“Now the Egyptians pressured the people in order to send them quickly out of the country, for they said, ‘We’re all going to die!’ So the people took their dough before it was leavened, with their kneading bowls wrapped up in their clothes on their shoulders.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Sometimes God’s instructions don’t make any sense. He tells us to do something in a certain way that doesn’t really fit with how we would do it, and our first instinct is to question Him and do it our own way. When God gave the Israelites the instructions to have a feast with unleavened bread, that didn’t make a lot of sense. It seemed arbitrary and random. At least it did until it didn’t. Let’s talk today about God’s odd instructions, and why following them really does make the most sense.

I love good bread. There are a handful of restaurants I will go to just for their pre-dinner bread. I really don’t care what else I eat. I just want to eat the bread. All the bread. Thankfully I’ve still got a metabolism that allows me to do that with relative impunity. (Although I am gradually finding myself able to eat less and less than I used to be able to eat in one sitting.) The best bread is soft and buttery in the middle with just a bit of a crispness to the crust to give each bite a little more texture than your basic sandwich bread. The only way to get good bread like that, though, is to add some yeast to it and to give the yeast time to do its thing. You can’t rush the process. If you do, you’ll wind up with an inferior product.

Before He unleashed the horror of the final plague on the Egyptians, God gave the people of Israel instructions to hold a festival that night. It was to be the inaugural run of a festival they were to celebrate as a people on into perpetuity. His instructions for how they were to prepare for it, though, were remarkably specific. They were supposed to eat certain foods prepared in certain ways. There were even instructions for how they were to be dressed when they ate it.

From the standpoint of hindsight, we understand what was going on and can see how and why it all makes perfect sense. From the perspective of the people receiving these commands, very little of it made sense. For instance, why go through all the trouble of preparing a family feast if they weren’t going to be able to take the time necessary to really enjoy it? Why all the rushing around in God’s commands to them? And surely it didn’t really matter what they wore to this feast they were eating as a family in the comfort and security of their own homes? Was there some kind of pageantry God had in mind that He wasn’t telling them about?

These kinds of instructions actually fit very comfortably within a pattern we see repeated throughout the Scriptures. Gideon was told to have his army take a drink from a river, and based on that sort his soldiers into groups. Joshua was told to have the Israelites march in a circle around a great city rather than using traditional siege tactics. Elisha the prophet told a foreign general to take a dip in the Jordan River to cure his leprosy. And those are only three of many examples of this pattern. Why does God do this kind of thing instead of operating in a way that makes a bit more sense to us?

The short answer is that He’s God and we’re not. He can see what we can’t. He understands what we won’t. He knows what is going to happen next when our guesses aren’t even in the universe of close to accurate. Sometimes He gives us a certain instruction because He wants us to trust Him. He asks us to do something in a way that He knows isn’t going to make any sense to us because He wants to give us the opportunity to trust in Him more than in ourselves. That kind of exercise in faith helps it to grow bigger and stronger. Other times, He tells us to do something a certain way because He knows that our doing it that way will leave us better prepared for what is coming next.

In this particular case, He knew how the Egyptians were going to respond to the final plague. He knew they were going to be pushing the people to get out right then. If the people weren’t prepared to go, they were going to wind up having to leave without all the necessary supplies for the journey that lied ahead of them. His instructions may not have made sense at the time they were given, but they did later. If they people hadn’t obeyed, they would have paid for it.

The same thing here is true in our own lives. When God has called us to do something in a certain way, there’s a reason for that. We may not understand the reason – and He is in no ways obligated to give us an explanation – but if we will trust Him, His ways will always prove wisest in the end. The simple truth is: We don’t know better than God. We never have. We never will. Trusting Him is always going to be the best way to navigate through whatever it is we are facing. Or, as the old hymn puts it: Trust and obey. For there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus than to trust and obey.”