Exodus 13:4-10

Here he gives us a Part B of why we keep this particular festival. So he reiterates first with pretty strong language the bread of life aspect of this feast. You shall eat unleavened bread seven days. Unleavened bread shall be eaten seven days, and do not let any of the leavening appear anywhere among you. And then he says, this was done because of what the Lord did. So there is an additional meaning that we need to understand. It is about what the Lord did in bringing Israel out of Egypt.

Now the continued explanation in verse 9 includes the Israelites' obligation to keep God's law, that is, His covenant, because of God's redemption of them and freeing them from their bondage in Egypt. The obligation comes because God essentially bought them. We heard about that we are slaves, right? Martin talked about the only way we could be freed from our slavery was to be enslaved, if you will, to Jesus Christ. So we were slaves of unrighteousness. Now we are slaves of righteousness. But that came at a great cost for Israel. The great cost was borne by all those firstborn who died in Egypt. God paid a stiff price for their redemption. And they themselves were only delivered or passed over because the blood of the Lamb covered them. Talk about a type. Otherwise, without God's actions on their behalf, Israel would never have left Egypt.

Exodus 13:8-10

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.

Exodus 13:6-10

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.

Exodus 13:9-10

This does not mean that it was not wrong for the Jews and others to apply unleavened bread to other things because those applications are true. But this is the reason why God instituted it. It was because of what He did.

I did not count them, but I know that in that couple of paragraphs, He said, "What I did," "What I did," "What I did" at least three times is why we eat unleavened bread. That is pretty clear. And I am not saying that the other applications of it are not wrong, but if we go right back to the beginning, this is where it started. It is because of what God did in getting Israel out of Egypt.

So the Israelites were to mark this gifting by God, that is, liberty, by eating unleavened bread during the Passover and Unleavened Bread period and this factual gift of God, ordered by command of God Himself through Moses, was first established on this occasion and Israel indeed followed through.

Exodus 13:4-10

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.

Exodus 13:2-10

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.