After all the rules for the Passover were given Moses brought all the elders of Israel together and told them to go pick out their lambs, slaughter the lambs, then take a bunch of hyssop, to be used as a paint brush, dip it in the blood of the lamb and paint the doorposts and the lintels. After that was accomplished they were to close the door and stay inside until morning. Moses’s explanation to them was when the Lord goes through to smite the Egyptians, He will see the blood and not let the Destroyer enter and smite the first born.
It’s interesting that God wants the Israelites to teach their children the meaning of all that is going on. God encourages the education of children, especially when it comes to God and His will for our lives. There are actually four verses in the first five books of the Bible commanding the education of the children on the Exodus.
On Passover when the child raises the question regarding the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, they are to be told “because He passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians, but saved our houses.” The questions and answers weredesigned to have them grow up knowing God’s power to both destroy and to save. We are all to fear God, it is the basis of morality. Psalm 111:10 tells us “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”
Those Israelites must have felt the fear of God because they obeyed and did what Moses told them.It was in the middle of the night that God struck down all the first-born in the land of Egypt who did not have the blood on their doorposts. And this death included the cattle. Pharaoh arose in the night, with all his courtiers and all the Egyptians because there was a loud cry in Egypt; for there was no house where there was not someone dead. That was when Pharaoh declared the Israelites were to leave. His words were, “Up, depart from among my people, you and the Israelites with you! Go worship the Lord as you said. Take your flocks and you herds, and be gone!”
And then what did Pharaoh do? He asks, “May you bring a blessing upon me?”
A presumptuous man, if nothing else. But I suppose he could ask for some pittance of self-aggrandizement, after all God already told the Israelites to ask for all the gold and silver the Egyptians owned. Actually, by the time Pharaoh
‘let the people go’ they had stripped the land of Egypt of all their wealth and God had even taken their first born sons. It’s hard to imagine just how difficult life would be for the Egyptians with their wealth gone and their free labor gone.
That exodus of the Israelites would take 600 thousand men, not to mention the women and the children. Can you imagine how bereft the Egyptians felt with all this gone? Then Scripture says, “a mixed multitude went up with them. These would be added to the number of Israelites who left. And the Israelites also took their livestock.”
The Israelites lived in Egypt for four hundred and thirty years to the day. But only about two hundred of those years had they lived as slaves. When they finally got out from under the heavy hand of Pharaoh, they left without preparation. Can you imagine uprooting your entire family without packing and without food provisions? All they had to eat was the unleavened bread they had been instructed to eat. The law of the Passover said no foreigner shall eat of it. A slave could eat of it once he was circumcised. Hired laborers could eat of it. It was to be eaten in one house, nothing of the Passover meal could be taken outside the house. Every man who eats it must be circumcised. Then God said “one law shall be for the citizen and the strange who dwells among you.” It was unique in the world that both citizens and non-citizens would be treated equally under the law.
All those Israelites obeyed God’s laws regarding their exodus. And that very day the Lord freed the Israelites from the land of Egypt, troop by troop.
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