Puffed Up With Pride

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Puffed Up With Pride

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In 1 Corinthians 5:1-2, Paul tells the church in Corinth “you are puffed up."

“Puffed up” is used as a vivid description of a person who is proud and vain—who wants to make themselves appear or seem bigger and better than they are. Or as they say, "full of themselves."

Paul uses the phrase in 1 Corinthians 5:2 and then makes a connection for us between a person who is puffed up with pride and the way a batch of dough gets puffed up when a small amount of leaven is put in the batch. Before long the leaven (such as yeast) spreads everywhere, fermenting and leaving hundreds of little “bubbles” of carbon dioxide in the dough, causing it to be “puffed up.”

In the same way pride, vanity and other evils grow and spread when even a small amount is initially present. Pride is an evil attitude that often leads to other more specific sins. A proud person is full of spiritual bubbles: lots of visible surface area, but nothing inside them but gas.

It’s a great word picture that would have been immediately understandable to most people as recently as the last century. Now we all get our bread at a store and have little experience with preparing dough, inserting a leavening agent like yeast, allowing the bread to rise and expand with air before baking it.

That’s probably why most modern translations like the NIV or NLT tend to translate the phrase as simply pride. Pride is a reasonable translation of the underlying Greek word phusioō, but doesn’t capture the imagination in the same way as the phrase “puffed up” does.

As a result it’s harder for modern people like us to catch the contrast Paul is making between the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, and people who are puffed up with pride like a loaf of leavened bread. Also, it’s harder to see that Paul was not only teaching the non-Jewish converts of Corinth to observe the Festival of Unleavened Bread (1 Corinthian 5:8), but he was using their understanding of that same festival as a method to teach spiritual lessons.

You can learn many spiritual lessons from the annual feast days of God like the Feast of Unleavened Bread, Pentecost, or the Feast of Tabernacles. The Church of God in the first century kept these holy days and so does the Church of God today. Find out more about how to observe the biblical holy days and how to tap into the valuable spiritual understanding they offer about God’s plan for humanity and for you. Contact a minister of the United Church of God near you.