“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
The Basket Case Chronicles #46
“Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:8).
Christians celebrate Passover. In this passage, they do so through recognition of three things. The first is that Christ was the Pascal lamb, sacrificed for us. The second is the rejection of the old leaven, the kind of typological leaven that the old covenant saints would banish from their homes annually. We do not keep the feast that way. We have banished the annual rite of ritual leaven banishment. And the third is another image—leaven here representing, not a God-given pattern of behavior in the Old Testament, but rather the yeast of human sinfulness. The two aspects of this sinfulness that are mentioned in particular are malice and wickedness. They are contrasted with sincerity and truth, making the parallel point that the malice is hypocritical and insincere and the wickedness is based, as wickedness must be, on falsehood. Believers are called, in this sense, to celebrate Passover constantly. There is never a time when malice and wickedness can be allowed into our homes. There is never a time when we can return to the old covenant ways—not because there was too much Passover there, but because there was not enough. We needed 364 more days of it. And there is never a time when Christ was not slain for us.