This Month Shall Be Your First Month

The first thing God says in Exodus 12 is not about lambs or blood. It is about time. This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. Israel is still in Egypt. No one has been freed. Pharaoh is still on his throne and the bricks are still due. And God says, in effect, your year begins now. The calendar of your slavery is over, and the calendar of your redemption has started, and the day of the deliverance will be its anniversary for as long as you exist.

Only then come the instructions. On the tenth of the month, each household takes a lamb, a year-old male without defect, one per house, or shared with a neighbor if the house is small. They keep it until the fourteenth and slaughter it at twilight. The blood goes on the doorframes. The meat is roasted and eaten with bitter herbs and unleavened bread, in haste, dressed for travel. Whatever is left by morning is burned. It is the LORD's Passover, and the day is to be commemorated for generations as a lasting ordinance.

The one idea is this: redemption is not only an event but a new way of counting. When God saves, he reorders the whole of life around that moment. Israel would date everything from the night they were brought out. Their year, their festivals, their sense of who they were, all turned on it. And this reordering was announced before the event, as a promise to be lived into rather than a memorial arranged afterward.

Christians know this reordering in a deeper key. Our year begins, whether the calendar says so or not, with the death and resurrection of Christ. The first day of the week became the day we gather because on that day the tomb was empty. The whole shape of Christian life is an attempt to count time from the deliverance rather than from the slavery.

The turn toward life is to ask what calendar you are actually living by. Most of us count from wounds and failures, from the year everything fell apart, from the thing we did that we cannot undo. God gives his people a different first month. If you are in Christ, your year begins with the blood on the door. Everything before it is the old count. Late summer, when so many of us are resetting schedules for school and work anyway, is as good a time as any to begin counting from the right night.