Lesson 13 is entitled simply the Exodus. We're gonna be covering a ton of ground in this particular lecture from the 10th plague going up all the way to arriving at the foot of Mount Sinai. And so what I'd like to do is just continue from where we left off in the last lecture, which we discussed the first nine plagues. And now we have the 10th plague, which Moses told Pharaoh was coming in chapter 11.
He said, hey, watch out. The 10th final plague is about to happen. And the people asked their Egyptian neighbors for donations, so to speak. And they were given all kinds of gold and silver and precious linens and whatnot.
And then we get here in chapter 12 to the Passover, the 10th plague. Now just as a couple of moments here to talk about the rationale behind this 10th plague. First really simply remember the number 10. 10 is the number of completion, perfection, totality, not seven.
I spent some time before talking about that. Seven is the number of the covenant. 10 is the number of completion. So this 10th plague is the cumulative plague against Egypt.
It's gonna bring total complete definitive, perfect judgment upon Egypt, the Egyptians upon all their false gods and ultimately liberate Israel from the pagan idolatry and the demons behind the pagan idolatry in Egypt. So if we had a scoreboard, it would be, you know, Yahweh 10 and the false gods of Egypt zero. Like it's a complete total destruction of Egypt. We talk a little bit about how Pharaoh has hardened his hearts and God hardens Pharaoh's heart.
And there's this great harmony really between the mystery of the free will of Pharaoh and the divine will, the divine providence of God. Pharaoh is guilty, he is free to choose whether to obey God or not to. So because he hardens his heart these nine times previous, judgment is now going to come and affect him in his household very personally. So there's a couple of things to keep in mind here.
First, Pharaoh refuses to deal rightly justly by God's firstborn son Israel. If you remember back in chapter four verses 23 and 20, let's see here, 22 and 23, Pharaoh says, Moses must say to Pharaoh, Israel is my firstborn son. I say to you, let my son go that he may serve me of Othmy. If you refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay your firstborn son.
So because Pharaoh did not heed this warning and let Israel go, Israel is identified as God's firstborn son, then he's gonna get a little bit of his own medicine here. His own firstborn son is going to die. So this is really, really important here. It's justice and it's mercy.
Justice, meaning Pharaoh was warned, justice meaning Egypt is guilty for all of the slaughter of the Hebrew sons. It's mercy because not all the sons will be destroyed just the firstborn son. And that brings us to the next point here. Pharaoh was considered divine as was his heir, his firstborn son.
Pharaoh is considered a God, and thus he is a false God. If one of the reasons for the destruction, one of the reasons for the plagues was the destruction of all of the false gods of Egypt, well naturally then it would be a destruction against Pharaoh himself who is a false God of the Egyptians. Incidentally this is also probably a judgment against another God by the name of Osiris, the giver of life, certainly that might be true, but now this is going to affect Pharaoh. Remember he's prideful, arrogant.
So he has such hubris to want to wage war against God and he just keeps getting smacked down over and over and over again. So that's point number one. He refuses to deal rightly with God's firstborn son, therefore his firstborn son must die. Point number two is he's considered divine as well as his firstborn son, so therefore it's judgment against him.
And the third point to keep in mind here now is that Israel must participate in this plague. If you remember, plagues one through three, all the Egyptians and all of the Israelites were affected by the plagues. In plagues four through nine, just the Egyptians were affected by the plagues and Israel was protected in the land of Goshen. So they were just watching this whole thing unravel and of course they had great respect and honor and admiration of Moses, the servant of God, they believe in Yahweh now, but here when we get to the 10th plague, now the Israelites must participate.
For a couple of different reasons. First it is a public renunciation of Egypt's gods. This was one of the things that came up during the third plague. If you remember, Pharaoh said, you guys can go sacrifice but do it within the land, chapter eight verse 25 and following.
And then Moses says, no, we cannot sacrifice within the land because we're gonna be offering sacrifices abominable to the Egyptians. And if they see that, they're gonna stone us because what the Israelites are going to sacrifice essentially are the Egyptian gods symbolized by all these animals. Israel must publicly renounce these gods. It's that detox program I talked about before.
Okay, so now when Israel participates in the slaughter of these lambs, they're essentially burning their bridges, right? There's no turning back now if you slaughter these lambs, these animals, that the Egyptians worship and smear their blood all over your doors. They aren't going back from this. You have to make a choice.
Who are you gonna serve? You're gonna serve Pharaoh? Or are you gonna serve Yahweh? Okay, so that's a big aspect.
If you want to save your firstborn sons, Israel, you must renounce the false gods of Egypt. That's a big point for why they must participate. There's another typological aspect as well for their participation in the slaughter of the lambs. But I'm gonna come back to that a little bit later.
Okay, so that's just kind of by way of introduction, understanding the rationale behind this 10th plague, a couple of points there to keep in mind. Well, when we go to chapter 12 verses one through 28, you have all of these instructions for the celebration of the Passover, which are going to protect their firstborn sons against the angel of death. That's going to unleash the 10th plague on the land of Egypt. Now these are required instructions.
They're not optional. If you don't abate the letter, all of this stuff, you're gonna lose your firstborn son the next morning. Okay, so obviously because of time and the scope of this particular introduction to salvation history, I can't read through all of this and point it all out. But I do have in the notes all of the highlights that most people are familiar with.
I mean, the Passover is a dynamite, really important story here for the deliverance of Israel and it's going to become so typological for the deliverance of all peoples, Gentile and Israel alike later on, which I'll talk about. I'm just gonna go through these notes and share with you the highlights here and then we'll unpack them. The first thing when you read chapter 12 that you're gonna notice is that the Israelites must take a lamb without blemish, a male and a year old. It's chosen on the 10th day of the first month of Nisan.
And that's really easy to remember. I love that my mnemonic devices. It's not Toyota, it's not Honda, it's not Ford, it's Nissan. And that's how you can remember, I don't know, you could go exaggerate the image and your brain a little bit further and just imagine all the Israelites here, driving around in their Nissons as the plague is unleashed and they flee into the red sea and their Nissons, whatever it takes.
But that's the first month of the year for them. So on the 10th day, they take this lamb without blemish, male and a year old. Then on the 14th day of Nisan, the lamb is sacrificed in the evening and they must take care not to break any bones. Note that we're gonna come back to that later on.
You must not break any bones. Then all the blood is gathered and smeared on the door frames and on the vertical and the horizontal beams of the door frames there with a hyssoprae that's also an important detail. Next then the lamb is sacrificed. It becomes eaten, I should say, as a sacrificial meal.
And therefore it is roasted whole and entire and eaten with unleavened bread and wild bitter lettuce or herbs. The unleavened bread, there's a couple of things that symbolic about this. The first major symbolism is that they need to flee the lamb with haste and so they can't wait for the leaven to work its magic and rise so they need to just take the bread unleavened as it is and be able to flee Egypt at God's command. I'll talk about another symbolism in just a moment, so hold on to that thought.
And then of course the bitter or the wild herbs, the bitterness symbolizes the bitterness of slavery there. So eat the lamb with the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs. And then the whole lamb must be consumed, the whole lamb, not a part of it must be left over. So it's kind of like a whole burnt offering.
It's roasted here, whole and entire, and it's consumed entirely. If your family's too small, you've got to pile up with another family nearby, next door and eat the lamb together, or you've got to burn the rest of it so nothing is remaining. Now this is so crucial. As part of this, the protection for this plague, if you want your firstborn son to be alive the next morning, you have to eat the lamb.
Everybody's got to participate in the sacrificial meal. Even the vegetarians, you know, you can kind of riff off this a little bit, but it's so important if you're a vegetarian, and you're like, I don't really like the taste of lamb. Well, then I would say, eat some mint jelly or something and make it taste better. If you don't want it, if you don't like the taste of it, you got to eat it.
A symbol of a lamb won't count. It won't cut it. You just can't take an animal cracker from the kids. A fan tree and be like, oh, this animal cracker represents a lamb.
That's going to suffice because I'm like a taste of lamb. I'm a vegetarian, nope, tofu won't work. Nope, you have to eat the actual lamb. Otherwise, the firstborn son would be dead.
I'm a firstborn son, incidentally, so I would make sure all of my family members ate this lamb. Okay, so then you have to eat it with haste, with your loins girded, sandals on your feet and stabs in your hand. Basically, you have to have all your luggage packing ready to go. You are getting ready to flee the land of Egypt and you must promptly respond to the Lord's command to flee.
Okay, then after you do all of this, God will pass over, from which we get, of course, the word Passover, Pesach in Hebrew, but it's Passover, or Protect, so another way to look at that. The word Passover or Protect these houses with the lamb's blood on the doors. So of course, if the blood of the lamb is on the doorway, the angel of death passes over and goes from house to house. And if you don't have the blood of the lamb, your firstborn son would be dead.
Now, at a certain point in the chapter here, God tells Moses that Israel is to observe this Passover meal as a memorial in every generation forever. Every year, every family in Israel must observe this meal, this celebration, this liturgy. That's really, really important. And I wanna spend a moment here talking about this because the Greek word here is anemesis.
And it's much more significant than a memorial, like we have in America, it's Memorial Day, we honor the fallen soldiers who fought for our liberties. We might remember a past event, like, I remember my wedding day, or I remember the day my first child was born in the hospital. I remember my graduation from college, whatever significant event it is, you remember it through an anniversary and you celebrate. Well, it's more than that for the Jewish people, for the Israelites, because they believe they participated in the event.
So there's this one little detail here throughout chapter 12 and 13, specifically chapter 13, verse eight. One of the things that the father must say to his son, when celebrating the Passover is this, chapter 13 verse eight, you shall tell your son on that day, it is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt. Now, this is not just the fathers of the generation that left Egypt. This is what every father in every generation in every year must say to their son, I don't even know why are we doing this, why are we doing that?
The father says it's because of what the Lord did for me. Now, this could be 10 years after the Exodus, it could be a hundred years after the Exodus, a thousand, it doesn't matter, because what they believed in is their members of the one body of Israel. They are united as Israelites to this one event, that is a unification of the Israelites together that transcends time and space, so to speak. It's this very powerful mystical theological reality in which they participate in the Exodus.
The Exodus is represented to every generation thereafter. And I have a really great quote from the Catechism that discusses this paragraph 1363. It says, in the sense of sacred scripture, the memorial is not merely the recollection of past events. Like I said, like we have anniversaries of different past events, it's not merely the recollection of past events, but more, it's the proclamation of the mighty works wrought by God for men.
That's it, it is a proclamation of the mighty works wrought by God for men, and in the liturgical celebration of these events, they become in a certain way present and real. That's dynamite there, it's dynamite. So again, it's what the Lord did for me when I was in Egypt, because the Lord has delivered every Israelite from the bondage of Pharaoh and of slavery and of death. So it becomes in a certain way present and real.
This is how Israel understands its liberation from Egypt. Every time the Passover is celebrated, the Exodus events are made present to the memory of the believers, so they can form their lives to them. Now keep this in mind as an amnesus, this participation, this representation of the events to each generation of Israelites thereafter. All right, so then moving on here, we have next to the discussion of the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
This is also found in chapter 13, you really gotta read 12 and 13 together, but the Feast of Unleavened Bread, it's the second feast of the Israelites. There are really seven feasts that are demanded by God in the Book of Leviticus. We probably won't have much time to go through all of them, but I'll do another Bible study on Leviticus and we'll go through it all. The Passover is number one in the spring, and the spring you've also got the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
It's distinct, but they're very much related. You can't really have and understand Passover without Unleavened Bread and Unleavened Bread without Passover, like the two sides of the same coin. So Unleavened Bread starts on the same day as Passover, but it lasts an entire week. So same day as Passover for one more week afterwards.
And that's a really important point here, these two feasts that are connected but distinct. Note that the flesh of the lamb and the unleavened bread are connected. I mean, even Passover itself, you have to eat the unleavened, you have to eat the lamb with unleavened bread in that celebration of Unleavened Bread goes on for another week afterwards. Keep that in mind, flesh and bread together.
Okay, now I said before that the unleavened bread symbolizes the speed, the haste with which they need to flee Egypt. Well, there's another aspect of the removing the leaven as well that's really, really important and it touches upon how they're supposed to celebrate the festival. So, leaven, removing leaven from the house symbolizes the removing of sin from the heart of the believers so that way they would celebrate the feast or the festival worthy. That's really important.
You're not supposed to profane this sacred meal, the sacred feast. You have to remove all sin so you can be humbled before God, grateful before God and celebrate it with great devotion. Now we know that this leaven symbolizes sinfulness because St. Paul tells us that.
In 1 Corinthians 5 verses 7 through 8, St. Paul says, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. That's a pretty powerful quote right there. And the greater context he's talking about the mass, he's talking about the Eucharist.
And that's what he says, the festival of the Eucharist. Let's not celebrate it with the old leaven of malice and evil. So leaven is a symbol of sinfulness really. So when the Israelites then go throughout their entire house and making sure that all leaven is removed from the house during the week of unleavened bread, starting a Passover, is kind of this ritual of removing sin from the house.
So that way you can participate with great honor and worthiness. I hope that makes sense. We're not supposed, even in the name, I should say this, even with the Eucharist and the mass of today, the same thing applies. As Paul is talking to us, he's saying, remove malice and evil so we don't profane the Eucharist.
Later on, in fact, in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, in fact, I'm gonna flip ahead there right now and quote this because it's so, so important and it's so applicable to us when celebrating the new Passover later on. But he says in 1 Corinthians chapter 11 verse 27, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself and sow eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment upon himself.
And this is, there's a greater context when Paul's talking about the Eucharist, many points in 1 Corinthians. But what he says about the old Passover and the symbolism of removing sin before observing the Passover applies to us for the new Passover land, which is Jesus Christ. And I'm gonna unpack that typology here in just a little bit. Okay, so I hope you follow that here.
That's what the 11 symbolizes. Sin, what Paul says, malice and evil, and we are to remove that from our lives. Okay, great. And then this last point as you read chapter 12 is the command to teach every generation the meaning and the purpose of the Passover meal.
You're supposed to hand down the story of the Exodus in every single generation. This is in Hebrew, it's kind of a catechesis how I like to think of it. A catechesis of explaining to the next generation of children year after year in this annual liturgical celebration what God did for us individually and as a people. It's really, really important.
Later on as we go through salvation history, we're going to see the importance of handing on the faith. Because if you don't, massive ramifications take place. Hand down the faith to every generation, lest people forget what the Lord has done for them. All right, great.
So with all of those instructions given by Moses to the people, the 10th plague takes place in verse 29, chapter 12 or 29 through 38. And just as God promised, back in chapter four verse 23, let my firstborn son go or I will slay your firstborn son. This takes place.