“‘Keep this command permanently as a statute for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the Lord will give you as he promised, you are to observe this ceremony. When your children ask you, “What does this ceremony mean to you?” you are to reply, “It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when he struck the Egyptians, and he spared our homes.”‘ So the people knelt low and worshiped.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Sometimes God reveals Himself in ways that are clear, direct, and unmistakable. More often, though, He works behind the scenes and gives us the task of passing along information about and faith in Him from one generation to the next. He does not, however, leave us alone and unequipped to do this. His big reveals are intended to become tools for us to use in passing on knowledge of Him generationally. We see this in the next part of the story of the Exodus. Let’s talk this morning about the last thing Moses says to the people before sending them on their way to get ready for the first Passover.

In many ways, what we are seeing right here is the real heart of why God was doing everything He was doing in this whole saga the way He was doing it. Yes, He was bringing judgment to the Egyptian people for their sins as a nation. That is something we see God doing to various nations throughout the Old Testament narrative.

As a quick aside, the presence of so many stories like this are a reminder that even though we have to be very careful pointing to any particular disaster that befalls a nation as proof of God’s judgment against them, neither can we very categorically declare that some tragedy is totally bereft of an element of judgment. Of course, the time scale of the Old Testament is much longer than the history of most modern nations, so we are generally all still young in our sins as compared with the nations we see in the text. Still, though, calls for repentance and a fresh seeking of the Lord are rarely out of place.

Getting back on track, it is also true that God was doing what He did the way He did it in order to bring the people of Israel from out of their place of slavery in order to fulfill the promises He made to Abraham. Pharaoh had no intention of playing ball with this mystery God’s command to relinquish his source of cheap labor to accomplish all manner of building projects he wanted to see completed. Until God had established Himself as unquestionably superior to Pharaoh and the whole pantheon of Egyptian deities, Pharaoh wasn’t going to budge. His stubbornness was such that any one single act wasn’t likely to get the job done.

But more than either of those things, what God was doing in the Exodus was establishing a people through whom He could continue to advance His plans to reveal Himself to the world through His Son. His making this dramatic reveal, though, wasn’t something He was simply going to be able to drop on the world and everything would work out just fine. He understood how He had created us. He knew that without a context, without a history, without a set of stories and mythologies in place to create a category for such an action on His part, we weren’t going to get it. Our final choosing of Him wouldn’t be free and loving. It would be little more than reactionary, and that’s not what He wanted.

Well, creating such a cultural context took time. It took putting in place big memory holders that allowed us to start to get our hearts and minds wrapped around the kind of God He is. Yet because we are a forgetful people, He knew He was going to have to put in place rituals and festivals and ceremonies that served as reminders for us. More than that, He was going to have to tell us to remind ourselves over and over again with these things. Still more than even that, though, He was going to have to put in place measures designed to help us pass along and expand on this cultural context from one generation to the next.

(And, by the way, don’t miss the confidence of what Moses says here. That would have been important. Moses told the people on God’s behalf that they were going to be celebrating this festival regularly with their families once they were settled in the new land He was leading them to take possession of and inhabit as their own. In other words, from this command alone they should have been able to have absolute faithful confidence that they were not going to meet any obstacle He was not going to help them overcome. But we are a forgetful people, so…)

So, God gave them a ceremony built around a sacrifice. He gave them rituals for that ceremony to help jog their memory. He told them to keep it generationally. And because they were going to do all of this, eventually their kids were going to ask them about it. That would give them the opportunity to plant these cultural seeds in the next generation so they would grow and eventually be planted again in the next after that. On and on like this the telling would go with God adding little bits of information to the larger picture along the way until the time came for Him to reveal the fuller picture in the person of His Son.

That’s all what is going on here. What does this mean for us? Directly, not very much. These were instructions given to Israel, not modern believers. This isn’t prescriptive for us. It’s merely descriptive. It’s informational. But in the information, there is also inspiration. What God was essentially telling the people here to do was to live out their faith in Him among their families in an invitational way. Parents were to be consciously keeping His commands and observing the festivals He gave them not for themselves, but so that one day their children would ask about them, giving them the opportunity to pass their faith along to the next generation.

If you are following Jesus, and if God has given you a family and children of your own, you have an opportunity to pass along your faith to the next generation. The translation of your faith into the hearts and minds of your kids is your job before it is anyone else’s job. But forcing them into it by coercion or pressure of some sort isn’t how that happens best. In fact, that decreases the likelihood of its taking root. Instead, you are to live out your faith in Christ in an invitational way in front of your children. In other words, you are to be a consistent follower of Jesus where they can see it. When you do that eventually they are going to ask you about it and your opportunity to do some Gospel seed planting will have arrived. This is not a one-time event, though. If you are getting it right, this is something that should be happening regularly and many times over the course of their young lives. Each time gives you the chance to plant seeds of faith that, when nurtured properly, will bear the fruit of generational faith.

This is what we are seeing here. We are seeing God’s establishing a pattern that Christian parents today are wise to continue. The details of the pattern have changed, but the need for it has not. So then, what are some ways you can invitationally live your faith out in front of your children? What kinds of acts of faithfulness can you perform in front of them that will get their hearts and minds going on what makes you different (and better for it) than their friends’ parents who do no such thing? The more you do this and do it intentionally, the more likely it will be that they will one day follow Jesus like you are. I can say with assurance that will be a good day.