“When the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, Hethites, Amorites, Hivites, and Jebusites, which he swore to your ancestors that he would give you, a land flowing with milk and honey, you must carry out this ceremony in this month. For seven days you must eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there is to be a festival to the Lord. Unleavened bread is to be eaten for those seven days. Nothing leavened may be found among you, and no yeast may be found among you in all your territory.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I enjoy eating good pizza. I don’t know many people who don’t enjoy that. PIzza may not be considered comfort food by many, but there’s just something homey and familiar about eating it to me. But while my go-to is what I’m going to call “regular” pizza. I also enjoy a good flatbread pizza. That thin, yeast-free, crunchy crust adds a really nice texture to each bite. Flatbread pizza is a rare treat for me, and it’s always optional. For the Israelites coming out of Egypt, yeast-free bread wasn’t a treat, it was a command…at least for the Passover festival it was. Let’s talk a bit today about why.

As we get into chapter 13 here, we are going to treat the text a little bit out of order. The reason for this is that after spending a couple of weeks just reading through the first part of this chapter, I noticed there are three distinct themes in it. In order of appearance, the themes are the consecration of the firstborns, the command to eat unleavened bread during the Passover, and the passing on of these traditions from one generation to another. Rather than treating them in order of appearance, though, we are going to take a look at them in order of what I think is from least significant to most significant. I recognize that this is just my opinion and not strictly textual, and also that I am departing a bit from scholarly consensus in this, but the more I read the text, the more this order makes sense to me. If you disagree with the order after we get through the third theme next week, Lord willing, I would be glad to hear it.

In any event, the first theme in the text we are going to tackle is the eating of unleavened bread during the Passover festival. As we saw back in chapter 12, God emphasized this to the Israelites as a pretty big deal. At one point He said that if someone eats leavened bread or even has yeast in their home during the Passover festival, they should be kicked out of the nation entirely. That ranked eating leavened bread during the Passover among the worst offenses a person could commit. They would be eating unleavened bread during the Exodus journey out of necessity. Once they got settled in their new home, though, they would be able to go back to eating regular bread. Once a year, though, during the Passover festival, they were to eat unleavened bread. Why?

The unleavened bread was meant to serve as a reminder for them of what God had done. It was to remind them about the Passover. It was to remind them that God had acted in a powerful way to redeem them from slavery in Egypt, and from there led them safely through the wilderness to the Promised Land. He did all of this by His initiative, power, and might. They didn’t have anything to do with it except to obey His commands. They were to remember by this that their role in their relationship with Him was just this: to obey His commands. If they would do that, He would take care of the rest. He would pour out blessings in abundance on them. He would keep their enemies at bay. He would make sure their economy was thriving. He would secure a grand and glorious future for them. The unleavened bread was a symbol of all of this and more. So, once a year, they were to eat it to remember.

Much of what God commanded the people to do throughout the Law actually functions in much the same way as this. It was aimed at helping them to remember what He had done for them. He did this, He put all of these rhythms and rituals in place because they were a forgetful people. They forgot about what He did remarkably quickly. As we are going to see in a few weeks, Lord willing, when we get to the end of chapter 15, no sooner had the people crossed the Red Sea on dry ground and celebrated God’s miraculous provision for them, did they complain about having no water to drink. When they went through a literal dry spell in their journey with Him, rather than trusting in Him to provide for them once again – a trust that would have been thoroughly justified at that point by the recent and powerful record He had of doing just that – they complained that Moses had led them out into the wilderness to die. God who?

Yet while we might share in God’s frustration with them as we look back on these stories from the standpoint of roughly 3500 years of history, we might as well stick a mirror in front of ourselves as we shake our head. We too are a forgetful people. When God has done something great for us, or when we have experienced His power and presence in some powerful way, we are truly jazzed by that for a few days. But often only for a few days. Once we have put a little bit of time and distance from the event of God’s display of power, we take our eyes which were once fixed intently on Him, and set them on the “realities” of life constantly clamoring for our attention. And when our vision is sufficiently filled by the immediate, we lose sight of the eternal, and we find ourselves very quickly in the place of the Israelites, complaining loudly and bitterly about the challenges sitting before us. We act as if we are totally unaware of what God did in the recent past to prove Himself more than capable of handling what this latest thing is if we would only look to Him for help.

Our penchant for forgetting is why Jesus gave us things like the Lord’s Supper and baptism. These are two things which from the outside looking in seem weird and even a little off-putting. Ancient critics of the church heard believers talking about eating the body and blood of their Lord and assumed this whole Christianity thing was a weird cannibalistic cult. And while many different groups over the centuries have had some sort of baptism ceremony as one of their initiatory rites, openly celebrating the fact that someone died (especially when you categorically reject the idea that people rise from the dead) seems more than a little morbid. It might work for the Addams family, but not so much for the rest of us.

Yet for we who are on the inside, these two things serve as powerful reminders of who our God is and what He did for us. They both point in the same direction in this regard. They point to the fact that our God loved us so much that He was willing to send His Son to die in our place (which is related rather directly to the next theme in this chapter that we’ll talk about Tuesday, Lord willing). But He didn’t just die in our place, on the third day He rose again to bring us new and eternal life if we are willing to believe in Him. God commanded us to observe these ordinances regularly through His Son and His servant Paul so that we would remember all of this and more. We are indeed a forgetful people. Let us make sure that, like the Israelites were to do, we are remembering well.