Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Sermon text is found in Exodus 23:14-19. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Three times you shall keep a feast to me in the year. You shall keep the feast of unleavened bread. You shall eat unleavened bread seven days as I commanded you at the time appointed in the month of Abib. For in it you came out of Egypt. None shall appear before me empty. And the feast of harvest, the first fruits of your labors which you have sown in the field, and the feast of ingathering at the end of the year, when you have gathered in the fruit of your labors from the field.

Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the Lord God. You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread, nor shall the fat of my sacrifice remain until morning. The first of the first fruits of your land you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God. Thus endeth the reading of God’s word. Break thou the bread of life, dear Lord, to me, as thou did break the loaves beside the sea.

Throughout the sacred page, I seek thee, Lord. My spirit pants for thee, oh living word. Bless thou the truth, dear Lord, to me. Hast thou blessed the bread by Galilee? Then shall all bondage cease, all fetters fall, and I shall find my peace, my hall in all, for thou art the bread of life, oh Lord, to me. Thy holy word the truth that saveth me. Give me to eat and live with thee above. Teach me to love thy truth for thou art love.

Oh, send thy spirit, Lord, now unto me, that he may touch my eyes and make me see. Show me the truth concealed within thy word, and in thy book revealed I see the Lord.

Please be seated. We are moving to the conclusion of the laws of the covenant found in Exodus 21-23. And the laws reach a climax here in these verses that we just read, leading up to a final epilogue where God says that his angel will be sent to the people to lead them into victory, to guide and deliver them.

It’s fitting that the laws of the covenant should end with these festival laws. If we remember that the purpose by which God has delivered his people from Egypt is this: we remember that Moses went to Pharaoh and told him to let God’s people go that they might celebrate a feast of worship to God in the wilderness. So that is the very purpose for which they’ve been delivered, and it becomes the conclusion, the eschatology as it were, of the law of God found in Exodus 21-23.

Today we’ll focus on the feast of unleavened bread. Next week we’ll talk about the feast of harvest, and after that the feast of ingathering. The feast of ingathering, the great climactic feast at the end of the harvest year, will be spoken on Palm Sunday. And then the following Sunday I’ll speak on the angel of the Lord who has promised to come and deliver them into victory—a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ, of course, on Resurrection Sunday.

Today our concern is with the beginning of these first three feasts of the agricultural year. We’ll discuss these three feasts in general. Then we’ll talk about their correlation to the seven feasts in Leviticus 23, correlating them then to the three gifts that we participate in through worship. And then draw some specific teaching from the scriptures relative to both Passover and the feast of unleavened bread.

The first thing we want to note about the feast of unleavened bread is that it is a feast, and it’s one of the three primary feasts that are listed for us in the word of God. Now, we’ve talked about these celebrations, these feasts. The term feast itself has this idea of a joyful celebration from God. A word that is associated with it in the Hebrew is a word that means to move in a circle, or to make a procession, or to celebrate, or to dance.

When you read dancing in the scriptures in the Old Testament, it’s usually the same word family as this word that’s translated feast. And so they have this connotation of solemnity, but also of great joy as well. R.J. Rushdoony, writing on these feasts, says that in Hebrew thought—and we would add this really is in Old Testament thought, in covenantal thought—feasting, solemnity, and rejoicing go together.

The association of solemnity is more with happiness than with stiffness. And so it is with these celebratory places of God’s worship and time that we find culminating in the Lord’s day, after the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is a holiday. In other words, it’s being spoken of here in the feast of unleavened bread. It’s a day or season of religious joy. And, as we said, this is the same term that’s used as Moses tells Pharaoh to let God’s people go—that they may celebrate a feast, a holiday, a solemn but joyous occasion in the context of the presence of God and worshiping him.

Having said that, this term is usually limited to the three main feasts that are presented for us here in Exodus 23: the feast of booths, or ingathering, at the end of the year; the feast of unleavened bread at the beginning of the cycle; and the feast of weeks, or harvest, in the midst of that cycle. In four specific occasions—which I have listed for you on the outline—these three feasts are combined together as the feast of the Lord.

Exodus 23, the text that we just read, and Exodus 34:18 through 22 is another place where this is talked about, and we’ll return to that a little bit later in the talk. In Deuteronomy 16:16 and again in 2 Chronicles 8:12 and 13. In Deuteronomy 16, we’ll return to that text as well in a few minutes to talk about the implications of these feasts and the required presence of men at them. And then in 2 Chronicles 8:12 and 13, Solomon is said to have offered burnt offerings to the Lord on the altar of the Lord which he had built before the vestibule according to the daily rate offering, according to the commandment of Moses for the Sabbaths, the new moons, and the three appointed yearly feasts: the feast of unleavened bread, the feast of weeks, and the feast of tabernacles.

So the idea is that the feast of unleavened bread is one of the three main feasts of the Old Testament agricultural cycle. Again, we want to see this as informing us in terms of Lord’s Day celebration being just that—feast and rejoicing, as opposed to being somehow mournful or doleful.

Rich Bledsoe, in an email, says this about the concept of feasting: “The truth is it is so much easier to fast than to feast. Fasting can be done all by ourselves. Fasting accompanies grief and sorrow and uncertainty. This is simply the fallen human condition. Fasting is very difficult. It’s a matter of joy and love and community. It’s easy to be miserable. Being full of joy is hard and rare. Frankly, although it seems backwards, it’s easier to sell fasting than it is to sell feasting.

We really long for some form of flagellation. Rejoicing is not natural. It is supernatural. And I think we do a lot to quench the spirit in this regard.”

Now, that’s really accurate. Some of my best responses to sermons come when I get up here and really talk about sin and bring people to personal conviction for sin. If I preach a sermon that’s really geared at bringing you to a state of repentance, that’s the sort of sermon that will receive a good response from people. Generally speaking, if I get up and simply celebrate the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ has come, that the gospel has been proclaimed, and history has changed, it’s usually not as receptive to us, because we feel so overwhelmed by our sin and burden.

But that’s exactly what Christ came to do: to move us away from our sins and deliver us from them into a state of celebration before him. Solemnity and repentance is part of that, but it isn’t the end of that. It moves us towards celebration and feasting.

So this portion of the law of the covenant is quite important to—and I know I’ve repeated this several times now, but to drive the point home—to remind us that what we come together for in the Lord’s day is certainly to come to a course correction and repentance based on the preaching of God’s word, but to move beyond that, to move through the form of the worship service to communion and the feasting celebration of the Lord that the day is characterized by.

All right. So on the other hand—you know, ditches on both sides of the road—this feasting or celebration is bound and regulated by God’s word. It’s not to be determined on the basis of what we think will make us feel good, but rather our feasting and celebration, which forms the basis for everything else, comes in the form of regulation of God’s worship.

We were at the coast a week ago, had a wonderful relaxing week at the Oregon coast in a house with big windows, fifteen feet from the waves, watching the ocean for four, five, or six days there. It’s just wonderful. And I thought about worship in relationship to our individual lives as we go into the week.

You have these big huge currents or wave structures that are formed by the tides, right? The tides are formed by the gravitational pull of the moon. And you have, out in the midst of the ocean—I imagine probably it isn’t really, but for the sake of the illustration—these waves start out there, and as they move onto the shore, that wave pattern is differentiated in millions, billions, seemingly an infinite number of waves as these waves demonstrate themselves or work out onto the shore.

These celebrations are reminders that God sets up wave patterns of joy and celebration in relationship to God’s law and word in the context of the unified host as we come together before him. And what happens then is that wave of joy and celebration, based upon Christ moving us through repentance and healing, gets differentiated in your life as you move into the week. This pattern of feasting and celebration that’s set out in motion, as it were, out in the middle of the ocean in the place where everything originates—so to speak, the worship service of the Lord in the week—gets drawn out into your particular application of it as you, as part of that great host of God’s people, go unto the shore and make your different manifestations of joy and celebration in the context of the week.

Now, that’s a biblical analogy in a sense, because the scriptures tell us that God’s word will be proclaimed and the word of God and its effects will cover the earth as the ocean, as the waters of the ocean cover the earth. And so that’s the picture for us going forth from here. And it all begins with an understanding of what the worship of God is: that it is celebration in the context of specific deliverance.

George Bush, the commentator in the nineteenth century, said that these seasons of relaxation and recreation from our toil are very important for man. Quoting him now, he says that they—he calls them “certain seasons of innocent hilarity”—are what these three feasts were. Bush was a very good, orthodox, conservative commentator, and it’s a good designation: “certain seasons of innocent hilarity” in connection with those religious observances which would tend to keep them within proper limits. So there’s joy, hilarity, recreation, and amusement in the sense of not thinking, but in the sense of rejoicing. But it is in the context of religious observances that tend to put not just a limit on that joy, but the substance of the joy emanates from what these observances teach us.

He went on to say that it is no doubt desirable that the precepts of Christianity should be so construed as to lay no chilling interdict upon these harmless amusements which the constitution of our nature seems to render occasionally requisite. And I would say it’s probably even deeper than that. God says that the height of our presence before him is this worship and celebration, these seasons of innocent, or actually God-formed, hilarity.

So the feast of unleavened bread is one of these three feasts. Now it says specifically in the context of Deuteronomy 16—I said we’d come back to that—all men should appear before God in these three feasts, including the feast of unleavened bread. And men are to come before God’s presence. And then we read in verse 17 of Deuteronomy 16 that every man shall give as he is able, according to the blessing of the Lord thy God, which he hath given thee.

So the idea here is that these three feasts, if they’re going to inform us into what the culmination of them is, the Christian Lord’s Day, one of the things we want to say about them is that they were required for men. They were not required for all people. Why is that? Well, remember that the setting for this is an agrarian economy, and there are animals that need to be tended, and that kind of stuff that has to go on. And if you were to leave them for two weeks out of the year or three weeks out of the year, it wouldn’t be good for the animals.

So it seems like in the context of the Old Testament, the focal point in agrarian rejoicing celebrations in God’s presence are the men that come together. Now, in a non-agrarian economy, that all changes. And so the historical progression both of a movement away from an agrarian economy through industrialization, etc., as well as the sorts of inventions and mechanisms that are put in place to assist even agrarian farms for week-long observances of being gone from them—these things all mean that culture moves in the context of all of God’s people coming into the celebration of the Lord that’s characterized by these three feasts.

But nonetheless, in the context of this specific feast of unleavened bread, it was explicitly the men that were required to go up. And the men were required to go up and to bring a gift. They were not to come before God empty-handed.

So I think the picture is that these three feasts were national events in which the people of God, which can be thought of as an army—not simply as an army, but as an army—the men are formed up into formation as a national group under God to celebrate in his presence. And in that forming process, they bring forward gifts as they come before God.

So I guess that the application of that, in terms of all that finding its culmination in Lord’s day worship, is that when the men of the church come together to form up the families of the church, we do so always wanting to come not empty-handed but offering to God what he has granted us by his sovereign grace and our accomplishments and work.

So by way of application of this truth, I think it’s very important that when you come to the worship service of the Lord, you come to be formed up as a unit and to go forth from this in that celebration of Christ’s triumph over sin and death into the week. And that when you come up, you come up distinctively in a way that recognizes who it is you’re coming before.

You’re coming before the King of Kings. You’re coming before the one whom you should always bring an offering to, as a way to remind yourself of who it is that you’re coming before, that you want to show him tribute and fealty. You want to bow down to the king, as it were, as you come up.

Now, if men keep this idea in mind, then when we come together for Lord’s day worship services—even if it’s in the context of a gym and various distractions—it focuses into the worship of the king that has a degree of formality to it and has a degree of reverence and a humble submission to it on the part of God’s people.

We’re not coming here today to hang out. We’re coming here today to worship God. And as we move into the worship of God, that’s when we move into this celebration of God that is both a celebration, but it’s also the unifying factor of the people of God coming together.

So men appear before God, and we see here the Old Testament model of the offering that’s part of New Testament worship. And as I said, the men were required to be absent from the fields. And in Exodus 34:4, God tells them that he’ll protect their fields while they’re absent from them. All the men go up. Some women are left behind, maybe some children, to do the farm chores or whatever. And as a result of this, they’re kind of in an undefended position, aren’t they? But God told them explicitly in Exodus 34 that he would protect them.

Now, it’s interesting—and again George Bush in his commentary notes—that the first incident recorded historically of deaths during these festival observances was actually in AD 66, when a Roman general killed fifty of the people of Lydia while all the rest of the city were gone up to the feast of tabernacles.

Now, AD 66 is thirty-three years after these people had rejected Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so what we see here is the judgment of God upon a people. The protection for those cycles of celebration were now removed because of the culmination of them in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So these festivals were ones which were required. They were required to come before God, and we see that in terms of Lord’s day worship, all people are required to come before God. We can apply the truths of God’s promises to protect our homes while we’re absent from them, and we can be thankful for the historical progression away from an explicitly and totally agrarian economy into the situation in which the world has been transformed, because it allows more and more people to come together—for instance, weeks at family camp, etc.

Which is the third point I want to make about these annual feasts: they produced not simply a forming up in the context of the local congregation or the local area, but they were national celebrations. And if you think about that, it’s a significant part of the church as it existed in the context of Canaan, that they were not simply united to their own tribe or their local relatives in the context of their hometown.

Remember that the land is divided into the tribal areas. And without annual feasts, we would see probably an increase of tribalism and a decrease of an understanding of being connected to the whole church across the whole nation.

Now the significance for us is that God wants us to think in terms of the church extended throughout the greater Oregon area, the greater Portland area, into the Pacific Northwest, and into the rest of the country and world. And so in our celebrations, it’s good in our annual celebrations to be inclusive of people coming from other places. It breaks us away from the idea that we’re the only church. Even if you enter into denominational celebrations once a year, it’s really not quite the same thing as these national celebrations that tended to break down tribal distinctions if they got in the way of understanding the unity of Christ’s Church.

So this year our Octoberfest is going to be matured some. We’re probably going to come up with a different name. We’re going to ramp up the venue. We’re going to make it more of a celebration. We’re going to at least invite people from the Pacific Northwest area. We want to try to invite specifically members of the CR churches in the area, but other reformed churches as well. We want to ramp it up somewhat to make it more regulated by what these scriptures teach about these three festivals. And that’s a good thing. You shouldn’t feel bad about that. You should remember it’s a teaching device that God gave them in the Old Testament, and which we can make proper application of today to remind ourselves of our connectionalism to the church throughout the region. It’s one way, but it is a significant way.

Same with family camp. Next year, if we believe Doug H. will be our speaker—he’s committed to that—if that’s the case, we can expect to have an influx of people, probably some from outside of the normal attendees. And that may put you a little bit at ill ease, but we just remember that’s what they did three times a year in Jerusalem as well. They’d meet together with men who were their brothers that they didn’t know, knew them less well than we know the people that come to family camp, because they didn’t have the same kind of communication capabilities.

All right. Now let’s talk about these three feasts in relationship to the seven feasts of Leviticus 23. And this is just a little outline to help you understand the context of this. You know, essentially there are three feasts, but in Leviticus 23, there are seven feasts listed: the Sabbath and six other feasts. So I’ve given you an outline here of how to correlate these Old Testament feasts.

First of all, there’s an agrarian perspective; each of these cycles has a historical perspective; and then the actual feasts listed on your outline. Keep in mind: First, the agrarian perspective of the feast of unleavened bread, the first feast of the year, is that this is the early spring harvest, probably barley harvest. I’m not sure. But in any event, it was early in spring, and it was the very beginning of the harvest.

Apparently the Passover season with the sheaf of first fruits signalized the beginning of barley harvest. Now, historically, the feast of unleavened bread and Passover is related back, of course, to the Exodus from Egypt. That’s the historical marker. And there are really several feasts that we can think of in terms of this.

First is the Sabbath in Leviticus 23. The first feast listed is the weekly Sabbath, and the Sabbath is a feast as well. And the Passover really represents the first Sabbath of the year, and so we can put it in this particular cycle.

Secondly, there was the feast of Passover, and then there’s the feast of unleavened bread. The day of Passover comes first in this cycle, and then there’s a feast of unleavened bread that lasts a week long. And in the context of that feast of unleavened bread, there’s also the first of the first fruits, the first sheaf as well.

So you might ask, what’s the correlation? You’ve got Passover, you’ve got unleavened bread for a week, and then you’ve got the first sheaf. And that really represents three or four feasts if we want to include the Sabbath day as a feast in this cycle. But they’re all at the same time. The feast of unleavened bread is what I’m saying—it kind of commemorates all of these, these two other feasts: Passover and first sheaf. They all should be thought of in terms of the feast of unleavened bread.

As I said, in four places these three feasts are said to be the three feasts of the Lord. And yet there are these others that are subsets of them.

Okay. The second set, or time in which these feasts occur, is fifty days later, which is the feast of harvest. Now here it’s late spring, and the wheat harvest—the early first wheat crop—is harvested at this point in time. The feast of weeks in early June or what we would think of as late May or early June would be at the end of the wheat harvest. And the historical marker here is the giving of the law at Sinai.

Okay? They come out of Egypt at the Passover related to unleavened bread and first sheaf. They come up to Mount Sinai, and fifty days later, at Pentecost, the law was given at Sinai. So that’s the historic marker that’s being taught to the people here. And then the feast itself is the feast of harvest, which is also known as the feast of weeks, Pentecost. And again here you read about the first fruits, but now these are loaves.

Okay? So we’ve got two agricultural cycles here. The early harvest of the barley and one sheaf is waved before God, and you have Passover and unleavened bread. And then the next thing that happens in this agrarian cycle is the fullness of the wheat harvest fifty days later. And now we’ve got a first fruits again, but it’s not a sheaf. It is loaves. There’s been maturation over these fifty days. And so that occurs.

And then the third cycle happens at the end of the harvest year in the fall. The third cycle: the agrarian markers are the fall harvest of the summer crops. The oil would now be fully harvested. The grapes would be brought in, the fruit crops, and other things, etc. The full harvest is accomplished. And the historical marker for the feast of booths, or ingathering, is related back to the time in the wilderness. We have explicit references to that. We’ll talk about in a couple of weeks as we talk about the feast of ingathering, or the feast of tabernacles, booths, Succoth. These are all different names for the same feast.

Now in Leviticus 23, there are several other feasts specifically related to these feasts. There’s trumpets—which would mark the beginning of what’s called the civil year. The blowing forth of trumpets is called a feast in Leviticus 23. Then there’s the day of atonement, and then in the same month the feast of ingathering. So you have all of those feasts bundled together in the third wave of this agricultural cycle that moves from early harvest to wheat harvest and then the fullness of harvest at the end of the year.

So we move from the feast of unleavened bread with Passover and with first sheaf, to then the middle harvest time—the wheat harvest is brought in—and that’s Pentecost, feast of Pentecost. And then we get to the end of the year, to the fall. All the crops have been brought in. We’re rejoicing because of God’s blessings. This is the high holy days, as it were, the feasting cycle. And here we have the blowing of trumpets, the day of atonement, and we have the feast of tabernacles, booths, or in our text, the feast of ingathering is the name for it.

So that’s quite a lot of detailed names there, but don’t let the names throw you. It moves from early harvest to the full harvest of the wheat to the full harvest of everything. It moves from the Exodus from Egypt to the giving of the law at Sinai to then the provision for God in the context of the wilderness where they dwell in booths, or as a heavenly people. And as we go through these the next couple of weeks, you’ll become more and more familiar with them.

Now, we also want to talk—room three on your outline. We want to talk about the relationship of the feast of unleavened bread and these three feasts to the three gifts God has given to us in the context of worship. And we’ve talked about this in the past. For most of you, this is a little bit of review, but there is a progression here in these feasts—a historical as well as an agrarian progression—that we’ve talked about here.

And what we see in this is that we can relate it to the movement of the Lord’s day worship services that we engage in here at Reformation Covenant Church. You know, we said that in order to celebrate correctly, in order to really rejoice before God, you have to understand how that’s to look. And so God gives them a series of detailed provisions to teach them how to celebrate, so all their life would be joyous as they went into the rest of their lives.

So here God tells us to come together every Lord’s day to learn what joy and happiness and blessing is all about, to form as the basis, then, for those waves that move out into our lives, differentiated throughout the week.

So if we’re going to do that, we have to understand how worship flows according to the scriptures. We can’t just decide, well, it’d be kind of neat if we began worship this day with maybe just a long period of silence, half an hour, sing a song of praise, and go home. Now, maybe if God’s word says to do that, we should do it. But what I’m saying is that if we don’t try to attend to how God tells us to worship, we’re going to fail to learn how our celebrations are regulated by God and will not enter into the full joy of the Savior in our celebrations.

And we believe—I believe—that God’s worship moves forward in terms of these three gifts. The three elements of the ark of the covenant were Aaron’s rod that blossomed, the manna, the golden pot of manna, and the law of God. And these things correlate to these three festivals that God gives us in the three main feasts spoken of in this particular text.

The feast of unleavened bread relates to the glory that all men want. Everybody wants to be counted worthy, weighty. They want people to listen to them. We want glory or weightiness. God says we fall short of that because of our sin. All men have sinned and fall short of the glory, the honor, the weightiness of God. And God assures us at the beginning of the cycle of our forgiveness. He assures us of our forgiveness of sins—or what the church has called historically—the pronouncement of the absolution of the people. The beginning of the service is the beginning of the movement of this cycle.

The feast of unleavened bread and Passover is related explicitly to their being redeemed out of the sin that they were engaged in in Egypt. And we’ll talk about that in just a moment. So it seems to correlate unleavened bread and Passover to this idea: the forgiveness of sins accomplished definitively through the coming Paschal lamb, the Lord Jesus Christ. It relates to that first gift, and we do that in the context of our worship.

The feast of harvest is the feast of harvest, the feast of Pentecost, in other words, or weeks. This relates, as we said historically, to the giving of the law at Sinai. All men want to know things. They want to know the true skinny. They want the real knowledge about stuff. And God brings us forward and says, “Here’s the real knowledge. Here’s the knowledge that nobody else can get. But you can’t get it autonomously. You’ve got to come confessing your unworthiness and receiving my forgiveness. And then I’ll give you the word.”

And the word is preached to us and read to us. And that word provides us with knowledge the way the tablets of the law and the ark of the covenant relate to the knowledge of Christ. And so the harvest festival, the feast of Pentecost, relates to this gift of knowledge, the word, the law at Sinai.

So we have a sermon here, and the sermon is responded to with offerings and with prayer and with consecration based upon the Old Testament cycle of what those sorts of services looked like.

And then the third gift that everybody wants is life. And God says he’s going to bring you here today. He’s going to assure you that it’s okay. Don’t be afraid of him because he’s forgiven your sins. He’s then going to speak to you through the word. And then he’s going to, before he sends you out to act in response to that, feed you with grace from on high. He’s going to give you life.

You know, I’m going to Poland. I’m going to talk to him about children. And I’m going to include this stuff because what we need to do to train our children to be Christian is to not try to get honor and glory on their own, apart from submission to Christ and confession of sin.

What we need to do with our children is to understand that their Adamic propensity is going to be to get knowledge on their own, apart from the word of God. And their propensity is going to try to get life and grab for life apart from the regulation of God’s word. And that’s why teenagers end up in trouble—because they’re seeking glory or weight, knowledge or truth, and life without understanding that God has given us all these things as we submit and show our worship and our dependence upon him.

Every Lord’s day, God tells us that he alone is the source of true glory, that he alone is the source of true knowledge, and that Jesus alone is the source of true life. And he corrects us. The basis for our sin is the rejection of those things. All men sin, fall short of the glory of God. And God says, “Train yourselves to think of these three movements, including these three feasts—the ingathering at the end of the year, high celebration. You see, so this movement of the agricultural year and the movement of removal from Egypt, out of Egypt, then the giving of the law at Sinai, and then God’s provision of manna in the wilderness—correlate to this movement of the Christian service that we’ve formed here at Reformation Covenant Church. And it is the basis for our life and celebration before God. It forms the pattern. And it prepares us and transforms us through this worship, through God’s gifts of these gifts to us, to go into the world and offer these same gifts to the world, and the elect will pick up on those gifts.

So it’s a tremendous blessing.

Let’s move on to talk about the relationship of the feast of unleavened bread to Passover. You know, again it gets a little confusing, but just remember: feast of Passover was one day of Passover. Then there was a week of feast of unleavened bread, and in the context of that, the first sheaf. Now, this is called here in the summation of these three feasts “the feast of unleavened bread.”

It’s not the feast of Passover. Passover is the first day. Then there’s a week of unleavened bread. But there is this necessary connection between the two. So I want to just touch very briefly on some points about the Passover.

If we’re going to be informed in Christian worship about the feast of unleavened bread and its significance, we have to bring in Passover. And I’ll do this quite quickly.

First of all, Passover had to do with the firstborn. Passover was the passing over of the people of God—those who had applied the blood of God to the doors of their houses. And remember, they were being passed over from death. The angel of death comes to Egypt and kills all the firstborn.

Now, I said we’d mention Exodus 34, one text where all three feasts are recorded. And Exodus 34, in verse 18, talks about the feast of unleavened bread. And then it immediately in verse 19 says, “All that open the womb are mine. All the firstborn are mine,” he says. And you’re supposed to make explicit provision for that. Why does it move from unleavened bread to the firstborn being his?

Well, because unleavened bread is associated with Passover. And God in the picture at Passover destroys Egypt through the picture of the destroying of the next generation. The firstborn represents the whole people. So when we come to the feast of unleavened bread and its relation to Christian worship, God says he owns our firstborn, but he owns all of us because of that firstborn.

So the feast of unleavened bread is connected to Passover, and it’s connected to the firstborn. All men outside of the covenant are under the tenth plague, which was this death to the firstborn. All men outside of the covenant are under the tenth plague. Only those within are covered by the blood of the lamb and assured of the victory and deliverance into the promised land as the new creation of God.

Secondly, Passover is related to liberty. And we know this: we’re coming out of slavery and bondage. What you might not know is that Exodus 20, verse 7, God says this about the Exodus and about their state in Egypt: “Then I said to them, ‘Each of you throw’—now he’s talking about when he said to them in Egypt, ‘Throw away the abominations which are before his eyes. Do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.’”

So it isn’t just a symbolic presentation of sin and death. They were in bondage in Egypt because of their sin, because they had defilements before their eyes. You see? So the Passover is not just a symbol of redemption from sin and death. It was redemption from sin and death for the people of God as they come out from Egypt. And certainly when we come to Christian worship, there’s this picture of moving into liberty by being transformed away from these sins of trying to get false glory, false knowledge, and false life.

You see? So God is moving us out of that. And one of the causes of celebration we have is if we see this transition week to week, Lord’s day to Lord’s day, of being brought away from those abominations and defilements that we tend to put in front of our eyes, symbolically representing all of our sin.

Third, Passover is related to the destruction of the gods of Egypt. Explicitly in Exodus 12, God tells him in the Passover. He says, “I’ll pass through the land of Egypt that night and will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast, and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment. Against all the gods of Egypt, I will execute judgment.”

Feast of unleavened bread related to Passover is about God’s victory—not just over our sin, but against the false gods that we tend to worship in the context of that sin. And it represents the final victory over all the gods of Egypt, and by way of application, over all the gods that the world can offer to man. They have been defeated definitively by the greater Exodus, the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Fourth, the Passover and unleavened bread are therefore related to life. It was the blood of the lamb, the Paschal lamb representing the blood of Christ, that’s applied to the door. Passover is inevitably tied to blood. But we think about this a little differently, too. We think about the shedding of blood, and we think about death in relationship to blood. But God in Leviticus doesn’t say that the death is in the blood.

The death of the flesh is in the blood. God says in Leviticus that the life of the flesh is in the blood. The application of the blood at the doorpost is a picture of life, not ultimately death. The Passover wasn’t primarily concerned with death. It was primarily concerned with life through the application of blood. No blood, no life. Under the blood, under the life of the Savior.

The cup of Christ’s blood is life to us in the context of the Lord’s supper. Yes, as we move through these worship elements that we have here, the life of the flesh is in the blood, not the death of the flesh. The doorposts represent life in the context of the blood of the Savior. There’s power in the blood. There’s life in the blood. And when we come today to communion, God says it’s the blood of Christ that we drink. And we drink life. We don’t drink death.

So the Passover has to do with life primarily, not death.

Fifth, the Passover has to do with victory. That after the Passover in Egypt, this was followed by a march into victory and conquest of the promised land to drive out the rebellious from God’s inheritance. So Christ’s death, the greater Passover, is followed in Matthew’s account of the gospel with the Great Commission. The Great Commission follows Passover, and the agricultural year shows that progression of Passover to victory.

Russ Junior writing on this says that the church is created by the redemptive act of God in Christ in order to act upon the world in Christ’s name and power. The church is the Passover house, and it serves the Lord to ring in his jubilee. It’s Christ at work through man to extend the Passover festival into all the world and to bring in the great jubilee.

Sixth, Passover is of course related to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Passover lamb. His ministry is the greater Passover, bringing us into life, deliverance, victory, and all the blessings that the Passover pictured in part in the Old Testament.

John 1:29, John saw Jesus, and he said, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” The world, not just a few, the world.

John 19:36, “These things were done that the scripture should be fulfilled: ‘Not one of his bones shall be broken.’” Talking of the Paschal lamb, applying that scripture to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

1 Corinthians 5:7, “Purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us.”

And then 1 Peter 1:19, “With the precious blood of Christ, we redeemed as a lamb without blemish and without spot, a Paschal lamb.”

And then in Revelation 5, of course, Christ is pictured as a lamb having been slain from the foundations of the world.

So Passover culminates in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we know a lot of that. I’ve reminded you of a lot of things that are true and are important, and we know it. But the question is, why do they eat unleavened bread for a week? What is that? That we don’t know as well about from the scriptures.

We know that they’re not supposed to eat leavened bread, that leaven is not to be there. We also should know—most of us probably do—that in Exodus 13, they’re told that no leaven shall be among you in all your homes or quarters. And if you do have leaven in your homes, then you’re kicked out of the promises of God. So the removal of leaven was not just in terms of the bread that was eaten, but they were supposed to have no leaven in their house for the whole week.

So before Passover comes, the idea was to go throughout your home looking for leaven or anything with leaven in it and throw it out. And by way of the way this was actually carried out, they’d take lamps to make sure they didn’t miss anything. They’d take a broom. They’d sweep out the house real good and look with the lamp wherever they could to find leaven in the house to remove it.

Now, you might think from this that leaven is a bad deal, that leaven is sinful or evil. And some people have come to that erroneous conclusion. They were instructed to remove leaven from their houses for a week in Exodus 12:15 as well. But in Matthew 13:33, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until it was all leavened.

In Leviticus 23:17, we read that you’re supposed to take from your dwellings two wave loaves. Now, this is the Pentecost first fruit offering: two wave loaves of two tenths of an ephah. They shall be of fine flour. They shall be baked with leaven. They are the first fruits to the Lord.

So in terms of the movement of these agricultural three cycles, the first one was no leaven, but the next one—Pentecost, what was to be given to God—these loaves was to be a leavened offering.

Now God doesn’t accept sin as an offering. So leaven can’t represent sin. We move from unleavened to a leavened offering. And then in terms of the movement of the three main offerings of the system—the whole burnt or ascension offering, then the tribute offering, the peace offering—the peace offering as well, in Leviticus 7:13, is described as being leavened. “Besides the cakes,” says his offering, “he shall offer leavened bread with the sacrifice of thanksgiving of his peace offering.”

So there’s a movement in terms of the three offerings as well to leaven being that culminating portion of that culminating peace offering before God. Why? What’s going on here? Does God want us to have leaven or does he not want us to have leaven?

Well, there’s a movement here. And the movement, first of all, I think is based upon an understanding of leaven as corruptibility before men. Men’s works are always prone to be corruptible. They can be corrupted by wrong or evil influences. So it seems like the leaven can first of all be seen as corruptible influences that tend to creep into our lives. And we don’t want to bring any of our works to God as we come before him for worship in terms of being accepted by him. The offering we bring is a show of our fealty to him, but it doesn’t say we want to be treated according to our works.

Augustus Toplady wrote that song “Rock of Ages,” and he wrote, “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to the cross I cling.” And the removal of leaven is a picture of that. But I think the greater picture of leaven is one of historical maturation.

You see, I’ve taken a lot of time to build up this progression of the agricultural cycle and to relate it to the historical progression of the people of God in the wilderness, moving to the historical progression of God’s people this side of the cross where Christ dies as the Passover, initiates the Great Commission, and we go into not just the land but all the earth. And in that process we move…