In Matthew 13:33, the Lord says that the ‘Kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened’. You lean quite heavily on leaven as exclusively referring to hypocrisy when this isn’t the case.
Yes, you are correct that leaven carries more than one "specific" rigid connotation. It both carries a generic analogical connotation of representing a catalyst that hastens/magnifies, i.e. the parable of the kingdom of heaven, and also can specifically represent how sin flourishes. A number of biblical symbols indeed function as "auto-antonyms" or near-equivalents in a sense, as whether they exactly mean good or evil is contingent upon the specific context it undergirds.
In this specific case study, the relevant focus is on how leaven is a symbol for sin and hypocrisy in the zoomed-in context of Passover and Unleavened Bread. Within this specific type-antitype study lens, it is evident that Jesus Christ as the true Unleavened Bread of the Life is contrasted with the leaven of sin and hypocrisy.
Anyhow, it is splendid seeing you back around, brother. Has life been well for you, my friend? I certainly hope all is well for you amidst these unprecedented moments of strife to witness and endure through, and that the God of Heaven may shower His blessings as an inundating deluge of rainfall in your everyday life.
Oh that’s very kind of you to say. God bless your strivings to learn from the Lord. May He grant you enlightenment. Yes the Lord has spared me a little time away from the factory. 😁
Thank you; I definitely am continually accumulating new biblical insights for sure, the thanksgiving and glorifying honor for which belongs to our God who sits upon the throne and unto the Lamb! And glad to hear, brother. :)
Further, I would argue that the passages from John that you use here are precisely an argument for transubstantiation. The Lord can be taken literally here. The Incarnation of the Lord, and His founding of the Church, can be seen as the point where heaven and earth meet. To put it another way, where the literal and metaphorical combine. Jesus is Word, and therefore He may be understood in a metaphorical sense to be also His teachings, and these teachings are to be ‘consumed’ and ‘internalised’ as you say, but we are also flesh and blood and in order to become one flesh and one spirit (Ephesians 4-6) with the Lord, and regain our eternal inheritance, we must both learn from the Lord, try to follow His example and literally eat His body and drink His blood, which He gives us both literally and metaphorically, although we know that it is under the appearance of bread and wine. The Lord is explicit repeatedly (John 6-50-51). This teaching was hard for the Jews, for the reasons you state, but by the miraculous power of God, who can turn water to wine, part the seas, who has given your body the ability to turn bread into flesh, the bread and wine offered by a Priest of the Faith literally is the flesh and blood of the Lord. I do not deny this is an awesome mystery, but it is the most literal and straightforward rendering of the text, and what is confirmed by the holy Church. ‘Unless ye become as little children…’. - the literal, unalloyed truth, devoid of lengthy and scholarly reinterpretation is surely what we are after here?
(cont.) Additional points about becoming as little children: remember what the Lord instructed His disciples, how that they must be as wise as serpents and simultaneously without contradiction preserving the innocence of doves (Matt. 10:16) when sent forth as sheep amongst wolves. (Lk. 10:3)
The full Christian walk in the truth of God requires both, for one cannot remain standing upon the Rock of truth in the midst of deception that wolves in sheep's clothing spew out of their unholy mouths without the wisdom as of that of a serpent in order to see through the serpentine deception and know how to not fall for it. And simultaneously, one must maintain the innocence of a dove to remain spiritually pure in the righteousness of God, lest one descends into the love of money for expedient self-gain.
Jesus's command for us to become as little children is an affirmation that our hearts must first and foremost be as innocent as the doves, that we open our conscience in humility and meekness toward listening to our Creator and hearkening unto His righteousness which He imputes unto us by His grace.
And at the very same time, this does not mean staying as "little children" forever, because one must mature in the righteousness of God unto a grown stature. The "little children" part means that when we are born again by water and God's Spirit, we spiritually mature *as if* we are little children all over again so that we mature according to the new man and not the old, sinful one that has been crucified with Jesus Christ. (Rom. 6:5-7; Eph. 4:21-24; Col. 3:9-11)
When the Israelites of old drew near the Promised Land, Jehovah relayed this to the Hebrews through Moses:
> "And Jehovah heareth the voice of your words, and is wroth, and sweareth, saying, Not one of these men of this evil generation doth see the good land which I have sworn to give to your fathers, save Caleb son of Jephunneh -- he doth see it, and to him I give the land on which he hath trodden, and to his sons, because that he hath been fully after Jehovah. Also with me hath Jehovah been angry for your sake, saying, Also, thou dost not go in thither; Joshua son of Nun, who is standing before thee, he goeth in thither; him strengthen thou; for he doth cause Israel to inherit. And your infants, of whom ye have said, For a prey they are, and your sons who have not known to-day good and evil, they go in thither, and to them I give it, and they possess it;" (Deut. 1:34-39)
Note what God said, how the little children of the Israelites were found worthy of inheriting the Promised Land by very reason of the fact that they at the time lacked the knowledge of good and evil.
Interesting point; I think I see roughly what you are getting at here. My theological response to your argument here is that we should remember that the 1st-century Pharisaic-Jewish context in which Jesus and His disciples lived in. The Lord's disciples during His ministry were Jews brought up in a largely Pharisaism-influenced version of Mosaic Judaism where they were instructed wholly in the Torah from youth and sought to live accordingly in.
Obviously, they in many ways did err from what the Old Testament actually ordains and commands, but that was due to the mass straying from Jehovah's truth brought about by the complacent self-righteous attitudes and accompanying superiority complexes of the 1st-century then-Judean leadership. At the baseline core, one of the obvious rock-solid doctrines they understood was that consumption of blood is a grotesque abomination, going back to the Noahic Covenant and the Levitical injunctions. The foremost emphasis I wish to place here is that Jesus lived out and exposited the Law a.k.a. Torah (Five Books of Moses) in their substantive true fullness unto verity, and that as a corollary, Jesus never violated the Torahic proscription of blood. This means that Jesus could not have meant "drink My blood" in literal terms, because such a scenario would violate the Torah that articulates the very righteousness He is the embodiment of. Yes, it was a hard teaching for the Jews in His day, but not in the sense that Jesus was telling them to violate the Mosaic Law in any way, rather so that the Jews in those days were stiff of neck and couldn't recognize with acceptation the larger spiritual reality of substantive fulfillment in Jesus Christ as the Redeemer of humanity. And in many ways, the modern-day "church" has apostatized just as (if not more so) grotesquely than ancient literal Israel did, since a spiritual Jew is a Christian.
You are 100% correct that we must become as little children as the Lord said, and that therefore we ought to understand the truth as it plainly stands. Would this not entail the corollary that one must allow the Bible to internally interpret itself without artificially forced assumptions that break the continuity of the testaments? The end point of becoming as little children, converted in the heart, is to be willing to learn in humility from our heavenly Father as children of God. This does not mean that one needs to think like a child in terms of critical evaluation and the such.
Just as you pointed out that leaven as a symbol isn't exclusively referential to sin, likewise little children aren't exclusively associated with spiritual maturity. Paul said:
- "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." (I Cor. 13:11)
- "...that we may no more be babes, tossed and borne about by every wind of the teaching, in the sleight of men, in craftiness, unto the artifice of leading astray... (Eph. 4:14)
In Matthew 13:33, the Lord says that the ‘Kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened’. You lean quite heavily on leaven as exclusively referring to hypocrisy when this isn’t the case.
Yes, you are correct that leaven carries more than one "specific" rigid connotation. It both carries a generic analogical connotation of representing a catalyst that hastens/magnifies, i.e. the parable of the kingdom of heaven, and also can specifically represent how sin flourishes. A number of biblical symbols indeed function as "auto-antonyms" or near-equivalents in a sense, as whether they exactly mean good or evil is contingent upon the specific context it undergirds.
In this specific case study, the relevant focus is on how leaven is a symbol for sin and hypocrisy in the zoomed-in context of Passover and Unleavened Bread. Within this specific type-antitype study lens, it is evident that Jesus Christ as the true Unleavened Bread of the Life is contrasted with the leaven of sin and hypocrisy.
Anyhow, it is splendid seeing you back around, brother. Has life been well for you, my friend? I certainly hope all is well for you amidst these unprecedented moments of strife to witness and endure through, and that the God of Heaven may shower His blessings as an inundating deluge of rainfall in your everyday life.
Oh that’s very kind of you to say. God bless your strivings to learn from the Lord. May He grant you enlightenment. Yes the Lord has spared me a little time away from the factory. 😁
Thank you; I definitely am continually accumulating new biblical insights for sure, the thanksgiving and glorifying honor for which belongs to our God who sits upon the throne and unto the Lamb! And glad to hear, brother. :)
Further, I would argue that the passages from John that you use here are precisely an argument for transubstantiation. The Lord can be taken literally here. The Incarnation of the Lord, and His founding of the Church, can be seen as the point where heaven and earth meet. To put it another way, where the literal and metaphorical combine. Jesus is Word, and therefore He may be understood in a metaphorical sense to be also His teachings, and these teachings are to be ‘consumed’ and ‘internalised’ as you say, but we are also flesh and blood and in order to become one flesh and one spirit (Ephesians 4-6) with the Lord, and regain our eternal inheritance, we must both learn from the Lord, try to follow His example and literally eat His body and drink His blood, which He gives us both literally and metaphorically, although we know that it is under the appearance of bread and wine. The Lord is explicit repeatedly (John 6-50-51). This teaching was hard for the Jews, for the reasons you state, but by the miraculous power of God, who can turn water to wine, part the seas, who has given your body the ability to turn bread into flesh, the bread and wine offered by a Priest of the Faith literally is the flesh and blood of the Lord. I do not deny this is an awesome mystery, but it is the most literal and straightforward rendering of the text, and what is confirmed by the holy Church. ‘Unless ye become as little children…’. - the literal, unalloyed truth, devoid of lengthy and scholarly reinterpretation is surely what we are after here?
(cont.) Additional points about becoming as little children: remember what the Lord instructed His disciples, how that they must be as wise as serpents and simultaneously without contradiction preserving the innocence of doves (Matt. 10:16) when sent forth as sheep amongst wolves. (Lk. 10:3)
The full Christian walk in the truth of God requires both, for one cannot remain standing upon the Rock of truth in the midst of deception that wolves in sheep's clothing spew out of their unholy mouths without the wisdom as of that of a serpent in order to see through the serpentine deception and know how to not fall for it. And simultaneously, one must maintain the innocence of a dove to remain spiritually pure in the righteousness of God, lest one descends into the love of money for expedient self-gain.
Jesus's command for us to become as little children is an affirmation that our hearts must first and foremost be as innocent as the doves, that we open our conscience in humility and meekness toward listening to our Creator and hearkening unto His righteousness which He imputes unto us by His grace.
And at the very same time, this does not mean staying as "little children" forever, because one must mature in the righteousness of God unto a grown stature. The "little children" part means that when we are born again by water and God's Spirit, we spiritually mature *as if* we are little children all over again so that we mature according to the new man and not the old, sinful one that has been crucified with Jesus Christ. (Rom. 6:5-7; Eph. 4:21-24; Col. 3:9-11)
When the Israelites of old drew near the Promised Land, Jehovah relayed this to the Hebrews through Moses:
> "And Jehovah heareth the voice of your words, and is wroth, and sweareth, saying, Not one of these men of this evil generation doth see the good land which I have sworn to give to your fathers, save Caleb son of Jephunneh -- he doth see it, and to him I give the land on which he hath trodden, and to his sons, because that he hath been fully after Jehovah. Also with me hath Jehovah been angry for your sake, saying, Also, thou dost not go in thither; Joshua son of Nun, who is standing before thee, he goeth in thither; him strengthen thou; for he doth cause Israel to inherit. And your infants, of whom ye have said, For a prey they are, and your sons who have not known to-day good and evil, they go in thither, and to them I give it, and they possess it;" (Deut. 1:34-39)
Note what God said, how the little children of the Israelites were found worthy of inheriting the Promised Land by very reason of the fact that they at the time lacked the knowledge of good and evil.
Interesting point; I think I see roughly what you are getting at here. My theological response to your argument here is that we should remember that the 1st-century Pharisaic-Jewish context in which Jesus and His disciples lived in. The Lord's disciples during His ministry were Jews brought up in a largely Pharisaism-influenced version of Mosaic Judaism where they were instructed wholly in the Torah from youth and sought to live accordingly in.
Obviously, they in many ways did err from what the Old Testament actually ordains and commands, but that was due to the mass straying from Jehovah's truth brought about by the complacent self-righteous attitudes and accompanying superiority complexes of the 1st-century then-Judean leadership. At the baseline core, one of the obvious rock-solid doctrines they understood was that consumption of blood is a grotesque abomination, going back to the Noahic Covenant and the Levitical injunctions. The foremost emphasis I wish to place here is that Jesus lived out and exposited the Law a.k.a. Torah (Five Books of Moses) in their substantive true fullness unto verity, and that as a corollary, Jesus never violated the Torahic proscription of blood. This means that Jesus could not have meant "drink My blood" in literal terms, because such a scenario would violate the Torah that articulates the very righteousness He is the embodiment of. Yes, it was a hard teaching for the Jews in His day, but not in the sense that Jesus was telling them to violate the Mosaic Law in any way, rather so that the Jews in those days were stiff of neck and couldn't recognize with acceptation the larger spiritual reality of substantive fulfillment in Jesus Christ as the Redeemer of humanity. And in many ways, the modern-day "church" has apostatized just as (if not more so) grotesquely than ancient literal Israel did, since a spiritual Jew is a Christian.
You are 100% correct that we must become as little children as the Lord said, and that therefore we ought to understand the truth as it plainly stands. Would this not entail the corollary that one must allow the Bible to internally interpret itself without artificially forced assumptions that break the continuity of the testaments? The end point of becoming as little children, converted in the heart, is to be willing to learn in humility from our heavenly Father as children of God. This does not mean that one needs to think like a child in terms of critical evaluation and the such.
Just as you pointed out that leaven as a symbol isn't exclusively referential to sin, likewise little children aren't exclusively associated with spiritual maturity. Paul said:
- "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." (I Cor. 13:11)
- "...that we may no more be babes, tossed and borne about by every wind of the teaching, in the sleight of men, in craftiness, unto the artifice of leading astray... (Eph. 4:14)