I. It was not the children of Israel who had brought themselves out of Egypt. They were a set of poor crouching slaves. It was not Moses who brought them out. It was the Lord who brought them out. This was what the Passover told them on the night they left Egypt, what it was to tell all future generations. The Lord was fighting for them. They were simply to follow where they were led, to accept the deliverance which He gave them and to remember whence it came.
II. The most wonderful of God's processes of education was the institution of sacrifices and the whole economy which is connected with them. The ground of the national existence was laid in sacrifice. The killing of the lamb, the blood token upon the door, the consecration of all the firstborn, were the witnesses that the slaves of Pharaoh were redeemed to be the people of God. Sacrifice was not merely the redress of an evil: it was a return to the rightful, orderly state of each man and of the people. The setting up of a self-will is the disturbance of order; the sacrifice or giving up of the will is the restoration of it. Therefore the sacrifices in the Book of Leviticus are not like the heathen sacrifices schemes to bring about a change in the Divine mind. They proceed, just as much as the law proceeds, from that mind.
III. A Jew who ate the paschal lamb mainly that he might commemorate the destruction of the Egyptians or the favour shown to Israelites may have hoped that the same power which slew one enemy of the nation would slay another. Yet this hope must often have been feeble, for analogies are but poor supports to the heart when crushed by actual miseries. But he who counted it his chief blessedness to see God asserting His order through Egyptians and Israelites, in despite of the unbelief and rebellion of both, would naturally conclude that He who is and was and is to come would go on asserting His order till He had put down every enemy of it, till He had completely made manifest His "own character and purposes." The enemies of God's order are sensuality, self-will, selfishness. It is God's intention to wage perpetual war with these, till He has proved whether they or He are the stronger.
God must be the Deliverer in the least case as in the greatest. Man must be the instrument of deliverance. It must be a deliverance wrought by the Firstborn of many brethren for His brethren, by a High-Priest as the Representative of a society.
F. D. Maurice, Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament,p. 186.