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The keeping of this Passover is very particularly described in this chapter, and we may be sure that it was entered into and enjoyed, as a religious festival, with exceeding zest. We naturally ask - What was its significance? What did it mean to those who celebrated it? We reply that in it and by it -

I. THEY RECOGNIZED THEIR UNITY AS THE PEOPLE OF GOD. They went back in thought to the time when they were bound together in the strong bond of a common sorrow; when they were a suffering people bent beneath the same yoke, bleeding with the same blows; and they recognized the fact that they were all the children of their fathers to whom Moses came as the great prophet and saviour. And the lamb of which they partook, with not a bone of its body broken, was the symbol of the national unity.

II. THEY REJOICED IN A GREAT DIVINE DELIVERANCE - A DELIVERANCE THROUGH SACRIFICE. The prevailing thought of the whole institution was God's merciful and mighty interposition on their behalf, redeeming them from the land of bondage and misery, bringing them out into liberty and happiness, and constituting them a nation, holy unto himself. And closely connected with the main idea of deliverance was that of sacrifice; they commemorated the fact that through the sacrifice of a slain lamb they had been spared and redeemed.

III. THEY HAD FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD AND WITH ONE ANOTHER. The Feast of the Passover and of Unleavened Bread was one in which they rejoiced together both as families and as a congregated nation "before the Lord." Then they had true fellowship with one another, meeting and greeting one another as members of the same redeemed nation, whom the Lord had pitied and restored; and while they were thus gladdened in heart as they associated one with another, they were also solemnized by the thought that they met together in the city of God, in the courts of the Lord's house, in his own presence. Theirs was a sacred union and communion; it was fellowship with the Supreme. When we meet, as Christian men, in ordinary worship, and more particularly when we gather together at the Lord's table, we are moved and animated by this same spirit, by these same convictions and considerations.

1. We realize our essential unity, our oneness in Jesus Christ. Are we not all members of that race on which, in all its distance from the home of God, he had compassion and which he stooped to save? Are we not bound together, not only as partakers of the same human nature, but as those who have bowed beneath the same yoke, who have needed the same Divine Redeemer, who have suffered in the same affliction?

2. We rejoice together in the same glorious redemption - a redemption that

(1) not only was designed and begun, but was triumphantly completed;

(2) a redemption which, in its spiritual character and its everlasting issues, dwarfs even such a great national deliverance as that which this Passover commemorated;

(3) a redemption which could only be (and was) accomplished through the sacrifice of the "Lamb of God," slain from the foundation of the world for the recovery of the world.

3. We meet to have holy and happy fellowship with one another, and also hallowed and elevating fellowship with our Father and his Son Jesus Christ (1 John 1:3). - C.

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KJV: And the children of Israel that were present kept the passover at that time, and the feast of unleavened bread seven days.

WEB: The children of Israel who were present kept the Passover at that time, and the feast of unleavened bread seven days.