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No.22.
13: 33 - 50.
pp. 141 - 145
The Hidden Leaven.
The parable of the leaven is the last of the four spoken by Christ outside the house to
the multitudes. It gives us the external history of the kingdom of heaven in its final
phase. But how do we interpret the word "leaven"? Expositors are sharply divided here,
many interpreting it of the gospel of grace which finally extends everywhere, and this is
deduced from the words "the whole was leavened" (Matt. 13: 33).
We should however ask ourselves, how is this word used in holy Scriptures? Is it ever
used in a good sense? And how did the Lord Jesus employ the word elsewhere in His
teaching? In the O.T. we read in connection with the Passover, "ye shall put leaven out
of your houses" (Exod. 12: 15). Exod. 34: 25 and Lev. 2: 11 state, "thou shalt not
offer the blood of My sacrifice with leaven" and "no meal offering, which ye shall bring
unto the Lord, shall be made with leaven". These offerings represented typically the
purity and sinlessness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
When we come to the N.T. we find the Apostle Paul speaking of "the leaven of
baseness and wickedness", contrasting it with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth
(I Cor. 5: 6-8). "Know ye not that a little leaven doth leaven the whole lump? Purge out
therefore the old leaven", and this ends with the words "Remove ye the wicked man from
among yourselves" (I Cor. 5: 6-13).
How does Christ use the word? He warns by saying "take heed and beware of the
leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees . . . . . then understood they how that He
bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and of
the Sadducees" (Matt. 16: 6-12). In Mark 8: 15 we read, "beware of the leaven of
the Pharisees, and of the leaven of Herod". Luke 12: 1 reads, "beware of the leaven of
the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy". The Lord Jesus uses it consistently of evil and not
once of good, and this accords too with its O.T. usage. The phrase "the leaven of the
gospel" used by modern preachers is a contradiction.
If Christ was using the word in a good sense in Matt. 13:, then surely some clear
statement would have been made that this was so, otherwise He would have been
contradicting Himself and causing confusion in His hearers. The consistent Scriptural
usage right throughout the Bible gives this word a bad meaning, but all this is ignored by
those who interpret the word as referring to the gospel of salvation.
What these teachers fail to realize is that these kingdom parables show the working of
Satan as well as the purposes of God, and as we have seen with the Sower parable, the
first three sowings are failures due to the activity of the evil one and the bad state of the
soil. If they want to show the triumphant conclusion of the parabolic teaching, then it is