Essential 100 - Day 19 - The Passover

If I ranked all of the “Essential 100” passages of Scripture, I would put Exodus 12 as one of the top 10 in importance. The deliverance from Egypt was also the institution of the Passover, perhaps the most important Hebrew observance AND the basis for the Christian observance of the Lord's Supper or Holy Communion. But there is so much more here that pastors have preached on and theologians have written volumes about.

Since I'm using this space to share how “God's Word Speaks” to me, I'll simply put my impressions out there and pray that God will speak to you as well.


I don't want to take away from the actual Passover event. Verses 1-14 speak of the detailed and very precise instructions God gives about choosing, cooking and eating the Passover lamb and marking the doorway with the blood. I would encourage you to go back and read again verses 11-14, four of the most important verses in the whole Bible.

But what hit me in reading this was that the following 6 verses (15-20) talk mainly about yeast. Now compared to the death of the first-born of Egypt and the sign of the blood on the door posts, this seemed pretty mundane until I came to v19, “And whoever eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel.” I know yeast or leaven spreads through or permeates the dough. I Cor 5:6, which tells us that “a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough,”equates yeast with sin: in this case the sin of immorality. “Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (I Cor 5:7-8)

So this yeast business really is important. It speaks to me of the sin(s) which so easily beset me – which I need to continually ask Jesus, the Lamb of God to purge from my life (If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins – I John 1:9).


One more thought... re vs 24-27. The Passover was to be a lasting ordinance. Why? One reason is so that the story of God's redemption would be told over and over. “When your children ask you... then tell them...” I'm further along in my Essential 100 readings than I am in my blogging about them, and this morning I read in Judges 2, that after Joshua's generation had died, another generation grew up, who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baals. They forsook the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They provoked the LORD to anger because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths. In his anger against Israel the LORD handed them over to raiders who plundered them. He sold them to their enemies all around, whom they were no longer able to resist. Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the LORD was against them to defeat them, just as he had sworn to them.”

How could it happen that in just one generation Israel went experiencing God's might and power in the plagues, His redemption during the Passover and His deliverance during the Exodus to “neither knowing the LORD nor what He had done for Israel?” Could it be that the earlier generation didn't tell observe the Passover ~ didn't tell the story over and over?

O, how important is my passing along my faith to my children? To teaching children and youth and supporting Christian education? The spiritual life of our next generation depends on our telling the story.

Do you agree?

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