The End of the Beginning

Each year during the Passover season, God’s teachings encourage His people to take a look back. But there is more to life than one’s past experiences. So, what does God expect Christians to look at and apply to future experiences?

For one thing, we take a look at the fruit—the fruit of our life, the “end” or result of our actions, our thoughts, our ways, the decisions we’ve made, and the paths we’ve taken. As we grow older, we can see how some of those decisions, choices, actions, and reactions have hardened habits into place—ruts in our minds and lives. It can be easy to see our life’s course as pretty well set, for better or worse.

But the Passover season is not just about looking back.

Yes, the children of Israel in Egypt were reminded very clearly that they had fallen upon hard times. They had been drawn into slavery, into bondage to a Pharaoh whose desire was to control and to kill. At the end of the day, perhaps they nursed their wounds and talked about days gone by. Maybe they reminisced, retelling the stories of their grandparents, and what it was like during the “old days,” when the land of Goshen had been a new beginning, as the family of Jacob left the hard times in Canaan, and started fresh—in the finest land in Egypt.

But when Moses was sent by God to the children of Israel, he wasn’t sent to rehash “the old days.” No matter how real their hardships and their descent into hard times were, all of that was only a prelude to something else. They were at the end of the beginning—the beginning of a new start in a new land, a land flowing with milk and honey. It would be a new day, with a God who would lead them out of the old days with dramatic miracles, and words of life. It was only the end of the beginning.

And that is where the future comes in. Christians are told by the Apostle Paul that we are to become a “new creation”—a new person from what each of us once was. That “new beginning” can start every year. In fact, it can start every day.

Today, this morning, right now, you and I don’t have to be controlled by the past—we can control what we become in spite of what we’ve been and even because of what we’ve learned. With God’s forgiveness and His strength, we can assess this day and the challenges it brings, make good decisions as to what to do and how to do it. We may have old challenges that face us—challenges that were the same as yesterday. But the way we handle them can be better. Everything that has happened to us is for our learning and training, and for the development of wisdom and understanding.

In Proverbs 2, King Solomon wrote, “When wisdom enters your heart, and knowledge is pleasant to your soul, discretion will preserve you; understanding will keep you, to deliver you from the way of evil” (vv. 10–12).

We get a fresh start today. Yesterday was only the end.

The end of the beginning.

Do you want to understand more about God’s Passover and the Holy Days that follow it throughout the year? Learn more about the new beginning God has in store for all of mankind, and how you can embark on it today. Order the free booklets What Is the Meaning of Life?, The Holy Days: God’s Master Plan, and Easter: The Untold Story today.