For seven days Israel was to remove leaven from their homes and eat unleavened bread. God gave them that observance so they would remember how He brought them out of Egypt. Paul later used the feast to confront a church that tolerated open wickedness. Remembering Israel’s deliverance and applying Paul’s instruction do not require Christians to place themselves under Israel’s festival calendar.
The Memorial God Gave Israel
The Feast of Unleavened Bread began with Israel’s deliverance from slavery. God put that rescue into the nation’s yearly calendar, including sacred assemblies on the first and seventh days. Children born long after the exodus were to learn why their families ate this bread and who had brought their ancestors out of bondage. Israel had not freed itself, and life in a better land was not to erase its dependence on the LORD.
Passover and Unleavened Bread commemorated the same deliverance, but God’s commands distinguish them. The Passover sacrifice belonged to the fourteenth day of the first month, and the seven-day feast began on the fifteenth. The two observances joined at the evening change of day. Passover recalled the lamb and the blood-marked homes spared when judgment fell on Egypt. Unleavened Bread carried that remembrance through the following week. Their close connection explains why Scripture sometimes calls the whole season Passover. The adjoining study on the Passover considers the first observance more fully.
So this day shall be to you a memorial; and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD throughout your generations. You shall keep it as a feast by an everlasting ordinance. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses. For whoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel. On the first day there shall be a holy convocation, and on the seventh day there shall be a holy convocation for you. No manner of work shall be done on them; but that which everyone must eat–that only may be prepared by you. So you shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread, for on this same day I will have brought your armies out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day throughout your generations as an everlasting ordinance.
The words used for the feast describe what Israel ate and removed from their homes. Hebrew matsot means unleavened breads or cakes. Chamets describes what is leavened or fermented, while seor refers to leaven, such as fermented dough retained to start a fresh batch. Greek azyma can name either the bread or the festival season. Knowing these meanings helps us follow the commands; it does not give us hidden doctrine in the sounds of the words.
A holy convocation was a sacred assembly, a gathering God called His people to attend. On the first and seventh days, they were to set aside ordinary work, with the stated allowance for preparing food. Throughout the week, leaven was to be absent from their homes and meals. God made this a command, not a family custom whose religious meaning could be changed at will.
God warned that anyone who ate leavened bread during the appointed days would be “cut off” from Israel. This threatened removal from the covenant people and their privileges, with the serious possibility of divine intervention in judgment. We should not reduce it to losing permission to attend a gathering. Exodus does not specify every procedure or how the penalty would unfold in each case. The NET note on Exodus 12:15 discusses both exclusion from the community and God’s judgment. Israel was not free to dismiss the command because it concerned bread.
The words “everlasting ordinance” occur with “throughout your generations.” God was establishing an enduring observance for His covenant people. That wording cannot by itself settle what He requires of the church under the new covenant. We need the New Testament’s instruction before taking a command given to Israel and making it a condition of Christian obedience.
Exodus then records the departure the feast would commemorate. After the death of Egypt’s firstborn, Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and ordered Israel to go.
And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they had brought out of Egypt; for it was not leavened, because they were driven out of Egypt and could not wait, nor had they prepared provisions for themselves.
The Egyptians feared more deaths and urged Israel to leave. Families carried dough that had not risen, with their kneading bowls wrapped in clothing on their shoulders. They took their children and livestock, along with the silver, gold, and clothing the Egyptians had given them. The LORD was releasing people who had been enslaved, and the pressure to leave was so urgent that they could not wait for the dough to rise or prepare provisions for the journey (Exodus 12:31-39).
Their hurry explains the bread they baked, but Israel did not invent the feast after the departure. Earlier in Exodus 12, God had already commanded unleavened bread for the Passover meal and prescribed the seven-day observance. He gave the sign beforehand. The rescue that followed gave His people the memory they were to preserve as a delivered nation.
Deuteronomy looks back on that night while instructing Israel about worship in the land. It calls the bread a reminder of affliction and again connects it with their hurried departure.
You shall eat no leavened bread with it; seven days you shall eat unleavened bread with it, that is, the bread of affliction (for you came out of the land of Egypt in haste), that you may remember the day in which you came out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life.
The “bread of affliction” reminded Israel of the bondage from which God had rescued them. As they ate, they were to remember their suffering and give the Deliverer credit for bringing them out. Deuteronomy also required them to worship at the place the LORD would choose. The first Passover had been eaten in homes in Egypt; the later national celebration was tied to His sanctuary (Deuteronomy 16:1-8). I need to follow those different stages rather than combine selected details into a modern meal and claim it reproduces every requirement of the law.
Moses also required parents to explain the feast to their children. In Exodus 13, he ties that teaching directly to the departure from Egypt:
And you shall tell your son in that day, saying, 'This is done because of what the LORD did for me when I came up from Egypt.' It shall be as a sign to you on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes, that the LORD's law may be in your mouth; for with a strong hand the LORD has brought you out of Egypt. You shall therefore keep this ordinance in its season from year to year.
Parents were to tell their children, “This is done because of what the LORD did for me when I came up from Egypt.” Their explanation joined the meal to an actual rescue. A child needed more than a rule about which bread to eat; he needed to hear about the slavery, the LORD’s strong hand, and the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 13:3-10). The sign and memorial were to keep God’s law in the people’s mouths, spoken and remembered rather than forgotten after the meal.
Eating the bread expressed their identity as God’s covenant people and their obedience, but the dough had not delivered them. God had redeemed Israel by His power. Leviticus also sets this remembrance within appointed dates and sacrifices:
On the fourteenth day of the first month at twilight is the LORD's Passover. And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the LORD; seven days you must eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall have a holy convocation; you shall do no customary work on it. But you shall offer an offering made by fire to the LORD for seven days. The seventh day shall be a holy convocation; you shall do no customary work on it.
Leviticus gives the dates and requires offerings throughout the seven days; Numbers 28 supplies further details of those sacrifices. Keeping the Mosaic feast therefore involved Israel’s sanctuary, priesthood, and offerings as well as removing leaven from the home. A family may use that removal as a teaching exercise today, but doing so does not fulfill the complete observance God gave at Sinai.
God required the nation to make time for remembrance. Ordinary work could not be allowed to push it aside, and parents could not leave the explanation entirely to the priests. Homes, public assemblies, and sanctuary service all bore witness that the LORD had acted in Egypt.
Deliverance Remembered in the Land
The feast continued beyond the emergency of leaving Egypt. After Israel crossed the Jordan, they kept Passover at Gilgal before the campaign against Jericho. Their food now came from the land God had promised.
Now the children of Israel camped in Gilgal, and kept the Passover on the fourteenth day of the month at twilight on the plains of Jericho. And they ate of the produce of the land on the day after the Passover, unleavened bread and parched grain, on the very same day. Then the manna ceased on the day after they had eaten the produce of the land; and the children of Israel no longer had manna, but they ate the food of the land of Canaan that year.
Israel ate unleavened bread and parched grain from Canaan’s produce, and the manna ceased the next day. The LORD who had fed them in the wilderness was now providing food from the land promised to Abraham’s descendants. Settling there gave them no less reason to remember their hurried departure from Egypt. A change in how their food was supplied had not made them independent of the God who delivered and sustained them.
During Hezekiah’s reform, the people gathered in Jerusalem and removed unlawful altars. They held the feast in the second month because not enough priests had consecrated themselves and the people had not assembled in time for the first month, as 2 Chronicles 30:2-4 explains. What follows shows people earnestly returning to the LORD while still needing His mercy:
For a multitude of the people, many from Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar, and Zebulun, had not cleansed themselves, yet they ate the Passover contrary to what was written. But Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, "May the good LORD provide atonement for everyone who prepares his heart to seek God, the LORD God of his fathers, though he is not cleansed according to the purification of the sanctuary." And the LORD listened to Hezekiah and healed the people. So the children of Israel who were present at Jerusalem kept the Feast of Unleavened Bread seven days with great gladness; and the Levites and the priests praised the LORD day by day, singing to the LORD, accompanied by loud instruments.
The priests and Levites were ashamed and sanctified themselves, setting themselves apart for their appointed service. Some worshipers had not completed the required purification, so Hezekiah prayed for those who had prepared their hearts to seek the LORD. God heard him and healed the people. They kept the feast with great gladness, praising God day by day, confessing, and receiving instruction from the Levites. Their need for mercy did not make the written commands unimportant. The restored feast belonged to a return to God that also required them to remove false worship and obey Him (2 Chronicles 30:13-22).
Josiah later celebrated Passover and Unleavened Bread during the covenant renewal that followed the recovery of the Book of the Law. Scripture commends the scale and order of the observance. Yet even an impressive festival could not substitute for obeying the revelation that had exposed Judah’s wrongdoing. The reforms called people back to God’s Word, rather than merely reviving an enjoyable national gathering.
After the exile in Babylon, the returning community rebuilt the temple and celebrated the feast again. They were worshiping after another deliverance in which God had moved a foreign ruler to support their work:
And the descendants of the captivity kept the Passover on the fourteenth day of the first month. For the priests and the Levites had purified themselves; all of them were ritually clean. And they slaughtered the Passover lambs for all the descendants of the captivity, for their brethren the priests, and for themselves. Then the children of Israel who had returned from the captivity ate together with all who had separated themselves from the filth of the nations of the land in order to seek the LORD God of Israel. And they kept the Feast of Unleavened Bread seven days with joy; for the LORD made them joyful, and turned the heart of the king of Assyria toward them, to strengthen their hands in the work of the house of God, the God of Israel.
The priests and Levites had purified themselves, and people who separated from the surrounding nations’ defilement joined in seeking the LORD. Ezra credits God with their joy and the support that strengthened the temple work. The “king of Assyria” here is the Persian ruler Darius, whose empire included the former Assyrian territories. The title does not move the celebration back into the earlier Assyrian kingdom. The NET note on Ezra 6:22 also identifies a Persian king and suggests a contrast with Assyrian rulers who had opposed Israel. The returned people depended on the LORD’s provision just as their ancestors had after Egypt.
When I follow these observances, I also see why parents had to explain them. A child could learn the meal’s routine and still know little about the God being honored. Christian parents have a similar responsibility to explain the actual events of Scripture and the practices Christ gave His church. If a child asks about baptism or Communion, he needs to hear who commanded it, what it points to, and why Christians obey. Neither ceremony saves him. A family using unleavened bread to teach the exodus should likewise explain Israel’s deliverance without suggesting that the family has acquired Israel’s Mosaic obligations.
How the Feast Leads into the Gospel Accounts
The Gospel writers sometimes use the name of one observance for the wider festival season. Greek pascha can refer to the Passover sacrifice, the meal, a particular day, or the season as a whole. Luke calls the approaching Feast of Unleavened Bread Passover, then describes preparation for the particular meal. At the meal, Jesus said:
And He took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, "This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me." Likewise He also took the cup after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is shed for you."
Jesus sent Peter and John to prepare the Passover. When He sat down with the disciples, He told them how earnestly He had wanted to eat it with them before His suffering (Luke 22:1-18). At the table He spoke of His body being given for them and of the new covenant in His blood. He was born under the Law and obeyed God’s commands to Israel, yet His words “Do this in remembrance of Me” directed the disciples to His own sacrifice. The bread and cup became His appointed remembrance for the church.
The bread and cup point to the real body Jesus gave and the real blood He shed. He did not say that the bread became His physical body or that the cup became literal blood. Nor did He command Gentile believers to become Israel or reproduce every custom of a later Seder, the ordered Jewish Passover meal. We can understand and appreciate the Passover setting without adding requirements He did not give.
The Gospel chronology also requires care. Matthew, Mark, and Luke explicitly describe preparing and eating the Passover, while John uses preparation language during the crucifixion and mentions leaders who still intended to eat the Passover. Some interpreters appeal to different calendars. Others point to the day beginning at sunset or to the wider meaning of the festival terms. “Preparation” could also function as the customary name for Friday. We need to test those proposals against the passages without presenting one reconstruction as though Scripture supplied an explicit chart. The study on the moment Jesus died treats the chronology separately.
All four Gospels testify that Jesus died during the Passover season, was buried, and rose bodily. Some teachers go further and identify His burial on the exact first day of Unleavened Bread as that feast’s specific fulfillment. The New Testament does not explicitly assign that meaning to His burial. At Pentecost, Peter explained His death and resurrection from David’s prophecy:
"Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption. This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses."
Peter says lawless men crucified Jesus according to God’s determined purpose and foreknowledge. God’s purpose did not make their deed righteous, and their violence could not prevent His promised resurrection (Acts 2:22-32). David’s body remained in its tomb, but his prophecy concerned the Christ. Jesus’ soul would not be left in Hades, the realm of the dead, and His flesh would not see corruption. God raised Jesus bodily, and the apostles were witnesses that He was alive.
Scripture establishes both Jesus’ complete sinlessness and the fact that His body did not decay. Neither truth depends on proving that an unleavened loaf predicted His condition in the tomb. My confidence in His burial and bodily resurrection rests on what Scripture records, rather than on that proposed symbolism.
How Paul Applies the Feast to the Church
Paul gives us a direct Christian application of Unleavened Bread. Jesus warned about hypocrisy and harmful teaching under the image of leaven, and Paul used its spreading action to describe corrupting influence. Yet God included leavened bread in the thanksgiving peace offering of Leviticus 7 and required it in the Feast of Weeks loaves of Leviticus 23. Jesus also compared the kingdom to leaven working through a batch of meal. The ingredient therefore does not have one fixed meaning wherever it appears. In the same way, the unleavened bread of the exodus recalls haste and affliction without establishing that it always symbolizes moral perfection. The study on the Parable of the Leaven examines the positive kingdom comparison.
Paul wrote to a Corinthian congregation that was tolerating open sexual immorality. He used the removal of leaven before Israel’s feast to explain why the church must stop protecting wickedness within its fellowship:
In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore 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. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
A man had his father’s wife, and the congregation was proud when it should have mourned (1 Corinthians 5:1-3). Paul required them to remove the unrepentant offender from fellowship. He was not telling them to inspect pantry shelves or suggesting that believers had become incapable of sin. As a little leaven affects the whole batch, their protection of this wrongdoing endangered the whole congregation.
At the chapter’s end, Paul distinguishes the church’s responsibility for those who claim Christ’s name from God’s judgment of outsiders (1 Corinthians 5:9-13). The church must not protect sexual immorality, greed, or idolatry among its professing members. The same applies to abusive speech, drunkenness, and extortion. Paul has not assigned the church to purge every unbeliever from society. Discipline within the church requires evidence and proper order. Qualified leaders must act without favoritism, while the congregation must refuse gossip and the temptation to enjoy a public scandal.
To deliver the man to Satan meant removing him from the church’s protected fellowship into the world outside, where Satan operates. The aim was his salvation, not revenge: the church was to name the evil, protect others from its influence, and warn him to repent. In 2 Corinthians 2, Paul says the punishment inflicted by the majority was sufficient. He tells the church to forgive and comfort the disciplined person so sorrow will not overwhelm him. The letter does not expressly identify him as the offender in 1 Corinthians 5, so I would leave that connection open. The instruction itself is clear. Discipline must not become endless punishment after repentance; when the offender turns from sin, the church should welcome restoration.
Paul grounds the command in what Christ has already done: “since you truly are unleavened.” They were to live according to the new identity Christ had given them, rather than clean themselves up to purchase redemption. “Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.” I understand “Let us keep the feast” as the continuing life of sincerity and truth that belongs to those He redeemed. Paul is not replacing the gospel with an annual obligation to remove yeast. He is telling Christians to stop defending malice and wickedness.
Christians still need to confess sin, receive God’s cleansing, and make restitution where they have wronged someone. Eternal security gives no permission for lawlessness. Everyone truly born again is a new creation whom the Holy Spirit indwells and seals, and obedience gives evidence of that life. Someone can call himself a Christian while stubbornly defending evil, but that profession does not establish regeneration, genuine new birth. Neither our obedience nor our efforts to repair wrongs earn salvation or keep us saved.
What Christ’s Church Is Commanded to Remember
Paul’s call to sincerity and truth does not put Christians under an annual requirement to observe Unleavened Bread. In Colossians he tells believers how to respond when someone tries to judge their standing by food rules or the festival calendar.
So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ.
Calling the festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths shadows does not make God’s commands to Israel foolish or false. Paul is explaining their relation to Christ, in whom their substance is found. We can learn from those observances without treating His finished work as incomplete or accepting condemnation for not keeping Israel’s calendar.
The apostles did not require Gentile believers to remove leaven from their homes, travel to Jerusalem, or present temple offerings. Keeping selected food rules cannot make us righteous before God. The exodus remains an actual deliverance to remember, and Paul’s use of the feast still teaches the church how to live. Neither makes the Mosaic observance an annual condition of Christian holiness.
A Jewish believer may retain cultural feast practices while confessing Christ. A Gentile might join an educational meal or remove leaven as a teaching exercise, while another chooses not to participate. Romans 14 calls us to honor the Lord in disputed observances of days without despising one another. Colossians forbids condemnation over festivals and food, and Galatians rejects using the law to obtain justification. An optional practice gives no one salvation or a superior place in the church.
When a church teaches about Passover, it should distinguish the written commands from Jewish customs developed later. A reconstructed meal may help people learn, but we should not present it as a perfect duplicate of the Last Supper. If we include later customs, we should say so. Respect for Jewish people and their practices includes describing those practices accurately, without giving selected customs an authority Scripture has not assigned them.
Communion is the remembrance Christ commanded His church. In sharing the bread and cup, believers remember His body and blood and proclaim His death until He comes. The elements remain bread and the fruit of the vine. They do not become physical flesh and blood, bring salvation, or repeat His sacrifice. He offered Himself once for sins and lives forever as our High Priest. His table directs us back to that completed sacrifice and forward to His bodily return.
Paul passed Christ’s command on to the church and called believers to self-examination and discernment of the body. Sharing the meal expresses fellowship under one Lord. We cannot approach it rightly while proudly defending sin that harms that fellowship. Although the Passover setting helps explain the bread and cup, Christ did not command us to reproduce the entire seven-day feast each time we gather.
Israel’s release from Pharaoh’s slavery directs us toward the greater redemption Christ accomplished. Jesus is the eternal Son, fully God and fully man, born of a virgin and completely sinless. Wicked men tortured and killed Him, but He willingly gave Himself to be slain as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. His atonement rests on His perfection and that voluntary sacrifice. His saving sacrifice through His shed blood and death was complete before His burial and bodily resurrection. The Father did not punish, curse, abandon, strike, bruise, or pour wrath on Jesus. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit acted in perfect unity in our redemption.
Christ died for the whole world, and God genuinely offers salvation to every person, though people can resist and reject His grace. Everyone who repents and believes in Jesus is forgiven and justified, declared righteous before God. God gives that person new birth, and the Holy Spirit permanently indwells and seals him for redemption. The believer is eternally secure in Christ. That salvation cannot be accomplished through a ritual. Unleavened bread cannot replace faith, and ancestry, church membership, baptism, or Communion cannot take the Savior’s place.
My Final Thoughts
God gave Israel this feast to remember a deliverance He had accomplished, and Paul used it to confront sin a church was defending. I cannot honor Christ our Passover by trusting a ritual to make me clean or making Israel’s festival calendar the basis of my acceptance with God. I am called to receive Christ, remember His completed work, and live with His people in sincerity and truth. That includes dealing honestly with the wrongs I would rather excuse.