“This day is to be a memorial for you, and you must celebrate it as a festival to the Lord. You are to celebrate it throughout your generations as a permanent statute. You must eat unleavened bread for seven days. On the first day you must remove yeast from your houses. Whoever eats what is leavened from the first day through the seventh day must be cut off from Israel. . . .Yeast must not be found in your houses for seven days. If anyone eats something leavened, that person, whether a resident alien or native of the land, must be cut off from the community of Israel. Do not eat anything leavened; eat unleavened bread in all your homes.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Every nation has a rhythm. There are things that come around every year that everyone celebrates together. These festivals and ceremonies help to give that nation its own identity. Observing them each year is important to the health and longevity of the people. If they lose sight of these, they will gradually begin to forget who they are. At that point, they begin to enter the dangerous territory of losing themselves. God wasn’t simply leading the people of Israel out of Egypt in the Exodus. He was building them into something they had never been before: a nation. As a part of this process, they needed to begin to develop an identity. In the event of the Passover, God was not simply bringing judgment to Egypt, nor simply helping Israel punch their ticket out of there. He was laying the foundation for a ritual that would define who they were as a people. Let’s talk about what is going on here.

In reading this passage, the first and most natural reaction is this one: What’s the deal with the yeast? Why is God making such a big deal about the people having no yeast in their entire houses for this weeklong festival? I mean, telling them to eat unleavened bread is one thing. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but fine, whatever. But telling them they will be kicked out of the nation if they commit the grievous crime of…enjoying a slice of good sourdough bread? That seems a little over the top, doesn’t it?

Think for a minute about the founding of a new organization. One of the first things any organization needs to do is to create a constitution and set of bylaws to govern their operation. Once these are written up and voted into authority, they set the terms for how things will happen. And in the beginning, things happen according to the rules. There’s an almost inherent understanding that we have to stick close to the script in the beginning as we find our footing so that we don’t drift astray and fall apart before we really get up and running.

This same kind of thinking applies to almost any new venture. When you have kids, your rules for them tend to be pretty strict when they are young, but then as they get older and demonstrate both responsibility and trustworthiness, you start to back off on some of those rules as you transition them to making more and more adult decisions on their own. When our nation first got up on its own two feet, we stuck to the script of the Constitution really closely. Today…things tend to slide a bit. Familiarly has a tendency to breed contempt.

Israel was just getting started as a nation here. In fact, they hadn’t even gotten out of the starting gate yet. God wanted to set them off on the right foot of having an understanding of who they were as a people. In creating the Passover celebration, He was giving them an identity. They were a people created by God. He is the one who set them free and was giving them a land to call their own. It’s tempting here to cynically argue that this was a terrible festival that celebrated the deaths of thousands of people and animals, but while the Passover liturgy mentions God’s judgment against Egypt, the real focus is on what He did for Israel, not what He did to Egypt.

The insistence on unleavened bread and the absolute banning of yeast from the homes helped to keep their focus on their dependence on God. They ate the Passover meal in a hurry and dressed to travel. Unleavened bread is better for traveling because it will last longer than yeast bread will. It was a reminder to the people of the journey they took once they left Egypt. This was a journey during which God provided for them over and over again. They had food to eat and water to drink every single day. Their clothes and sandals did not wear out. He protected them from their enemies. He held them accountable when they sinned.

By putting all of these restrictions in place, God was helping to create some fences around their identity as a people. They were His people. By commanding this to be celebrated each year, they would be regularly reminded of whose people they were as well as what were the implications of that identity. If they were God’s people and not their own, then they needed to keep His laws and statutes. This would keep them on track with His plans for them and constant recipients of His blessings. Now, they gave up celebrating the Passover pretty quickly and forfeited all of those things, but that’s another story.

For now, the important thing to understand is that where we might see passages like this as irrelevant, random, boring, or otherwise unhelpful to our broader understanding of the Scriptures, for the original recipients of these words, they were of vital importance. They were a gift from God to help them know who they were. When they obeyed His commands – even when those commands didn’t make a lot of sense at face value – they deepened their relationship with Him.

The same thing goes for us. No, we don’t have to keep the Passover festival any longer as followers of Jesus. Their rituals and ceremonies are not ours. But our God has done great things for us even as He did great things for them. In fact, He has done surpassingly greater things for us in Christ. We have rituals and reminders that are a part of our regular lifecycle even as they did in things like baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These are regular reminders for us of whose we are. They point us to who our God is and what the implications of this should be for our lives. Even more personally than this, though, it is good for us to put in place regular reminders of who God is and of why keeping His commands is good and wise to celebrate and observe within our own families. We do this because we are a forgetful people, and we need help staying on track with Him. So then, what are you doing with your family to remember who God is? Consider ways you can have regular reminders to help keep you on track. You’ll certainly be glad you did.