From these few verses, we learn the rudiments of this festival—the Feast of Unleavened Bread. God packs a lot into just a few verses. He tells us that it is a memorial of God leading Israel out of Egypt. We talk about that quite often during these days. He says that is a feast to the Lord. It is not a feast for us, necessarily. We get to enjoy it, but the feast is unto Him! That is where our focus has to be. It is part of our worship of Him.
It is to be kept perpetually in response to an everlasting ordinance. So, these things tell us that this is not something that God was going to do away with once His Son came. He emphasizes, here, that He wants this holy time to be kept perpetually, everlastingly, and always. He wants us to always be able to look back once a year to those things that were done, so that we will understand the lessons of them.
We are to eat unleavened bread for these seven days. We are not to let any leavened bread pass our lips. So, He gives it to us in the positive, as well as the negative. That way we are sure to understand that this is a time of unleavened bread only. It is not just that we eat unleavened bread at this time, but it is also that we eat unleavened bread, and we do not eat leavened bread. Understand, we cannot add any leavening in during this time. He wants us completely unleavened.
By the first day, all the leavening, He says, should have been removed from our dwellings. He does not want any part of this time to have any taint of leaven.
We are to meet twice in holy convocation during this seven day period—the first day, and the last day. This means that we are to be called together as a group in a church service, as we call it today, so that we can hear the instruction.
It says that we should do no customary work on these holy days (first and last), except what is required to prepare food. And even then, we know, that should probably be as little as possible because these are holy times, and God wants us to concentrate on spiritual things, and not on physical ones.
