COMING to this passage again we must observe carefully the warning that Jesus gave his disciples concerning the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Jesus was clearly warning the disciples against the error in the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducess. This is the strange thing because the Pharisees and Sadducees were the religious teachers of the day. They were the ministers who had been trained to teach the people the truth of the Jewish faith handed down to them from God through Moses. If people could not rely on their teachers who could they rely on. It was accepted and natural to believe that the teaching that the Pharisees and Sadducees gave was sound and reliable. Jesus was saying that this was not the case.

Jesus was not saying that everything that these men taught was false. If he had he would not have spoken of the yeast of the Pharisees. Here was the subtlety of the problem. Yeast is put in bread for the good purpose of causing the bread to rise when it is cooked and in order to produce the perfect loaf. However what Jesus is stressing here is the fact that the amount of yeast used in a loaf is very small in comparison with the rest of the ingredients. The yeast is only just a small amount of ingredient, but even though it is so little, it in fact has an effect out of all proportion with regard to its size. Once yeast gets into the dough it effects the whole of dough in a powerful way. In bread this is something that is of great good, but with false teaching or error this is a very bad thing and a serious problem.

Jesus was pointing to the error in the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. It was like yeast. It was a small part of the whole of the teaching, and could be felt to be unimportant and insignificant. Jesus points out that we must never look at a little error as unimportant. Like yeast a little error permeates the whole of Christian belief and understanding, and effects the whole in such a way that the whole becomes corrupted, and so a person receiving such teaching will be putting their soul in the gravest of danger.

The fact is that a small error does infect the understanding of the whole. If the error is accepted as truth, then it begins to change the meaning of everything else, and so the whole truth gets infected and ceases to be truth, and so the teaching becomes poison to the soul.

Also the fact is that once let a small error creep into Christian belief, and it opens the flood gates for further error to be accepted, and because the error is so small each time it is added, it is not noticed, and so the life of the church of God is corrupted, and the church begins to die.

We have only to look at history to see the reality of this. There have been thriving churches in places in the past that now don't exist and the Christian faith has all but departed from those areas. There was live churches in the north of Africa in the early centuries of the Christian church, but now they are no more and are forgotten. What was the reason for this decline and death. It was that the yeast of a little error was allowed to creep into the teaching, and this eventually corrupted the whole church, and so the Spirit of God departed from them.

We have only to read the letters to the seven churches in Asia in the first three chapters of the book of revelation to see how important is the warning Jesus gives here about the yeast of error. Those churches were warned about the errors they had allowed, and were told that Christ would remove their candlestick - that is reject them - if they did not repent and correct their error, and we now see the result.

A little error is such a serious problem. It is offensive to Christ because it distorts the pure Gospel of his salvation. Because of this Jesus gave his warning, and we need to take his warning to heart today.

We must watch out for error in the teaching and practice of the church, and where it is found resist it and speak against it and reject it, even if this will make us unpopular. We must not allow ourselves for the sake of outward unity and the fear of destroying peace in the church to countenance error in the church.

If we are to be able to act on this warning we must begin by routing out error concerning the nature of the Bible. The destruction of the truth concerning the Bible that has crept into the church over the last century or so has been the seed bed of the churches impotence to fight against error. The Bible is our only sure authority as to what is truth and what is error. If we allow a diminishing of the authority of the bible, by saying that it contains the word of God, but can't be said to be the word of God, then we are in trouble. It allows people to say that not all the bible is truth, and that it needs correction, and contains faults, and this means that no part of the bible can be said to have authority because it is open to any person to question any part of the Bible. If we are to take Christ's warning to heart we must stand for the infallible inspiration of the Bible, so that what can't be found in the plain teaching of the bible, or be proved from it, is not to be received and promotes the yeast of error.