The Contagion of Unbelief

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Well, we will have bags of snacks at our house, as people tend to do. And a while back, Charlie started telling me, for example, don’t eat anything out of the bag of goldfish that’s on the right, because Charlie and Jojo got hold of it today and they were eating out of it. Okay, thanks for the warning, because if they’re unrestricted, I know where those hands have been, all right?

I’ve met them. And, you know, I’m not naming names. I will say it’s one of the younger three.

But yesterday I was mopping the fellowship hall, and I look over, and one of them is down on hands and knees trying to lick the water up off the floor. So I’m really not interested in eating or drinking after children. So she would warn me, you know, stay out of that particular bag of goldfish crackers.

Or, you know, I might see a Ziploc bag of popcorn on one of the tables in the living room and say, has a child had their hands in that bag today? And she’ll tell me whether they have or haven’t. Or she’ll say, I don’t know.

You know, you’re just going to have to risk it. And then I usually pray about it and quickly decide I don’t want popcorn after all. There was one time recently, though, that I asked her if children had had their hands in a bag.

And I don’t remember if it was popcorn or goldfish or some kind. I don’t know what it was. But I asked her, I said, has anybody been touching the food in this bag?

And her answer was something along the lines of they only touched a few on the top. Excuse my English, but that don’t matter. Right?

That is just a few on the top. It does not work. I do not observe the five-second rule.

If they have stuck their hands in the bag and they have touched the one on top, it is contagious, all right? That top one is germy, and then it has spread its germs and filth all through the box. It is all unclean as far as I am concerned.

That filth has spread. We have to be on guard against the germs. We have spent the last two years taught that, have we not? That it can’t be contained in one place.

We were told, and part of what was confusing and frustrating for a lot of us is they kept changing the rules, you know, six feet apart, eight feet apart, well six feet apart for this many minutes. And we learned sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason, okay? You can’t contain the virus or the contagion.

You’re either there by it or you’re not. But once it gets into a place, it’s going to spread. And we see the same kind of thing, this idea of a contagion, of something undesirable spreading to everything it comes in contact with.

We see this in Jesus’ interaction with the Pharisees and with his own followers in Mark chapter 8. If you would turn with me in your Bibles to Mark chapter 8. We’re going to see tonight how when something is contagious, it’s not going to be just limited to one spot on its own.

If it has the opportunity, it’s going to spread. Mark chapter 8, once you turn there, if you’re able to stand without too much difficulty, if you’ll stand with me as we read from God’s Word. If you don’t have your Bible or can’t find the passage, it’ll be on the screen for you.

But we’re going to start in verse 11 tonight and look through verse 21 as Jesus deals with this idea of the undesirable spread of unbelief. Starting in verse 11, it says, Then the Pharisees came out and began to dispute with Him, seeking from Him a sign from heaven, testing Him. But He sighed deeply in His spirit and said, Why does this generation seek a sign?

Assuredly, I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation. And He left them. And getting into the boat again, He departed to the other side.

Now the disciples had forgotten to take bread, and they did not have more than one loaf with them in the boat. Then he charged them, saying, and by the way, that does not mean like he ran at them like he charged. It means he gave them instructions.

He charged them, saying, Take heed. Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. And they reasoned among themselves, saying, It is because we have no bread.

But Jesus, being aware of it, said to them, Why do you reason because you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive nor understand? Is your heart still hardened?

Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember?

When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of fragments did you take up? They said to him, Twelve. Also, when I broke up the seven for the four thousand, How many large baskets full of fragments did you take up?

And they said, seven. So he said to them, how is it you do not understand? And you may be seated.

So hopefully on your way in tonight, you picked up the grid that had this passage and the parallel passage in the book of Matthew, because looking at them both together really helps us understand a little bit more deeply what’s going on here. They give context to each other, and I think it’s important. But what we’re going to see in both of these accounts of this event, of this exchange with the elites and then the discussion with his followers afterwards, is that Jesus talks about leaven.

He talks about yeast. And the leaven that he’s talking about is this deliberate determination not to believe him and not to believe God despite the evidence that’s in front of them. These people were determined not to believe, and it did not matter what evidence, it did not matter what sign He presented. They had already made up their minds that no matter what they saw, they weren’t going to believe because they didn’t want to.

And that’s what Jesus is warning about. This word leaven, by the way, is an old word, so if by chance you’re not familiar with it, leaven is another word for yeast. Like the yeast that we put in bread to make it rise. and I don’t understand all of the mechanics of it, but I’ve explained it to the kids before as it’s.

. . This is so appetizing.

It’s little bugs that you mix into the bread dough and they eat part of the dough and then they burp and it makes bubbles and it makes the bread go up. That’s basically how it works. But it spreads throughout the whole dough.

And leaven, yeast, is used frequently in Scripture as a picture of some kind of sin and the way it spreads. And so he’s warning them about this deliberate unbelief. Now, I want to be clear on this idea of unbelief, or we might sometimes use doubting as a synonym, but I don’t think they necessarily mean the same thing.

So when we’re talking about unbelief and doubt and honest questions, this is not meant to demonize people who have doubts, people who have honest questions. To those who were in the study on Wednesday night, I told you yet again, I think churches have made a huge mistake when we have not made ourselves a safe place for people with honest questions. Because when people have honest questions and they don’t feel safe asking them at church, then they go to the world looking for answers and they get the wrong answers.

Or it leads to deeper questions, bigger questions that left unanswered Lead people away from Christianity. Now I think some churches make the opposite mistake, that they are so into questioning for questioning’s sake that they never arrive at any answers and everything’s just up in the air and God’s word is whatever you want it to say. I think questions are a good thing.

I think the church should be a place where people can bring their questions and deal with their questions, but I think we’re not asking questions just for the sake of asking questions. We’re asking questions because we believe there are answers. And so we’re working on finding them together.

So when I’m talking about unbelief, I’m not talking about people who have doubts. We all have doubts about things at times. I’m not talking about honest questions.

Hey, I’m really struggling to understand this. There was nothing doubting or honestly questioning about anything the Pharisees were doing. The Pharisees, it was a matter of, and not just the Pharisees, all of the elites around Jesus.

It was a matter of deliberate unbelief. It’s not that they were wrestling with, is He the Messiah, is He not? Is He a prophet, is He not?

Does He speak for God, does He not? They knew deep down in their souls who He was, but they didn’t want to believe. They were determined no matter what evidence they saw that they were going to reject it.

And they each had their own reasons for rejecting it. You’ll see between Matthew and Mark that He mentions the Pharisees. Both of them mentioned Jesus talking about the Pharisees.

And then Mark records that Jesus said the Pharisees and Herod. Matthew records that Jesus said the Pharisees and Sadducees. And on your handout, I gave you a couple of reasons why I think that might be, that they give different names and none of them have to do with, well, it’s made up or they made mistakes.

It could be all of the above. It could be that there was some overlap between the Sadducees and Herodians. There might have been some overlap between them.

Some people who were politically Herodians and religiously Sadducees, they could have been both. It could have been that Jesus mentioned all three, and nobody here in their gospel accounts is trying to get. .

. I mean, they admit we are not trying to give every detail of everything Jesus said or did, so they accurately recorded the things that popped into mind. But nowhere saying.

. . Matthew’s not saying, no, he said Pharisees and Sadducees.

He didn’t mention Herod. And Mark’s not saying, no, he said Pharisees and Herod didn’t mention the Sadducee. They’re just each giving a piece of the puzzle.

But among them, between them, we see that he mentioned these three groups and they all had their own individual reasons for wanting to reject Jesus because they all had things that were more important to them, really, than what God was doing. The Pharisees rejected Jesus in favor of their own traditions because their traditions often misinterpreted what God’s Word said or went beyond what God’s Word said. So when Jesus came and perfectly fulfilled God’s Word, it left their traditions out in the cold.

And you know, sometimes we get a little attached to our traditions. And if you don’t think we’re attached to our traditions, try changing the date of Thanksgiving with your family. Now, some of you do that already, but some people are going to lose their minds.

You know, start messing with traditions. People, eventually, like with the kids, which stuffed animal do I have to take away to make you listen? Eventually, we’re going to find the one you love.

Eventually, you’re going to get to the tradition that’s going to make somebody lose their mind. The Pharisees were very attached to their traditions. And so if it was Jesus versus their traditions, even if in their mind it was what God is doing versus our traditions, we’re going to take our traditions.

The Sadducees, and so the Pharisees were kind of the legalists of their day. The Sadducees were kind of the liberals of their day. Because you look at a lot of what is taught in Scripture that’s supernatural, and they rejected it basically with a posture of, we’re too intellectual and superior to believe those things.

They even looked down on the Pharisees for being kind of the dumb fundamentalists of their day. Wait, you believe in a resurrection? You believe in life after death.

You believe in angels. We’re too sophisticated to believe these things. For the Sadducees, they were all about status.

The Pharisees were too, but in a different way. For the Sadducees, they wanted to be seen as the intellectually superior. They wanted to be seen as separate from the Pharisees.

Those two only ever got along when they were teamed up against Jesus. And so if Jesus came along, and sometimes Jesus sided with the Pharisees when they were right. When they were right about resurrections, when they were right about life after death, when they were right about angels, when they were right about some of these things, Jesus said so.

The Sadducees weren’t about to stand for that. And so if it’s between what God is doing over here that doesn’t fit with our program and our status of being the smart intellectual religious people, then we’re going to take this over here. And so they were opposed to Jesus.

They group. As a matter of fact, Mark says the leaven of Herod. So you’ve probably already figured out if you didn’t know this coming in that they were followers of Herod.

They were called Herodians because they were followers of Herod. These were the people who didn’t like the idea of somebody coming along and being the Messiah, the King of the Jews. They didn’t like this idea because they looked at Herod who was already sort of on the throne as King of the Jews.

The Romans had put him there. And because of their connections, because of the power they got from it, because of the wealth they got from it, they really liked Herod being in charge and didn’t want to see that change. So if it came down to what God was doing or their own power, they were going to reject Jesus and embrace their own power.

All three of these groups had their individual reasons for not wanting to believe Jesus. But they came together around the idea of rejecting Jesus. Now the problem here is that they had ignored numerous pieces of evidence in order to be able to reject Jesus.

Jesus did not just show up in Jerusalem one day and say, here I am, I’m the Messiah. Believe in me or else. Jesus built up to this.

Jesus did miracles. Jesus taught. And when He made His claims clear, he had already done some things to back it up.

And so for them to reject his claims was to ignore their own eyes and all the things that God had done out in the open in front of them over the previous years. And Jesus identifies two recent previous examples of his own miracles that everybody in this conversation seems to have forgotten. If you go to verse 20, well verses 19 and 20, He’s asking His own followers, have you forgotten?

Have you forgotten about the feeding of the 5,000? And have you forgotten about the feeding of the 4,000? Do you not remember how I fed these people?

Do you not remember how many baskets you yourself took up afterwards? It seemed like even His followers weren’t connecting the dots. And so the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians, they were looking at these miracles that Jesus had just finished.

It’s not even like it was decades before and they’re saying, yeah, but what have you done lately? This was pretty recent stuff. And yet they’re going, no, that’s not enough.

We want a sign. He’s done signs already. You want signs?

He’s done that. No, not that sign. They want their own sign.

So they’re ignoring the evidence that’s right in front of them. But also, you know, when Jesus deals with the unbelief of people around him, I like to go back and see what have they already seen that he’s done? I like to go back and count up the things he’s done up to this point.

And I’m not infallible, but my count is this, what I came up with this week. By this point in his ministry, he has publicly healed 12 people. He has exercised demons from four people.

He has raised two people from the dead. I mean, that right there ought to settle the whole issue. And he’s orchestrated five events that are not explainable by purely natural And I mean things like changing water into wine, calming storms, walking on water, things like that.

So he had done, what is that? 12 plus 4 is 16, plus 2 is 18, plus 5 is 23. He’s done at least 23 miracles in public that they had witnessed or heard about.

And they’re looking at all of that and saying, no, that’s not enough. Show us a sign. Now, if they had any intellectual honesty, if they had any curiosity at all, they would at least recognize there’s something here.

There’s something going on with Jesus that we can’t explain, and they’d at least be wanting to know more. But their response is to look for a sign, and the problem with that is He’s shown them signs. What they’re really asking for is show us the sign we want to see.

We might look at that and think, what’s the big deal? Show them a sign. People still talk that way.

Lord, if you’re real, show a sign. I was reading a book this week where they were talking about how people say this, and yet if God put an arrangement of stars in the shape of a cross, people would look at that and still find reasons to explain it away. Which, by the way, there are constellations in the shape of crosses.

There’s something called the Southern Cross. It’s on the flag of Australia. So if we’re looking for that.

. . But you know what?

If Jesus put a giant blinking neon sign in the sky that said Jesus saves, people would find reasons to explain it away. What they’re doing is trying to set up a sign that they would want to see in verse 11. The problem here is that they are expecting the God of the universe to obey their commands.

Do you see how silly that is? The irony is that they want him to prove that he’s God by obeying their commands. Now, I don’t quite have four decades under my belt on this earth, so compared to some of you, I’m kind of new to the theology thing, but I don’t think it works that way.

Right? God doesn’t obey us. It’s the other way around.

So prove to us that you’re God by doing exactly what we say. And people still take that approach to God today. And this is understandably frustrating to Jesus.

Verse 12 says he sighed deeply. Now, I talked a couple weeks ago about how he sighed in his spirit, and it wasn’t a sign of frustration. I think it was a sign of sadness.

Here I think he’s frustrated. He sighed deeply in verse 12 and then we see in Matthew’s account of it, he gives us a little more detail in Matthew 16 verses 2 and 3, he comments about how they understand the signs from the weather right in front of them, but they can’t understand what God is doing right in front of them. And these are the religious leaders.

These are the teachers of the law and they don’t have a clue what God is doing. And he says the reason for this is because they have willfully abandoned God and His priorities in favor of their own. As long as you’re too focused on what you’re doing to pay attention and obey what God is doing, then you’re not going to understand God’s plans.

And so he calls them out and he refuses to give them what they want. In verse 12 here in Mark and in Matthew 16. 4, he says no. Now in Mark, he says no sign shall be given.

In Matthew, he says no sign shall be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah. This is not a contradiction either. Remember, both of these guys are summarizing what happened.

The idea of quoting everything verbatim, that didn’t come around for a few hundred years after that. Their purpose is to give us the gist of what he said. So when Mark records, he said, no sign shall be given.

He’s making the point that Jesus just refused to give into their demands. You want a sign? You’re not getting the sign you want.

I’m not jumping through your hoops is the point of Mark’s record here. Matthew just gives us a little further information that Jesus says, the only sign that is going to be given to anybody is the sign that I want to offer, it’s the sign of the prophet Jonah. Now when you look at that, there are at least two different occasions where he invokes the sign of the prophet Jonah.

Because there are at least two places in the book of Matthew where he has a very similar conversation and says, you want a sign, the only sign you get is the sign of the prophet Jonah. And he explains that what that sign means is that just like Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights. He says, so I will be in the belly of the earth for three days and three nights.

When you look at Jonah being swallowed by a whale, you know, if we saw that happen, we’d think, oh, he’s a dead man. And so for him to be spit out three days later when he should have been dead, you could look at it as a foreshadowing of the resurrection. And Jesus says, it’s going to be just like that with me.

I’m going to be in the grave for three days and three nights. People are going to think I’m dead and then I’m going to come back. There’s your sign.

Jeff Foxworthy just stole from Jesus as far as I’m concerned. Jesus said, here’s your sign. It’s going to be the resurrection.

You don’t get anything other than that. Jesus was not going to put on a big show. He wasn’t going to have neon lights.

He wasn’t going to have strobes. And He wasn’t going to do things at their command. You want a sign.

The only sign you get, by the way, the only sign you need is the sign of the prophet Jonah. When Jesus comes back to life, having said He would, having predicted it, That settles it. That settles the issue for anybody who’s open to the possibility that He could be who He says He is.

If you’re not determined not to believe, then when you’re convinced of the resurrection, it pretty well settles it. And so He tells them that’s the only sign there is. And again, He’d already had this conversation with them back in Matthew chapter 12, which is also recorded in Luke chapter 11.

But he indicates even when they got that sign, they weren’t going to believe. And it’s because they were not in unbelief for lack of evidence. They were in unbelief because they wanted to be.

And that’s what Jesus is warning about with this issue of the leaven. Jesus warns us against an attitude that says, I don’t want to believe what God says. Because it’s so easy for us to fall into that same category.

Now, we may not abandon our faith. we may not say, well, I don’t believe in God because I don’t want to believe in God. But sometimes even as Christians, we can read something in the scriptures and say, I just don’t want to do that.

I know people who profess to be believers who say, no, I don’t want to believe that that’s what that means. Okay, I can’t make you, but that is what it says. And so Jesus warns about this in verse 15.

He says, then he charged them saying, take heed, beware the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. And so in verse 16, they think he’s talking about actual bread, but he explains in verses 17 through 21 that we’ve already read through that he’s talking about spiritual things. And eventually, Matthew makes it clear in Matthew 16, 12, that they realize he’s talking about these people’s teachings.

He’s not talking about actual bread. He’s talking about the things that they teach. Because each of these groups has their little circle of influence, and there are people around them who are being influenced by the things that they teach and the attitudes that they portray.

And sometimes the disciples might even be in those circles of influence. Some of the disciples may have come from schools of thought where they looked up to the Pharisees. They may still at times have some of those tendencies.

And so he’s warning that this is infectious. These teachings and these attitudes that follow with it. These teachings were connected with the things that they taught.

The Pharisees with their traditions. The Sadducees with their teachings of being too intellectual to believe what the Scripture said. The Herodians with their pursuit of power at any cost. Their teachings were connected with this attitude of what I call volitional unbelief.

They did not believe because they did not want to. They valued other things more than God, so they refused to believe. And Jesus said it’s contagious.

He compares it to yeast. and the reason he compares it to yeast is because you can’t leaven half of a loaf of bread. If you’ve ever made bread, you know, you put the yeast in there, you knead the dough, it’s just, it’s all in there and you can’t take it out. You can’t limit it to half the loaf.

You know, you might think, well, I can get by with, I’ll put the yeast in and then I won’t really knead the dough. You know what? It’s going to spread through that whole loaf and eventually the whole loaf of bread is going to rise.

It’s like the germs I talked about at the beginning of the message. It just spreads if left unchecked. If allowed to take root, it just spreads.

And now there’s nothing evil about having yeast in your bread. But again, for them, it was often used as a, not that yeast in itself was sinful, but it was used as a picture of how sin operates. And so he told them this to help them understand if you start valuing other things above what God’s doing, and you start saying, I’m not going to believe God here because it’s not convenient for me.

That spreads. If you start listening to people who are promoting unbelief, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to listen to that teaching because it doesn’t suit you.

If you start listening to that, that’s going to spread. It will take over your life. So he warns his followers, take heed, beware, stay away from it.

And where this applies to us today is, again, it’s so easy. to fall into that trap of saying, I’m going to choose not to believe this because it’s not convenient. I’m going to choose not to believe this because it’s easier.

I’m going to choose not to believe what God says here because I just flat out don’t want to do that. If we adopt that posture in one area of our lives, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t spread. Don’t be surprised if you start doing that if it doesn’t spread to others around you.

And so what you and I need to do instead is cultivate a willingness to believe God when He speaks and when He acts. To believe what God says. Sometimes it’s going to be inconvenient.

Hello, sometimes it’s going to be inconvenient to believe what this book says. Sometimes it’s going to interfere with what you want to do. Sometimes it’s going to put expectations on you that are not as fun as not having those expectations.

Sometimes we’re going to be attacked and made fun of no matter how lovingly we try to live out these principles. Sometimes this book is just inconvenient. But we need to be willing to believe God anyway.

We need to be willing to believe what He says and believe it enough to obey it. Because we cannot be so naive. Jesus warns His disciples and by extension us, warns us that we cannot be so naive as to think that we can say, no, I’m not going to believe that in one small area and expect that it’s going to stay there.

Sometimes people talk about the slippery slope like it’s a fallacy, but sometimes the slope is slippery, and sometimes it’s slopey. And Jesus warned that the yeast would end up everywhere if we let it get a foothold anywhere.