When God instructed Israel about the Passover observance, He included a forward-looking phrase: "And it shall be, when you come to the land that the Lord will give you, as He has spoken" (Exodus 12:25). The Mekhilta notices those last three words — "as He has spoken" — and asks: when exactly did God promise to bring Israel to the land?
The answer reaches back to (Exodus 6:8), to the very beginning of the liberation story: "And I shall bring you to the land which I raised My hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob." The promise of the land was not an afterthought or a reward tacked on to the Exodus. It was one of the original four promises of redemption that God made to Moses before the plagues even began.
The Mekhilta is teaching that the Passover sacrifice and the Land of Israel are bound together from the beginning. When God told Israel how to observe the Paschal lamb, He embedded within those instructions a reminder that this was not merely about escaping Egypt. It was about arriving somewhere — a specific land, promised to specific ancestors, for a specific purpose.
This linkage transforms the Passover from a commemoration of departure into an anticipation of arrival. Every year that Israel performed the sacrifice in the wilderness, they were enacting not just the memory of what God had done, but the certainty of what He would do. The phrase "as He has spoken" is a legal receipt — proof that the promise existed before the first drop of lamb's blood hit the doorpost.