The Blood and the Unleavened Bread, part 3

Do you remember what 1 Corinthians 5:8 said? “Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.” 
 

We cannot keep the festival with the old yeast or leavened bread. This is why we ask you to look into your own relationship with Christ whenever we have communion. We are to eat only the unleavened bread now that we have applied His blood to our lives. 

That, of course, is the bread of the new covenant. As soon as they applied the blood of the Lamb, or from the moment of conversion, the leaven (sin) was to be put out of their lives. 

Old Volks Home

Here is a brief testimony from a friend of mine, concerning his and his families coming to faith in Christ. He shares, “My Dad started his business in 1965. So, you’ve got Ervin Auch and Verlin Schultz – you can’t get more German than that. Two Germans working on German cars. Eventually their shop became a BMW dealer. 
 

Eight years later, my whole family came to Christ. We all applied the blood of Christ to our lives. [As an aside here, let me remind you that you do that by surrendering your own will and heart to Jesus and His will.] The thing I remember the most is how much my life changed after I got saved. Everything changed. I stopped hanging out in the bars, I stopped running around, I stopped smoking dope. Jesus changed everything. And my dad’s business changed – so much so that his business partner sold his half to my dad.” 
 

The point of sharing that story is to show that, once you apply the blood to your life, you no longer eat the leavened bread. Now you eat the unleavened bread. 

When the Bible talks about leaven, it typically refers to a leftover batch of bread-dough from the last time they had made bread. It would often ferment before it was used. Subsequently, it would cause the bread to rise. The rising of the dough is symbolic of pride, the lifting up of self. God was trying to tell Israel that once they were covered by the blood that they were to no longer have anything to do with the spirit of this old world. There cannot be any pride and self-exaltation. Now that you are saved, work out your salvation – or you could say, let your salvation play out in your life. Let the new life you have in Christ lead you into righteous living. 
 

When Israel started her journey out of Egypt, she was given a sufficient amount of sweet dough to last them the whole seven days of the festival. Anything that still had leaven in it was to be left in Egypt. In other words, when you surrender your life to Jesus, you are to leave your old life. You don’t take your old life with you. Have nothing to do with the sin of your past. 

That’s what baby dedications are all about. It’s parents dedicating themselves to help their children work out their salvation. They must teach them what it means to live as a Christian. They train them up in the way that they should go, as the Bible says, so that when they are old, they will not turn away from it. 
 

The urgency of staying away from the leavened bread was so great that Jehovah gives this warning nine times. Nine times He tells them to have nothing to do with leaven/sin. 

Let’s look back at Paul’s urgency in 1 Corinthians 5:1 “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father's wife.” That is the kind of behavior that was to be left behind. Paul could not believe that this type of behavior was occurring within the church. 

When Israel left Egypt, she literally started a new life. That is what happens to us when we get saved. We are to leave the old life behind and move on to the new life Jesus has for us.

Continued tomorrow