The exodus, and the one He accomplished at Jerusalem

The exodus is the event the Old Testament never stops referring back to. It is the reason given for the Sabbath, for the treatment of foreigners, for the festivals, for the law itself — you were slaves in Egypt, and the LORD brought you out.

It is a rescue, and every detail of it becomes vocabulary: a lamb, blood on a doorframe, bread eaten in haste, a sea opened, a pillar of fire, water from a rock, bread from the sky.

This volume has already walked most of those as separate threads. Today they are one event.

And then the prophets do something strange with it. They start talking about the exodus in the future tense.

Forget the former things. Said by a prophet whose whole nation was built on remembering one particular former thing.

Isaiah is not dismissing the exodus. He is saying a bigger one is coming, and the language he uses for it — a way in the wilderness, streams in the desert, water for My chosen people — is exodus language pointed forward.

Jeremiah says it flatly: the days are coming when people will no longer say as surely as the LORD lives who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt, but who brought them up out of the land of the north.

The word behind His departure is exodos. Luke wrote it in Greek and left it standing.

Moses, who led the first one. Elijah, who fled to the same mountain where the law was given. And between them a man about to accomplish an exodus at Jerusalem — a rescue out of a slavery, marked by a lamb and blood and a meal eaten before departure.

Which is why the last supper was a Passover, and why Paul says Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed, and why the church has been eating a meal about a rescue ever since.

And the thread ends with a song that names both events at once.

The song of Moses the servant of God and the song of the Lamb. Sung by people standing beside something like a sea of glass mixed with fire — which is where the first song was sung too, on the far shore, by people who had just walked through.

And the thread explains why the church kept a meal rather than a monument. Israel was told to keep the Passover annually so that when a child asked what the ceremony meant, a parent would tell the rescue story. The instruction assumed a question from a child, and built the answer into the calendar.

One rescue, told twice, and the second one is what the first was about.

Trace it: Exodus 3:7–10; 12; 14; 15:1–21; Deuteronomy 5:15; 6:20–25; 26:5–9; Psalm 78; 105–106; Isaiah 11:15–16; 43:16–21; 51:9–11; Jeremiah 16:14–15; 23:7–8; Hosea 11:1; Matthew 2:15; Luke 9:28–36; 1 Corinthians 5:7; 10:1–4; Revelation 15:1–4.

Luke 9:31 is the only place in the New Testament where exodos is used of Christ’s death, and the word choice is almost certainly deliberate given who is standing there. Peter uses the same noun of his own death in 2 Peter 1:15, in the passage from Week Five where he recalls this very mountain.

Matthew 2:15 quotes Hosea 11:1 — out of Egypt I called My son — and applies it to the child returning from Egypt. Hosea’s verse is about the nation; Matthew reads Christ as recapitulating Israel’s history, which is the interpretive move behind much of this thread.

1 Corinthians 10:1–11 walks the exodus as a series of types — all baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea, all ate the same spiritual food, all drank from the spiritual rock, and the rock was Christ — and then says these things happened as examples and were written as warnings for us.

Exodus 15 is the oldest poem in the Bible on most reckonings — the song sung at the sea, with Miriam and the women answering with tambourines. Revelation 15 has the redeemed singing it again beside a sea, which makes it the only song in Scripture explicitly sung at both ends of the story.

Look it upH3318 יָצָא yatsa, to go out, come forth · H1350 גָּאַל gaal, to redeem, act as kinsman · G1841 ἔξοδος exodos, departure, exodus · G629 ἀπολύτρωσις apolutrosis, redemption, release by ransom

Where this touchesExodus 12–15 · Isaiah 43:16–21 · Jeremiah 23:7–8 · Luke 9:28–36 · 1 Corinthians 5:7; 10:1–11 · Revelation 15:1–4. The seed, lamb, blood, tree, bread, water, the Name, the dwelling, the Shepherd, the city, the marriage, the mountain, the light and the vine were the earlier threads.