Break with the Old, live in the New

 

Exodus 13:7

Unleavened bread shall be eaten during those seven days. Nothing leavened may be found among you, nor shall leaven be found anywhere within your borders.

Nowadays, when you want to bake bread, a quick trip to the supermarket is all that is needed to buy the packet of concentrated yeast necessary to ferment the dough so that it will rise before baking.

But in ancient Israel, the process was much more involved.  To start the baking cycle, the wheat or barley had to be ground into flour first, and then mixed with water and left exposed to the air for about a week to ferment.

To speed up the fermentation for later baking, a tiny piece of the previous batch would then be kept in a cool place.  This already fermented piece of dough would be mixed into the fresh batch and ferment the whole new batch of dough in just one day. This piece of fermented dough was called leaven, which is what Paul was referring to in 1Corinthians 5:6

Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven works through the whole batch of dough?

Why would God, when He gave the instructions to keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread, emphasize it so prominently by repeating the instructions thereof many times, even stipulating that no leaven was to be found throughout the whole land - not just in their houses - and spelling out that the consequence of ignoring these instructions was that you would be cut off from Israel, a very severe punishment?

It was to point out that the prophetic significance of this feast lies in the complete break that had to be made between the religious observances of the Old, and the freedom of the Spirit in the New Covenant. The Old cannot be carried over into the New. Consider the ancient baking process of the Israelites - for a whole year, every new bread that was baked had a piece of the previous baked breads in them, in the form of the piece of leaven that was kept aside each time to be used for fermentation of the new bread dough. But now God wanted them to break completely with the old leaven, not allowing even the tiniest speck of it to survive, and start a new leaven. Break with the Old, live in the New.

The New Covenant has done away with the dead works and self-effort of the Old Covenant. 

The New Covenant cements the fact that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (John 1:17)

Points to Ponder:

2 Cor 3:6 “He has enabled us to be ministers of his new covenant. This is a covenant not of written laws, but of the Spirit. The old written covenant ends in death; but under the new covenant, the Spirit gives life.”

Spirit lead me