The Symbolism in the Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread

In the home office of the church up in Milford, Ohio, of course, we prepare the building just like you prepare your homes and all of us. By de-leavening the office, everybody pitches in, cleans not only their own work area, but usually another part of the building so that the job gets done without anyone being burdened by it. As I was leaving the office the other day before the trip, I stopped one of the, I heard a vacuum in one of the rooms just down from my office and the door was closed and I knocked and opened it. One of our younger media employees was in there vacuuming and that was his room too. It was one of our auxiliary studios. And so he was vacuuming and I saw I said goodbye to him and he turned off his vacuum cleaner and said, you know, I was under thinking, I was pushing this thing back and forth, this is one of the craziest things we do in the church.

Surprised you? Now, this young person grew up in the church. He's baptized. He's a converted person, but not crumbs, but not leaven, eating flatbread, matzo, watzo. What's a matzo? That's what I said when I was 12 years 13 by 11, I guess, when my mother started feeding me flatbread every spring. What in the world are we doing? Why do we eat flatbread for seven days? Why do we put it all out? I gave a sermon. I mentioned I started out in Charlotte 40 years ago. It was a trainee in the church. And one of my, about a year after being in the ministry, I gave a sermon to prepare the congregation for Unleavened Bread. And my zeal wanted to make sure everybody got the leaven out. And so I went through kind of a long process of explaining the importance of just, you know, taking toothbrushes and doing all this and making sure that everything was turned upside down, get all the crumbs out, shake all the rugs, and do all the things and start working. And I think I went overboard in my explanation because it sounded a little bit strange to one gentleman who walked up to me afterwards and he said, that was kind of the strangest thing I ever heard. It sounded like a fraternity prank.

This was a World War II vet, a Korean War vet, and a Vietnam War vet. Now, granted, it does sound strange, doesn't it? And if we just focus on the physical, then we might just become a little bit legalistic or perhaps miss the larger spiritual point of why we do these things. That's why I think God anticipated all of those types of questions or reactions at the very beginning of all this. If you turn back to Exodus 12, as the passover here, the first passover, the leaving of Egypt by the Israelites, took place.

All the instruction was given, regulations. And if you look down in verse 26, it shall be, God says, when your children say to you, what do you mean by this service? Now, He's speaking about the Passover, and they had gone through that. And He said, so He's speaking about the Passover, but this entire days of Unleavened Bread all come together and work together with the Passover, the days of Unleavened Bread experience. He said, when your children say, what do you mean by this service? You shall say, verse 27, it is the Passover sacrifice of the Lord who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households so the people bow their heads and worship. God knew that there would be a time when children and others would ask, why, what's the meaning of this service? Why do you do this? And to be able to give an understanding and explanation that is that understanding is extremely important. Why do we keep these rituals that we have, especially at this time of year of Unleavened Bread, even the Passover service with the bread and wine washing each other's feet? We go through that every year and explain the symbolism, the ordinance of humility by the washing of the feet. But then the putting out of leavening and then the eating of Unleavened Bread for seven days might seem a bit odd to a person who doesn't understand and certainly someone trying to learn how this fits with the New Covenant, with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And our role today, because after all, we're not Jews. And if somebody sees you carrying three or four boxes of matzo out of Kroger, Harris Teeter, love saying Harris Teeter, just love Harris Teeter. Harris Teeter.

I was glad to see Harris Teeter still in North Carolina. They might think, what are you, Jewish? Why are you asking about that? You don't look Jewish. McNeely? It's not a Jewish name. That's what my study hall teacher said when I gave her my pink slip coming back from the Feast of Tabernacles one year. I had written down there, going for the Feast of Tabernacles. She looked at me, she said, you're not Jewish. Well, I didn't know how to answer that day, but I learned later how to give her an answer for that. How do you answer what you do and the whys and the wherefores? Because these spring Holy Days contain very important rituals more than any other day. We'll keep Pentecost, we'll keep Atonement. Now, we'll fast there. Trumpets, have our services, go to the Feast of Tabernacles. But we don't do what we do right now with the rituals that we have. These are unique on the Holy Days and unique to us. We don't have, if you've been around a few years, you recognize in the Church of God, we don't have a lot of rituals. We're not big into ritual. You want ritual? Go to the Catholic Church. Go to the Greek Orthodox Church. They've got lots of rituals. But when we do them, we do them right. And we do them because they have meaning. When we put the leaven out, and when we eat the leavening, unleavened bread during the days of the leavened bread, when we wash each other's feet, when we take the bread and wine, we know what we're doing. We know why. And that's important. They are symbols of the most important of the concepts of spirituality that God is wanting to get across to His people and ultimately to the world. Other people take their communion, and they take wine, and they'll take bread, and they'll... other people do foot washing, and that's fine. But we should know... need to know why we do these things and why they are so critically important. And we do them, and we should know that we do them because they're more than just physical matters. Yes, they are physical, but there are spiritual lessons behind them.

The putting out of leaven, the taking of a vial of wine, the washing of someone's feet represents some of the most elementary teachings from God. And these symbols speak of certain teachings and forms by which God establishes a relationship with man. When we go back to Genesis, and we begin to see this even in the very first few chapters, in Genesis 3 and verse 15, is the very first promise of the seed. It is the promise of the Messiah fulfilled in Jesus Christ, Genesis 3.15. And so from the very beginning of the story, God pointed the first man and woman to the coming of Christ and the seed who would crush the head of the serpent. In the story of Cain and Abel, we see the need for humility in human relationships.

In the story of Cain and Abel, we see how sin can lie at the door of an unrepentant mind. Because when Cain killed his brother Abel, and God came around, that's what the subject was in the conversation. Sin lies at the door when the mind and the heart is not right. And so in that story, we see the need for submission to one another as well as submission to God. Abel brought a firstborn animal to be sacrificed to God. He understood something about sacrifice and blood that had to be shed. And he also knew that it had to be the finest and it had to be unblemished. So what we do with humility, what we do with an ordinance that represents blood, the blood of the Messiah, and when we look to the promise of Christ's sacrifice, promised from the very beginning, they represent some of the most elementary aspects of God's teaching that begin way back in Genesis.

We also do this, and we do what we do because God tells us to do it.

That's extremely important. In Exodus 12, we're right here. This is where the Passover is instituted and the days of unleavened bread. In verse 15, he says, 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. And on the first day there shall be a holy convocation. And on the seventh day, a holy convocation. We just heard the announcement establishing that seventh day, telling you where, when, we're here today on the first day of unleavened bread. And for the next seven days, we will eat unleavened bread. And we will hope to not forget to eat donuts, Five Guys hamburgers, or whatever it might be. When I was 16 years old, I was halfway through my second jelly donut during the days of unleavened bread when I realized, uh-oh, uh-oh, I swallowed what I had, but I threw the rest of it away.

I wasn't baptized yet. Okay. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hand. I've told you my, you know, I've made the mistake. I've had people over the years in the ministry, they would call me halfway through the days of unleavened bread. Mr. McNeely, Mr. McNeely, I forgot that I ate a hamburger, or I had a sandwich. I asked, was it a ham sandwich? No, it wasn't a ham sandwich. I said, don't worry about it. Just learn a lesson. You can sin and not even know about it. Okay. We'll see you at church next on the Holy Day. We know that it's a symbol. It's a symbol, but it's an important symbol. And we do it because God tells us to do it, but as we do it, we also do it because we want to do it. In Leviticus 23, this basic command is repeated as well. Seven days, you will eat unleavened bread. And as we eat that bread during that seven-day period, if it's a matzo, if it's a piece of rykrisp, if it's your own homemade-baked unleavened bread, whatever it is, when you eat that, you should recognize that you are eating the symbolic, perfect life of Jesus Christ, and you're putting that into your body. And it represents that. And it represents your need and my need for Christ to live his life within us. Because that's the only way we're going to overcome sin.

And you know, and I know, that by the cleaning out of our homes and the removal of all the baking powder and the yeast and all the bread that we've got, that that's just a symbol of sin that we put out, as God tells us to do. And it doesn't merit us one iota of spiritual work or grace. It doesn't.

But the fact that we've done what God tells us to do is certainly a part of our relationship of obedience to God. But it's only a symbol. Years ago, I used to tell people, I said, look, if you spend weeks cleaning out and weeks of doing all of this, and then days of 11 bread come, and you fill your mind with something that's causing you to spiritually lust after another person, or you fill your mind with something that causes you to be angry, what have you learned? People would get all 11 out, but perhaps get absorbed by some type of entertainment that was glorifying sin. What's that all about? You can put the bread out, but we can still be sinning with our thoughts, as Christ said. And we can still be sinning with it. We haven't learned a thing. I think we understand that. And so when we eat that bread during the days of 11 bread, we are being reminded that we need the bread of life, as the song by the choir said, we need that bread of life in us, because by that we have eternal life. And that bread of life is the body of the life, if you will, of Jesus Christ. He who eats and drinks this bread will live forever, he said in John 6. And that bread is his life within us. Paul said in Galatians 2 and verse 20 that the life I live, I live now by the faith in the Son of God who lives in me. And when we eat that 11 bread, that is telling us that we must, throughout every day of the year, be having and developing a spiritual relationship with Jesus Christ that is first and foremost. That's what it teaches us. And that's why we do it. Because that's the most elementary aspect of our relationship with God. We do it because Christ left us an example as well. When he was in the flesh, he kept the Passover. In Luke 2, verses 41 and 42, as a child, he attended the Passover on the beloved bread services in Jerusalem with his parents. They left him behind. They had to go back and get him. But he was there. We see in the Gospel accounts Christ keeping the Passover. Let's turn to Mark chapter 14.

Verse 12, on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they killed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, where do you want us to go and prepare that you may eat the Passover?

Well, he gave them instructions to do that. The apostles regarded the observance of the Passover in the New Testament as simply a perpetuation of the Old Testament Passover, except for the modifications that Christ instituted. And we walked through those modifications the other night, as the Scriptures were read to us on the Passover. How that Christ changed the symbols to the wine and the bread. He said, eat, this is my body, and drink, this is my blood, shed for your sins. He substituted bread and wine as the symbols of his body and his blood, signifying a completely new relationship between God and his people. No longer would there be a need for an animal sacrifice, which at the end of the day never forgave one's sin anyway.

Not one drop of blood of any animal sacrifice or other sacrifice as part of that system forgave one's sin, but the shed blood of Jesus Christ does. And as that wine and that bread came to us two nights ago, we took those symbols. We perhaps paused and thought about it. We thought very deeply about the life and the death of Jesus Christ.

A perfect life. We think of a period of suffering prior to his death.

And so we kept the Passover. We've always kept the Passover in the form of Christ's example. We call it a New Testament Passover or the Passover today. We'll put in New Testament to differentiate the fact that we don't kill a lamb and we don't take that blood and put it on our doorposts. We do not keep a cedar, as the Jewish people do today. What we do is completely different than what they have as their tradition and their custom, you know, generated through the ages. What we never have and never ever try to observe a Passover in the manner that we see back in Exodus 12. Sometimes over the years, I've watched as people get caught up with the truth and learn the truth. And then something as we recognize the Jews today keep the Sabbath, they keep the Holy Days. They're the closest thing out there to what we do in one sense. And sometimes we've made the mistake and I've watched this with people. And I had to learn this myself early on because I studied Hebrew for a couple of years at ambassador and went to the travel to Jerusalem and got caught up in the culture and the history and teaching and read Josephus, had Josephus read to me. I was telling the Scots, we've been saying with them that growing up in the Church of God, we had our own Apocrypha. Two of the works of our own Church of God, Apocrypha, was Josephus and Hislop's two Babylon's. By Apocrypha, I'm talking about extra-biblical works that we always referred to. Sometimes I used to think Josephus was the fifth gospel, as it was read so often growing up in the Church. But I see some of you laughing, you're the old timers that are laughing and remember that time. But we're not Jews. Sometimes people have really got into Jewish music. And I had some people one time, they were members, and every time they did special music, they wanted to do a Jewish piece. And that is fine. Second one's good, third one's over. Okay, but it starts to wear thin. And after a while, I realized that they're drifting toward Judaism. And I told them one day, I said, you know what? We're going to have some other music. I said, we're not Jews. We're not Jews. We're Christians. And while I appreciate what the Jews have done and have gone through, you're not a Jew. And I'm not a Jew, except inwardly and spiritually. We're Christians. And what we do is not Jewish. What we do is Christian. It is of God's truth when we keep a Jewish Passover. That's why you don't worry about the arguments that people get caught up and say, well, we should have kept the Passover last night, some say. The 15th day. No. We keep the Passover when Christ kept it. When He set the example, and that's when we keep the Passover. All the other's argument. All the other is just interesting stuff. We don't keep an Old Testament Passover. Okay? We keep a New Testament Passover. Always focus on that, and you're not going to get caught up in some of the other vain arguments and issues that people get off into at times in our culture. We keep a New Testament Passover when Christ kept it with the symbols that He set. And what they did in the Old Testament is the Old Testament on the terms of the Passover there. The other stuff we know what to do and how to bring that over as well, but that's another larger subject. Christ substituted bread and wine as the symbols of His bread and His body. And we keep what we do. Now, that doesn't mean we just throw out everything from the Old Testament either, because when you go back to Exodus 12 and you look at the way in which they kept that Passover and the instructions in Exodus 12, there are some lessons for us.

We don't kill a lamb when we're not going to put blood up on their doorposts. But in Exodus 12, when you look at the story very carefully, you see that it was a ritual that was kept in the home. The head of the house was responsible for leading his house in the observance. They put up a lamb several days in advance before they would kill it.

There was a personal accountability because the family kind of looked at that lamb, and whatever examination they went through, they felt an affinity toward that lamb. Kids probably got attached to it. Young, fine, unblemished lamb, you admire it, and you examine it, and you look at it. There's an intimate manner in which God gave the instructions to the Israelites to keep that foreshadow the way we today reflect and prepare ourselves for the Passover so that we don't take it in an unworthy manner. So that when we do come and take it, we've had a period of days to reflect and to think about that sacrifice, in this case, Jesus Christ, and what it means to us. And so there are lessons there. The household personally killed that lamb back in Exodus 12. You had to realize there was some sadness mixed with joy because they also ate it. And I'll bet they enjoyed it. Little mint sauce, some herbs.

So there was sadness and joy. We have a sadness and joy at the same time as we come and take the Passover service. You look at that very carefully, and it shows an experience that they had that should produce the same results in us today with the symbols that we have. A foot washing service where Jesus taught humility and service in John chapter 13, where he took a towel, girded himself after the supper, poured some water into a basin, started to wash his disciples' feet, and did the work of a servant, which teaches us humility and service to one another. It would keep us from having the attitude of Cain toward his brother Abel that grew in anger, resentment, and envy, and then multiplied to hatred that caused him to lift his hand against his brother and kill him. Sin was at the door because it was in the heart, and it wasn't expunged. It wasn't overcome.

If we can approach one another with a true attitude of service reflected by that foot washing attitude, then indeed we are on our way to becoming a disciple of Christ, which is what verse 35 of John 13 says.

Since I was with the brethren in Raleigh, I made a point of this the other night. Those of you from Greensboro, I'll repeat it for your sake, but for all of our benefit, verse 35, we wouldn't know what it says. John 13, by this, all will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. Christ gives us this hallmark, this sign of what would be a disciple. I know the Sabbath is a sign as well, and that's another part of another subject. But look at what verse 35 says. You know it, and I know it. He says that this will be by which all will know that you're my disciples. A disciple is one who follows after the example of his teacher. And Christ said to his disciples, Go preach the gospel into all the world, and make disciples of all nations. Make people who are like me, because you model what I did, and they will model what you do. And Christ said that if it is because of that, that people will know that you're my disciples if you have love one for another. Take away the name Church of God, and whatever other name you want to put in front of Church of God. United or any other name. Doesn't matter in one sense, but it does matter, because it's a disciple of God, a disciple of Christ that we are to be. I'm not talking about a denomination of a church out in this world. I'm talking about one who follows Christ's example. That's what we are to be. So this will be how they know you are my disciple. Not my Church of God, not my Christian, although we are Christian, and we are the Church of God, and we are part of the body of Christ. But are we a disciple? And are we making disciples? You see? Look at what Christ said when it comes down to how we are to be. Now, we can put a label out here, and anybody can hang up a label outside and say Church of God. And brethren, in the last five or so years, we've seen a lot of shingles out there that say Church of God. But whatever name in front of it you want, or behind it. But who's going to be a disciple? One who those who love one another. At the end of the day, I've come to realize I better have that love for my fellow brother and sister if I'm going to be the true disciple of Jesus Christ, and by example teaching it. Now, that's hard. That truly is hard.

I'm the last person I guess I would lift up as one that is an apostle of love. But I know what I need to do. There are some people who perhaps are a bit more loving by nature, and maybe they have certain gifts there. I know how I'm supposed to be, and you do as well. But that's it. We have to have that. The foot washing every year reminds us of the humility of service where we are willing to totally submit ourselves to one another in that way. We eat an unleavened bread then for seven days to be reminded that it's by that bread of life within us that Christ, through his sacrifice, did his part. We have a part to play in recognizing and working against the sin that is such a major part of our environment. And the experience of putting out leaven is so rich in lessons to teach us the difficulty that it is to extract sin from our life and to overcome. It takes a lifetime. One thing I've realized both in being in the ministry and just in looking at my own life, how challenging it is to overcome a sin, a habit, a frame of mind, a way of thinking. How good are you at it? Excuse me for my lack of grammar.

Look at your... we all examine ourselves. Look at yourself. Where are you as opposed to where you began or where you were five years ago? At times we will see growth and at times we may be a little bit discouraged. I recognize that. Sin is very challenging to deal with and to overcome. And making changes in some of the basic matters of envy or anger or patience or even growing in love, they're seasonal and even lifetime for us all to consider. But we have to continue at that process and that's why every year through the Holy Days, and particularly when it comes to the days of 11 bread, we are reminded of various things. Even when we discover the utter impossibility of putting out all the 11 because we discover at the end of the days of 11 bread, the Twinkie.

Oh, wait a minute. There won't be any Twinkies this year because they stopped making Twinkies. No Twinkies. Whatever it might be for you, I fully expect to find it. I went through my drawers at my office and at the home and we put things out. But we just may find something. Does that mean I didn't keep the days of 11 bread? No. It means that even our best efforts will fall far short and that we all need the grace of God. Even the physical serves to bring us back to the ultimate grace of God. 1 Corinthians chapter 5.

1 Corinthians chapter 5.

Here in this chapter, a problem in the church was brought to the attention of sexual immorality, verse 1, that had to be dealt with. The members were puffed up, he said in verse 2. They had not properly dealt with it by putting it from their midst because that example and that lifestyle, very blatant, very openly known, was eroding confidence in faith and spiritual growth within the church. Paul said, you need to put this person out. He did in the name of Jesus Christ for a time, that their spiritual life might be saved. He said in verse 6, Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Only takes a little bit of leaven, as we know, to puff up that pile of dough that we've made and create a nice puffy loaf of bread because of the way yeast multiplies. Only takes a little bit of spiritual envy or anger or direct immorality to begin to not only infect the person, but if it's open, as this case is, and it sometimes may be within a congregation, creating a problem of not just sexual morality, but also other issues, it can spread through a portion or segment of a congregation and it can leaven a significant part and hinder the growth and stability of the church. That's why he said to put that person out for a period of time, to deal with one who is openly sinning. But he draws it to a larger point in verse 7. Purge out therefore, purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump. Purge, put it out. Corinthians was written at the time of the Days of Unleavened Bread, so he had taught these Gentiles who come into the church about the Days of Unleavened Bread, or he would never have written this letter back to them. If he had written this letter to a group of people who had no idea about the Days of Unleavened Bread, what value would it have been? Paul had taught them the Holy Days. And that's why he could say, put out the old leaven that you may be a new lump. And they would understand what he was saying. Since you truly are unleavened, for indeed Christ, our Passover was sacrificed for us. Verse 7 is a powerful statement. He says, since you truly are unleavened, how are you unleavened? Because you put every package of yeast out and every crumb? I learned a lesson about how to get the crumbs. How many of you labor over your cars? Getting the crumbs out of your cars. I used to eat a lot of sandwiches when I was in the field ministry driving around all the time, go through and get a hamburger, take lunch with me in between services. Over a period of a year, I accumulated a lot of crumbs down in the cushions and under the seat. Now I go to an office, 15-minute drive. I don't eat in my car anymore. But I so clean it out. But a few years ago, I learned how to get it done. All right? It's too late for you this year, but next year I'm going to give you a tip. How to really de-leaven your car? You open up all four doors, you crank up that leaf blower.

And you just put it under the seats and just blow it all out. It works. Gets it all out. Gets it all out from the cushions and under the seats when you can't get... You try to get under the seats with your vacuum and you, you know, bloody come out with a bloody hand because you hit everything.

You know what I'm talking about. Put that... try that leaf blower. If you're running shorter on time, you might try it in your house. You can just open up the doors and the windows. But make sure if you do that, then you got to go out in the yard and blow it all out of the yard because you got to get it out off your system. It does work. My son reminded me the other day. He called me and said, yep, dad, that leaf blower really does work.

And I said, yeah, I know. I'm going to do it myself. How are we unleavened? We're unleavened because of Jesus Christ's sacrifice and His life within us. That's how we're unleavened and His grace. Christ, indeed, Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. Then he says, 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. Verse 8, he gives just a beautiful instruction, keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness.

He's speaking spiritually there. Examine yourself. Recognize the need to stop the sinful actions, thoughts, things that we get involved with, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. And that unleavened bread represents sincerity and truth. And we eat it to be reminded of that. That's how we keep the feast today. And so Paul's instruction there shows us how we are unleavened and we go through all of this. And we understand that the deep spiritual rich lessons, they teach us that are all a part of the leading us spiritually to God and in the process leading us to the ultimate salvation that God will give to us of eternal life.

And these things are the bread, the wine, the pudding out of the leaven, foot washing, their symbols to teach us something spiritual. The way I've, you know, we all live through a period of time where all this got thrown out the window back about 18 years ago as a heresy swept through the church and a lot of people just didn't, they weren't grounded in why they did what they did. And they were so willing to be bamboozled by false teaching that got that made them just throw it all out and say, well, it's all Christ.

And it's, you know, Christ has done it all for us and all of those old arguments that are not scriptural. Because people had not really under stopped and analyzed carefully why they did what they did. And they may have just been going through rituals without understanding the meaning behind it and what it teaches. As I worked through this and as I saw how people's reactions were, I think I came to some understanding that I hadn't had before. And this is what I always try to bring out during the Days of Unleavened Bread that, look, how do you, how do you, sin is a spiritual concept.

How do you define and represent sin in this world? Well, you can, an action, an attitude, certain things, you know, is a deck of cards sin, is a bottle of beer sin. Some people think so. We don't. It's the wrong use of that or anything else that is sin. How does God teach us something that is spiritual? This is a great challenge. This is what we're really dealing with. These are humility. That's a spiritual concept. He shows us, reminds us of it through a foot washing service.

He reminds us of sin by showing us this concept of leaven. He reminds us of purity and, in this case, of a sinless life by a flat piece of bread that's unleavened. These are spiritual dimensions. This is the spiritual dimension. It's the unseen that we must see and we must understand because it deals with a relationship with God and eternal life. How do you represent justification, salvation, sin, humility, and these spiritual matters that are so important without a bit of the physical?

That's what God has given to us. We understand how it all works together. I say we don't have a lot of ritual in the Church of God, but we had just enough. We've carried over from the Old Testament scriptures just enough to keep us rooted and firmly anchored in the basics to give us these physical expressions of spiritual matters.

That's one of the great lessons. That's what the book of Hebrews is all about. They had the temple, the priesthood, the sacrifices, and the Hebrews just to show that all those were just symbols of something made without hands in the heavens.

And we know what has been brought over, and we know what to do in these spiritual principles that are so integral to God's plan. God gives them to us, and they impress upon us these matters so that every year we're reminded of sin, justification, salvation. Spiritual concepts that take shape and form in the Word and the acts that we perform as part of the revealed pattern of worship that God gave through Moses. And under the New Covenant, we know through God's Holy Spirit what remains as important and essential and what's no longer necessary. We deeply understand the spiritual meaning behind what we do. We understand the necessity to follow the example of Christ and His disciples. In Romans 6, Paul drills deeper into this beginning in verse 1.

He says, We don't continue in sin that grace abounds. We stop the sin. We keep the days in 11 bread to be reminded that we must cease the sin as our part. Christ did His part, but through His sacrifice. Our part is to recognize that we have sinned to repent and to cease and no longer continue in it, to live righteously.

He goes on to talk about that, Therefore, we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we should also walk in newness of life. Our baptism, which we in a sense repeated, or recommitted ourselves to by Passover service, the Passover service and the commitment we made at baptism, was a death and a burial of the type. And we were resurrected that we should walk in newness of life. We were raised from the dead, penalty of our sins was removed from us. For if we have been united in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away, that we should no longer be slaves to sin. We are not, and we should not be. For He who has died has been freed from sin. And if we died with Christ, we believe we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion from Him, over Him. And certainly as we keep the days of unleavened bread, we also understand that the resurrection of Jesus Christ took place during the days of unleavened bread, three days and three nights after His death. And that on that day that He was resurrected, He was accepted as the wave sheaf offering. That's why He told Mary, don't touch me, I have not yet ascended to my Father. And then later on in the account, we see it the same day, they did touch Him. And so that was the wave sheaf offering that Leviticus 23 talks about. We haven't even got there. You'll probably go back into that at Pentecost, because that's where you begin to count Pentecost, toward Pentecost. But the wave sheaf offering was accepted during the days of unleavened bread. Christ then, that's when He was accepted and He came back just like that. Do you ever wonder how He did it? He went to heaven, or He went to the throne of God, or He went to the presence of His Father, however we would express it, because He hadn't been accepted. He said, don't touch me. And then a short time later, they touched Him. He made a real quick trip. But brethren, what He did was He went to the throne of God, and He brought His blood. You know, Hebrews 9, we read this the other night, it really struck me.

Hebrews 9, verse 12. You want to understand what He did from the time that He was resurrected. He appeared and He said, don't touch me. And then He was accepted as the wave sheaf offering. And then He reappeared again to His disciples on that day of His resurrection.

Insert Hebrews 9, verse 12 right in there, and you will then begin to understand, in a sense, that scene that must have been in heaven when Christ walked in, if you will. Because verse 12 says, not with the blood of goats and calves. Verse 11, Christ came as high priest of the good things to come with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands that is not of His creation. Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood, He entered the most holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling, the unclean sanctifies with appearing of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God. Verse 12 was a remarkable scene because with His own blood, He entered the most holy place. When He was accepted that offering, as only He could have been, having lived the perfect life, died and accepted. What a scene that was! What a scene as He entered the most holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for all mankind, for all time. That sacrifice stands right there.

In a sense, what happened is Christ was resurrected during the Days of Unleavened Bread and went through that as we see. If we go back to Romans 6, he says in verse 10, For the death He died, He died to sin once for all. But the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but the lives of God in Christ Jesus are allured. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey it in its lusts. This is at the heart of what we are doing during the Days of Unleavened Bread. The life that He lives, which is speaking of our life, He lives to God. I'm sorry, verse 10 says that He died once for all, but the life He lives, He lives to God. Therefore, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. As we let that life be a part of our life through the Holy Spirit, then sin can be replaced by the life of Christ Jesus within us. That's why He says, don't let sin reign in your mortal body. Do not present yourselves as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, but for you are not under law, but under grace. And so right here in these 14 verses of Romans 6, we have a beautiful picture of what we are doing and why we are doing it and what we are to learn here during these days of unloved bread. So, brethren, enjoy this period of time. As Paul said, let us keep the feast. Let us keep it with the bread of sincerity and truth, and let us understand extremely well why we do the things that we do.