Tag: Reminders

Morning Musing: Exodus 13:5-7

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“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.

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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 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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