Remembering God’s Salvation

Truly, we can be a forgetful people. Because of the presence of sin, we tend to let what the Lord has done for us pass from our memories, driving us to discontentedness and other sins. Sadly, it is all too easy to forget God, His greatness, and His great works and to fall into different forms of idolatry. After all, when we forget the Lord, we do not abandon our religious impulses altogether but we focus them on other so-called gods, whether they be other spiritual beings or things such as fame and fortune (see Gal. 4:8–9).

Since fallen people tend to forget the Lord, God warned Israel at the beginning of the nation’s history not to forget Him once they settled in the promised land (Deut. 4:9). He even instituted feasts to help the Israelites remember what He had done for them. One of these was the Feast of Unleavened Bread, as we read in today’s passage.

Moses has already laid down some of the rules for this feast in Exodus 12:17–20, and much of 13:3–10 repeats what was already said. Notably, the instruction in chapter 13 focuses more concretely on the celebration of the feast once the people settle in Canaan. Once they are settled and prosperous, they are to keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread lest they forget their humble origins in slavery and God’s goodness in saving them from Egypt. The removal of leaven during the feast would symbolically remind them of their decisive break from that past in Egypt (vv. 6–7) and encourage them to continue living as God’s holy people, separated from the world for His service.

The feast, verses 9–10 explain, is to be as a “sign” on the hands and foreheads of the people so that God’s law might be in their mouths. Later Jews took this text as a justification for making phylacteries—leather boxes containing snippets of Scripture such as today’s passage that are worn on the forehead during prayer. Such a practice is not necessarily wrong in itself, though Jesus condemned the Pharisees for using phylacteries to proclaim their piety (see Matt. 23:1–12). Still, the making of phylacteries is not the point of the text. The sense is that keeping the feast would put the Lord and His law ever before the eyes and minds of Israel so that God’s Word would permeate their entire lives, down to the words they spoke (Ex. 13:9).

Above all, the people were to remember the Lord and His salvation as if they were redeemed from Egypt even if they did not live at the time of the exodus (“for me”; see v. 8). By faith, later generations participated in the great salvation of the exodus.