Of Bread, Yeast and Unbelief

Mark 8:1-21

May 11, 2008

 

We have been going through the Gospel of Mark these Sunday mornings, and chapter 8 brings us to the end of the first half of the book. Scholars agree that Mark has a part one and a part two, and this is the end of part one. The theme of Part 1 is that the Kingdom of God has come in the person of Jesus Christ. And for the last seven chapters we have seen dramatic miracles and healings and heard many powerful teachings all pointing to that reality. The long awaited hope of Israel has finally arrived. The Kingdom of God is here.

 

In today’s passage, Part One draws to a close, and it is surprising closing. We would expect great faith and confidence and anticipation, but what we get instead is uncertainty. Lack of understanding. This passage ends with Jesus asking the disciples the same question twice. In verse 17: “Do you still not see or understand?” and in verse 21: “Do you still not understand?” Despite all they had seen Jesus do and teach; despite all the miracles and three years of His constant companionship, they still had trouble “getting it” about Jesus. Which brings us to the sobering question. If it happened to them, can it happen to us? Is it possible that in some way we “still don’t understand” everything we are supposed to understand about Jesus?

 

Let’s look into this story with the following outline.

1. The hunger of the crowd.

2. The forgetfulness of the disciples.

3. The yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod.

 

First, the hunger of the crowd.

 

This is the second miraculous feeding story. Back in chapter 6 we had the feeding of the 5000 and here we have the feeding of the 4000. In both cases the people are with Jesus nonstop for days on end. In this story it makes it clear that they are far from civilization: a remote place.

 

Doesn’t it strike you as unusual that a crowd of 4000 people would stay out in the wilderness listening to Jesus night and day for three days and not give one thought to food? The remote place means exposure. It means nothing to eat and drink. Why would a large crowd of people deliberately put themselves at risk?

There is only one answer. They could not get enough of Jesus. Once they found Him, they could not leave Him.

 

At the end of the last chapter Mark tells us the effect that Jesus had on people. “Everyone was overwhelmed with amazement.” They said “He has done everything well.” He was so compelling that 4000 people in this story and 5000 in the previous left their families, their jobs, their villages, their safety to go be with Jesus wherever He was. They suddenly lost concern for absolutely everything else, including eating.

 

Why? Because Jesus awakens in them a deep spiritual hunger that they never knew they had. They met Jesus and suddenly realized, “this is what my soul has been looking for my whole life.” And Mark tells us that everyone hungers for Jesus in the same way.

 

These people are Gentiles. They are still in Gentile territory, so these people are not children of Israel and they are probably not even monotheists. If they believe in anything they believe in the local gods like Baal and Marduk and Molech. So it is not as if they got up one morning and said, “I am dissatisfied with my religion, I am going on a spiritual quest to find another one. I think I’ll go check out the God of the Israelites.” They were not spiritual shoppers at all.

 

But what happened is that they were simply going about their business one day and along came Jesus, they met Him, and realized the more they got to know Him that they had to have Him. They dropped everything and attached themselves to Him, and didn’t think about anything else. This happened to countless people again and again in the gospels.

 

Why? Because when we meet Jesus, we meet our soul mate. Every human being was created by Jesus Christ, made in His image, and was made for Him. Colossians 1 says “by Him all things were created and for Him all things were created.” Every one of us comes from Jesus Christ and are made in His image. When we meet Him, we meet our soul mate.

 

When we say we are made by Him this means He knows us better than we know ourselves. He designed and built us.

When we say we are in His image this means we resonate with Him in the deepest vibration of our soul. He is a perfect version of us – and when we meet Him we sense that this is what we can become.

When we say we are made for Him this means that we are never supposed to be apart from Him.

 

This is why the Bible says that unless we fill ourselves with His glory, His word, His presence, we will be ever unfilled. Our spiritual souls are always hungry and only Jesus can satisfy us. These people didn’t even know they were hungry until they met Him, but once they met Him that hunger was awakened and they could not get enough of Him.

 

The Bible says that if we try to fill our spiritual hunger in any other way, we will never succeed. If we try to fill our souls with our career or our spouse or our children we will never be able to do it and we will be asking something from them that they can’t provide. We might kill them.

 

The other three typical places people go to try to fill their spiritual hunger are the gods of money, sex and power. People build bigger houses and buy more and more houses not because they need them but because they are spiritually empty. With sex, it is no surprise that pornography is the biggest money maker on the internet. The appetites for sex are voracious but never satisfied. It is a spiritual issue. You cannot satisfy the hunger of the soul with sex, you can only satisfy it with Jesus.

 

He does not condemn money, nor power, nor sex, nor careers, nor spouses nor children. All of them He created and all of them are good. But none of them are big enough to fill your soul. Your soul is like the ocean. It is too big to be filled with these lesser things. “I am the only one that can fill it.”

 

So why did these 4000 follow Jesus into the wilderness for days with no regard for food, shelter or safety? Because when they found Him they found what they were made for. When you find Jesus you never want to be anywhere else.

 

Second point: The forgetfulness of the disciples.

 

This was the second time Mark tells us Jesus fed a huge crowd with just a couple of loaves of bread. Scholars tell us that if Mark, the most economical of the gospel writers, tells us about two feedings, then the likelihood is that Jesus did this many times. But we know He did it twice, and this was the second time.

 

You would think that when Jesus called the disciples together and said, “Hey guys, we have a problem. What are we going to do about feeding all these people?” You would think they would say, “We’ve seen this before! I know what we’re going to do. We’re going to get five or six loaves and he is going to feed everybody with them.”

 

But no. They say the same thing they said the first time. “Gee, we don’t know. We have absolutely no way to feed them. Can’t be done.”

 

Then Jesus has to do the same thing all over again. “How many loaves do we have? Sit them down in groups. Step by step, same as before, and the miracle was done.

 

What is the matter with the disciples? Have they completely forgotten that Jesus has miraculous power? Did they forget what they saw right before their eyes only weeks before? Evidently they did.

 

Never underestimate the ability of even the most experienced believer to forget completely that God can provide your needs.

 

Never underestimate your ability to forget completely that God can provide your needs.

 

We tend to doubt God’s compassion and provision the most when we are in hard places. Many people who move here from other parts of the country find this a hard place to live. The culture is different, the schools are different, the people are different. Many times their faith takes a hit. And like the disciples with Jesus, they forget that God can provide their needs. This problem is too great. This situation is too overwhelming. They forget that God has provided in the past.

 

Does it comfort you to know that this is human nature? Psalm 105 is a long Psalm telling the people to call on God’s name and look to the Lord their strength. The entire Psalm, 45 verses, is nothing but reminding them of every way God provided in the past. He delivered them out of Egypt. He led them by the cloud and fiery pillar. He fed them with manna and quail. He brought water in the desert out of the rock. Etc. And the conclusion? You can call upon His name when you have problems today. He still can answer. His track record is 100%.

 

I was at the Board meeting for Glad Tidings India this past week and during one of our breaks Dr. Bill Scott was telling us about a time they had no money in the bank at India Bible Literature in Chennai. It was one week until the monthly salaries for the staff needed to be paid. He was training four key Indian men to be his successors at the head of IBL, and one of them, Prassana, whom some of us know, said to Dr. Scott, “you’d better call our Board in America and tell them we need payroll money.” The US Board had told them that they could always cover a shortfall in an emergency.

 

Dr. Scott said, “we will do no such thing. Why would you ask the American Board for our payroll money before you asked God? Have you forgotten that God can provide?”

 

So they got the management committee together and prayed. Two days before payday they got a check from Saudi Arabia that exactly covered their need. It was from a woman whose husband was an oil company executive. She had never given a dime to IBL in the past and wasn’t even on their mailing list. But two months earlier she had heard Dr. Scott speak at a conference. With her check came a note saying how she suddenly felt an overwhelming urge from the Lord to send this exact amount of money to IBL. When they looked a the postmark they realized it was exactly the day Bill Scott and Prasanna and the other leaders got down on their needs and asked the Lord.

 

 

Their policy is unchanged to this day. They never ask for money; they just tell people what God is doing in India. And they pray. And they have many stories like the one I just told you.

 

Never forget to take your needs to God. Even when the pressure is great and you are likely to forget. Always go to God.

 

Last point: the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod.

 

After the miracle Jesus gets in the boat and heads off to the other side with the disciples. And he tells them: Be careful. He is giving them a warning; Be on guard! For what? The yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod.

 

Now what is yeast? Yeast is a fungus and it’s used in bread dough. It spreads from one cell to another until it works through the whole loaf. In bread it is a positive outcome because it makes the bread rise. But mostly in the Bible it is a negative image. Yeast permeates and corrupts; it destroys. The best analogy is a cancer.

 

The Biblical image of yeast is that it is an infection that starts small, but spreads slowly through your whole body and takes it over. First it will dominate you, and eventually it will kill you.

 

Jesus is telling his disciples, and us, to be careful. Be on guard, because if you get even a little bit of the infection of the Pharisees and Herod, it will in time take you over and it will kill you spiritually. In the words of David Bisgrove, if you have the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod you have stage 4 spiritual cancer.

 

Now what do the disciples, who love Jesus, have in common with the Pharisees and Herod, who hate Jesus? Why does the Lord lump them together? The disciples aren’t perfect, but they are basically good guys. The others are always antagonists. Why does Jesus put them together?

Because they have seeds of the same spiritual cancer, and that spiritual cancer is unbelief.

 

Look at the Pharisees. In verse 11 they show up right after the miracle and demand a sign. Jesus sighs and says no. He says no because they are not interested in believing at all. They are interested in undermining him. If they really want a sign, what is wrong with the feeding of the 4000 or the 5000 or the healing of the deaf and dumb man. There are plenty of signs if they are really interested in evidence.

 

The yeast of the Pharisees is that they don’t trust Jesus. They don’t believe and no amount of evidence will make them believe. They look right at the evidence – 4000 people with full bellies on only seven loaves of bread – and they say, “I don’t believe you.”

 

That is the yeast of the Pharisees. They have hearts that are hard. They have eyes that see but they don’t see.

They have ears that hear but they don’t hear.’

They have minds to understand but they don’t understand.

 

And the reason Jesus uses the Pharisees and Herod as examples is because they are the extreme example of what happens to you when you don’t recognize and root out any bit of unbelief that you have in your heart. If you don’t learn how to believe you are going to become just like the Pharisees or Herod.

 

What is belief in Jesus? It is putting all your weight on Him. It is surrendering everything to Him. Trusting Him in everything.

 

Herod was the King. He was a puppet of Rome, but he loved being King. The Pharisees were the religious rulers. They ran the religious business in Israel.

 

Now if you look at Jesus objectively, all the evidence points to the fact that He is the one true King, and He is the one true religion. So Herod and the Pharisees would be the most threatened. If they were to trust Jesus it means they would have to turn their backs on what was most important to them.

So they are never going to do it. They have built their lives on the comfort and security of their positions and they are never going to give that up. That would take a courage and humility that they just didn’t have.

 

What this means for us is that we have to give up everything to follow Him. And we have a lot. We are comfortable here in Metro West Boston. If we really follow Jesus, the more we look at him and the more we hear him, the more He challenges us to commit everything to Him. If we don’t, we have stage 4 spiritual cancer. Our hearts are going to get harder, our eyes are going to cloud over and our ears are going to stop up. We will know but not know, see but not see, hear but not hear. And we will get spiritually dead.

 

At the end of WW2, General Patton’s army liberated one of the first concentration camps they found. We have a good account of this because an 18 year old soldier wrote a memoir. The sights in that camp made Patton vomit. Patton went into the town next to the camp and brought the Mayor and his wife out to the camp and showed them what they undoubtedly already knew. Because when the guards were off duty they would go into the town and drink and womanize and talk, so everyone knew. The evidence was right in front of them.

 

The next day Patton ordered the mayor and his wife and all the able bodied citizens of that town to come back and bury the dead in the camp. They did it. They got the job 80% done and were supposed to come back the next day and finish. But that night the mayor and his wife went home and hanged themselves. They left a note. It said, “We didn’t know, but we knew.”

 

When it comes to Jesus Christ, you don’t have an evidence problem. You have a faith problem. Anyone who says, “well I have this question about some verses back in Genesis, or I have a problem because the church treated me wrong one time,” might not being honest. You don’t have an evidence problem, you have a problem of the will. You don’t want to commit.

 

Because you know that submitting to Jesus might mean that He will ask you to do something you don’t want to do. Or give up something you don’t want to give up. And if you hold on to that attitude long enough you’ll become like Herod or a Pharisee.

 

So today if you hear his voice, don’t harden your heart. Say to Jesus, I trust you and I obey you. My money is yours, my family is yours, my mind is yours my heart is yours. All to Jesus I surrender.

 

Jesus is the one who made us. We are made by Him and for Him. He knows us best and He is our soul mate. You can trust Him.

 

When you meet the girl you think you might want to marry you ask yourself the question, is she the one? You are never going to be able to answer that question until you try. You have to commit and marry her. That’s how you find out.

 

Jesus says trust me. Trust me with your money, trust me with your life, trust me with everything. I know you and love you and will show you the miracles of my provision over and over and over again. Fall back and lean into my arms. Don’t fear, just believe.