Having thus considered the ingredients which composed the meat-offering, we shall now refer to those which were excluded from it. The first of these was "leaven." "No meat-offering, which ye shall bring unto the Lord, shall be made with leaven." This ingredient is used throughout the inspired volume, without so much as a single exception, as the symbol of _evil_. In chap. xxiii. of our book, which will be noticed in due course, we find leaven admitted in the two loaves which were offered on the day of Pentecost; but from the meat-offering leaven was most sedulously excluded. There was to be nothing sour--nothing that would puff up--nothing expressive of evil in that which typified "the Man Christ Jesus." In Him, there could be nothing savoring of nature's sourness, nothing turgid--nothing inflated: all was pure, solid, and genuine. His word might, at times, cut to the quick; but it was never sour. His style never rose above the occasion. His deportment ever exhibited the deep reality of one walking in the immediate presence of God. In those who bear the name of Jesus, we know, too well, alas! how leaven shows itself in all its properties and effects. There has been but one untainted sheaf of human fruit--but one perfectly unleavened meat-offering; and, blessed be God, that one is ours--ours to feed upon in the sanctuary of the divine presence, in fellowship with God. No exercise can be more truly edifying and refreshing for the renewed mind than to dwell upon the unleavened perfectness of Christ's humanity--to contemplate the life and ministry of One who was absolutely and essentially unleavened. In all His springs of thought, affection, desire, and imagination, there was not so much as a particle of leaven. He was the sinless, spotless, perfect Man. And the more we are enabled, by the power of the Spirit, to enter into all this, the deeper will be our experience of the grace which led this perfect One to place Himself under the full consequences of His people's sins, as He did when He hung upon the cross. This thought, however, belongs entirely to the sin-offering aspect of our blessed Lord. In the meat-offering, sin is not in question. It is not the type of a sin-bearer, but of a real, perfect, unblemished Man, conceived and anointed by the Holy Ghost, possessing an unleavened nature, and living an unleavened life down here, emitting ever Godward the fragrance of His own personal excellency, and maintaining amongst men a deportment characterized by "grace seasoned with salt."