The Unleavened Bread of Sincerity and Truth

Well, that's the announcement section. We don't have special music, so we can go right into the main sermon for today. And as always, I love to share Bible knowledge with all of you. That's where the greatest amount of profitable knowledge is available. And last night, if you left after dinner, after the night to be much observed, you could observe that big, round, beautiful, silvery moon. And it's at the full moon, just as it has been going on since God started the whole process and showed Adam and Eve about times, as it mentions in Genesis. And this is the first mention of the calendar. Let's go there real quickly. Genesis chapter 1.

In verse 14, when God was reassembling things, we know there was this angelic rebellion that took place. We don't know all the chaos that ensued, but it does say that everything became darkness and chaotic. But after God starts rearranging things as he prepares to create man, in verse 14, it says, Then God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and seasons and for days and years.

There are several translations here. For instance, the Good News Bible says, Then God commanded, Let lights appear in the sky to separate day from night and to show the time when days, years, and religious festivals begin.

The word in the Greek mo'ed is religious festival. So even from the very start, God had prepared for festivals to be celebrated in his name, and we are doing so today. This is one of those special mo'eds. It's not based on man. No man has set this up at all. God set it up from the very beginning. Notice in Exodus 12, many have probably read over this section, which had to do with the Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread in chapter 12, verse 1.

It says, Now the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be your beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year to you.

So God is establishing here the religious festivals. We don't know all that was celebrated prior to this, but now it had to do with a special event, which was the Passover.

The word here, when it says, This month shall be your beginning of months, the word is kodesh in the Hebrew, which means new moon.

God expected his people to be able to tell time through the different phases of the moon. It's a natural marker for it.

Even today, if you look at the paper, it will tell you what phase the current moon is in.

There are two words that are used in the Bible. I'm talking about in the Old Testament for the word month.

Kodesh means the new moon, which is the day on which the crescent appears.

This is when, if you had a big clock, this would be like the hour 12. This is the beginning.

1201 is when that faint crescent, the first little sliver, appears. That's the beginning of the month.

Then it goes to three o'clock, which is the first quarter. This is what is called the quarter moon.

Then it goes to six o'clock. That's when you get the full moon.

Then you get the three quarters, when it starts waning.

Nine o'clock is three quarters of the moon. Then you get back to the new moon.

The moon is measured by these four different phases.

When it's the new moon, it's actually when the moon is between the earth and the sun.

The moon revolves around the earth, and when it is located behind the sun, the sun is hitting the back side.

That's why we can't see anything. That's why it's 12 o'clock, zero hour, and it's darkness.

Then it begins the earth and the moon to change.

When it arrives at six o'clock, it would be the full moon.

That is when the new moon is between the earth and the sun.

The full moon is when the moon is on the opposite side of the earth.

You have the sun, you have the earth, and then you have the moon.

The sun's rays are so powerful that they hit the earth, and they bathe all of that area, and they hit the moon directly.

That's why we see the full moon.

This is the way God would say that we would count time.

To adjust it to the seasons, every three or four years, they would add an extra moon or month.

This is 29.5 days for the moon to make one whole orbit around the earth.

This is why we keep these feasts in accordance with the phases of the moon.

That takes us now to the New Testament, at a time when Jesus Christ and His disciples looked at the moon.

They celebrated Passover.

The 15th is right there at the full moon stage, just like we have done now, close to 2,000 times that we've been celebrating.

God's people and God the Father and Jesus Christ, they're celebrating. They're keeping these feasts up in heaven, looking down and seeing who are those faithful ones that are doing the same thing.

There's one scripture in particular that describes the New Testament Passover and Days of Unleavened Bread, which the Apostle Paul directly focused upon.

I want to go into that scripture today. It's pregnant with meaning. It's very important for all of us to focus.

It's in 1 Corinthians chapter 5. And where we get the following title, the Unleavened Bread of Sincerity and Truth, because that's what we're going to talk about. Just to give you a little background material on this 1 Corinthians, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 16.

Let's go there for a moment. In verse 5, he was at Ephesus when he wrote this letter.

In 1 Corinthians 16 verse 5, he says, Now I will come to you, talking about the Corinthians, when I pass through Macedonia, for I am passing through Macedonia, talk about a future trip.

And it may be that I will remain or even spend the winter with you. I remember winter time would be November, December. So that's when he was planning to visit the Corinthian church. So Paul had a huge area to cover, and transportation was horrible at that time. He was three times shipwrecked.

The roads were always filled with bandits around the bend, but he would have to travel. So he might just make it once a year. And so he would send these letters. He wanted to prepare the Corinthian church for the coming days that were the Passover and the days of Unleavened Bread. So he goes on to say, So this was a time before he was going to stay in Ephesus until Pentecost. He was preparing the Passover and Unleavened Bread at Ephesus. And so he sent this letter ahead of time, preparing the brethren to keep the Passover and the days of Unleavened Bread. But the Corinthian brethren had a big problem. Paul had already been notified of it. And so in his letter he addresses a problem that the Corinthian brethren had to solve, had to act upon before the Passover and days of Unleavened Bread took place. That's why he writes in 1 Corinthians 5, verses 6 through 8, It says, Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. The days of unleavened bread, Paul was saying, should be kept with sincerity and truth. What did he mean by all of this? I want to give you a little historical background, and the purpose is to take you back to those days in Corinth. If we were part of the Corinthian church, here we have a master pastor who's in charge, and we can all learn so much how he handled and how he was so loving, but at the same time, he was firm when he had to be. And he was unbending when it had to do with obeying God's commandments. So he mentions here that they were boasting and glorying over something that they shouldn't. They were tolerating something that was not proper. And with very few exceptions, leaven stands in the Bible for sin. We know that. This was the dough which had been kept over from a previous baking, and while it was being kept, became fermented. Now, yeast is something we have all kinds of baker's yeast, and it's actually a type of a mold that will get into the dough and will cause a chemical reaction to ferment. And of course, in those days, they didn't have leavening products as we do. They would just leave the dough, they would leave a piece that was not baked, and then they would put it on the window sill on a plate and let the mold, the yeast in the air, come and land on that dough, which was wet, and so pretty soon there was a chemical reaction from this type of a mold.

And then afterwards you found that you take that piece and you mix it with new dough, and after a while that fermentation process diffuses into all the dough, and it talks about the dough rising, which to them was sort of a miraculous process. But they knew that what happened if you left that piece out there in the window sill for a couple of days, maybe you went off on a trip. What would you find? You'd find that dough full of mold, and it would rot. You could not consume that.

That is why they related the leavening to something that would putrefy. It would rot. It would cause rotting to take place. And this is what Paul now is saying to the Corinthian church. Look, there's sin in the congregation that needs to be dealt with, or else that sin is going to cause others to take license. They're going to say, well, they're doing it. They're getting away with it. We can do it too, and pretty soon it has pervaded the entire congregation. And this was what Paul, as the pastor, which would travel to different places, said that this is unacceptable.

As you well know, before the Passover, the Jews had this instruction that they had to light a candle and go through the entire house to make sure that all the leavening had been removed before the first day of unleavened bread. And they actually had a saying. They said, God, we have cleaned the house, and we have kept it. And any leavening that is left over, do not attribute it to us, because we did our best. We couldn't find everything, but just realized we were faithful in what we did. I know all of us were busy de-leavening our homes, and actually that's where the word for spring cleaning, the term and the definition, comes from. Spring cleaning is actually because the Jewish communities would clean things up, and then it just became widespread. He mentions that here, Paul, that Jesus Christ has already been sacrificed for us. So it means that we have committed to remove the leavening from our lives. When we're baptized, receive God's Spirit, we have made a commitment. We're not going to let that yeast of the world infect us and take us back to a former way of life. That's why he mentions here that you are truly unleavened through that sacrifice of Jesus Christ. He says, for indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us very clearly. That's where we have become unleavened before God. Do we deserve it? No, we don't. But through Jesus Christ's sacrifice and our commitment to continue in this way of life, God extends his favor. He extends his forgiveness upon repentance, and so he extends that grace to us. This is what Paul is explaining here. Just as God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, so he's delivered us from the sinful ways of the world. He's taken us out. The church should be a different way of life that's being practiced, keeping God's commandments in, keeping the world's evils out. And it's an ongoing process. Then he says in verse 8, Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness. So what is he talking about here? Well, he is, first of all, confirming that he is keeping these days along with the brethren. So people that believe that Paul was changing the law or was eliminating these feasts, notice he said, let us keep the feast. He's including himself. And this is what Paul taught. He never broke any of these feasts. He was faithful in it, as we see here. And there's a famous quote from the Encyclopædia Britannica, the 11th edition, which was the one that specialized on religious items, religious issues. And so this Encyclopædia Britannica really went a lot longer at length to explain a lot of points. And dealing with the Passover and these feast days, this is what it says. There is no indication of the observance of the Easter Festival in the New Testament or in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. So not only during the time of the New Testament, but even further about another 200 years. It mentions here that Apostolic Fathers were the first ones that wrote afterwards, at least in those first two, the second century. He says, the sanctity of special times, which would include Easter and Christmas, was an idea absent from the minds of the first Christians, who continued to observe the Jewish festivals, though in a new spirit, as commemorations of events which those festivals had foreshadowed. We could not explain it ourselves better than that, what we're doing here. We're keeping these feast days that are explained in the Bible, but also, as it says here, in a new spirit. We're not keeping them like the Old Testament. We don't have a lamb that we have to sacrifice. We don't have to take the bitter herbs, which symbolize Christ's sufferings.

But it says, in a new spirit, as commemorations, which means memorials, reminders of events which those festivals had foreshadowed. They were shadows of things to come, and so they were keeping them in this way.

This comes from the Encyclopædia Britannica. That is exactly how we are keeping these feasts. In a new spirit, we don't change the dates. We don't change the symbolism. But we're keeping them now in this new spirit because of what they mean to us and in the future.

This article continues, Thus the Passover, with a new conception added to it of Christ, as the true Paschal Lamb and the firstfruits from the dead, continued to be observed.

So that is one of the most eye-opening and truthful statements that you will get with some of these church historians. You won't find these quotes being used very often in other places. But this Encyclopædia Britannica was a specialized edition where things had developed the spin doctors quite as much as what they have today.

So Paul says here that we are to keep this feast, not with old leaven. What does that mean? We have to go into a little bit of the context because it means equating the old leaven with the sinful old way of life.

Paul here is dealing with a problem that he found many places. In those days, the Gentiles did not have any sexual prudence. They were not abstinent.

Gentiles of those days from Greek and Roman morality, they had sex when they wanted to have sex. Of course, they still had laws against adultery and things like that, but it was a very loose lifestyle.

If anybody has ever visited an area there south of Rome where Pompeii and all the different houses of prostitution in some of these areas. So for people to come out of that lifestyle was quite difficult.

Corinth was the most important Greek city in its day, even surpassing Athens. It was a cosmopolitan, the great commercial center. People being called had a problem because they were not used to having to break and stop all of these sexual excesses.

They had this problem, which is mentioned in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, which had to do with 11 that he's speaking about. Verse 1 says, It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles, that a man has his father's wife. So basically, the man was sleeping with his stepmother. And this was something that had gotten out.

A lot of people in the Corinthian church knew about it. But instead of denouncing it, instead of going to that person, why they were allowing it, they were tolerating it. And this is what verse 2 says, And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from you. The word for mourning here means the same expression as when a person has died, and you are mourning, you're in grief. This is something that should afflict you. But instead, everybody was acting like nothing's happened, everything's normal.

Oh yeah, this fellow has a problem, but we have to look the other way. Just a young man, we have to just not worry about it so much. After all, God will forgive him. Paul was incensed over this, as you can read. Verse 3 says, Let's go to verse 2. I didn't finish this. And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you. And so there is this element that you have to put God's law above who the person is. One of the most damaging things is when you become a respecter of persons.

In other words, if someone is not important, well, they can really be punished. But if somebody is important, well, you have to look the other way. And here, the Corinthians, for whatever reason, had gotten very puffed up. And, well, no, we're just going to keep this fellow in the church.

We'll just let him work it out on his own. And they didn't know the danger they were introducing into the church by allowing this. Verse 3, it says, For I, indeed, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have already judged, as though I were present, him who has done this deed. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

So Paul had to take a decision, and the person had to be suspended, had to be removed from services as long as he was that way. And in those days, it was very easy to separate. The church was like a small oasis in the middle of all of this depravity.

And so now, instead of being in God's environment, he said, now you put him out where Satan still governs, which is this world. And so now the person has to go outside and be there, involved with the worldliness around him, in the hopes that he will repent, that he will change his life. And so sometimes it's very painful, but it has to be done.

Where there is tolerance of sin, there's going to be multiplication of sin. And our church has to be very different than the world around us, and even the way the churches act nowadays, that are just becoming more and more liberal, more and more acceptable of things. And we have to maintain the biblical standards and not water them down, not change them at all. And at the same time, one of the laws of God is not being a respecter of persons.

That you're not here because of a person that you're following. You're following God and Jesus Christ. And you're looking at the fruits. Are we teaching the truths? Are we maintaining the faithfulness? Of what we have learned? We have to retain that, or else we can be deceived. We can be deceived because someone sounds important or has errors of importance, or feels that his authority grants him that he can take people with him.

That's not what God's way of life is. God has been dealing with this from the very start. And of course, you cannot change people's minds. They have their own decisions to make. And God's way is not the dictatorial way. You don't impose things. People have to want to come. They have to make it through their commitment to God. And of course, you can always be damaged or abused because of that. What do you do with a person who doesn't want to follow, or doesn't want to obey, or doesn't want to continue?

You can't force them. And so, look at God the Father and the splits he has had to deal with from the time of Lucifer. Because God's way is open, it is available, and it is vulnerable to being abused. Taking advantage of. And we just don't want to be in a system that is always imposing and having people that have to just follow in a blind list and sectarian obedience. We do not want that spirit at all. So, he mentions here that he has to deal with situations. He says in verse 6, Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? If you start tolerating one thing, you will tolerate other things. That's what he is mentioning.

He says, therefore purge out the old leaven, that old system, that you may be a new lump since you truly are a leaven, for indeed Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. Therefore, let us keep the feast not with the old leaven, not with the old system of the world. We cannot accept that. We cannot tolerate a type of sin that is going on, that is damaging the corrugation, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness.

Let's stop there for a moment. What does this mean? The leaven of malice and wickedness.

The Greek word for malice means an evil habit of mind. So it's something that's dealing with your mind, your thoughts.

This is an interior attitude that malice, you mean harm, you mean something bad toward another person.

The word wickedness is the effect of what malice interiorly does. This is now the external act, the wickedness. Malice is where you scheme, where your thoughts and your attitudes are there, focused, and then wickedness is the fruit of it. It's the result of your thoughts. So, again, wickedness is the outward result of our inner thoughts. See if we can nip them in the bud, that type of bitterness or anger or something that is there before it produces the action.

Christianity is based on dealing first with the thoughts, bringing them to Christ. Don't let the thoughts control you and change you. You have to change your thoughts. You have to control and dominate them, and then the actions will take care of themselves.

This is what Paul was contrasting, the malice and wickedness of the leavening, that we shouldn't have that system. That's why it's so hard, what we are trying to do, only through God's Spirit, because it's a struggle.

Human nature is self-centered by nature. So it's very hard to change from looking inward and being concerned about one to being outward-centered, to looking at others and being concerned about others more than ourselves. It's not easy, but this is what it's about, to be able to be in God's kingdom one day.

So then he goes on and mentions the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

Now that is again, he's contrasting what is malice and wickedness on one side with the old lifestyle, the old way of thinking, the leavening bread, the leavened bread. And then he contrasts it with the sincerity, which is the inner motive, to be able to produce truthfulness and to produce something that is genuine.

And that is something of worth. So he's changing again, contrasting one to another. The left to wrong things, to the correct things that he goes through. Now the word sincere is a very interesting word. Actually, we use it in English, sincere. In Spanish, it's even more clear because it's sin sero, which means without wax. And this is what the Romans used.

And in the Greek, it comes from the word aelikrenis, which means unmixed without alloy. And it's talking about a thing which is examined by the sun's light that is found pure and unadulterated. So when you put it on the sunlight, you can examine it very much. It's interesting in the Latin part that sin sera means without wax. And the sculptures and statues, many times beautiful marble, white marble statues. But what would happen? The sculpture would be out there working away. It's almost finished, got the whole thing, spent a couple of months on it, and all of a sudden, chip comes out. Boy, you know, right here on the arm. Am I going to have to throw this away now? That's all this marble. So the unscrupulous sculptors would take some wax and put it in the place and then paint it white. And so when they sold the statue, it would look intact. You couldn't tell.

But if you put the statue out in the sunlight, eventually the wax would melt. And you see, that was not a sin sera statue. That was a statue con sera, which means with wax. And this is where our word sin sera comes from. The Latin means without wax, something that is authentic, that it is genuine. And so Paul is telling the Corinthians, look, we have to be sincere. We have to be truthful. We can't be making things up. And one of the worst sins in the New Testament is hypocrisy, what many of the Pharisees would do. They would look great outside, but inside they were full of envy. They weren't converted people. They were dedicated people, but they weren't converted. They didn't have God's Spirit. And so Christ could see the difference. This righteous statue on the outside was full of wax. There was a lot of things that were pretensions that weren't truthful. And so he's telling us that we have to have sincere thoughts. We have to have sincere attitudes. And that has to go before God first. When we pray, you know, all the wax melts. We go before God. He sees us as we are, not as we want to see ourselves, not as we want others to see ourselves. We see whether there's wax or not. And so he's the one that cleans us up, takes the wax out, and he can make a new sculpture without that wax. But we have to be sincere. And as a result of being authentic, being genuine, then we can produce something that is truthful. Something that does have genuineness, that is the reality. The word for truth here, which is eletheia in Greek, it is that which is the reality of the thing.

The reality of the thing. Not what we want it to be, not what we want others to think, but what it is. It is something genuine. And he is saying this is part of our life. We're never going to be perfect, but we need to go before God. Show him our faults and be overcoming them. Be removing those things that are false, that are damaging. Just as the Corinthian church had this problem. I want to read to you from a comment by William Barkley, giving a historical background on this section. He says, shocked as Paul was at the sin, he was even more shocked by the attitude of the Corinthian church to the sinner. They had complacently accepted the situation and done nothing about it when they should have been grief stricken. The word Paul uses for grief, they should have known, is the word that is used for mourning for the dead. An easygoing attitude to sin is always dangerous. It has been said that our one security against sin lies in our being shocked at it. It's hard to be shocked. Today's youth, it's hard for them to be shocked at something. Because look at all the access they have to everything. But you can't lose that innocence. You have to be shocked by sin and not accept it. Not becoming complacent and acceptable. Because again, a little leavening leavens the whole lump. He goes on to say, When we cease to take a serious view of sin, we are in a perilous position. It is not a question of being critical and condemnatory. It is a question of being wounded and shocked. It was sin that crucified Jesus Christ. It was to free men from sin that he died. No Christian man can take an easygoing view of it. Paul's verdict is that the man must be dealt with. In a vivid phrase, he says that he must be handed over to Satan. He means that he must be excommunicated. The world was looked upon as the domain of Satan, just as the church was the domain of God. Send this man back to Satan's world to which he belongs, his Paul's verdict. But we have to note that even a punishment as serious as that was not vindictive. It wasn't something cruel or revengeful. It was in order to humiliate the man to bring about the taming and the removal of his lusts so that in the end his spirit could be saved. It was discipline, not exercise only to punish, but rather to awaken, and was a verdict to be carried out, not with cold, sadistic cruelty, but rather in sorrow as for one who had died. Always at the back of punishment and discipline in the early church there is the conviction that they must seek not to break the person, but to make the person who has sinned. So you don't break them like you break a horse, but you're helping the person be remade so that he won't end up being condemned by God.

So sincerity is, again, something that God looks upon. We need to always look at not having any wax that we're trying to pretend or deceive others about.

Because God knows us, he sees every part of us, and we have to come before him. Let's read in Psalm 139. This is a moment when David was very sincere. Psalms 139, verse 1. This is a good scripture to read during the days of Unleavened Bread.

This is why God loved David so much, because he was sincere. He made mistakes, but he repented, recovered, and kept serving God with all his heart.

He says, O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up. You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.

For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You have hedged me behind and before and laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain it.

What this reminds me of, having now children and a couple of grandchildren, is a mother's love for his child, or her child. They know everything about that child.

We husbands, we just look at the baby and she's not drooling or doing something. It's okay. The wife knows whether the nail on the tiny toe has been cut properly or not.

They know everything about that baby because it's part of them and it's an extension and they love the baby.

David is saying, God knows me more intimately than my mother ever did. That's the love that God has for us. He goes on in verse 7.

Even if we were stranded in a desert island, God is still there. He can listen to us just like he would in our own house. He's never going to abandon us.

He says in verse 11, Even if I say, Surely the darkness shall fall on me, Even the night shall be light about me. Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from you, But the night shines as the day, The darkness and the light are both alike to you. So God doesn't have, he doesn't go to bed, he doesn't need to sleep, he doesn't need to recharge his batteries as we do.

For him, he's aware, just like a mother is, even at night. A little baby is starting to cry, and the mother wakes up. She's concerned. Well, God is the same way. He's aware of things going on. Verse 13, he says, And wonderfully made, marvelous are your works, And that my soul knows very well. From this verse came out the famous book called, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, by a doctor that took that, just a wonderful book, if you've never read that, I recommend it. And he says that, You made me, all, every one of my trillions of cells that I have.

You made each one of them. Verse 15, he says, How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand. When I awake, I'm still with you. He was a great meditator. He would examine things. Another great meditator was the apostle Paul. You know, he didn't just come up with those words. He experienced things that brought about those words, words that he had meditated. He used the right words at the right time because he had experienced all of that in his life. Verse 19, Then he says in verse 23, That's called following God and sincerity and truth. That every day we get up, we commit our day to God, guide us, show us the right way, and then at night we reflect and we pray and examine me. How can I be a better person? Because the Days of Unleavened Bread is about improving. It's about getting rid of leavening in our lives as we have de-leavened our homes.

So as we go about avoiding leavening and eating unleavened bread, we need to remember this scripture.

1 Corinthians 5, verses 7 and 8, about keeping these days with sincerity and truth, avoiding having sinful evil thoughts that lead to wicked actions, instead focusing on unadulterated good and pure thoughts, the sincerity, the sin, Sarah, that we have talked about. And that will lead to being truthful and also following what is true. That's the type of feast that God intends for all of us to keep.