Tag: Exodus

Morning Musing: Exodus 12:21-23

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“Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, ‘Go, select an animal from the flock according to your families, and slaughter the Passover animal. Take a cluster of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and brush the lintel and the two doorposts with some of the blood in the basin. None of you may go out the door of his house until morning. When the Lord passes through to strike Egypt and sees the blood on the lintel and the two doorposts, he will pass over the door and not let the destroyer enter your houses to strike you.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Blood is really important. That’s true physically, of course, as we die if we lose too much of it. It’s also true in various other symbolic ways. Relationally speaking, we talk about blood relatives versus those who are just relatives by marriage. Familialy, there is the saying that “blood is thicker than water,” meaning we are going to have closer relationships with our family members than non-family members. When they put ratings on movies, part of what determines how restrictive of a rating a particular film gets is how much blood gets splattered across the screen. Bloody violence gets rated higher than non-bloody violence (think Deadpool versus Star Wars). Blood has also long played an important role in our religious practices. This was the case in the first Passover. Let’s talk about why and what is going on in this next part of the story.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 12:14-15, 19-20

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“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.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 12:12-13

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“I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night and strike every firstborn male in the land of Egypt, both people and animals. I am the Lord; I will execute judgments against all the gods of Egypt. The blood on the houses where you are staying will be a distinguishing mark for you; when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No plague will be among you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the ministries I follow fairly closely has a phrase they repeat pretty regularly. It goes like this: ideas have consequences; bad ideas have victims. When we believe things that are wrong, not only will we do things that are wrong, but bad things will eventually come to us and those around us. The wrong beliefs of the people of Egypt had finally brought them to the point we find ourselves addressing this morning. God was bringing judgment against the nation in the form of the death of all of its firstborn. We have talked about it once before. We’ll talk about it one more time in the days yet to come, Lord willing. Today, let’s take a look at a couple of details in this next part of the story that give us a better picture of what was really going on here, and the nature of God’s perfect justice.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 12:1-2, 11

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“The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, ‘This month is to be the beginning of months for you; it is the first month of your year. . .Here is how you must eat it: You must be dressed for travel, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. You are to eat it in a hurry; it is the Lord’s Passover.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In John’s Revelation, when the last apostle is recording his vision of the various judgments that will culminate in the end of the world, in two of the three series of seven judgments, the final judgment is silence. Just as we are approaching what we are sure must be the end of everything, we are greeted instead with silence in heaven. Read in context and on its own terms, the moment is truly jarring because of how very unexpected it is. That’s a little like what we get here. We are ready for God to unleash His full fury on the Egyptians. Instead, we get something rather different from that. Let’s begin something new today as we explore together how God finally fulfilled His promise to bring His people out of Egypt.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 11:9-10

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“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Pharaoh will not listen to you, so that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.’ Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh, but the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go out of his land.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Let me give you a bit of a peek behind the curtain this morning. I often write the introductions for these posts several weeks before I write the rest of them. These introductions serve as placeholders so that when I come back to actually write the full post I have a bit of a reminder of what I was thinking when I was first studying through a particular passage. As a result, I’m often studying one part of the text while writing about another a few chapters back. On occasion this lets me see connections between two different parts that I might otherwise miss. Way back at the beginning of chapter 7, just before God set Moses loose on Pharaoh, He told him (again) what was going to happen. The words He used then were remarkably similar to these words right here. Let’s come back to them again and touch yet again on this theme of Pharaoh’s hard heart. From that, we’ll spend a moment reflecting on why all of the repetition we find in this story is so important.

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