3.5
Your God redeemed you (Deuteronomy 15:15)
On the first Passover, Israel as a nation was born. Their first day as a people also marked the first month of the Jewish calendar. The Passover is still observed as a yearly remembering of God’s deliverance from slavery. The historical events of the exodus define Israel as a people. It remembers God’s deliverance not only from slavery by human hands but also from spiritual bondage by the hands of false gods (Joshua 24:14). Its theme of freedom is accompanied by the equally important narrative of new beginnings because it was as if Israel’s life began all over again when God delivered her from Egypt for Himself.
The Passover is identified with springtime. In the spring, winter shakes off its cover of snow and hibernating sleep so that the earth is free to sprout new life of all kinds. Seeds break open everywhere with life that nourishes our body with food and our soul with beauty. To the naked eye, all this activity in spring seems to come from nowhere. Winter’s surface looks all silent and still, as if its cold is of death. The workings of winter are wrought in secret, underground. We don’t see the ceaseless preparations for the coming season when the fruits of their hidden labor finally begin to show. In the same way, the Bible says very little of God’s workings in Egypt during Israel’s years of slavery. But when His time arrived, God delivered her from slavery and death to their polar opposites of freedom and life. As seasons follow definite laws of change, so too does God transform by His unique laws of liberty and life.
For forty years the people wandered in the desert, every day reminding them of their rupture with the past. Nothing was familiar and they could not imagine how their most basic needs would be provided for. What would they eat or drink? Where would they settle for the night? With what would they occupy their time? How do they wait on God to reveal His ways and provisions for them? What does it mean to wait on God? This journey of so great a number of people -- 600,000 men and uncounted women, children, servants and animals (12:37) -- threatened to unravel many times. It is just this journey that God prepared for Israel, in a time and place He chose to reveal to her not only who they are to each other, but also who she is in her own eyes (Deuteronomy 8:2)
Throughout Israel’s exodus, God repeatedly proclaimed two messages for all nations to hear. The first message is that He - the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - is the One and only true God, set apart and holy above all. Anything else professing to be a god is an idol, a deceiver of the people and worthy of nothing. God’s judgments on Egypt were against both the Egyptians and the idols they worshiped. Together, they were complicit in one lie, collaborators in a shared deception. The relation between a worshipper and his god is as intimate as Adam and Eve becoming one flesh (Genesis 2:23, 24). It is no coincidence that the Hebrew name for the heathen god, Baal, comes from the word that means to marry, baal. The worshiper and worshiped are as one, each defined by the other by entrusting one’s life to the other. God revealed to both Israel and Egypt that He is not like the gods of Egypt, and is to be worshiped above them. They are either betrothed to Him or other gods, but never to both.
God’s second message in the exodus is equally simple: God chose a people out of all the nations for Himself (Exodus 33:16). He separated Israel and sanctified her as His own. One God of one people. But how can the God of all choose only one people for Himself? How can He claim that He shows no partiality (Deuteronomy 10:17) and still call only Israel His people (Exodus 5:1)? Both messages disturb our conscience and sense of justice in so many ways. It seems nearly impossible to resist judging God’s absolute exclusivity and partiality. Our human vision of justice and good can not contain the magnitude of God’s ways, but we can consider this: if there is only one God and He alone can be trusted and worshiped, He would be compelled by His trustworthiness to speak this truth into every ear so that it may prevail over every competing voice. If this God alone is true, how can He not tell His creation? How can He not want to share Himself, if He is good? And if God chose one people in history as His own, let us pursue understanding His seeming self-contradiction. If God is One and He is good, there is hope in this apparent injustice. God’s sovereign choosing is so profound a revelation of His love for all, a later chapter is devoted to considering this way of His.
Israel can celebrate the Passover because she was obedient to God’s instruction. She sacrificed lambs her last day in Egypt, applied their blood on the lintel and doorposts of her homes, and ate their roasted flesh. In her obedience, she experienced God’s faithfulness to her. The lambs sacrificed in the exodus are the first record of Israel as a people sacrificing animals to God. Most likely none of them understood what killing a lamb had to do with protecting their own life. Only later did God begin to explain the meaning of blood sacrifices. In this command, God was showing His valuing of life. Life’s value can not be measured with money, gold or silver but only with life. God revealed to Israel that blood sacrifice alone can redeem life, that only life can pay for life. “When I see the blood, I will pass over you” (11:13) the angel of death. The dense meaning of blood sacrifice is discussed more in the next section.
Today, Jews celebrate Passover over a special meal called a seder. Seders are elaborate ceremonial meals that serve as an object lesson to teach and re-experience the historical events of the exodus. They emphasize that Jews must never forget God’s deliverance from slavery and death and must tell the Passover story to their children. The telling is meant to personalize the story with questions, prayers, songs, portions from the Bible, rabbinic teachings and eating lots of foods as symbols to reenact and ingest God’s deliverances. There is no longer a Temple in Jerusalem to offer lambs. The Passover of today barely remembers the lambs’ blood that protected each home from the angel of death. Today, it is more a celebration of the week long Feast of Unleavened Bread that starts the day after Passover. Today, the Passover themes of new beginnings and freedom are more often associated with springtime and freedom from social oppressions that exist now, such as inequalities for women, minorities and others.
The last plague is the climax of God’s wresting Israel from slavery. God redeemed her with the sacrifice of another’s life and brought her into a covenant relationship with Him. It was not what she did but God’s doing that delivered her; not what she accomplished but what He fulfilled for her sake. “The Lord will fight,” God said, “while you keep silent” (14:14). God redeemed Israel for Himself. It was His work. She could do nothing but watch in awe, and receive. In the same way Israel rests on the Sabbath because God completed creation, so is her Sabbath rest because He accomplished her redemption.
You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to observe the Sabbath day (Deuteronomy 5:15)