“This month shall be unto you the beginning of months…” (Ex. 12:2).
It wasn’t, of course. The beginning of months, I mean. The nation of Israel would have a calendar year quite unlike ours. Our New Year follows the pagan celebration of the rebirth of the sun. Instead, the Jews to this day have a civil year much like our “school year,” beginning in September with Rosh Hashanah, the Blowing of Trumpets. Eventually when they would enter the Land, the Israelites’ field crops would be planted then, in the autumn, and harvested in the spring, beginning with the barley harvest.
This statement in Exodus 12 comes, then, in the middle of the year—at the beginning of the seventh month, Abib. But these words of the Lord came not only at the end of the drab winter and at the first signs of spring; they came at the end of more than four centuries of oppression, since Ishmael began to mock the son of the free woman (the only way I can see a period of 400 years until the Exodus, Gen. 15:13; Acts 7:6).
Our Lord is the Lord of beginnings. “In the beginning (or, in beginning) God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). But there were beginnings before that beginning: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God” (Jn. 1:1-2). In fact, our Lord declares, “I am…the beginning…, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come” (Rev. 1:8).
And our Lord is also the Lord of beginning again! When the first creation lay in ruins, its masters now chained and enslaved by the rebel king, God proposed a new beginning: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk. 1:1). It was to be a fresh start so miraculous, so stupendous, that it would make the Heir of all things poor in the process. Yet by it, humanity could hope again. It would be said of all who laid claim to His offer: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all
things are become new” (2 Cor 5:17). Oh, the freshness, the liberty, the song-filled heart of the newly freed slave who steps into this “beginning of months” and joins the redeemed ones’ chorus: “The Lord is my strength and song, and He is become my salvation: He is my God, and I will prepare Him an habitation” (Ex. 15:2).
However, for the children of Israel, this first deliverance over their enemies would hardly be the last. That wonderful exodus from Egypt was only the first beginning of many needed beginnings again. And so it is with us. We love to sing, “From victory unto victory, His army shall He lead,” but the conquest is not one uninterrupted triumph. We at times find ourselves—whether individually or as local assemblies—desperately in need of a chance to begin again. We stand alone in the darkness with Jacob at the fords of Jabbok, or sit beside Nehemiah and grieve when we hear that the Lord’s people “are in great affliction and reproach” (1:3). Sometimes we even lie with David on the palace floor, fasting and mourning at our personal folly and sin, wondering if there is any hope for us again. Or like Peter, we have fled His sorrowful gaze and now weep in bitterness of soul.
Yet we know there must be hope for us, because we know how these stories ended—every one of them with dramatic new beginnings! Yet such fresh starts are not automatic. As in type that first Passover night, there must be a new beginning of obedience to God’s Word, a new grasp of the deadly consequences of unforgiven sin, a new appreciation of the value of the blood applied personally, and a return to that simple trust that feeds on the Lamb to gain strength for the journey Home. If so, this could be for you, for me, “the beginning of months,” of a fresh start with the Lord. Will it be?