Author and bread-maker Abigail Dodds talks about what something as simple as the mixture of flour, water, and yeast can teach us about God, the Bible, and what it really means to be satisfied by our Savior.
Excerpt:
Abigail Dodds
One of my very favorite Bible passages is Colossians 3:1–4. It says, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” That is still one of my favorite passages, but one of the ways that I misapplied that passage was to think that earthly things were earthy things, and those aren’t exactly the same thing. If you keep reading past verse four, which was always my favorite part that I would memorize and then I would be done, it defines what earthly things are. It’s things like sexual immorality. It lists a whole bunch of things. Those are the earthly things that we are not to be fixing our minds on and that we are not to be participating in. But earthy things—God made the world. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Ps. 24:1). Those things are actually pointers to God. It’s like Lewis says: there are sunbeams that point us in the direction of God if we can trace along them all the way up and back to the sun, we see more of who God is. Where that can go astray is that if you do not know God’s word, if you do not know the way he chooses to use the earth as metaphor for himself—for example, things of the earth like bread as metaphor for himself—you’ll miss it. You’ll go really weird, and people do.
Matt Tully
What’s an example of that? What do you mean by that?
For instance, there are a lot of real nature lovers—people who absolutely love nature and value the earth or the environment—but who cannot find God in it. They cannot find the true and living God through merely accessing the world because they cannot understand the meaning without both the revelation of the world and the word.
You’ve got to have the revelation of Jesus Christ through the Scriptures—the written word—in order to rightly understand all the metaphors in the world—like bread and a vineyard. That’s where knowledge of God’s word is absolutely essential if you want to start poking your head around in the metaphors of the world that are going to point you to Christ.
Abigail Dodds
(emphasis added)
Covenant Presbyterian Church 