Get rid of the Leaven

1 CORINTHIANS 5:7

KEEPING THE FEAST

I was talking to a family member recently about a series of TV programmes called, "A Life of Grime". Neither of us had seen the whole series, and neither of us had seen the same programmes as the other. But one episode I hadn't seen involved the emergency services in one large city, I think an American city. It was Jewish Passover time and the fire brigades were being kept busy because the Jews were coming out of their homes and lighting fires in the streets.

They were actually carrying anything out of their homes which they believed had been contaminated by contact with yeast and destroying it by burning in the neighbourhood. No sooner had the fire trucks dealt with one blaze than they were being called out to another.

Some of you will have seen the TV programmes on the Mancunian ortodox Jews screened towards the end of last year. Again, in one of the episodes there were Jews going to great lengths to remove any little trace of yeast from their homes. One lady was attacking every metal surface in her kitchen with a blow torch in order to destroy the yeast traces. One family even kept a spare yeast-free cooker in the garage to be brought into the kitchen for the feast of unleavened bread.

It's all related, of course, to texts like these, Exodus 12:14-20 ; Exodus 23:15; Deut. 16:3.

The Feast of the Passover and the feast of unleavened bread are part of the same feast. There is the night of the Passover celebration when the lamb is eaten, and that's followed by the seven day feast of unleavened bread. The Israelites ate their bread unleavened as they were preparing to be delivered from God's judgement and from Egyptian slavery. They did so because they were eating in haste; there was no time to wait for bread to have yeast added to it and allowed to rise before being baked. So, it became part of the symbolism of salvation.

So, you can easily see how leaven became a symbol of stuff that you had to get rid of in your service for God. There's nothing wrong with yeast in itself, nothing at all. But in it's association with the Passover, it became something that you had to deal with by a search and destroy mission. It's only a short step from that to seeing it as a symbol for ungodly traces in the life of holiness. So, you have a number of places in the New Testament where yeast is used as Biblical shorthand for the power of sinful tendencies in the human heart.

The Lord Jesus used the concept particularly of the attitudes and behaviour of his opponents, the Pharisess and the Herodians - Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees by which he meant their pernicious teaching. On another occasion he said, Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.

So, the use of this picture was something familiar to the minds of people who lived in the cultures of the first century. Most of them grew up in households where kneeding the dough, and allowing time for the yeast to make it rise, was a daily occurance. Most of these people had grown up knowing from personal daily experience what this picture looks like in reality. Not many of them had a Tesco or Sainsburys to shop in. I guess not many of us grew up in a home where the importance and power of yeast was on display every day in the kitchen. Many recipes allow in all for about two hours in which the dough containing the yeast is covered and allowed to rest until it's risen to about twice its original size. The incredible thing about the yeast is that if the mixture was well kneeded then the whole batch of dough was changed by the power of the yeast.

Now, that's the very picture the apostle Paul has in his mind as he writes 1 Corinthians 5:6. Here's a lively church; it's teeming with gifted people; it's got lively worship which tends at times to become disorderly. There are a lot of good things this founder of the church can say about it. B ut there was something seriously wrong. There were certain tendencies and attitudes in the life of this church that were in danger of affecting the life of the whole entity. This was particularly so about a case of incest that had been brought to Paul's mind. You'll see a reference to it in 1 Corinthians 5:1. Although there are many Gentiles in this Corinthian church, Paul has no qualms about addressing them through the authority of the Old Testament law which forbad any sexual relationships between a man and his father's wife. That covers not only one's mother but any woman who is married to one's father.

There are a number of reasons why this situation in a Christian church is very bad. The first is that it's condemned by the law of the Old Testament. Leviticus 18:8 says Do not have sexual relations with your father's wife, that would dishonour your father. The God who is holy and pure was speaking to His people in those laws, and the New Testament again and again shows us that many of them are still in force and binding on the conscience of modern believers.

But that's not the only reason why this was serious for the church at Corinth. The second concern was pride. See 1 Corinthians 5:2. The Greek word literally means inflated. It comes from the word for bellows. It's to be puffed up. The church should have been filled with grief over this unholy breaking of the law of God, but instead it was feeling proud of its tolerance. Perhaps the church leaders were adopting the spirit that because they were under God's grace, they could ignore God's law. That's always been a curse that's beset the church down the ages. Believers thinking that all kinds of immoral behaviour can be justified because we have such a kind and forgiving God, that he won't be upset at a bit of sexual activity, after all, he's a God of love, so he won't be offended if this sexual relationship's surrounded by love. So, Christians sometimes make room for disobedience to the Lord God Almighty because they're in love. They justify God-hating behaviour in the name of love. There's a massive pride at the heart of that kind of attitude. It assumes that you can re-interpret what God has plainly said, through the lens of your own love-sick prejudice.

The third reason why this was so bad is to do with how it looked to the non-Christians. It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that doesn't even occur among the pagans (verse 1). Now, that can't mean that incest never happened in the non-Christian world of the first century. We know it did happen. So, what Paul may be implying here, is that the pagans didn't take pride in it like the Corinthian Christians were doing. It may have gone on, but it wasn't a matter for boasting. The world's often clearer in its thinking on these things than the church. The world knows how Christians ought to behave and passes judgement on any church that tolerates sin and refuses to discipline it. Dick Lucas tells the story of a clergyman who went to a new parish and found sexual immorality in the leadership. He dealt with it by removing people from their posts. And that vicar was criticised by sections of the congregation, but he was applauded by the pagans who lived around the church.

Indeed, as you'll see, the apostle calls the church to exercise discipline in the case of this man. 1 Corinthians 5:3-5 are a very serious and very loving call to treat this man as if he belonged to Satan rather than to Christ, in order to discipline him. Put him out of the church. Stop him coming to the Lord's Table. But serious though it is there's a loving purpose, the hope that the man will come to his spiritual senses and repent and return to a godly lifestyle.

But the main reason why this was so serious is found in 1 Corinthians 5:6-8. To be a real Christian is to be a Passover person. Paul's actually seeing the Christian life as a feast or a festival. Not something that we keep once a year, but something that's at the core of every day life. Let's keep the festival with sincerity and truth.

You know the story. The Jews were in Egypt. They were living a miserable life of slavery. Every day was a day of hardship. Despite many miracles the Egyptian Pharaoh had hardened his heart against the living God. He was trying to implement a policy of genocide agains the Jews, trying to kill all the baby boys. Eventually, God's patience ran out. He got ready to send one final judgement. All the first born males in Egypt both human and animal were to be killed by the Angel of the Lord in one night. Every home was under judgement. The only homes to be spared death were the homes protected by the blood of a perfect male lamb; the blood smeared on the doorposts.

When the angel of death came he wold pass over the homes protected by the blood of the lamb.

So, the Jewish families and those Gentile families who had grown to love the God of Israel, got ready for the night of the passover. They were to eat the passover feast, because not only was the blood of the lamb to protect them from death, the flesh of the lamb was to give them strength for life. They were to eat the lamb in family groups, and accompany it with yeast-free bread and with bitter herbs.

The people thus saved from deatha dn judgement, would be free to leave Egypt and would be delivered from slavery in order to make the journey to the promised land.

There can hardly have been a night like it in the history of the world. Death entering every home in a nation. Imagine the suffering in the Red Lake Reservation of the Chippewa people this weekend. Death came suddenly and horribly on a normal day to members of their community. Multiply that by thousands in the land of Egypt. Almost every home in every street and every village resounding to the screams of mothers and fathers as they look at the bodies of freshly dead children.

But in the homes protected by the blood of the lamb, only quiet thankfulness and deep awe at the God who delivers his people from judgement.

That's the picture the apostle has in mind.

But, of course, the lamb whose blood delivers us from deatha nd judgement is the Lord Jesus. There on the Cross in the morning sunshine and then the darkened noonday, hangs the Son of God. Blood flows from his hands and head and feet. The air is shattered by the terrible cry, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me. He's suffering the pain of dreadful judgement. All that the sin of his people deserved he carries in himself. The heavy weight of the judgement of God crushes the heart and spirit of the Lord Jesus. It's unimaginable suffering. Your sin's penalty being born by Jesus. The hand of an all-powerful Father, inflicts terrible vengeance on the son. The hand of God is mighty and strong, more powerful than we can imagine, and on that Friday the hand was stretched out to crush the Lord Jesus.

It's the judgement you deserve. Your selfish rebellious heart have brought you into the most dangerous place imaginable. Your sin has made you what the Bible calls a child of wrath. On your way to the outer darkness. On your way to the day when the hand that created you will throw you into hell.

But here's the miracle. When you turn to Christ and trust him as your King and Saviour; when you turn from self-rule in order to be ruled by Jesus and His Word, you are saved from the judgement. When the day of judgement comes it will pass over you. You can live now as a person who knows that in that day you'll be safe and secure in the promised land of a new paradise. Because the Lamb of God was able to cry our from the Cross, IT IS FINISHED ! The work of forgiveness is finished. There's nothing left to pay, all can be forgiven. It's finished. The work of Passover is accomplished.

So, if you're a Christian and that Passover is yours, how are you to live? You're to live without yeast. You're to live an uncontaminated life. A life of purity and truth. A life that is consistent with a crucified Messiah. A life that believes that sin and hypocrisy are worthy of utmost judgement. A life that says, those things are eveil, they're what put the Lord on the Cross, I'll have nothing more to do with them. I'll take a blowtorch to anything that's impure and out of line with God's truth. I'm a Passover man. I glory in the cross and the Saviour, and I hate the yeast of impurity. Those things which bring dishonour to the Passover Lamb are my enemies to be rooted out and thrown away, so that I might do the best thing any man can do, bring glory to the Lord Jesus