Some among us like to count things in Scripture. Now, maybe you weren’t counting, but this passage contains three more references to God’s deliverance—in verses 3, 8, and 9.
In verse 3, God says to remember the day in which they went out, and verse 9 also calls this feast a memorial. Memorials cause God’s people to remember something foundational, and as we rehearse them, God’s lessons become imprinted into our being.
Thus, it is essential for us to have the right perspective of the memorials that God commands so that we remember the things God wants us to remember, and not merely remember something that is true, but which misses the larger object that God intends.
Something similar happened in the histories of Israel and Judah. Under some of the kings, the feasts were observed, but the people didn’t remember the correct things. The books of Amos and Isaiah record that they had a good time and they paid lip-service to God, but the feasts did not produce anything lasting. The people did not tie their observance to the correct reasons, and so the feasts lost their effectiveness—their God-given power. Without the focus that God intends, the feasts became good times with a religious gloss, but they were not truly kept to God. They can even be times of debauchery, as we saw with the idolatrous Supernova Sukkot festival in Israel last fall. Over the centuries and millennia, Israel and Judah forgot what God said to remember, and it has all gone downhill.
Now, just as we saw in chapter 12, this passage states the reason and the object of this feast, which is to remember that God brings His people out of slavery. God’s merciful deliverance undergirds everything else this feast entails.
Verse 9 here contains a critical detail. It says part of the reason we eat unleavened bread and avoid leavening is “that the Lord’s law may be in your mouth.” This is curious because what is physically in our mouths this week is unleavened bread. But here, God begins to show that the unleavened bread is symbolic. It is a token or a teaching vehicle to bring something more important to mind. We are not going to explore this just yet, but make a mental note for now, and we will come back to it.
These are the instructions that the people are told to pass onto the next generations. The reasons are given as to why we keep this feast. This is instruction for us to teach our children about this holy day. Notice there are three major points. There is essentially one in each of these verses.
1) Re-emphasizes that God did it for us. God freed us from sin on His own. He brought us out by His own power. The Lord did this for me when I came up from Egypt. This is the element of grace that I mentioned earlier. God is responsible for calling us out of the world and bringing us out of it by His own strength.
2) This day is a sign and a memorial that the Lord’s law may be in your mouth. This is an interesting concept that we will get back to.
3) This feast is to be kept every year in its season. If we would go back into Exodus 12:17, it is put a little differently. It says we are to ‘observe this day throughout your generations as an everlasting ordinance.’ He is saying that this is a perpetual observance. It is to go on every year because it has very important instructions for us that we need to be reminded about continually.
When the Israelites left Egypt, they did not leave sin. They left the place of their bondage. They came out of their place of bondage. The Exodus is an analogy of a person's spiritual conversion, especially the earliest stages of that conversion.
God intended the keeping of the last Day of Unleavened Bread, along with the eating of unleavened bread, for the entire seven days, to serve as a reminder of what He has done for us. Unleavened bread is to serve as a reminder to us of what He has done to bring us out of bondage.
Verse 8, shows that what the Lord did was for each of us individually and personally, "what the Lord did for me when I came up from Egypt"—when I came out of bondage. It is not speaking of the whole physical nation of Israel, nor is it speaking of the whole spiritual congregation of Israel, (that is the entire church); it is not speaking of either of these things as a group. But specifically, in verse 8, it is speaking to individuals, and personalizing it. In other areas, as we see, it does include the whole nation of Israel, and the church.
As we go through this please notice both the negative and the positive aspects of leavened and unleavened bread and the eating of them.
So here we have, very early in the course of things, the fundamental meaning of the Days of Unleavened Bread. For seven days beginning in the first month (Nisan or Abib), on the fifteenth day, we must not eat bread that is leavened. And conversely, we must eat unleavened bread.
In Exodus 13 we will see the command. But, what we are going to see is that the sense of His commands is metaphorical. It is not actual. Notice how He phrases this:
This is just after He mentioned to them to tell their sons what has been done in Egypt and why. This eating of unleavened bread, then, was to be a sign to the Israelites for what God has done.
