Friday, January 23, 2009

Of salt, and leaven

Those of you who live in the U.S. know that our television broadcast signals are scheduled to be all digital in February of this year. Since I have a rabbit-ear antenna on an analog t.v., I got one of the digital converter boxes a few months ago and have enjoyed watching shows in digital format. One of the local public broadcasting stations (aka PBS) has 2 additional 'channels', one is called Create. I love watching several of the cooking shows they have on Create. (What does all of that have to do with spiritual warfare or EFT, you ask? I'm getting to that next.)

On one of those shows, I forget exactly which one, it may have been 'Baking with Julia' (Julia Child) they were talking about and demonstrating baking bread. There are several ingredients used in baking bread, and a Passover bread omits the leavening. I won't get into that discussion, but all leavening agents were supposed to be removed from the house during the Passover celebration. Jesus broke the bread and gave it to the disciples during the Passover meal before he died and told them to 'take, eat, this is my body...' Jesus was born in Bethlehem, meaning 'village of bread'.

In the discussion of bread making, it was mentioned that salt can kill the action of yeast (which is a leavening agent). That's an interesting thing to know, so I tucked it away as a mental note. I found a couple of web references for that too, as follows: Salt: Salt acts as a yeast retardant, as well as

Salt inhibits the growth of yeast. Never mix yeast into salted water. Since most tap water goes through a filtering process which utilizes salt as a refining/cleaning agent, many cooks use only distilled water for baking. However, if you are baking during the hot summer season and find your dough rising too much, the addition of a little extra salt can control that runaway yeast growth. (from here)
Then while pondering that a couple of days later, some things Jesus said sort of clicked into place. Before that, the saying "Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. " (Mat 5:13 KJVA) didn't make a lot of sense to me.

But, when you combine it with other passages such as: "How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should 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. "(Mat 16:11-12 KJVA) as well as: "In the mean time, when there were gathered together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon another, he began to say unto his disciples first of all, Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy." (Luk 12:1 KJVA)

I had heard that being the 'salt of the earth' referred to salt being a flavor enhancer. That's all well and good, but I still didn't quite see how following Christ fit into the idea of enhancing flavor. To me, it makes more sense that we are to be 'salt' and stop or inhibit the growth of the 'leaven' (hypocrisy and lies), which very much fits into the idea of spiritual warfare.

I'd been meaning to type this up for a couple of months, but I just read a blog post that discusses a vision. The vision is about pillars in the sea, and that made me think of the sea being made of salt water, and Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt. (Gen 19:26) I don't know if that has anything to do with the vision or not, but it gave me the nudge I needed to finally type up this blog post.




No comments: