Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Jensen Holt McNair.

If you read along this morning already, then you know that Mark Chapter 14 is packed full of the Passion narrative. It begins with Jesus preparing for the Passover and

Festival of Unleavened Bread with his disciples and ends with him standing on trial

while one of his close disciples denies him. There's so much to pull and learn from a section of

scripture, but I want to focus specifically on two different statements Jesus

makes about himself in these passages.

So to start off Mark 14, Mark 14 begins mere days away from the festival of unleavened bread.

I'm assuming that many of us, like me, are not entirely familiar with all that

goes on during this festival. But Mark's original audience would not only have known about

this festival, they would have celebrated it and would have been familiar with its symbolism.

And so in order to understand all that is going on here,

I think it's important that we step into their shoes and try to understand the context of this chapter,

to know a little bit of what they would have known.

So, the significance of the Festival of Unlevined Bread was that it was a time to look back at God's deliverance of the Jewish people from their slavery in Egypt and their deliverance into God's Promised Land.

During the festival, they would sacrifice a lamb, reminding them

of the blood the Jewish people spread over their door post during the very first Passover

in Egypt. As you remember, they did this so that the angel of death would have passed

over their doors and only deal the plague of death on the firstborn of the Egyptian families.

It was this plague that led Pharaoh to

eventually send the Israelites away. And so in the days of Mark, those who celebrated

Passover as part of this festival were both remembering what God had done for his people,

...