Daily Devotion – September 1, 2020 – Dr. Pat Taylor Ellison
Exodus 12:1-14
12:1 The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt:
12:2 This month shall for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.
12:3 Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household.
12:4 If a household is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join its closest neighbor in obtaining one; the lamb shall be divided in proportion to the number of people who eat of it.
12:5 Your lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats.
12:6 You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight.
12:7 They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it.
12:8 They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.
12:9 Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire, with its head, legs, and inner organs.
12:10 You shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn.
12:11 This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the passover of the LORD.
12:12 For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals; on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD.
12:13 The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.
12:14 This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.
After 9 other horrible plagues that Pharaoh first surrendered to and then hardened his heart to, the 10th plague would be the decider: death of the firstborn. Look at the careful instructions. Those instructions would bind the children of Israel together for centuries, forming a turning point that would become a pivotal part of the Hebrew culture. They would be recited for millenia afterward – even today. But for that 14th day of that month, they were simply survival instructions, and urgent, since once God intervened in this way, the people would have only a short window of time to get out of the country.
Following the law to the letter got the children of Israel out of oppression. It’s no wonder they developed at times into a people for whom the letter of the law became their road to freedom and an emblem of their relationship with God.
What a different emblem of God must Jesus have been to the Jews. He did not flaut the Law, but he lived his life out of love to the people and in service to each beloved child of God. That must have made the leaders of the Jews crazy. Their very survival had been dependent of following instructions perfectly. Jesus’s instructions are so much bigger and broader than the Law. And, while the Law is a gift from God and structures society so that it is predictable and dependable, the Gospel, the very life of Jesus, is even wider than the law. How do we live our lives today in that tension between the justice and judgment of the Law, and the mercy and self-giving of the Gospel? And how does the perhaps more comfortable reliance of the letter of the law become a stumbling block to our seeing God at work in the world?
Gracious God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us both the Law that orders us and the Gospel that reconciles us to you. Give us wisdom to know the difference. Amen.
