Christ is saying to his generation, ‘You scribes think that because you are born Jews, and because you keep the ceremonial law, that you are God’s children, but it isn’t like that. There is an inner secret event. Real conversion is inside of you. Like leaven working in a lump of dough, it works from within because it has been mixed carefully through every part. How graphically Christ put it! The leaven affects all the dough, and the work of God in individual human life is like that. When the gospel is received by faith, it is hidden in the heart, and it secretly starts to change the whole person. The Christian life is not automatic in us, inherent in us. We are not born Christians. We may reach 15, 20, 30, 40, 60 years of age, and it is not there. We are spiritually dead still. It has to be placed there. We have to hear the preaching of the gospel or read Scripture, or hear the witness of a Christian friend. We have to respond to what we hear The woman had to put the leaven there in the dough, else it would never have been leavened. The hard part is sometimes a battle with our own hearts when one part of us says, I want to be changed, and the other part says, leave me alone. You scribes have not asked for light from heaven; spiritual life is not there in you. They imagined they could advance by giving greater attention to their religious practices, but you don’t make yourselves Christians by any ritual or ceremony. We have to be changed from the inside out.
The leaven was hidden in the lump and the gospel is hidden in an individual life. That does not mean that no one can ever tell if it is there or not. The whole point of the parable is to give us a picture of transformation by a hidden agent, and as the leaven causes the whole dough to rise, so too the gospel steadily transforms a life. As you look at that person soon after they have trusted in Christ, you may see no visible change on the outside, but there is a powerful new agent at work within them which does not leave any part of life unaffected.
How different this is to the nominal believer whose religion is all on the outside for public viewing. How different also it is from the expectation of man that when Christ came he would come as an all-powerful conquering king, subduing all before him by virtue of his majesty. He will indeed come like this at the end, but now the gospel works in a much more secret and hidden way, gently and by spiritual influence and understanding the privacy of individual hearts. This again is not what the world expects. But because it is so, we need to be ready to listen to the gentlest reproof from God, and align ourselves with the still small voice of the Spirit.
That leaven had to go through the whole lump. Conversion is not just a partial change, so that one person can say, ‘I have got a new mind. What did you get?’ No, all is changed. Before we invented excuses whenever we were in trouble, now there is a new honesty. We were ready to indulge in sinful pleasures, now we keep far away from those things because we know they lead to death. Our whole mind is changed, but so too are our will and our affections. How does this happen? God works within us and gives us a new nature. We have new tastes, new desires, new motives that we never had before. And the gospel which is within us goes on changing the life as new areas of our being and behaviour are affected by it. As we sit under the ministry of the word and read Scripture and meditate on it, we examine every aspect of our lives and we bow to the Lordship of Christ when we are challenged. What a picture of power!
But it is also a picture of the progress of the gospel throughout the history of the world. This does not imply that that whole world will be converted. The Scripture is very clear that that will not happen. ‘Broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: 14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it’ (Matthew 7:13-14). And yet the gospel must be preached to all the world. ‘And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people’ (Revelation 14:6). It is in this sense that the gospel affects the whole world. We know that the progress of the gospel is gradual in that respect. First Judea, then Samaria, then through the missionary work of the apostle Paul into Gentile territory, and through the witness of the churches throughout gospel age, to every nation. Out of the nations God will call his elect, but only through the instrumentality of his people, telling others what they have come to know by grace alone. Let the churches endeavour to make known the gospel in every corner of the world.