Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, "Go and select lambs for yourselves according to your clans, and kill the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning. For the LORD will pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the LORD will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you. You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and for your sons forever. And when you come to the land that the LORD will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this service. And when your children say to you, 'What do you mean by this service?' you shall say, 'It is the sacrifice of the LORD's Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses.'" And the people bowed their heads and worshiped. Then the people of Israel went and did so; as the LORD had commanded Moses and Aaron, so they did.
Exodus 12:21-28
Moses here passes on the divine instructions to the people. Their reaction - bowing down to worship, then returning to their homes to complete the commanded preparations - is significant, for it is in the obedience we offer to the command of God that faith is proved real. The divine provision of protection would have been unavailing for the Israelites if they had not in fact made it their own by placing themselves under the sheltering blood. It was not their action in so doing, but the provision of God, that saved them, but the provision of God could not have helped them if they had not done so. Similarly, in the New Testament antitype, it is not faith that saves us - we are justified by His blood - but we cannot be saved without faith. Faith is the hand that receives. But the Israelites also obeyed the instructions to eat the Passover with loins girt and staffs in hand, and this is meant to signify their identification with the inner meaning of the Passover sacrifice. This bears a lesson of the supremest importance for the spiritual life which we will look at in the next Note.