The Passover and this feast are linked, as much as are Christ’s death for us and His life in us.
As we saw in our last lesson, the Passover was the “beginning of months” (Ex 12:2) for Israel—the birthday of the nation. No longer labor camp slaves, they were now the people of God. And it happened by their identifying with the death of a substitutionary lamb. Every true Christian has a similar story. My real birth-day occurred when I was “born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever” (1 Pet 1:23). It happened at the moment I accepted the Lord Jesus as God’s Lamb who died in my place at Calvary. But along with the lamb in Egypt that first Passover night, the Lord also commanded the people, “You shall eat nothing leavened; in all your dwellings you shall eat unleavened bread” (Ex 12:20). So here we read, “And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the Lord; seven days you must eat unleavened bread” (Lev 23:6). There were only two seven-day feasts: Unleavened Bread and Tabernacles. The one-day feasts speak of events, as we’ll see. The seven-day feasts point to ongoing blessings. There is clearly a direct link between the Passover and this festival of Unleavened Bread because the one led right into the other. And it’s no surprise that God intends for all those who have been saved by His Lamb to understand that the unleavened bread speaks of holy living based on honesty and truth. “Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with…the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor 5:7-8). Redeemed people should also be right-living people.