Thoughts on 1Corinthians 5
….Your glorying is not good. 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.
I Corinthians 5:6-7 (NKJV)
Israelite women used the sour dough process for making bread. Each week,a small portion of bread dough is kept from a batch and allowed to ferment. During the next bread making process, this fermented dough is introduced as a starter ingredient. The effect of this is that as new ingredients are added, the old dough acts as a leaven in the new batch. This practice is continuous throughout the year until the feast of Unleavened Bread when every old leaven is completely removed from the house to give way to a fresh start.(Ex 12:15,13:6)
Leaven according to the dictionary is a pervasive influence that modifies something or transforms it for the better. However, In this chapter, leaven is symbolic of the process by which evil spreads to affect an entire community. And so when the church turns a blind eye and begins to accommodate certain practices that are discordant to the Christian life, these acts have a tendency to spread. As at the time of Paul’s writing, it was about a man that had sexual relations with his father’s wife, now we know that today, the church now has a LGBTQ community all in the guise of freedom😟
Brethren, we need to open our eyes wider and look out for one another. We must stop the pretence where evil is concerned and condemn it for what it is, while not forgetting Paul’s charge in Gal 6:1 Whatever leaven is in our lives must be removed quickly before it spreads to the community. We remember the story of Ananias and Saphira (Acts 5:1-11).The promptness of apostle Peter in condemning the action of this couple and the immediate consequences of their action caused a great fear in the church and served as a deterrent to others because after this, we didn’t hear of any other related occurrence in the early church.
Today’s church has become so consenting that even things we once condemned when we were unbelievers are now done in the church without restraint or remorse. (Am sure some of today’s churches will not approve of Paul’s recommendation to the Corinthian church and will look at it as extreme or capable of driving members away from the church)
As we are reminded in today’s chapter, Christ became our Passover lamb as an opportunity to remove the old lump and start afresh. Let us therefore put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.
(Eph 4:24)
