First Passover in Canaan

 

Joshua 5: 10-12

 

First Passover in Canaan

While the people of Israel were encamped at Gilgal, they kept the Passover on the fourteenth day of the month in the evening on the plains of Jericho.   And the day after the Passover, on that very day, they ate of the produce of the land, unleavened cakes, and parched grain.   And the manna ceased the day after they ate of the produce of the land. And there was no longer manna for the people of Israel, but they ate of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.

 

How important was this marker in a Jews person life, some forty years after the death angel had passed over every home in Egypt that had the blood of an unblemished lamb on the doorpost of their home, but had killed the firstborn of both people and animal where the blood had not been on the doorpost?  Scripture never told us if they were Jewish people that refused, but if they obey Moses and God, and were saved

 

The people who had left Egypt had died off because they did not believe in God and obey Him, and this new generation had only known manna as their food source.  When they crossed into the land promised by God and referred to as the Promised Land they found it was the time of the year for the barley to ripen and on that day they kept the Passover on the evening of the 14^th day of the month they ate the unleavened bread and roasted grain, the next day the manna stopped falling.  God had been faithful over all those years to feed them the bread of angels, but now they were in Canaan and God had a new source from the land of the Promise.

 

Often we the Church of the Living God forget the lesson; Jan and I were leaders in a movement called Lay Witness; it was begun in the Methodist Church by a man named Ben Campbell Johnson.  My mentor Jack Archer, an oilman, was the district director for Texas.  We did many missions on weekends as team members and then one day Jack told me he believed God wanted Jan and me to lead out in this movement.  It was a great time and we were experiencing God renewing His Church.  But like the manna one day it was very clear God had used this tool greatly but had removed His hand and it was becoming a program of the many Churches but was no longer a movement from God.  Like the manna, it had accomplished all that God had planned for it.  Many who had been blessed by it had a hard time understanding this truth. 

 

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice

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