Reject the Leaven of Wickedness and Crave the Leaven of Righteousness

I would like you to step outside with me for just a moment. Outside, and I'd like you to look at the majestic pyramids that are so tall and cast such a long shadow. They are such large monoliths, just right over there. And when you see the monoliths, the thing that's the eeriest thing about them is that they're silent. They're so huge and looming, but they're absolutely silent. Three of them in close proximity to one another.

And you really can't get very close because they're heavily guarded by a class of people that you and I don't belong to. But if we go over to the river and we take one of the sailboats and journey down the Nile towards the Mediterranean, we can go to one of the cities, or we can go up the river to Thebes.

And at Memphis and Thebes, we can see the palace of the Pharaoh, of the reigning Pharaoh. But on our way, we find that we are nothing. We are nothing but laborers. We are nothing but the off-scouring of this greater society who walks by and forces us to not look at them. And yet, we are the ones who feed them. We are the ones who make them wealthy.

We are the ones who build their great monoliths. We are the ones who sweat and can be taken and killed at any moment. And as we journey and we see the palace, and not knowing what's behind the walls, we are kept at a great distance. And yet inside are the most amazing luxuries, and pools of water, and personal temples, all manner of servants, and luxuries, and silks, and beautiful things to wear, and things to see, and things to do, and music everywhere, and fashion. But these are people that they're different people than us.

This is the society, the great society, and you and I are nothing. How did this society come to be? How did this class come to be so distinctly different? How did you and me become nothing, and they become everything? And in our eyes, we believe that's the case. Why are they so close to the gods, and tell us what's happening from the spirit world down? And we are their faithful servants and obedient, even to be killed, and used, and abused in any way that they want us to.

How did this take place? I'd like you to turn to the back of your Bible, and try to find the maps of the patriarchs. Find a map back there of maybe the time of Abraham, or perhaps even the Exodus, something that shows Egypt with the Nile and the Delta.

One thing that's intriguing about the map that you'll find in the back of your Bible, if you happen to have one there, is that before 3000 BC, it wasn't just this little blue river in a dry desert like it is today. When you step away from the Nile River today, you only go a few feet, unless they have water hydration flowing out through irrigation, to water that desert. Where they don't, it's just river, and right beside it is sand.

Right behind the bulrushes, it's just sand, as far as the eye can see going west across the Sahara Desert. But it wasn't like that 3000 years ago. 3000 years ago, along the western side of the Nile and reaching out across North Africa were grasslands. The climate was much wetter.

It wasn't a really tropical climate, but there was enough rainfall to provide grasslands, and there were lakes, and modern ground penetrating radar can see where the river beds used to be, and where some of the lakes used to be. They found some civilization out there. There used to be two classes of people. According to a book called The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson, these two classes of people were one group along the river that used the dependable water of the floods and the land there that had the sediment on it to grow crops. They were a stationary people. These you might call the farmers.

They formed little towns and villages along the outskirts of the river, and they were permanent. But out in the grasslands were the shepherds, and the shepherds were a bit nomadic, but they would travel with their herds, and they could eat grass all year, even though the lakes would dry up. There was enough there to graze on. The shepherds, their crop, which were animals, were more valuable than the plant crops, the vegetables, and the grains.

And so the shepherds saw themselves as a superior people. They traveled. They saw. They did. And somewhere out there, before 3000 BC, they were the ones to establish a primitive religion based on spirit beings and gods. And they have found out there the first, which they believe, is the very first temple, or roots of a temple, with the icons of spirit beings.

It so happened that around 3000 BC, that climate change had been going on and going on for so long that there was no sustainable grazing land outside of the river area. And so those shepherds had moved more and more over towards the river, over into the farming communities. And they began to convince that the farmers that they were the superior people. They had more wealth. They said that the gods had instructed them in the ways of religion, and that it was important that these individuals submitted to them as the priests and the leaders of this religion, which the people willingly did. When you came down to 3000 BC and a little bit up beyond, we find that this wealthier class was utilizing things like gnosis. They were kind of Gnostics. They had this higher knowledge from the heavens, and they were reinforcing their class in several ways. One was their dress. They dressed smarter. They dressed sharper. They dressed and limited the type of materials that humans could own within the population. Only they could have the fine quality fabrics. The gods had determined this. Only they knew what the religion was, and they had to teach and have others succumb to that religion, and then provide the sacrifices for that religion, and then provide the labor to build the temples. And the bigger these icons got, the smaller the farmers saw themselves in their own eyes. And it was the first known use of pageantry, of this royal display of annual days in which the royalty would roll itself out and show the pageantry and show the grandest, the largeness of their difference, and in that way intimidate and subdue. And the farmers became willing recipients of the lower class. They willingly believed and were duped by this. By the time the Israelites came along, some 1,500 years later, we find them as part of the farmers, living up in Goshen, doing farming. In fact, they're not just farmers. At some point, they become part of the disposable farming community at the bottom, the bottom feeders of the farmers, absolutely locked in to terrible lifestyle that was supporting that higher sort of class of people.

It was at the same time that a new invention was discovered in Egypt and rapidly spread through Egypt. It was called leaven. The Egyptians were the first known culture to have invented or discovered leaven, and it quickly became a staple of their diet. Leaven is not known how they discovered it, but it was such a miraculous, unknown thing. Even down through time into the Middle Ages, people never knew how bread got leavened. It just was set out, and you came back, and something magic had happened to it. And so the Egyptians credited the gods of Egypt with leaven, and they prayed and they thanked their gods for leaven. This was symbolic of an Egyptian society that was evil, that was ruthless, that took advantage of, that utilized the willingness of others for their own personal gain, without any thought for their own welfare.

Centuries later, when the Israelites are living in this culture, we find that their lives were very, very bitter. We find that they were despised, they were expendable, their children were being slaughtered if they were male, they were being abused in many ways intentionally to make their lives just as awful as possible. We know in Exodus chapter 5, for instance, they were making bricks and mortar, but it was determined that they could inflict more agony on them by taking away the straw and making them make the same amount of bricks with no filler, and then being able to whip them. You see, the whole point was to be able to whip them and make their lives just miserable by requiring them to do something that was impossible to do. Moses cried out to God and he said, this pharaoh has done evil to this people. Evil was being done to these people. Something happened. Something happened that we actually celebrated last night. We celebrated it two nights ago.

The unexpected happened to the lowest people trapped in an evil society who themselves had a staple food of leaven, which was symbolic with that society. And that was, they were rescued. They weren't just rescued. They were rescued by one who would turn the tables, who would take the top crust of the evil Egyptian society and make it the bottom, and would take the very bottom class and make them the top, and make them the model nation.

This one who came and rescued them, led them out into a new society with a different structure, a different leader, one who cared so much he would do any and everything for them, who didn't want to suppress them but actually exalt them in every possible way.

He had a foundation that was a code of honor. Honor for everyone. Honor for God. Honor for fellow man. A lifting up of everyone so that everybody could reach the maximum potential. And the symbol of this new culture was a very different bread. It was unleavened bread. And it's with that symbol that they were rescued and they began to march out. Now, if you and I, again, were to step outside for a moment, we would see the pyramids going by. We would see the palaces going by. We would see this culture around us that despises us. We would see it going by and we would be heading to a new destination way far away, in a different place outside of a sinful society. If we were to step outside, we would see this going by because this is the first day of our journey, of a six-day journey, to a place called the Red Sea. This is an exciting time, but we have not left Egypt yet. We're still here, but we are journeying out of it. We want nothing to do with it. We're trying to put it behind us. And so, the story of the exodus, both theirs and ours, is one of excitement. It's one of determination. It's one of endurance. It's one of proper motivation. And it's described well in Galatians chapter 1 and verses 3 and 4. Let's go to Galatians chapter 1. Begin in verse 3. All the credit for this goes to God.

And so, in Galatians chapter 3, I'm sorry, chapter 1 and verse 3, Galatians 1 and verse 3. It begins with the word cherus or charis. In the Greek, that word means graciousness. The prime meaning of cherus is graciousness. Paul says here to the church at Galatia, graciousness to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. God is very gracious to us as we see Egypt going by. We've been released from the worst of the worst. And it's starting to pass by. We're making progress because of a very gracious God who is making peace with us through the blood of his Son. And that atonement has caused us to have great favor. It's caused us to have a sinless relationship with him where he can see us as just. He has justified us through his blood. And so consequently we come to verse 4, who gave himself for our sins that he might deliver us from this present evil age that you and I literally are walking through and leaving. Throughout our lifetime we are making this journey out of a type of Egypt. And he is delivering us from this present evil age step by step as we follow him according to the will of our God and Father. You know, these exoduses that we read of and that you and I experience, they are synonymous with the Passover and the days of unleavened bread. They're synonymous with the with the bread that we are eating this week versus the bread we were putting out of our homes last week. And they're synonymous with the calling that God has given us in the covenant that we have along with the physical representation of that trek out of Egypt that they made with the covenant that they had. Today I'd like to examine some of the bread symbolism that God built into these spring festivals. We can't do much. We'll look at a very narrow slice and there's lots more that others can talk about at another time. Let's focus on one lesson that can be extracted from the symbols of leaven and the symbol of unleavened bread. The title of the sermon today is, Reject the Leaven of Wickedness and Crave the Sweetness of Righteousness.

When we looked at Egypt as a nation back around 3000 BC, Egyptologist Wilkinson said that was the model that all other civilizations on earth have copied. The class distinction, the support of that through what we wear, what we do, through the pageantry, the icons, the palaces, the feeding and the setting up of the high class and almost the slavery or the dedication to that class by others. And the various things that keep the lower class subject are repeated on regular basis, regular intervals. And the various things that keep the lower class subject are repeated on regular basis. Now, whether Egypt was the first culture, we find Egypt in Revelation 11 is also synonymous with Sodom. It obviously wasn't the first culture, but we find that this world is represented by the concept of Babylon the Great, Babel, Babylon. A lot of these things feed from the same mind that goes all the way back to Genesis chapter 3, that serpent, the God of this age. And so it is, the God of this age is one who encourages self-promotion for the destruction of relationships. And that's what it's all about. Self-promotion, and whether incidental or part of the architecture, it's the destruction of relationships that is vital, vitally important. And that's what this God and what people on this earth are busy about. In James chapter 3 and verse 13, James brings this out very clearly. James is an interesting book in that he wrote one book. He was right there. He knew his brother, our Lord. He saw the apostolic age taking place, and at some point late in the first century, he writes a book. And this book contains a lot of observation-inspired observations and lessons for us. And the one thing that he says about civilization and mindsets is here in chapter 3 and verse 13. Who is wise and understanding among you? Well, wouldn't we say it's those in the forbidden city in Peking, China, all these years? Or another forbidden city down in Egypt where nobody can get in? Surely those are the enlightened ones? Or the forbidden cities that exist in North Korea and over in other places around the world where the great ones are and the Illuminati and those who are orchestrating events on this earth and have the power to push buttons and make things happen for the economy? Well, who is wise and understanding? We need to be wiser than that. In verse 14 it says, if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth. If you have me in your heart, me, it's about me, I, me, and my, then don't lie against the truth. Here's the truth.

Your word, your logos, is truth. Jesus Christ himself is the truth and this word is the truth. He goes on, verse 15, this wisdom does not descend from above, but it's earthly, sensual, and demonic. That's promotion of me, whether it's out there for I want to get all I can get, or it's in the church, all I want to climb as high as I can climb and get all the recognition I can get. That is from the wrong mindset. This wisdom does not descend from above, but it's earthly. It's physical. Carnal just means physical. It's about us humans. It's what we tend to think of as we listen and are affected by the temptations that Satan sends our way.

For where Indian self-seeking exists, confusion and every evil thing are there. And our world just continues to copy previous societies, and you can go back and back and back, and you can see the horrors in each phase of civilization. We've lived through this little brief phase of nicety only because God wants it that way, but basically because of something called mad, mutual assured destruction.

Basically, it's because this nation has had B-52s in the air around the world for the last 50 years or something, and telling everybody to be nice or we'll take you out. Now, that's being worked around very heavily right now, and people are finding that there's some bluff in that. And so there's a gearing up for change in the world. And Jesus Christ indicates that what lies ahead is not going to be just a little not as nice as what it is now. It's going to be the worst that has ever happened in history, and it's going to be bad for everybody, including the church, except for a small part of the church or some part of the church that will be prepared or that will be spared in a place of safety. This is the evilness. But verse 17, we find that this evil society in which everybody is being separated and about to get really sliced and diced is very different. This leaven-based society is very different than the society that is currently in heaven, the kingdom of heaven, that's going to come to this earth. The civil unrest, the the wages of sin that is just promoting death, it's not life, even if you're living, the people are not happy, this bitterness, broken lives that people are going through, this age is going to terminate. And coming is a new mindset with a new leader, a king of another age, a new age, the next age, the kingdom of God. It's the mindset of enhancing relationships, of taking those who are nothing and enhancing their lives and enhancing their environment to where it is the most beautiful, imaginable thousand years that people can spend. And it's all about them. It's all about promoting them. It's all about promoting finally the 12 tribes of Israel to being a model nation to where others will say, come here, let me take your arm, go show me how this works.

James 3 verse 17 says, the wisdom that's from above is first pure.

Pure is not in leaven. There is no purity in leaven, as we'll see in a minute. Purity is in unleavened. Purity is in something that is absolutely pure. It's harmonious. It's welded together. It's enduring. The ingredients are are fully sustained and they support each other.

Imagine the Israelites, the contrast in their minds on the night to be much observed with just the previous day. It must have spun their heads around to have been totally at the bottom and here they are walking behind the pillar of fire, laden down with the gold and silver of the wealthy, higher class that was around them. They're probably pinching themselves every step. Can this be real? Well, God has established two symbols for two mindsets.

Leaven bread and unleavened bread. Here is what you might call leavened bread. The label... I know you're going to be shocked here. Like, why don't we do that all together real quick? Okay, thank you. The label says bakery fresh breads. It does say made in China, but we're going to ignore that part. Ignore the fact that it's injected foam coated with rubber. This is two types of bread and you have you have leaven bread that looks similar to this.

Ah. Okay. And you have unleavened bread. Okay.

Comes in various forms. Unleavened bread. Leavened bread, unleavened bread. And they're two different, very visibly different, forms of food, but both actually have the same ingredients. This is made primarily of wheat, water, salt, and sometimes a little oil. This is made of wheat, salt, water, and a little bit of oil. Same thing. Same exact ingredients. And yet, what a difference. We'll see that the mindsets of sin and righteousness begin the same. Begin with the same individual. But the there is a big different that impacts them. What is it about leaven that makes it a symbol of evil during the days of unleavened bread? I had to ask that question. What, what, I mean, here we are. We do it every year, but what is it about leaven? Why is it so bad, as it were, during this feast to have anything to do with it? Well, we know that Egypt is referred to as a sinful society. We see that in Revelation 11 verse 8. The Israelites were enslaved there. They were a leaven culture, etc., etc. But why? Why is leaven the symbol? You know, just so you know, modern yeast is a recent invention. Yeast, as we know it, has not existed down through time. Leaven was, leaven was something that came and infected the bread, and people didn't understand it. It wasn't until, as far as history says, it wasn't until probably the 16th century, maybe even the 17th century, that a brewer in Holland, and they're not sure how he did it, maybe he used beer instead of the water, or he spilled some brewer's yeast into the dough. But anyway, found out that it leavened, and they began to realize that leavening was a yeast. It was some kind of something that could be introduced, and yet they couldn't figure out how to do it well. In 1780, they were able to isolate this type of yeast and inhabit in what they called a yeast cream. You didn't have to have a starter, you could just have the yeast cream. And so they would sell this cream to people who wanted to make bread without having to set it out. Well, in 1825, somebody figured out how to make that into a soft cake called yeast cake. And it wasn't until the beginning of World War II that the yeast cake was developed by a German. And at the beginning of World War II, right around 1940, some Germans here in the United States called the Fleischmans were able to figure out how to dry this yeast and have it in a powdered form. And so we're used to now just getting some yeast and injecting it in, and you know, you have this bread. But it wasn't so. All the way back through time, what happened was you made the same ingredients that would go here, and then you would set it out. You just set it out. The result was random. Leavening was just random. You had the... if I could just use this for a minute... you had your you had your dough, right, and you set it out. And what's going to invade it? You don't know. What's floating around? Might depend on the weather. If you had a northern wind blowing through and these skies were clear, guess what? Your flour, your dough, looked like that the next day. It didn't rise.

Depending on what yeasts, molds, and bacteria got into this thing, your lump could rise. But you don't know what rose, and if you're going to like it, because some of that stuff was pretty bitter. And if you, in doing this, had stuff on your hands and injected a bunch of bacteria that was horrible, the bread wasn't very good. So it was just kind of a... you didn't know what you were going to get. You never knew what you were going to get. But the one thing everybody got, according to historians, was bitter bread. A slightly bitter-tasting bread. One form of not self-rising, but of dough that rises by setting it out. It's called sourdough. It has that tangy sourness to it. And you can take that along as starters. That's an old bread. It's a form of an old bread. One of those that was just set out. But depending on where you were and what got in it, the bread would have some different kind of taste to it.

Leavening is an external influence on grain flour dough. It's something that comes from somewhere and gets into it and changes it. It's totally an external influence. The kind that's exposed to air and over time just becomes random. It's not just a flushing up of the flour dough. We think, oh, you have leavened bread and you have unleavened bread. Same thing, right? No. No, not at all, in fact. This is completely different than this when it becomes this. This has changed totally into something else. Let me explain.

Leavening is a process that involves the wholesale destruction of the host grain. Now, think about it. We're supposed to be grain, right? We're supposed to be developing the first fruits for the harvest. Like Christ was the wave sheath of the first barley harvest. We are then supposed to be ready for the harvest, the harvest of the first fruits. He said, I pray that it's God's will that you bear much fruit and that your fruit remain. Well, here comes something along that destroys grain, destroys ground grain or flour. And it's a very hostile thing.

European Union yeast industry states this. Leaven is the process for enzymes first break apart grain fibers, allowing bacteria and yeast spores to further decimate its structure in order to expose its sugars. So you have the flour structure, you have the grain structure sort of built in, and somewhere in there are complex sugars. And the yeast wants simple sugars. There's nothing there for the yeast to get at yet. First of all, the bacteria have to get, I'm sorry, the enzymes have to get in and break the fibers apart and start exposing the complex sugars that are in there. Aggressive microscopic bacteria systematically then break down those sugars time after time into smaller and simpler molecules, step by step. Then aggressive yeast spores come on and devour the simple sugars and rapidly reproducing themselves. The expanding yeast colony excretes a liquid which releases ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide into the dough, resulting in fermentation and raising. See what's happened? An utter destruction and injection of a liquid that causes this now to rise, and it leaves it with a slightly bitter taste. Adam Clark commentary says of leaven, leaven itself is a species of corruption being produced by fermentation, which in such cases tends to putrefaction.

So you see, this is a symbol of something that is not this. It's not just a raised version of this. It's not, well this one has gas and this one doesn't. Or this one's a little floated up and this one isn't. This thing has been fully destroyed by outside agents and fully pulled apart and decimated. And all the relationships and all the structure that was there have been just ripped apart.

Human slavery, kind of like the bitter taste of ancient breads, it was a bitter experience. In Exodus chapter 1 and verse 14, it says, And the Egyptians made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and brick, and in all manner of service in the field, and all the service in which they made them serve was with rigor. When you look at the world's cultures, they're always bitter experiences. As a tourist, you can go around and say, oh, this is a nice culture and that's a nice culture, but you'll always see the ruins, you'll always see the remains of the painful past that the people have endured in getting there. Bitterness is associated with this society in which we live.

This Egyptologist, Wilkinson, deduces from the records he has studied over there, he has made Egyptology his focus, and he comes with a little different view than you might have as a tourist. He doesn't see all the pomp and the grandeur and the great first civilization of Egypt as a great thing at all. Rather, he sees it as a very painful experience that has been replicated down through time by other civilizations. He says that ancient Egyptian society brimmed with deceit, with despotism, with brutal repression, corruption, and was rife with internal fragmentation and even civil war. You talk about destroying relationships, even in the top structure, that's what was going on. And he also states that it became the model for all future civilizations.

I think it's not coincidental that leavened bread on the Egyptian model and what humanity has used down through time has a bitter taste to it. Let's look in Mark chapter 8 and verse 15. See what Jesus said here. Mark chapter 8 and verse 15.

Then Jesus charged them, saying, take heed, pay attention. He says, really, take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.

Two societies. One was the Roman Empire. Herod was the representative of Rome in the region. Beware of civilization. Beware of those who are self-promoting. Beware of these things that are actually very, very bitter.

The Roman civilization, which was built on the Greek, which was built on Persia, which was built on Babylon, which could be traced back to Egypt, which could all go right back to the serpent, Satan the Devil. It's bitter. Beware of it. It's been the thing that has killed the prophets and Jesus Christ. The modern Rome and its revivals have killed the apostles and Jesus Christ. It's killed the new church down through time. It's going to revive its ugly head and kill again. It's going to kill the church, many of them in the church. It's going to kill humanity. It's going to ultimately try to kill off Jesus Christ and the saints at his return. Beware of that.

The botany department of the University of Hawaii says, the effect of the leavening process made the breads of antiquity slightly bitter tasting. It's what we like, though, isn't it? It's what the Israelites coming out of Egypt wanted, but they didn't have time for the dough to rise, and so they had to bake it, and it came like this. Now, this is totally intact. You won't be finding any mold on this next week. It's going to be compact, condensed, a great source of food. It's real wheat flour intact with salt and water and oil. It's very, very different than this.

Before conversion, we were in bondage to sin, and this was our symbol. We like this. We like this very much. Now, there's nothing wrong with this next week, but this week... no, no, no.

We like this. Not so much. You're cooking this, are you buying a lot of this during the year? You know what? This is baked. You go in the store, you go in the mall, and it's like, oh, drive me to this stuff. This is fabulous. Just fabulous. We love it. This way of life seemed right to our old man. This is us. Yeah, it seems right. Just bake me up another batch, and that's great. Leavening, you see, makes it very appealing to humans. Peeling. And the way that seems right to a man, but ends in death, is very appealing to us humans. Very appealing. Baking911.com says, Leavening transforms the rather tasteless flower. Have you ever just taken flower? Go take some weed or barley flower, and pop a spoonful in your mouth. You know? Kind of tastes like sawdust. It actually doesn't have much taste to it. When you think of bread, it's not the flower that has the taste. It's not the water, it's not the oil, and it's not the salt. It's the leavening that gives it taste. Leavening transforms the rather tasteless flower into a variety of textures and shapes with an appealing aroma. That's what we like.

It's the leavening that corrupts it from the outside that makes it appealing to you and me.

The leavening process is interesting in that it also ensures the demise of the loaf. In about seven days, this is history. The University of South Dakota's Earth Sciences Department has an article published, Using Molding Bread as a Clock.

I found that you can actually have a dependable clock, just bake a loaf of bread, set it out. Seven days, it'll be molding. You could use it as a clock, a primitive clock.

The demise is built in as it's being first created. It's going to die. It's going to rot.

But it's so appealing. Paul said, you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness. But it seemed right to us. It's like, okay, well, I know that one didn't work out well. That one molded and rotted. But let's bake another one. Let's give this another try. I know that relationship got shattered, but let me get selfish over here and see if it doesn't work out better. I'll get some better people to use.

And I think this is going to work out great. But you know, it sure seems tasty, just like our acquired taste for various leavened breads with various tangs or various flavors, various things that are put in them. And we have this acquired taste for it. So sin is similar to that.

Yet the aftertaste of original bread was always bitter. It left a bitter taste in the mouth.

You know, the symbol of leaven is used in different ways in the New Testament. It's not always sin by any means. But during the days of unleavened bread, it is represented. And one of the main symbols of leaven is that of sin. In 1 Corinthians 5 and verse 6 is a statement by Paul that talks about the spreading mindset that because leaven goes through this process of when it finally hits the sugars, it reproduces itself. It has a whole bunch of babies that grow up and mature real fast, and they have a whole bunch of babies. And this stuff just really goes on simple sugars once it reaches that stage. In 1 Corinthians 5 and verse 6, it says, Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?

Bread, once it raised, you didn't have to just always put dough out. You could take a lump that you saved over and you could inject it. And you would then, once that dough was broken down by the enzymes and the bacteria had broken out those sugars, just a little bit of that stuff, it would reproduce itself so fast and start injecting those fluids and tear that wheat structure down. It just went rampant. And so, a little leaven can leaven the whole lump. It can really get legs. And just as a, you know, yeast, yeasted bread is a favorite of humans everywhere. You know, you go to Italy and go to France and the baguettes and they're fresh, and it's just fabulous stuff. You go over to India and you have the nan breads, just very, very interesting things that are made. And yet, sin also can be very appealing to us. Even those of us who are called to journey out of sin, as we see Egypt going by, we say, oh hey, you know, kind of like to live there, kind of like it here along the river. That palace would be fun to stay in.

And we could sort of lose our objective of going somewhere else.

And verse 7, Therefore purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump. We are, during this festival, especially before this festival, to get rid of any leaven out of our houses, but we are to, throughout our journey, to put leaven out, to find sin, represented here by the symbol of leaven. Put it away. Get rid of it. Purge it out that you may be a new lump.

In chapter 7 of Romans, we find that we are in a dual condition, just as it says right there in 1 Corinthians 5, verse 7, that purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as truly you are unleavened. So at the one, we are unleavened in God's eyes. We are justified in His eyes. And yet, at the same time, we're fighting sin, aren't we? We can't enter into this festival and say, oh, this is a celebration that I'm now perfect. I don't have anything to do. I'll just sit down here along the trail on the first day in Egypt and wait to get picked up. It doesn't work that way, does it? This is a journey down a difficult path. We've got to get all the way to the Red Sea to see that Red Sea divided, which we'll talk about on the last Holy Day. But here in Romans, chapter 7, in verse 21, notice that there's challenges. We haven't made it fully to this state in a permanent way. It's a daily goal, a daily challenge. And so I find then a law, Paul says, that evil is present with me. This is symbolic of you and me this week, and this is reality of you and me this week. And we kind of do the switcheroo, you know? This is us, but then we find this and we say, oh, I don't want that. Get rid of that. And we're this, only to find, who's that? How did you get up here again? Knock you off. Hello? This is the struggle, isn't it? And it's going to be our lifelong struggle.

So going on here in Romans, chapter 7, we find this sort of law that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the unleavened man.

But verse 24, oh, wretched man that I am, because I find this guy when I look a little deeper, who will deliver me from this body of death? And then he says, I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord. That's who's going to deliver me from this body of death. So then with the mind, I serve the law of God, but with the flesh, the law of sin, with the physical views and mindset. And the course of this world that we got used to and made habits and the lust of the eyes and the temptations draw us to this and say, yep, this looks intelligent, logical, and that's for me.

But God, help me to reject that and be this. And forgive me today for being that. Keep seeing more of that come up. So there's the struggle and the solution. One way of describing this challenge is what's in the title of the sermon. And that is, God is teaching us to despise the bitterness of leaven, which is a favorite. And He's leading us and encouraging us to crave the sweetness of unleavened bread, the pure sweetness of unleavened bread. Now, some people say, I don't like unleavened bread. I come to this festival every year and it just doesn't do it for me.

Well, I think maybe that's part of the symbolism as well. Every time I see a piece of this and say, you know, that's what I ought to be, but I want, you know, kind of like this, there's a lesson in there that I really should be learning to crave this, which is not part of my normal human nature. Again, these are just symbols. But I think we have to, this week, realize we are here to be craving a sweetness that to us is not something germane to the human mind.

It's an acquired taste. This is an acquired taste through God's Holy Spirit, not the bread necessarily, but what it represents. Righteousness is an acquired taste for mature individuals who are growing with the Holy Spirit of God. In Matthew 4 and verse 48, Jesus said, become you or be you therefore perfect like your Father in heaven is perfect.

That is an example. If we want to compare the God family with the sweet, pure, uncorrupted leaven, you might hold this up and say, oh, there's a symbol of the family of God.

It's true, it's real, it's not broken apart, the relationships are there, and if you stop and think about what it's made of and what those symbols are used elsewhere in the Bible, consider the symbology of grain with Jesus Christ being the first of the first fruits and you and I being grain, and that is intact. Consider oil. What do we do with oil? Anointing and the oil representing God's Holy Spirit. What about water? Oh, yes, water. Again, a strong symbol. What about salt? Oh, yes, you are the salt of the earth. All of these things exist in this unleavened bread right here. They exist intact, knitted together, enjoined together with none of them, none of them corrupted.

And talk about an enduring piece, enduring piece of bread. You know, when this stuff was finally figured out that you could bake unleavened bread and not have it, you know, infested with yeast, the sailors who sailed the ships and did the fishing over along the Cape Breton coast and took the fish, salted back to Europe during the Middle Ages. That was the thing that got them through. That very difficult time over there was the fish from over here, salted fish. They found a little later that sailors everywhere could eat what was called a... what was it? Hard tack.

Another was sea biscuit. It was named sea biscuit. Okay? Sea biscuit. Now, the sea biscuit revolutionized the sailing industry back around the time when this country became a formal country.

And the individual who invented that stuff was on the East Coast and the sailors began to use it, and it just took off. Okay? He eventually sold his recipe to a fledgling company called the National Biscuit Company, and today that's Nabisco. We are a cracker culture in the United States.

These things have become a real big part of us. They're enduring. You don't think, oh, let me think. I better check the date on my crackers. Better see if the matzo is, from 1900 years ago, might have mold on it yet. It's not going to do that. But don't try to keep your loaf of bread around for very long at all. So, God commanded the Israelites to come out of Egypt. He commands us to come out of society by following Him. We are to live a life of righteousness, and yet at times, you and I want to go back to Egypt. You know how they were, oh, that we were in Egypt. We used to have that yummy bread and leaks and other things, you see. Even though it was sinful and awful and painful and bitter, there are times when we want to dabble in it. We want to go back. Similarly, there are times when you and I profess to embrace Jesus Christ and the commandments while battling our internal nature. Just like Paul said, that which I want to do, I don't end up doing.

These conflicting desires come to us this week, and here they are. You know, you've seen it. You've probably been shopping or something, and you think, oh, look at that. I got my, uh, uh, head.

As we were approaching these days, we were with our granddaughters in Cincinnati, and I said, uh, hey, how would you like some really yummy, unleavened bread? And the girls went like this. It just didn't compete. I don't know. No, no, this is going to be good. So, took some, took some, just like this, and buttered it up, sprinkled a little salt on it, slid them in the oven.

And then, uh, we were in Cincinnati, and I said, uh, hey, how would you like some really yummy, just like this, and buttered it up, sprinkled a little salt on it, and slid them in the oven.

They came out piping hot, you know, and here, you get one of these. And the girls grabbed him, they, you kind of, like, hey, this is pretty good. Everybody wanted one. Hey, papa, can we have another one? Will you make me another one of those? And, uh, so the, the youngest one came around and, and she said, those were good. And I said, tell me, what was good? What do you think was really good about that bread? She said, the butter. So, you see, we're still not so intrigued by the bread, but maybe what you put on, put on the bread. Yet, God chose unleavened bread as a, a symbol of sincerity and truth, and He named the beast after it. It's the feast of unleavened bread.

And, you know, as we've talked about last year, the name, feast of matzo. Matzo means sweetness. And, uh, Strong's defined matzo, sometimes shortened to matzo and sold as a, product, as sweetness in the sense of greedily devouring sweetness. Greedily, passionately, you know, craving sweetness. We, we move from this to craving this. How do you do that? Well, it can't just be with you and me alone, can it? It comes from sampling. It comes from God's Spirit. It comes from a transformed new mind that He places within us.

Sweet unleavened bread symbolizes Jesus Christ at the Passover. Sweet unleavened bread symbolizes the church. It symbolizes that which you and I look at this whole week. An example of the bread of life in our Lord and Savior, an example of what we ourselves are striving to be. Be like our Father in Heaven. Be like our elder brother. Become Christ-like. We are striving to head this direction.

Keelan, to leech commentary, says, the significance of this feast of unleavened bread was in the eating of the matzo. Not in the name, not in the avoiding leaven, but in the actual eating of pure unleavened bread. As bread, which is the principal means of preserving life, Keelan to leech says, it might easily be regarded as the symbol of life itself. So the matzo, or unleavened loaves, were symbolic of the new life as cleansed from the leaven of a sinful nature. Now, all this week, you and I will be eating on leavened bread and symbolizing the sinless nature, the righteousness of God, symbolizing a new person created in the image of our Lord and Savior.

As we do that, and by putting out leaven and looking for it in our life, we portray the process by which God is leading us to eternal life, of changing us from children of a father that with a small f to children of our Father in heaven. We need to see ourselves as cleansed and desire to be cleansed, desire and crave that pure sweetness. At the same time, realizing that this is a symbol as much a goal as anything else, and yet it's the reality in the Father's eyes every time we repent. It says in 1 John 1, verses 7 and 8, if we confess our sins, he is so gracious and he is anxious and he is faithful to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So that is our reality when we're repenting.

We also, at the same time, are told there, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. So, brethren, in conclusion, as we put out unleavened bread and as we put sin out of our life, as we put in, I'm sorry, as we put out leaven and as we put in unleavened bread, as we ingest it and we put it in, we portray this process that's leading us to salvation. We're replacing the old man with the new. Let's conclude by reading Ephesians chapter 4, verse 22 through 24. Ephesians chapter 4, verse 22.

He's talking here about being taught by Jesus Christ as the truth is in Jesus.

That you put off concerning your former conduct, put off the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lust. This is the old man.

It was invaded from an exterior source. It ripped and tore apart and then it began to rot through mold and demise. So we're to put that away, that thing that's growing corrupt according to personal promotion. Instead, verse 23, to be renewed in the spirit of your mind and that you put on the new man which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness.

Eating unleavened bread throughout this feast symbolizes your need for God to lead you in his way from bitterness into a strong internal desire that craves the sweetness of God's righteous way.

Let us really pursue the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth as we walk with our Lord and Savior to his kingdom.