The Revolution Brigade

Sorry about the title, I couldn’t help myself.  Now, down to business:

And they had forgotten to take bread, and did not have more than one loaf in the boat with them.

And He was giving orders to them, saying, “Watch out! Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” (Mark 8:14-15)

He spoke another parable to them, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened.” (Matthew 13:33)

The bible mentions three specific types of leavens:

• The Leaven of Herod
• The Leaven of the Pharisees
• The Leaven of the Kingdom

Leaven, in the natural sense, is a permeating agent that causes transformation.  In the case of bread, when introduced in small amounts, it causes a batch of dough many times the size of the amount of leaven to rise.  For the purposes of the parables that Jesus taught, leaven is an outside influence on thought patterns that affects our world view and how we think.

Jesus was attempting to communicate the danger of allowing outside influences, even in small amounts, to affect our thought patterns because the result would be an infection of our entire lives.  Just as leaven mixed with dough causes the dough to rise, ungodly thoughts in small measure affect our lives.  Jesus specifically warned us about two trains of ungodly thought:

The Leaven of Herod: The leaven of Herod is an athiestic thought life.  When I say athiest, you think of somebody who doesn’t know or believe in God.  For our purposes, functional athiesm is just as bad.  What do I mean by “functional athiesm?”

Functional athiesm is a condition that befalls followers of Christ in which we live our lives as though God does not exist.  If there is a problem, we try to fix it separate from the power of God in our lives.  It is the logic that says, “God helps those who help themselves.”  When you’re on the boat with no bread, the functional athiest says, “You don’t have any bread because you forgot to bring bread.  Next time bring bread.”  Nevermind the fact that the creator of all heaven and Earth is on the boat with you, and has proclaimed that you are going to the other side.  Nevermind the fact that you have already seen Him multiply loaves and fishes to feed multitudes.  Functional athiesm.  It’s an ugly business that is more prevalent than we might think.

The Leaven of the Pharisees: The leaven of the pharisees is a religious mentality.  It has God in form but without power.  Phariseeism offers explanations but not solutions.  When a pharisee is on the boat with no bread, he says things like, “God, in His sovereignty, has arranged for you to have no bread so you can better identify with others who have no bread in this hour.”

A religious spirit is one in which principle trumps presence.  We tend to want to reduce the persuit of God to a formula that always produces the intended result.  The bible is full of godly principles that mean nothing apart from the person of Jesus.  The new covenant was never about religious practice, but rather about a restoration of the relationship between God and His creation that was damaged in the garden.

The reference to the leaven of the kindom is obvious.  A “kingdom” is the “dominion of the king.”  If we allow Jesus to reign supreme in our hearts, even in small measure, the effect will be a rising of our entire life.

I strongly recommend the teaching entitled Three Leavens of the Mind by Pastor Bill Johnson of Bethel Church in Redding, CA as an expanded resource to further clarify the writings here.  Most of this is influenced heavily by his material, and he is a world class teacher who explains it better than me.