Can you imagine a more unsavory meal—a combination of garlic and milk and honey and leeks? For Israel, keeping the feast meant a complete separation from the gods, religion, bondage, food, works, and slavery of Egypt. It also meant a break from its worldly glory, wisdom, power, strength, and popularity.
By putting away the leaven, they put away all that was associated with the land of their slavery. God did not give them time to make bread with leaven. They did not have time to wait around in Egypt until the bread had finished rising so that they could bake it.
And so today God is not calling us to believe in Him and then hang out in the world until all the stuff we have cooked up in the world is ready to be consumed. Instead, He requires a quick and absolute break from our slavery to the bondage of sin.
The Feast of Unleavened Bread is also a memorial. One of the ways we allow God to purge our hearts and minds is by remembering what He has delivered us from. The Feast of Unleavened Bread was to be a memorial. But we are called upon not just to remember the purpose of the feast, but also to teach it to our children.
Unleavened bread shall be eaten for seven days; no leavened bread shall be seen with you, and no leaven shall be seen with you in all your territory. It is commanded by the Lord that we teach our children the reasons for our beliefs. We must all be ready to explain to our children the fundamentals of our faith.
But you must notice something critical here: The father explained to his son what he was doing, not just what he believed. Children cannot read our minds, but they can read our actions. Or, are they even asking? Furthermore, the Passover meal and the observance of the Feast of Unleavened Bread all took place within the home. These were not special events where the family got all dressed up in their Sabbath best and trotted on down to the local synagogue for a service and a potluck dinner.
The children were asking questions because the events taking place were taking place in the home. Are your children asking you about your relationship with the Lord as they see it lived out in the home, and if not, why not? Others among us avoid certain habits and teachings, sure that they must be listed as a sin in the Bible, but they are not. One of the main manifestations of the Feast of Unleavened Bread in the life of the believer is the fact that it is kept in sincerity and truth.
For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Sincerity also means clearness and purity, and is the opposite of impurity and hypocrisy. Truth is the opposite of lying and deceit.
To keep the festival with the bread of sincerity and truth means that we must do more than simply put our sins on a shelf where we know they are available to us later. It is seen as pure, as opposed to secular or profane bread which is made using leavened fermented dough.
Jewish Passover coincides with the ancient agricultural Feast of Unleavened Bread Exodus , Leviticus which honoured the barley harvest in April and forbade the consumption of bread until an offering had been made to God.
The recipe for ritual unleavened bread must be followed carefully: water and wheat flour; no salt, sugar or fat. Barley, spelt, oats or rye may be used instead of wheat flour. The dough must be prepared very quickly to avoid any natural fermentation.
It is then cooked in an oven. Unleavened dough is also used to make hosts altar bread , to consecrate the Christian Eucharist. But that is another sermon for another time. Back to Exodus chapter 12, verse God has established these memorials in connection with his redemptive acts in order to strengthen our faith. Perhaps monuments or memorials have been significant to you.
Perhaps you have had experiences where you have seen things at monuments that caused you to contemplate things of the past. Some of you have been reading James Bradley's book, Flags of Our Fathers , which is about the six marines who raised the American flag atop Mt.
It is probably the most photographed event of that entire war, maybe of the whole century. It is an image that is indelibly printed on your mind. My father was a marine, and I remember as an eleven year old being taken to Washington D. And I remember how struck I was by this memorial; and it brought back a flood of thoughts into my mind.
As an eleven year old boy, I wasn't even in existence when the Second World War occurred, but through my father's stories and through the presence of that monument, certain things were sealed in my mind. So also these memorials that God has appointed to His children are designed to seal in our minds His work of redemption.
The worship of God demands our preparation, consecration and full attention. Now secondly, if you will look at the verses , you will see the details of the feast. The feast is established in verse 14, and it is detailed in verses 15 through In fact, you will find ten instructions here. Just like we saw at least sixteen specific instructions for Passover, we find ten instructions for the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And again, it strikes me as we read this passage that we are reminded that the worship of God demands our preparation, our consecration, and our full attention, and you will see in each of these instructions how our preparation, and our consecration and our full attention are evoked.
Look at verse You will see three things in verse 15 which are stressed. First, we are to eat only unleavened bread for seven days. Seven days, you shall eat unleavened bread. The seven days perhaps refers to a period of completeness. And the rabbis note that whereas some of the Passover regulations were temporary, for instance the spreading of the blood on the lentil and on the door posts, that was temporary.
That was a one time activity. That wasn't repeated in the later Passovers. But all of the instructions of unleavened bread were perpetual, they were essential to the observation.
Whereas, there was only one Passover where the door posts and the lentil would have been painted, in all the feasts of unleavened bread, these particular commands were going to be kept. They were essential and they were perpetual. The unleavened bread, the bread of haste is to be used. You will find out why this was called the bread of haste when you learn again that the later rabbis required that this bread be made from start to finish in under eighteen minutes or it be thrown out.
From the time that you begin kneading it, to the time that it was baked, eighteen minutes, total. Truly the bread, I don't know how much time bread normally takes, but eighteen minutes is pretty good. So it is the bread of haste that is to be used. The leaven, of course, in the Passover, referred to the haste of preparation for the Passover. It reminded the children of Israel that they were going to have to get out of town quick. They had to make their preparations very quickly and be ready to move.
And the leaven in the feast of unleavened bread seems to be related to the corruption that leaven often had with later associations in the Bible. In the New Testament, leaven is regularly used as an emblem of a corrupting element, just like you just read in I Corinthians chapter 5. And so with regard to unleavened bread, the removal of leaven from the houses seems to be emblematic of cleansing of impure qualities and such.
Of course, removal of, leaven from the houses would have also prevented any kind of an accidental use of the leaven in the process of preparation of the bread. As an added bonus, it would have practically also given you a new start for leaven.
Leaven was apparently used like this: it was a lump of dough left over from the last batch. It had already fermented. It would be scooped up when you were preparing your next batch and would be added into it to help the rising of the bread itself. And it would have been utilized over and over. Anything left, would have been kept over.
Well, you can imagine that after a year, you are bound to have some stuff that has been around for a while. Now this actually hit me when I was in Scotland. I had a friend, who had very kindly invited me over to his apartment, and he was going to serve me some breakfast.
And he had the coffee and the tea going. He was very kind to have coffee going for a barbarian like myself since he was drinking tea. And he had some other things going for breakfast. And I noticed him open a drawer and remove and object that was solid.
I said to him, what is that? He said, oh that is the porridge. You have your porridge in a drawer? Oh yeah, you know we scoop it out of the pan, after the last use and we just put it in the drawer. And then we bring it out again, we add a little water, we stir it up, we put it on the stove and we use it again. Needless to say, I was not thrilled about eating that porridge.
You can imagine that after a year some porridge would have some very old elements in it in that kind of a setting. Well, the Feast of Unleavened Bread made sure that you cleaned out all the old leaven and at least you had a new start for the year to come.
At any rate, very seriously, at the end of verse 15, we are told that anyone who eats the leaven is to be cut off. Whoever eats anything leaven from the first day, to the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel.
This is of course, a reference to Old Testament church discipline. The phrase, cut off from Israel , is used thirty-six times in the first five books of the Bible. It is mostly used in connection with violations of God's law, in connection with worship, and sexual immorality. Those two areas are considered so important that a gross offense in them requires that a person be cut off from Israel. It is a representation here of Old Testament church discipline. And it shows how serious these ordinances are to be taken.
Trifle with these ordinances, and you find yourself ostracized, perhaps even physically displaced from the people of God, but certainly put outside of the fellowship of God's people. Church discipline is something that is designed of course, to protect the purity of the body.
But it also designed to be a warning and a protection to the hearts of men. Paul, when he speaks of church discipline being applied in I Corinthians, sees it as a way in which a brother might be won back from the wiles of Satan. The Baptists, last century, as they wrote manuals of church discipline for their local churches had beautiful phraseology in this regard.
When they had gone through the various steps of church discipline and had been unable to win a brother back, they said this. But this was not an act of spite or meanness or vengeance. He was to be considered a friend who might be won back into the brotherhood. They are to be times of gathering together to praise YaHuWaH for His great redemptive plan and to celebrate our deliverance from the bondage of this world.
As we go through the rehearsal of the past in His wondrous mercy and grace toward us in all He has done for us, we keep alive the memory of it and the anticipation of the future promises and the glory which is yet to come.
In effect, it becomes a rehearsal in preparation for the final act. YaHuWaH Himself is the host of the festival and these convocations are times of meeting with Him as well as meeting with one another.
He is present in power by His Spirit to effect the spiritual significance of the feast into our lives. It is traditional at these gatherings to have a festive communal meal with the "kiddush" of bread and wine. The specified sacrifices are not applicable without a temple, but will be re-instituted in the Millennium. The intervening days are kept as holy days centered around the observance of the festival but with the liberty to perform necessary tasks.
They are special days of rejoicing celebrated with festive meals. The day after the weekly Sabbath which is in this week, is the day of the Firstfruits offering. He was the Firstfruit from the earth to be presented to the Father as a perfect man, the first of the Earth's harvest.
Traditionally in temple times, the firstfruit portion of barley was cut at the going down of the sun on the weekly Sabbath and presented at 9. This ordinance of the feast was fulfilled in YaHuWshuwaH's resurrection from death on the Saturday night and His ascension to the Father the next morning to sprinkle His blood upon the mercy seat in heaven, after having fulfilled the type of the Passover Lamb, and having lain three days and nights in the grave according to the prophetic word.
Unleavened bread is eaten each day to keep before us the significance of the feast not just an abstinence from leavened bread. We perform in the natural, literally, that which we do in the spiritual - the feasting on the pure Word, YaHuWshuwaH. NOTE There are many tasty flat breads available at retail outlets which are unleavened apart from matzah.
Barley was the grain harvested at this time of year and used in the unleavened bread. From Wikibooks, open books for an open world. This I say therefore, and testify in Elohim YaHuWaH, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles the world walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of Abba, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart;" Ephesians , 19 "But you have not so learned Messiah,..
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