asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold and for clothing. 36The Lordhad made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and they gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the Egyptians.
37The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Sukkoth. There were about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children. 38Many other people went up with them, and also large droves of livestock, both flocks and herds. 39With the dough the Israelites had brought from Egypt, they baked loaves of unleavened bread. The dough was without yeast because they had been driven out of Egypt and did not have time to prepare food for themselves.
40Now the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years. 41At the end of the 430 years, to the very day, all the Lord’s divisions left Egypt.
Exodus 12