The Feast of Craving Sweetness

At the moment of your birth, you were sweet. You were sweet, actually, in more ways than one.

But you had an attitude of sweetness, and your body, actually, was composed of sweetness.

Your diet was simply that of your mother's and your mother's only until your birth. You, as a baby, were fully uncontaminated. Once you were born, your diet was your sweet mother's milk.

Babies are a unique state at birth, and even following birth, they continue in that sweetness of mind and also body for some time. When babies finally begin eating food, solid food, they begin with the more sweet, basic fruits and vegetables. When you were inside your mother, your whole intestinal tract, what's called your gut or your intestines, your stomach, contained no fungus. No spores of yeast were anywhere in your body.

Your entire intestines, science say, were 100% sterile, which is an interesting fact. However, beginning with the moment of your birth, during the birth process, various things began to invade your body, and things began to change.

There were certain substances that your mother transferred to you, and indeed, when you took your very first breath, your internal system became inundated with yeast spores and various microbes. The fungus and yeast spores that got inhaled began to work down into the intestines fairly rapidly, in fact. There, in your intestines, fermentation began to occur—fermentation of the milk. And a fermentation that takes place in our intestines is a very necessary part of life.

Vitamins there are created by the yeasts and the microbes and the fermentation process. The fermentation process begins to actually build within our intestines outside bulk—bulk from outside sources that are very necessary for the humans to live.

The genes of microbes and yeast that exist in your and my internal system number 100 times those of the human genome. We don't tend to think much about what goes on there. The human body is created of so many genes that have been not documented. And yet, what is right in our guts has 100 times the number of genes of living microorganisms than our own bodies contain. These microbes—you may not wish to know this—form 60% of a stool in its dry form. This is quite a living thing that's going on within us.

As you reached eight months of age, you as a baby had a taste that began to alter. It was no longer content with mother's milk and the sweet purity of mother's milk. It wanted to move on to other things. Those simple fruits and vegetables began to be very tasty. There was a trending towards foods with bitterness. Bitterness because that's the way our human taste goes. Cereals actually have bitterness. Grains have bitterness. Breads have bitterness in them. When you reach the state of adolescence, pure milk, even from cows, was considered boring and bland. Too simple. And so, fungus was added to the milk to begin to create what we call dairy products of cheese and yogurts, sour creams, buttermilk, cottage cheese, and a variety of things that our taste buds enjoyed more of the sourness, more of the bitterness. In adulthood, fruit juices became too sweet. And so, yeasts were added to them. In a variety of fungi and yeasts were added to a variety of fruits to provide a wide variety of wines, of various varietals or varieties, with many different levels of tastes. And the yeasts used are many different varieties to bring out the subtleties of various types of wines and beers, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. Even tea itself is a brewed fermentation process involving leaves that bring out a certain bitterness that appeals to the adult taste. Naturally sweet breads that we were used to, what we would call the fry breads of the world, be it in the west, the crepe that's associated with France, that sweet, just plain dough, plain flour, that oven by itself has a certain sweetness to it, the other fry breads like the Spanish tortilla, the Indian nan, the African chapati, the Italian Greek flatbread that in ancient times formed the base for pizzas and other types of pastas. Those things became bland as well, and so fungus was added to them. And the fermentation of the fungus that boiling up creates bread loads that have a slight bitterness or a tang, something to them that is not as simple as the original just basic grains once were. Now, notice how far we as adults, some of you adolescents or growing children, have come since the pure sweetness of our birth, from the pure sweetness when we desired and craved mother's milk, and we would cry if we couldn't have it. Let's stop for just a moment and consider newborn versus adult bodies. When you look at a brand new baby that comes out, everybody just stares at it. You just look and you think, wow, how perfect, how pure, how clean, how amazing. And the little eyes open up to see their first sights and sort of stare and take in things for the first time with a pure mind, a pure mentality. How far have you come from that day to where now what do you and I desire to see with our eyes or think with our minds or do with our bodies or if we even look at our bodies how different they are when that little hand pops into ours without the wrinkles and ours have the wrinkles. We've come a long way since the day of our birth. Similarly, what about the diets of adults versus the newborns? I think one of the things that really shocked me about the difference in our diets was not long ago when one of our daughters brought over a baby to be babysat. A baby. Now, we used to have our own babies, but it's been a while. Now you're going to bring over this brand new little baby, precious little thing, and it's going to be left for a whole hour or two. My wife was much more confident about it, but I was the one that received the bag of stuff and you have to use this and you have to use that and here's the baby. I'll be back.

Now, I looked in the bag and there was, as was described to me, this is special. Here is a bottle for the baby of mother's milk. That is precious stuff.

Don't be giving this cow's milk, buttermilk, nothing out of your fridge. This baby can't live on anything else but this pure stuff in this little glass container, which was very small, had been pumped, specially prepared for this hour or two or whatever it was, and to look at that and think that is unlike anything that is in the human environment. You can't get this. This is pure gold. This is better than gold because this baby has to have and can only eat mother's milk. You and I, however, have moved along. Fox News this week ran an article that says, would you eat surstromming? I didn't know, so I had to read the article.

This is sort of how far we as humans can go. Surstromming is a type of fermented herring that is traditionally enjoyed, and the author writes in parentheses, really?

In Sweden, near the end of summer, the warm months, the white fish is fermented and then canned, and the fermentation continues in the can, ripening the fish, producing a variety of foul gases that often cause the can to bulge. When opened, the onslaught of the smell is so powerful that many choose to open it outside, much to the chagrin of their neighbors.

Airlines have banned it as a safety measure in case a can should explode, because you can't open the windows.

If we go to Romans 7, verses 8-12, this is like what has happened to you and me since birth. I'll use that analogy, because the Bible does, and we'll see that in a moment. In Romans 7, verse 8, Paul says, "...but sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire." Something was growing inside me, as it were, in my mind. This is boiling around and fermenting in me. "...for apart from the law sin was dead. I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. And the commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bring death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me and by it killed me." You see, where we're headed as humans, we are headed towards growing old and eventually dying. But spiritually, mentally, we are also corrupting and being corrupted and boiling up inside and being permeated by something that is taking us towards death. It's going to kill us. In Matthew 18, verse 3, Jesus said, "...unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven." We have to stop that process. We have to convert. We, in a sense, have to go back to the pure sweetness of birth, to that type of estate, unfilled and uncorrupted and unbrewing, and all of the stuff that we've gotten into has got to come out. The Feast of Unleavened Bread is all about this theme. We were born sweet and sinless, and that is not important, but we've become full of sin. We have brooded all through our lives in every way. Ourselves, along with society, have just been filled with this internal brewing that has taken place. Verse 4, the Passover shows us that we have a rescuer, we have one who will come and help us, that will clean us out, wash us by his blood, clean us up, take us to a state, as he said, like little children, so that we can be like he is, that pure piece of bread, uncorrupted by any yeast, unstained by any bitterness, that is, fully and purely the sweet, pure thing.

Today, let's take a look at a sermon entitled, The Feast of Craving Sweetness. I know it sounds like an odd title, but you're going to see in a minute, it's not odd at all. The Feast of Craving Sweetness. And as we look at this, let's realize what it is that these days are trying to get us to become. What is in a name? Well, oftentimes, not a lot. But when God names something, it usually has a meaning, and that meaning usually runs deep and has quite a lot of relationship to the event, to the person, to the deed, to prophecy, etc. And so it is. God has named various things in the Bible. You can remember that he changed Abram's name to Abraham. He named David. He named the city of Jerusalem. He named our Lord Joshua in the English, or Yahashua in the Hebrew, that has a rich, full meaning. He named Cephas Peter, which has a specific meaning, etc., etc. And so we have the festivals, and God has given us the names of the seven festivals. Sometimes we get a little careless and just call them by their first-century Jewish terms. Sometimes they are descriptors, but God gave official names to these feasts back in Leviticus 23 and other places. Sometimes the Jewish terms of the first century are rather static, I would say. They don't have much meaning. For instance, the term Pentecost. Pentecost is not the name God gave that feast, but it was called Pentecost later on. Pentecost just means fiftieth. It refers to the fiftieth day in an accounting process. And even by itself, when you say Pentecost or you say fiftieth, there's not a whole lot of richness there, is it, as far as meaning goes. Other things are like that as well. The days of unleavened bread. It's kind of a static term. It's not mentioned actually in the Bible as a formal name for these days. Rather, it was a term, days of unleavened bread, used only twice by Luke in writing to Theophilus, who was an unconverted Greek, and he was referring to a period of time in which unleavened bread was used. But those kind of were formalized, in a way, into days of unleavened bread. And so you and I are sort of keeping the days of unleavened bread, which, even by themselves, is kind of just a name, sort of static. If we go to Exodus chapter 23, instead of Leviticus 23, let's stop first in Exodus chapter 23 and verse 16.

Because if we want to look at the name God gave the day of what we call Pentecost, you won't find it in Leviticus 23. You just see a description that you should count 50 days and have a holy day. There's no name for it. But in looking at Exodus chapter 23 and verse 16, we notice, and the Feast of Harvest, that is, the Feast of Harvest, the first fruits of your labors, which you have sown in the field. See, now we find that that Feast of Harvest of the first fruits, that has a real rich name compared to Pentecost, which nobody really knows what that means in English usually. See how these names kind of richen up. Even going on, we know the Feast of Tabernacles, he goes on in verse 16, and the Feast of In-Gathering. He just talked about the Feast of Harvest, but now he talks about the Feast of In-Gathering at the end of the year, the big harvest, which we also know as the Feast of Tabernacles, which actually means the Feast of Thickets or the Feast of Crude Temporary Huts or Booths made from vegetation. Like Paul said, this tent that we have, this tent, we look forward to it getting rid of this tent and being with the Lord permanently. That's what the Feast of Tabernacles looks forward to. There's a time when humanity will have a very temporary existence just ahead of a great resurrection into the family of God. And so it's a very temporary time. Now, what about the name of this feast that we're celebrating? The Days of Unleavened Bread, when we use that term, I don't know about you, but it seems to convey that you de-leaven your houses and your cars in advance, and then you have seven days of unleavened bread. It's kind of what goes in my mind. You come up, oh, got to get ready for Days of Unleavened Bread. Unleavened out, right? Unleavened in, because these are the days of unleavened bread. And so we go through avoiding unleavened bread for seven days, and if you eat bread, it's unleavened bread. Now, that's sort of what we do, and if we do that, we're obeying the rule. The world doesn't obey the rule. It doesn't know the rule, but someday it will know the rule that for these seven days you don't eat the big puffy stuff. You change. It takes a little bit of changing. You forget sometimes, but you change. You know, this is bad, and the thin stuff, that's good. And at the end of the seven days, for the next 55 weeks, you try to flip back. Now, this is good, and this stuff... I don't know what that stuff is anymore.

So that's sort of the rule. So we're in the days of the unleavened bread rule. Bread is bad. Matzos are good.

You know, the days of unleavened bread isn't really rich in a name, is it? It's sort of static.

And, well, a good reason for that is because it's not the name given anywhere in Scripture. Days of Unleavened Bread, as I said, was translated into English from Luke, in Acts 12 and 20, where he said, after the days of unleavened bread. But he didn't even use the term bread there. He just said, after the days of something. No Greek word for bread. It was referring, of course, to the time which we're observing right now. But my point is, he wasn't giving the formal name as these are the capital days of unleavened bread. If you look in the King James Version, you'll see that they're not even capitalized. And you'll also find that bread is in italics. It's not even used. So what's the whole point here? Well, if arguably days of unleavened bread is not the formal name, what is? What are we observing? Let's go to Leviticus chapter 23 and verse 6. Leviticus chapter 23 and verse 6 is where God gives us the name of this festival. It was originally given in Hebrew a different language than what we speak. It says in Leviticus 23 verse 6, And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread to the Lord. That's not the days of unleavened bread. This is a feast. It's a festival. Something to be celebrated, not just sort of a period of time, static time.

Now, the feast of unleavened bread is an English translation here, obviously. It's interesting that for some reason in the Bible, wherever this festival is mentioned, God never chose to use the term from the Hebrew or the Greek for the word bread.

You know, we have bread, unleavened bread, or leavened bread, and we use the word bread. That word is definitely implied, but God used other words to define this festival, than using even the term bread, because there are other words that would actually bring more meaning to what this feast is all about.

The name for this festival in Hebrew is the Feast of Matzah. One word. Feast of Matzah. May even sound a little familiar, like matzoh, a commercial product. The Feast of Matzah. Matzah is a wonderful word, and according to Strong, the name of this feast means to have an urgency to eat sweetness.

An urgency to eat sweetness. That's what's implied by it. Matzah means sweetness in the sense of greedily devouring for sweetness. Think about greedily devour. You're going to greedily devour something. I assume you have to have other people there. You've got something that you really, really want. So much that you'll put yourself ahead of anybody else and any other thing. You'll thrust yourself upon it and greedily devour it for sweetness. That's what this feast is called. The Feast of Greedily Devouring for Sweetness is what's implied here. Let's look a little deeper.

Matzah. Sweetness in the sense of greedily devouring for sweetness and concretely sweet, absolutely sweet, not soured or embittered with yeast. Now what is referring to is bread. Bread that is unsourred, uncorrupted, unputrified by this bubbling, souring, bittering action of an outside agent that has gotten in and is infecting the whole loaf. And that you and I are to have a passion to devour the pure sweetness of the unleavened bread.

So the Hebrew name that God gives this feast depicts no interest whatsoever in yeasted or bitter bread or that which adults or worldly people would have come to like. The thoughts and the ways of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, the human passions, the carnal desires. And it's not that we just sort of say, don't do that. We actually have a passion for the opposite. We have a passion to get in and devour and eat and become that which is pure and sweet and yeast-free, corruption-free. The timing of this feast comes right after the Passover. And at the Passover, we pictured Jesus Christ as that sweet, unfermented, unbitter, uncorrupted bread. And now we have a feast the very next day to where we are to be passionate about becoming that, of devouring Him as the bread of life, that pure sweetness. Not just accepting it from Him, but literally becoming it. Because now for seven days it's representing you and me. And that child, that baby mentality, that pureness, that uncorrupted state and nature and character that Christ had and that we are to become.

It's a wonderful feast when we think of it as a passionate craving for the pure sweet bread with a capital B that's absence of anything that's infected it or putrefied it, embittered it. And that's what the name implies. It's interesting that God used that term, matzah.

Now, Israel was in Egypt, just like you and I currently live in a world of sin. There's a big difference in not eating leavened bread for this week and craving purity and righteousness. See, we could go through this feast as the days of unleavened bread, simply saying, well, if I choose to eat bread, I'll make sure it's unleavened. I'll check the ingredients. And at the end of the feast, we say, I either did well or I had an oopsie or two. See, there's a huge difference in doing that versus daily on our knees craving this nature of God and asking God, give us this day our daily bread, the pure sweet stuff. Help it to become us. Help me to become perfect and pure like my Father in heaven is. There's a big difference in not breaking the Ten Commandments. You can sort of look at the Ten Commandments and say, okay, big difference in not breaking the Ten Commandments and in loving others as Christ loved us and gave Himself for us. See, one can be a little bit passive. Well, I got the commandments and I'm trying not to break them. Try not to eat unleavened bread this week. And at the end of my life, if I get there and say, you know, here, I'll do the score. Ate one donut and made one mistake. Shot one person. That's not too bad. Not too bad for a whole life. Do you think we've made the mark in God's eyes? In either case? Because, you see, it's the nature of God that He wants us to develop. The meaning of the English feast of unleavened bread could be summed up as the feast of craving the sweetness of unfermented bread. That's action, isn't it? That's passion. That's an eagerness. That's going out and searching and working to crave the sweetness of unfermented bread. Let's go to 1 Corinthians 5 and verse 8. We'll see the Apostle Paul talking about this.

1 Corinthians 5 and verse 8. There's a few words here that get added in the English. We'll look at those in a minute. Let me just read it to the New King James, but let me use the Greek meanings of the words. Therefore, let us keep the feast, not with old ferment, nor with the fermenting of malice and wickedness, but with unfermented sincerity and truth. If you go through, you take a Greek lexicon, you'll find that all the words that I didn't mention just now aren't in the Greek manuscripts. Everything I read is actually there in the Greek manuscripts, and some of those other words can kind of divert us around. So let us keep the feast, not with old ferment, nor with the fermenting of malice and wickedness, but with the unfermented sincerity, I'm sorry, with unfermented sincerity and truth. See where we're supposed to be going?

We're to get this fermenting, leaven, yeasty, percolating stuff. The Greek word zoome for ferment, or leaven, and azumos for fermented, mean boiling up, fermenting. You know, this stuff you watch it, it kind of boils and goes up and you watch it slowly, just and then it moves along, it moves throughout, and it infects. What is actually happening when you take yeast spores and you put them in, what they actually do is begin to eat and reproduce. It's actually reproduction going on. New spores are being born through a process that I won't describe here, and the living beings, as they go, they eat, and then they reproduce again, and they move on until the entire lump is spoiled, in a sense. It's fermenting.

We are not to have that old ferment, but to get rid of that, and that's the malice and wickedness, and now have the unfermented sincerity and truth. So this feast really is to demonstrate, it's to set as a goal, and also be an example that we are moving forward in a passion to become sweet, unfermented, uncorrupted. So we could say, welcome to the feast of craving sweet, unfermented bread, because that's what it's about. God used the term, you know, have a craving, a passion for sweetness, but he's referring to it in the term of bread, though he doesn't use that term.

Welcome to the feast of craving sweet, unfermented bread. It's closer to its original name in the Hebrew. God wants us to desire His pure, sweet mindset, and crave it, and want nothing else. It doesn't matter what comes, it doesn't matter who or what is in the way. We're going to plow through that, because what we really want is to be Christ-like, and to get rid of the fermented, bitter mindset that has corrupted us.

We want to become new babes in Christ, sweet and unfermented. We started out kind of like dough as a newborn, pure, unembittered, but our life's journey has taken us down a road where our state has been altered, and our sweet lump has been permeated with this fungal yeast. We don't mind so much. We think, well, this is a little different, a little more exciting. But what has happened is that that sweet lump, or that precious little baby that we once were, has now become corrupted into something that is distasteful to God.

It's not something he can identify with. It's not something he wants. It's repulsive. It's enmity to him. It's not something he can bring into his family. And so, as you might take something that's stinky and putrefying and go put it in the trash, so that's where you and I would have to go and be burned up if we stayed on that course.

Yeast is a living fungus. There are 1,500 named species of yeast. However, there are 1.5 million unnamed species of yeast. Yeast, there's a lot of yeast, various types. And bread makers have historically used airborne yeast back at the time of the Exodus. They didn't have time to leaven their dough because it's that yeast that's in the air, one of those millions of types of yeast that ferments bread. Now, you might think, well, that's kind of archaic. Well, it's really not. At the time of Christ, bread was fermented and leavened by setting it out and letting that yeast.

When the United States was founded, bread in this country was all leavened by sitting it out. Now, what you could do is, once you got enough spores in there and got it going, you could save a piece and you could stick it in later into another one. And like I said, it would continue to multiply and have baby yeasts. And so it worked out pretty well. It was not until a trade fair was held in the United States, I believe it was in Philadelphia, that culminated a great European effort among scientists to figure out how to make a yeast that people could just put into a dough and leaven it.

They knew it. It's kind of like the atomic bomb or some kind of physics. They knew you should be able to do it, but nobody could figure it out. The Germans were working on it, the Russians were working on it, people in this country were working on it. Somebody with a very hard name to pronounce from one of those places finally showed up at this kind of world's fair and sold it. And from then on, things really changed. But it's just a process as well as getting that yeast out of the air and putting it into a substance that's easier to work with.

That took place in the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Whatever the source of yeast fungus is, the effect is this boiling fungal mold. It devours organic compounds in a bitter brew that releases carbon gas as it goes about replicating itself. In Luke 13, verse 21, Jesus defines it as a boiling up. Jesus defines it this way. Luke 13, in verse 21, it is like ferment, it's that Greek word zume again, same one, it's like ferment, this boiling up, which a woman took and hid. And the Greek word there means to insert or to incorporate in three measures of meal till it was all fermented.

So, once again, it's this process of being infected. The term yeast actually comes from an Old English term combining two words, and the two words mean to boil and to foam, just like the Greek word zume means to boil and to foam. It's a living organism that eats carbs and sugars and grows and multiplies through reproduction. It then spreads and infects new territory where it was not placed. There it continues to invade, devour, alter, reproduce. The effect is it injects carbon and bitter tastes into whatever it invades. Similarly, we see just as Christ shows here that some is put in and then it infects the whole lump. There's a similar mindset we find in Galatians 5 verses 7 through 10 that invades you and me.

Galatians chapter 5 verses 7 through 10. It invades us, it ferments, it breeds within us, it spreads, it warps us, warps us, it swells us, it disfigures us. Galatians 5 verse 7, Paul says to the Galatian church, you ran well. You were doing pretty good there. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? What got into you? This persuasion does not come from him who calls you. Verse 9, it's a Greek word again, a little ferment, Greek zoome, ferments, Greek zoomo, the whole lump. It ferments, you see. A little bit of ferment starts breeding, reproducing, and invades the whole lump. This boiling, fermenting, spreading thing takes place. Just in society, think about how it spreads. You hear some obnoxious thing over here, and pretty soon you hear it over here, and then it's over there, and then everybody's doing it. And then somebody does something over here, and then it's done over there, and everybody's doing it. And the world just gets worse and worse and worse. The mentality is growing in ever-increasing bitterness for mankind, and the result is a sourness. It's an unhappiness, and it spreads like a fungus, and it ferments. It's offensive, it's harming, it's careless, it's thoughtless. In Mark chapter 8 and verse 14, Jesus warns us about this. Mark chapter 8 and verse 14, don't let that fungus get in you. You and I have been cleansed by Christ's blood. We need to get it out, and we need to keep it out. And he gives us a warning, just as he did them. Mark chapter 8 and verse 14, Now the disciples had forgotten to take bread, and they did not have more than one loaf with them in the boat. This is leavened. This is the putrefied, adulterated form of bread. Now, without another word, in verse 15, he charged them, he warned them, he very strongly said, Take heed, beware of the ferment, Greek word zume, of the Pharisees and the ferment of Herod. Be aware of this. Don't let it spread into you. Fight it. Stay away from it.

The intent here seems to be, or you too will become fermented thoroughly with bitterness and bitter yeast, just like these others that he mentioned. And the result would be no sweetness, no godliness remaining. The carnality would percolate throughout. It would move through every part. Another similar analogy he uses is that fruit on a tree grows the same everywhere. In other words, it has moved all the way through every fiber of that plant, and the fruit is all the same. So he's warning, be careful, take heed, beware, because fermenting yeast will also go all the way through. Truth be told, we like yeasted breads. This week's a little hard on us. We like our wines and our beers and our alcohols and our teas and the other things that yeasts get in and ferment and brew and sour. Thayer's Greek says of the word azumos, unfermented, free of yeast. That's a general term. It's not the formal name of a feast. If we go to Luke chapter 22 and verse 1, we see a scripture that some this time of year get confused about, somehow think that Passover is also the feast of unleavened bread. The two somehow get combined, because there's an assumption here that this verse and another like it is talking about a formal name of a feast. Let's look in Luke chapter 22 and verse 1.

If you're using the New King James Version, you'll see a bunch of capitalized letters. If you're using an Old King James Version, you'll notice that nothing here is capitalized. If you're using the modern King James, you'll notice the word bread is italicized, because it simply is not used in the Greek. But what's being said here, if we just read it straight through, now the feast of Greek azumos, the feast of unfermented, drew near, which is called Passover. So we come to the feast of unfermented. The Passover is the first feast mentioned after the Sabbath in Leviticus 23, and it is a feast where unfermented bread is used. And this is what it's referring to. Verse 7, then came the day Notice it's not days of unleavened bread. It's not the feast of unleavened bread. It's just talking about a day. Again, in King James Version, you'll find it's lower case. The day, the word bread is not used. The day, then came the day of unfermented, when the Passover must be killed. Again, it's referring to a day when bread was unfermented, and the Passover would be killed, which is the Passover.

We don't need to add things that are not in the Bible and get confused by them. Rather, what's being referred to here is the use of unfermented. So then came the day when bread was to be unfermented, when the Passover must be killed.

The Bible always refers to this festival with regards to a lack of fermentation and a lack of bitterness. It is about bread, but the words chosen specifically focus on the yeast, the brewing, the leaven, the corruption, the spreading, the spoiling, the souring.

Now, in Bible and Jewish history, sometimes the entire eight days are referred to as the Passover, or the entire eight days are referred to as unleavened bread, because they all have a similarity of using un-easted bread during this time. Even we tend to use terms like that. We'll call it the Passover season, or unleavened bread season is coming. What are we talking about? We're talking about those days, those eight days in which bread does not have yeast in it. The Greek English lexicon of the New Testament says regarding Luke 22, verse 1, the Passover was a Jewish festival celebrated on the 14th of the month, Nice En. This was followed immediately by the Feast of Mazoth on the 15th to the 21st. Popular usage merged the two festivals and treated them as a unity.

If you want any technical analysis of the separation of Passover and Days of Unleavened Bread, the United Church of God has two doctrinal papers, Passover. One is from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament, and you can read about some of these things. Let's go to Exodus chapter 12 now as we wrap this up. Exodus chapter 12, verses 15 and 16. Here we're going to find that during these days of desiring and craving the sweetness of unfermented bread, that you and I are to be focusing on that and actually doing that. It's not really an option. God intends, and the Church teaches, that every day we should be ingesting and eating the pure, sweet, unleavened bread that is free from any type of corrupting brewing of fermentation. Exodus 12, verse 15. God says, seven days you shall eat matzah. Devour this sweetness, the feast of craving.

It's your goal. In other words, for seven days it should be your goal to actually learn to crave the sweetness. What it's really referring to, of course, is that which we pictured at Passover, that perfection of Jesus Christ, the uncorrupted, unfermented, unspoiled, in any way, mind and life that He lived and gave to you and me so purely and that He continues to live in absolute perfection. Never having had a wrong thought, a wrong word come out of His mouth, only pure love with pure joy and pure stitching together of the unity that comes from the God family. You and I are to eat it, to devour, to crave this sweetness daily as our goal, as our intent, as our desire. Continuing, it says, on the first day, that's a mistranslation. If you look up the Hebrew, it should say, certainly, certainly, the first day you shall cease or rest leaven among your houses. Don't get the idea that on the first day you're supposed to, like on today, the Holy Day, you're supposed to go home and put your leaven out. This is a mistworded sentence. It says, certainly, the first day you shall cease or rest from leaven among your houses.

For whoever eats ferment from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel. On the first day there shall be a holy convocation, and on the seventh day there shall be a holy convocation for you. This is probably the most rich, meaningful feast for the saints that there is, because this is the one where we really get to work. We saw what Christ did. We know the harvest of the firstfruits is coming at the next feast, but this is the one that typifies your life and mine. Now, what are we going to do during this life? Are we going to have the days of unleavened bread where we try not to do anything wrong? Or are we going to dive in with a craving and a passion to have sweetness in our life and to get rid of the adulterating, putrefying, fermenting, boiling yeast that has permeated us since we were born?

Conclusion, every day during this feast we are to intensely desire and be reminded of that purity without ferment of sin. Along in our life we became corrupted, and our infant purity has taken us other places because of that which we fed on, and I'm talking in a spiritual sense. It has embittered our nature, and you and I have been called to reverse that trend, and these days highlight that need, highlight a passion that we are to have, and the work that we are to be busy about doing until Jesus Christ returns. Let's conclude by reading 1 Peter 2, verses 1-5.

1 Peter 2, beginning in verse 1. Here's the direction, here's the mindset we need to have as we go through this day, every day of this feast, and every day of our lives. Therefore, laying aside or putting out all malice, all deceit, all hypocrisy, all envy, and all evil speaking, as newborn babes desire the pure milk of the Logos, Jesus Christ, that you may grow thereby. Indeed, if you have tasted that the Lord is gracious, coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious, you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Let's make this feast a time of craving the sweetness of the bread of life.