[OBW]

You clearly don't get it.

First, your declaration that you don't now what story I am talking about is a ruse, unless you are only putting on a show of intelligence concerning leaven. You know exactly which "story" is being mentioned. It is the one concerning the sowing of the seed. A story about the places that the seed can land and try to grow. It might have been better titled, "The Parable of the Soil."

Second, leaven is used in so many places because it speaks about small things put into larger things that causes the larger thing to be altered. And once put in, there is difficulty in extracting it. (In the case of actual leaven, essentially impossible to extract.)

The verse concerning searching to scriptures is not contextually part of the passage about the leaven of the Pharisees. So it is forced upon the discussion. And when something is discovered to be metaphorical or allegorical, that does not automatically bring every possible aspect of that allegory/metaphor into play. There is probably only one aspect of leaven that is in play in this statement. It probably has to do with the things not found in scripture that are being added into their teachings. It might extend to the idea that taking in their teachings was to take in something that will alter your faith and obedience from what it should be (but probably not). The rest of the possible aspects of bread-making could become a Christian self-help book, but that might turn out to just be leaven of 20th/21st century LRC theologians. At least that is where I would start. You don't just bring the whole analogy in. You seek to find how it is meaningful.

And you don't presume verses not in play as relevant to understanding the one you are reading. Take the John 5:39 fortune cookie and the Matt 16:6 fortune cookie and stick them together. NO. Read Matt 16. It has its own words and context. If, after studying Matt 16 for a while, someone were to ask "how might John 5:39 play into the understanding of this?" I might have to answer "I'm not sure. It is not within the context of Matt 16 and therefore not necessarily about the same thing. It might be said that the Pharisees were not doing a very good job of searching the scriptures. But failure to get everything out of it would not be leaven, so I'm still not so sure."

Last, "purge out the old leaven" is not part of the Matt 13 context. So a statement like "Small minded people cannot accept when their concepts are wrong. But the reason they made the mistake in the first place was not because 1 Cor. 5 and Exodus were not relevant to an understanding of leaven, but because they misunderstood what the term “purge out the old leaven” meant. . . " is to suggest that understanding the irrelevant passage is important. The one parable in Matt 13 that concerns leaven is about adding the kingdom (the leaven) to something else — "humanity" might be a reasonable way to describe the significance of the flour/dough. There is no purging of old leaven involved. No need to understand "purge out the old leaven."

And, in short, you have blown by the actual words in Matt 13 and gone to look for something else as the answer. You are too focused on the whole bread-making experience to pay attention to the particular ways that small parts of that process are relevant to the one parable (the kingdom as leaven) and irrelevant to all the others in Matt 13.

And you wonder why I suggest that you are doing exactly what Lee did. It may have actually come about it from a different source, but it is no less like Lee and no less wrong.

Beware the leaven of Nee, Lee and the LRC. Beware of the leaven of those who have splintered from the LRC yet cling to its leaven.