Who has despised the day of small beginning?

How the mighty must bow to the smallest..

The amazing story of our cooperation with one of God’s smallest creations is here unravelled to some extent. It would create volumes if I were to write about all of it. And I admit that I only know what little will be found in this essay. It is my hope that the readers, whether bakers or not, whether preachers or not might at least be awed by the connections between the two books , creation itself and the Bible.

One of my versions of the Bible contains the word bread 453 times.

“Give us today the bread we need tomorrow”

Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as baker’s yeast or brewer’s yeast, is a unicellular 
fungus essential for fermentation in baking, brewing, and winemaking. (Wikipedia)

The phrase in the prayer taught us by the Lord about our daily bread uses a word found nowhere else in the NT. ‘Epiousion’ is taken to mean ‘daily’ but extends beyond the day when the bread is set to rise. The only known process of baking leavened bread at this time was the natural fermentation caused by the naturally existing yeast fungus called by a complex latin term “Saccharomyces Cerevisiae”. So it is translated to ‘a mould growing on sugars found in beer’. The process of such baking, using the naturally existent wild yeast found everywhere in nature takes time. From the setting of the dough until it can be baked in an oven a time span of 3 days is normal. In that time the fermentation takes place inside the dough until ‘the entire dough is leavened’. If the new dough is infected with a lump of old ready ‘mother’ dough the process can be done in 12 hours.

Since the common mode of salary for the most common ‘day workers’ is paid out at the end of the workday the needed ingredients for bread are bought on the way home from work at the end of the day, the bread is kneaded and allowed to rise, or prove, and the next morning it is ready for the oven. It is set today for tomorrows consumption. Relying on the natural wild yeast leavens the bread. It is only available in the dough infected with the fungi.

Modern brewer’s, baker’s or dried yeast is produced on an industrial scale. Various strains of yeast are cultivated to our everlasting enjoyment. But who thanks the God of the yeast?
The unicellular yeast buds and multiplies at phenomenal speed. From a few hundred grams of yeast implanted on the pulp of processed sugar beets the voracious yeast eats its way through the feeding substratum until it reaches tonnes of yeast which are then packed in cubes of various weight or dried and packed for later addition to which ever liquidized starters are required for the production of Bread, Wine, Cheese, Beer etc.. Liquids are needed for fermentation to begin. And the astonishing thing about this minute organism is that it thrives best at the same temperature as our own human body, 37 degrees Celsius!

You heard that right. The yeast is on a suicide mission. As it gobbles up the sugars it often first has extracted from starch it produces carbon dioxide and ethanol, which is alcohol. The concentration of alcohol stops only when the yeast dies from the very product it has so busily been making. The carbon dioxide is trapped in the dough as small bubbles which when heated expands and brings about the texture of leavened bread. The alcohol? It evaporates from the dough at about 67 degrees Celsius. You cant get intoxicated from the alcohol in the bread unless you eat the uncooked dough. I had a Bernese Mountain dog who tried that . She regretted it ever after, fancy eating 12 cinnamon buns proving on the tray?

Earth, Wind, Water and Fire

In the world views of both ancient and modern people the entire existing and observable world can be described as the sum total of those four elements. Bread needs all four to come into existence. The grain must grow on the earth watered by the rain, it is pollinated by the winds blowing through the standing wheat, then it must be milled and ground and then mixed with water, before being fired in the oven to exact temperature and precise time. It is truly a child of Earth, Wind, Water and Fire. And although it is extremely physical it cries out a metaphysical reality. But here is a clinch. The elements must not only be present together, they must also be integrated until the dough is one loaf and none of the original elements can any longer be distinguished from the others.

That throws light on another aspect of ‘unity in diversity’, to wit, the fellowship of the Body of Christ on earth. Of their diversity nobody is in doubt. As to their Unity opinions will differ wildly. Three hundred souls in one place is an assembly but not a body until a level of commonality is achieved by which the three hundred speak with one heart, one voice. Nothing expresses this better than what Paul wrote to the Ephesian church.
‘Be diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. One body and One Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling. one Lord, One Faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.’ Eph 4:3-7
That is the loaf and body of the Church. As little as you can bake bread from merely having placed the ingredients close to each other, equally little can a mere assembly in one place be called a body. The key is integration by the very means that Jesus declared in that passage in Mark 8.
‘He summoned the disciples with the multitude and said to them, ‘If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me, For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it. but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels shall save it.’ Mark 8:34-35
Did I make mention of the suicide mission of the yeast? Death to self.. And Jesus Christ came to give his life as a ransom for many. Are there not uncanny parallels?
And what about the grain falling in the ground and dying if it is to produce fruit?

Does bread bake itself?

You may have noticed or at least reflected that the production of bread is totally impossible if nature was left to itself. The four elements are never found together in the natural world. No grain in the field desires to become bread and grinds itself down to flour. No wheat grain grows in water, nor in salt deposits and water on its own can be infected and become putrid by dead yeast but not come close to bread. Unless someone, possibly a baker, (Probably) collects the four substances and brings them together in the proper order in the due process there will not be the smallest bagel to eat. If I were to give you a bread recipe stating the four ingredients and their proportions and you simply put them in a baking tray before shoving into an oven, what would come out ? A mess.

Unless the proportions are right, and unless they are integrated with each other by kneading and beating and allowed to rest and grow only to be knocked down again to regain momentum by the inclusion of new oxygen no bread will be produced. It takes careful planning and careful execution. At the same time it is so simple that Bread is a staple diet in very many parts of the global population. This allows a few reflections way beyond the humble bread itself.

There is a common attitude expressed by people who claim to be atheistic in outlook. They claim to have searched for evidence of God in His creation but found none. They know from past experience that nothing ever produces anything. They know how hard it is to bring order out of chaos or allow random happenings produce anything worthwhile. They blissfully forget that when they study creation to find the creator they themselves are part of what they are trying to observe. They are absolutely incapable of stepping outside the created order and are therefore metaphysically incompetent to say anything about how it came to be and why at all. They are what they observe and since they have excluded God from the start, they only echo the void they themselves have created. To recognize God the creator is to comprehend the One who gives the grain to the eater, the one who ‘feeds his people with bread at the right time.”

I ask them as kindly as I can if they do not see that excluding a Creator from creation defies all logic reasoning. And I make the point of illustration from the bread they eat. I ask: Have you ever found evidence for the baker in your Hovis or Warburton Loaf? They may respond with something akin to ‘Oh thank heavens , no no I have not.’ It would be most disconcerting to find bits of the baker in the toast! Is the existence of bread not an absolute evidence for a baker? I have yet to come in contact with anyone denying that. And bread is only a fraction of the observable universe. A sane bit of extrapolation leads in only one direction. No bread bakes itself. So the four elements needed for the making of bread work on the four basic ingredients in the bread and suffice to feed a multitude.

Earth, Wind, Water and Fire turn Flour, Water, Salt and Yeast into bread provided there is a baker involved.
This is not only basic bakery but also basic ‘gastrosophy‘. (Literally ‘the philosophy of the thinking stomach.) It means that not even simple bread is without a metaphysical background against which we can understand why God the creator uses bread and images related to it as part of the most profound spiritual reality. ‘Man shall not live by bread alone , but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God.’ Deut 8:3, Matthew 4:4

Unleavened bread in remembrance of salvation

Until the arrival of or discovery of the way to produce yeast all bread was dependent on so called wild yeast. It exists everywhere in creation. It was in the 1680s that the strain of yeast was isolated and could be produced in quantities. Until then the natural existence of yeast was harnessed as soon as ground wheat or other gluten bearing grain was mixed with water. This activated the yeast fungi and started a process of fermentation. As described above that process took time. When Elohim Yahweh told Moses to leave Egypt he gave them a farewell dinner menu consisting of the spotless lamb and the unleavened bread. “They shall eat the flesh that same night, roasted with fire, and they shall eat it with unleavened bread and with bitter herbs.” Exodus 12:8 Unleavened bread is the bread of the pilgrim, the bread of the fugitive, the bread of the one who departs from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. And it is the bread that can only become in volume what it is in weight.

Sanctified bread is free from caverns and empty spaces

We speak of the work of sanctification and seen from the angle of bread it points to the work of the Holy Spirit in ‘knocking the air of pride out of us wherever it appears in our lives. “His chastisement is not pleasant for the time being but when it has been done it brings the fruit of righteousness.’ Hebr 12 The kindest thing the Spirit can do to any child of God is to ‘knock the stuffing out of us.’ I see that God wants to place the weight of His glory on us, but as long as we are puffed up we would crumble if shown a heavy grace.
‘As He was so are we in the world.’ Really?

The leavened bread however is simply ‘puffed up’. The carbon dioxide trapped in the net created by the action of the yeast in the wheat swells in heat and the bread rises. But it adds nothing else but perceivable size. The length of time yeast is allowed to work brings out various elements of taste from the flour and the sugars in the bread feed the fungi and some of the sugars give the brown, actually caramelized colouring, of the bread. The lactose is preferred by the fungi, the fructose gives the colour. When bread is baked without the leaven it becomes a different product.

The leaven must then be excluded entirely for the proper bread of the Passover. In this context leaven is seen as detrimental to the bread, and it extends to every other fermented product in the life of the believer. The massa, matzoth or matza bread has to be worked so fast that no fermentation has time to start. By pommeling, beating, crushing with hands and breadpin, by piercing with the sharp tines of a fork the bread is thinly spread and cut and the fast baking in high temperature adds stripes to the underside of the bread. it must not rise, it will not rise, it cannot rise. It is in volume what it is in weight.

From this passage in 1 Corinthians you get the first hint of what the word leaven means when used negatively. Behind the warnings against allowing leaven when it comes to our interactions as a church fellowship is the struggle between the ‘flesh’ and the Spirit. Paul develops that theme in Galatians ch 5.
And it would not be going too far to say that this also was given to him while he was alone with the Lord for three years after his conversion on the Damascus road. Jesus had told the original 12 the following about what corrupts and defiles a man. In Marks rendition of the gospel he lets us know that what we eat or ingest cannot defile us. Against the frenzied hyper-cleanliness of the scribes and the Pharisees who foamed at the mouth at the disciples eating with unwashed hands Jesus had said ‘That which proceeds out of the man that is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of men proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.’ Mark 7:21-23

It was in the next sequence of events that Jesus warned against the leaven of the Pharisees. The disciples are perplexed after the feeding of the multitude and although they had gathered in twelve baskets full of left overs from the five thousand fed, and seven baskets full after the feeding of the four thousand, they did not understand the relationship between Jesus and abundance. Neither did they understand as yet what Jesus meant when he had declared to them that he was the ‘Panis Angelicus’, the bread of angels from heaven. Pointedly Mark relates that they were in possession of only one loaf. (8:14) The Lord berates them on their lack of understanding. Beginning with the strong warning: ‘ Watch out! Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.’ He then asks them why they still did not understand who He himself was.‘ The apparent size of the Pharisees and Scribes was based on their being puffed up in pride, they were hollow behind the facade.

Flesh and Spirit

Let us not be too hard on them. We or at least I did not understand the full impact of the bread miracles. But before I go into that let me connect the warning of Jesus to the extended warning to us as the followers of Jesus given by Paul to the Galatian churches.
‘But I say, walk by the Spirit and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit and the Spirits against the flesh, for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please… the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness carousing and things like these, of which i forewarn you just I have forewarned you that those who practice such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God.’ Gal 5:16-21

Can there be any doubt at all what the leaven of the Pharisees and Herod are about? Following the gist of the letter to the Galatian churches you see how the Judaist fraction which seems to have made waves all over the early Church was determined to teach that Christ crucified was not enough. The gospel needs augmenting, they claimed, with such things as we ourselves can do and control. But those things will all come out of our own hearts and those hearts are desperately wicked until a man or a woman is born again. The most hot air producing activity of the flesh is pride. Pride puffs a man up far beyond his weight. Going into the ring for battle but having an opponent way above your weight may occasionally bring home a victory, but only if you are a David up against a Goliath!

John, the second of the inner circle of disciples, understood the same issue and told us that we should not love the world. Making too hasty a judgement as to what that might mean has led many to reject the created world altogether and have created a two tier world view where the gospel becomes other worldly and separated from the spiritual reality that is parallel to the visible world, not contrary to it. Creation is entirely ‘diatheistisc’, which is ‘God-transparent,’ we see God in and through creation but God is not the same as Creation. (For more insight into that read Romans ch 1.)

This is what John wrote: ‘ Do not love the world, nor the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the FATHER is not in him. (And here comes the definition of what he means by ‘the world’). For all that is in the world, the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God (the Father) abides for ever.’ 1 John 2:15-17

Avoiding the leaven of the pharisees is in some sense the same as ‘sanctification’. That is the life enduring process from my conversion to Christ until my day of departure from the world. Then I shall have been deemed ready to meet with Him for whom I have alive all these years. The road has been rocky and full of holes at times and many a fall has grazed my knees, but when I am at the end I shall be like Him for I shall see Him as He is. (1 John 3:2) ‘ And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself just as He is pure.’ 1 Jon 3:3 You see: more casting aside of the leaven of the Pharisees and Herod.

The feeding of the multitudes.
Now we may be ready to draw a better conclusion to the mystery of the multiplied loaves of bread and portions of fish as told in the gospels. As a side track it may be said that the phrase bread and fish refers to the habit of eating still common in many parts of the world. The bread is not only there for being eaten as such but is also both plate and cutlery. It is broken, not cut. It was considered that cutting the bread killed it. Consequently scripture insists on speaking of the breaking of the bread. It was often baked with a cross cut and broken after the indentations made by the cross. Then it was used to be dipped into the common bowl of whatever accompanied the bread. The Greek word is ‘opsarion’ and refers to anything eaten in such a manner with bread as the mainstay. (See John 6:9, 13:26..morsel) Fish in Greek is ‘Ichthys’. But it need not necessarily have been fish as such. In Mark 8 it is literally ‘small fishes’. Being by the Lake Galilee that is of no surprise.

Two kinds of bread bear witness to the one and the same Bread of Heaven which came down from Heaven .

We have made a case for two kinds of bread. One that excludes all leaven because it was made in and for specific circumstances. I have already indicated that the Passover bread was part of a larger purpose. The way that bread is produced is highly charged with symbolic meanings. At the end of this paper I will post a link or two showing the way messianic jews interpret the Matza. But a hint is in place: crushed, broken, pierced and striped are not only significant in baking of unleavened ceremonial bread, I also aligns with Isaiah 53 in its description of the suffering servant. He was bruised, pierced and striped on our behalf.

Jesus is the content creator of all there is in the universe.

But let me open a still wider horizon of understanding.
What shall we make of our Lord and Saviour from these words in the letter of Paul to the Colossian Church?

“And He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, both in heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities –all things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things and in Him all things hold together. (Have their substance and essential properties.) Col 1:15-17

The High view of Christ which was the very key to the gospel declares bluntly that Christ himself is in on the creation of ‘Saccharomyces Cerevisiae’. The single cell structure of the common yeast is so vital that one gramme of yeast contains 100 million yeast cells each a glutton for sugar and able to multiply many times over in it’s life cycle. Not much else in creation multiplies faster. If He who created the yeast with its capacities for multiplying, why would any one raise an eyebrow at the same Son of Man and Son of God taking ordinary bread produced by the yeast and by-passing the tedious and time consuming process of fermentation and resting and proving and baking and bring the finished product to the table with plenty to spare? ‘Bread of heaven, bread of Heaven, feed me till I want no more.’

He did the same with the wine at a famous wedding at Canaa. But then again he is the true vine too.
This is a moment of awe, is it not? The one who created it all steps into His own creation and co-creates along the same routes as the initial miracle of creation. Do you still not understand? Alas, the people in his day would rebuke Him rather than receive Him and ‘although He came to His own, they received him not.‘
In Johns gospel we are told of the meeting between Jesus and Nathaniel. ‘ Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him and said of him: ‘Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.’ (In breadterms: a bread without any ferment of leaven!) Nathanael said to Him, “how do you know me? ” Jesus answered and said to him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.” John 1:47-49

We could continue for many hours exploring all that is told by the many images of bread in the scriptures.
We might speak of a barley loaf rolling down a hill into the camp of the Midianites and flattening their tents, being a portent of Gideons victory over the enemies. We could speak of Bread miracles even during the former covenant as 100 men were fed from one loaf. A poisoned stew had brought matters to a head, but bread was found for them from what one man brought and it fed them all, even with leftovers or surplus accounted for. 2 Kings 4: 42f We could spend hours pursuing various images of bread and the consequences of the use and misuse of it.

But our purpose has been reached if you see that the Bread which came down from heaven fed and feeds those who believe in Him who was born in a house of Bread (Bethlehem) and was broken for our salvation. If the bread trough is empty today then we may understand that scarcity of bread and scarcity of the word of God have the same cause. Neglecting the commandments of God is the root cause of all famine. (Deuteronomy 28: 15f)
But here I go again. I can only commend us to His grace and revelation of what his words mean. With seeing eyes we want to see.

‘And it came about that when he reclined at the table with them, He took the bread and blessed it and breaking it, he began giving it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and He vanished from their sight.” Luke 24:30-31

Abide with me, fast falls the eventide..

Teddy Donobauer
November 6th 2025

Links concerning the messianic understanding of Matza

Matzah And Messiah: Five Ways Matzah Points To Jesus – Chosen People Ministries
The Lord’s Supper
The Afikomen: My Body Broken for You — Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations