Commentary - Exodus 23:14-19

Bird's-eye view

Here, at the tail end of the Book of the Covenant, God lays out the rhythmic life of His people. This is not a collection of arbitrary rules for party planning. This is the establishment of a national calendar of gratitude. Having been delivered from the house of bondage, Israel is now given a structure for their remembrance and their joy. The life of the covenant community is to be punctuated by feasts, by corporate gatherings before the face of Yahweh. These are not optional suggestions for the privately pious; they are commanded appointments for the entire nation. The rhythm of the year, from the first barley harvest to the final ingathering, is to be oriented toward God, the giver of all of it. This is applied theology, where the deliverance from Egypt is not just a fact of history, but the foundational reason for a perpetual cycle of feasting, giving, and worship.

The structure is simple: three times a year, the men of Israel are to present themselves before their King. Each feast has its own historical and agricultural significance, but all of them serve to reinforce the central truth that Israel belongs to God. He brought them out, He sustains them in the land, and He is the one to whom all worship is due. The specific regulations that follow, concerning leaven, fat, and first fruits, are not fussy details but rather concrete expressions of the holiness and priority that must characterize their approach to God. The passage concludes with a command that seems cryptic to us, but which contains a profound principle about honoring the goodness of God's created order.

Outline

Context In Exodus

This section of laws, from Exodus 20:22 through chapter 23, is commonly called the Book of the Covenant. It is the application of the Ten Commandments to the civil and ceremonial life of Israel. After the foundational moral law is given from Sinai, God immediately provides the blueprint for how a redeemed society is to function. These laws are not a means of earning salvation, but rather the grateful response of a people who have already been saved. The context is grace. Because God brought them out of Egypt, they are therefore to live this way. The command to feast is grounded in the reality of their exodus. This is not legalism; it is liturgy. It is the ordered life of a people who have been given a new identity and a new Lord.

Clause-by-Clause Commentary

v. 14 Three times a year you shall celebrate a feast to Me. The first thing to notice is the object of the celebration. The feasts are "to Me." This is not about national morale or agricultural festivals that happen to have a religious flavor. This is God-centered worship, commanded by God for His own glory. The Christian life is a life of feasting, and the reason we feast is that we have a God who is worthy of celebration. He sets the schedule. Three is a number of divine testimony and completeness. This annual cycle is a complete testimony to God's work of redemption and providence.

v. 15 You shall keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread; for seven days you are to eat unleavened bread, as I commanded you, at the appointed time in the month Abib, for in it you came out of Egypt. This is the first of the three feasts, tethered directly to their history. The unleavened bread was a memorial of the haste with which they fled Egypt. They had no time to let the dough rise. But it is more than just a historical marker. Leaven in Scripture is a consistent metaphor for sin, corruption, and hypocrisy. To eat unleavened bread for seven days was a week-long object lesson in purity. They were to purge the old leaven of Egypt out of their lives. As Paul tells us, Christ our Passover has been sacrificed, therefore we are to keep the feast, not with the old leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (1 Cor. 5:7-8). This feast was their annual recommitment to living as a people set apart from the corruption of the world they had left behind.

And none shall appear before Me empty-handed. Worship costs something. Gratitude that is not expressed through tangible giving is not gratitude at all. This is the principle of the tithe and the offering. When you come before the King, you do not come to take, you come to give. You bring a tribute, an acknowledgment that everything you have is from His hand. God does not need their sacrifices, but they needed to give them. An empty-handed worshiper has a heart that has not yet grasped the sheer magnitude of the grace he has received.

v. 16 Also you shall keep the Feast of the Harvest of the first fruits of your labors from what you sow in the field; also the Feast of the Ingathering at the end of the year when you gather in the fruit of your labors from the field. Here are the second and third feasts, which we know later as Pentecost and Tabernacles. These two are tied to the agricultural calendar. The Feast of Harvest was a celebration of the beginning of the harvest, offering the first fruits to God. The Feast of Ingathering was at the end of the harvest season, a great festival of thanksgiving for the provision of the entire year. This brackets the productive season with worship. You thank God at the beginning, acknowledging His sovereignty over the growth, and you thank Him at the end, acknowledging His faithfulness in the provision. It sanctifies the entirety of their labor. Work is not secular. The field, the seed, the rain, and the growth all belong to God, and these feasts were the national declaration of that fact.

v. 17 Three times a year all your males shall appear before the Lord Yahweh. The command is specified for the males. This is the principle of federal headship. The men of Israel represented their families and households before God. When the heads of the households gathered, the entire nation was present by representation. This was a serious summons. To appear before the Lord Yahweh, the sovereign covenant-keeping God, was to present yourself before your King. This reinforces the corporate nature of the covenant. Salvation is personal, but it is never private.

v. 18 You shall not offer the blood of My sacrifice with leavened bread; nor is the fat of My feast to remain overnight until morning. Here we have two sharp prohibitions that guard the holiness of the sacrifice. First, the blood and the leaven must be kept separate. The blood represents the life, the atonement. Leaven, as we've seen, represents corruption. To mix them would be a profound theological contradiction. You cannot mix the remedy for sin with sin itself. The atonement must be applied to a people who are purging the leaven. Second, the fat, which was considered the best portion and was reserved for God, had to be offered immediately. It could not be left over. This speaks of the urgency and priority of worship. You give God the best, and you give it to Him without delay. Procrastination in our duty to God is a form of contempt. You don't put God off until morning.

v. 19 You shall bring the choice first fruits of your ground into the house of Yahweh your God. This reiterates and sharpens the principle of first fruits. It is not just the first, but the choice first fruits. God does not get the leftovers. He does not get what is merely acceptable. He claims the very best, right off the top. This is a constant test of faith and a declaration of priorities. Before you have calculated your full harvest, before you know if it will be a lean or a fat year, you give the cream of the crop to God. This act declares that God is first, not just in principle, but in your checkbook, in your barn, and in your life.

You shall not boil a young goat in the milk of its mother. This command has puzzled many, but the principle is profound. What is the purpose of a mother's milk? It is for the life, nourishment, and growth of her young. To take that very substance of life and turn it into an instrument of death is a grotesque perversion. It is a twisting of the created order. It is cooking a creature in its own life source. God is establishing a principle here that His people are not to be those who twist good things into their opposite. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The milk is for the kid, not for cooking the kid. We are not to take the means of grace and turn them into instruments of bondage. We are not to take the authority God gives parents, which is for nurture, and use it to crush our children. This law is a prohibition against a spirit of perverse and unnatural cruelty. It is a command to respect the grain of the universe, to honor the connections and purposes that God has built into His world.

Application

For the Christian, this passage is not a dead letter. We are no longer required to travel to Jerusalem, but we are commanded to keep the feast. Christ our Passover has been sacrificed, and the life of the believer is to be a perpetual Feast of Unleavened Bread, marked by sincerity and truth. We are to continually purge the old leaven of sin from our lives and our churches.

The principle of first fruits is still binding. God still lays claim to the first and the best of our increase. The tithe is not an Old Testament relic; it is a principle of worship that acknowledges God as the source of all our provision. We are not to appear before him empty-handed, but are to be a people marked by radical generosity, giving cheerfully and sacrificially.

And finally, we must take to heart the prohibition against boiling a kid in its mother's milk. We live in a world that is expert at taking God's good gifts, sex, food, authority, life itself, and perverting them into instruments of death and degradation. We must be a people who honor the created order. In our homes, in our churches, and in our work, we must ask if we are using the milk of God's kindness to nourish, or if we have put it on the fire to boil something that ought to be cherished. Let us be a people of the feast, a people of grateful giving, and a people who cherish life.