When it came time for Moses to communicate God’s instructions for the Passover to the people, he included some very clear procedures.
First, take a lamb. Slaughter it. Sacrifice it.
Second, grab some hyssop. Dip it in the blood of the lamb and spread the blood on the doorpost of your house so that the Lord will pass over that house. Everyone that is in the house will be safe, but everyone outside the house will be subjected to the tenth plague.
This section of Scripture has so many points we could pull from that, if we wanted to, we could park here for a month and still not exhaust the subject (and we might, depending on how I feel tomorrow).
One that is not talked about nearly as much is the aforementioned hyssop. From the context, it looks as if hyssop is some kind of wash rag or painter’s brush, since it’s used to apply the blood to the doorposts.
In actuality, hyssop is a plant (an herb, to be exact). It’s a useful plant though. As a dish, it can be utilized for its healing and medicinal properties, or it can be added to a meal for extra flavor. In Leviticus 14, hyssop is used as part of the ceremonial cleansing process for leprosy.
The plant itself is very hardy and was sometimes used as an application tool, just like a paintbrush. This explains why Moses told the Israelites to dip the hyssop in the blood to apply it to the doorposts. Not only did it have a symbolic cleansing property, but it could also be used as a physical tool.
One of the most famous mentions of hyssop comes in Psalm 51:7, when David begs God to “cleanse [him] with hyssop,” so that he would be clean. He wants God to purify him spiritually, so that his sins could be taken from him.
We need God to purify us as well. Baptism in faith is defined in Acts 22:16 as the thing that “washes away our sins”; it marks us as clean, in other words, just as the blood from the hyssop marked the Israelites during the night of the Passover.
It’s likely that some people grumbled about having to find hyssop to mark their doors, but God’s instructions were clear: If you want to be delivered from the tenth plague, they needed to use hyssop. The same applies today. If we want to be delivered from death, we have to do it in the manner that God told us.
