Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees

In this passage, the Lord continued to demonstrate by His mighty works that He was indeed the long-promised Messiah, and that He had come from God. He performed miracles of healing across a wide spectrum of acute medical problems. He also fed the four thousand using the meagre resources available, and the surplus was greater than the original supply. Faced with all this evidence, the voice of unbelief is still heard to say ‘Show us a sign from heaven’, cp. Matt. 16. 1. The Lord rebukes these religious leaders by saying that they could discern from the heavens whether the weather will be fair or foul, and yet they were unable to discern the fact that His mighty works were indeed the ultimate ‘sign from heaven’ they were seeking. The Lord shows that unbelief will never be satisfied, no matter how conclusive the evidence presented.

After this confrontation with unbelief, the Lord says to His disciples, ‘Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees’, v. 6. But the disciples misunderstood, thinking that the Lord was referring to the fact that they had not brought bread with them. The Lord reminds them that He had just demonstrated the adequacy of heaven’s resources in the absence of adequate supply, and that He could not be referring to the lack of bread, but that He was referring to the doctrine of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Leaven is consistently portrayed in scripture as the propagation of evil. It permeates silently and insidiously until the whole mass is irreversibly affected. The apostle Paul likened the tolerance of immorality in Corinth to leaven saying, ‘And ye are puffed up’, 1 Cor. 5. 2. And again, ‘Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven’, vv. 6, 7. Likewise he likens the false gospel, being propagated among the Galatians, to leaven, saying again, ‘A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump’, Gal. 5. 9.

The Lord would have us be diligent in our watchfulness against the inroads of ‘leaven’ in any assembly, whether doctrinal or moral, and to have the courage to deal with it promptly, before all is affected.