Exodus Chapter 13

This article first appeared as a post I wrote for The 555 Club.  Before your read this article please read Exodus Chapter 13. 

In chapter 13 of Exodus, God has freed the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery. Through the ten plagues and especially the final plague of the death of the firstborn, the will of the Egyptian people and the will of Pharaoh have been broken. The Hebrews set out into the wilderness, laden with the wealth of the Egyptians, just as God had promised Abraham in Genesis 15.

“But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions.” Genesis 15:14 NIV

Now they have begun their journey towards Canaan, and God starts them off with a command. They are to consecrate all of the firstborn animals and firstborn male children to the LORD.

“The Lord said to Moses, 'Consecrate to me every firstborn male. The first offspring of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me, whether human or animal.”” Exodus 13:1-2 NIV

The word consecrate means to “dedicate,” “sanctify,” or “give exclusively to”. This is directly related to what happened in the last plague, the death of the firstborn. It was to be a reminder for all time, not only that God had delivered them from Egyptian slavery, but it would also serve as a story to be told to their children to pass on the knowledge of what happened in Egypt and how God delivered them. It would also serve as a prophetic picture of the coming Messiah and His deliverance from the bondage of sin.

In the case of animals, God commanded that a firstborn male animal would either be killed as an offering or it could be redeemed by the death of another animal. Here God continues to illustrate the concept of substitutionary death, pointing us to the work of Jesus on the cross as our substitute.

For human firstborn children, the application of God’s command was a little different. Every firstborn male was to be consecrated to the LORD. In other words, they were to be given to Him for service.

These firstborn sons could be redeemed by a substitutionary blood sacrifice of an animal.
Again, this is meant to point backward as a memorial of God’s deliverance from Egyptian bondage and also prophetically point forward to Jesus, who will redeem people by being His substitutionary blood sacrifice.

This was supposed to begin once the Hebrews entered the land of Canaan. But there will be a strange turn of events at Mount Sinai that will cause God to choose the tribe of Levi to serve Him as priests and be set apart as servants of God instead of every firstborn Hebrew male. We will talk more about this in the coming chapters.

The idea of the firstborn being dedicated to God was to teach the Hebrews that God had a claim of ownership on their first and their best of everything. It was a reminder that they all belonged to Him and would not exist without Him.

God gives them another command that serves as a reminder of their deliverance from Egyptian slavery. Once a year, they would celebrate “The Feast of Unleavened Bread”. For seven days, they were to eat bread made with no yeast, then on the seventh day, they were to celebrate a feast to the LORD.

This would be a reminder that God had delivered them from Egyptian slavery, but it was especially a reminder for the children in the future. It would give parents an occasion to tell the children the story of Egypt, the plagues, and God’s deliverance.

When the Bible talks about yeast, it usually uses it as a symbol of sin. A little lump of yeast will grow when mixed with flour and will spread. This is a picture of the nature of sin: if left unchecked, it will grow out of control.

Paul uses the concept very clearly in this New Testament passage:

“Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” 1 Corinthians 5:6-8 NIV

So, as God is taking them out of Egypt, He is equipping them to never forget what He has done, to pass the stories down to the next generation, and teaching them that they are to be dedicated to Him and to consecrate themselves to Him in holiness as an act of thanks for God's great mercy.

So they leave Egypt, and God knows they are not a people of war. They have been making bricks for hundreds of years; they are not trained warriors. So, God leads them on a route that will avoid immediate conflict with the people of the nearby lands. They will eventually become a fighting force, but at this point He is still training them.

In these first miles as free people, God is instilling into them three things:

First, God was teaching them that the Passover, the dedication of the firstborn, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread would give them a framework for thinking about the future.

• To remember and pass on to future generations what God had done in Egypt
• To teach that they all belonged to Him
• To teach that God was calling them to holiness, to be consecrated to God alone.
• To point to the future when Jesus will come as our Passover Lamb of God.

Second, as they were leaving Egypt, they carried the bones of Joseph, the son of Jacob. Through those bones God was speaking to the Hebrews.

• Those bones reminded them of all the promises God had made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and how God had blessed the Hebrews through Joseph.
• Joseph’s bones reminded them that just as they once took the bones of Jacob to be buried in Canaan, they now were taking the bones of Joseph to be buried in Canaan.
• Those bones reminded them of the faith of Joseph. Joseph was so sure that God would deliver the Hebrews and take them to the land of Canaan that he made his sons promise that his bones would be taken with them when they left Egypt. It was as if Joseph’s bones could not rest in Egypt; only when they laid them in Canaan would he symbolically rest, because Canaan was his promised home, not Egypt.
• While the Hebrews carried those bones and walked towards Canaan, they understood they were a walking miracle, and that the bones of Joseph they carried were a reminder of all that God had done and that God was now doing exactly what He had promised to Abraham.

Third, when the Hebrews left Egypt and came to camp in the wilderness, God continued to prove that He was with them. God showed them His presence by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. This was a visible reminder of what He had promised, over and over again. God had said to His people, “I Am with You!” The cloud and the fire were a constant reminder that they were not alone; their covenant-keeping God was right there in their camp.One last thought.

We might think it would be great to have physical evidence of God with us today, like the Hebrews did, with the fire and cloud of God hanging over every church and every believer all the time. As I read this and thought about what God was saying to us through it, a thought popped into my head. The cloud and the fire in Exodus that served as evidence to the Hebrews that God was with them, we have today.

For the Hebrews, the evidence of God being with them was external. They could see the cloud by day and the fire by night and know that He was there.

For us, the cloud by day and the fire by night is internal. There, next to the Red Sea, God was with them, but today, for all believers, God is within us. They saw the cloud and fire at the edge of camp, but we feel the cloud and fire within our hearts through the indwelling Spirit of God.

The Holy Spirit gives us the assurance that He is with us, and that we, like them, are on a journey! That we have been given promises, too! He will not rest until He brings us into that place that He has promised us. For the Hebrews, it was Canaan. For us, it is a New Heavens and a New Earth in which righteousness dwells.

That is our promised land, and I can’t wait!