Devotional Thoughts: Thinking with their stomachs

Matthew 16:5-12 is another example of how Jesus used the ordinary stuff of life to make his point.

Once again food was the immediate concern as seen in v. 5 that said, "the disciples discovered they had forgotten to bring any food."

You can imagine them looking at the crowds of people who were milling around Jesus while he was teaching and healing people and thinking uh-oh, how are we going to feed all these people?

I suppose this might mean that on many occasions they actually do plan ahead and have some food to give to people. But sometimes they worry they may run out or they forgot to bring any at all. Maybe they figure the crowd looked thin today and not real excited so maybe they didn't plan ahead and bring food only to find out their crowd estimate was off.

Jesus knowing their anxiety then says in v. 6, "Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees."

The disciples, thinking with their stomachs, think, huh?

I suppose they may have thought Jesus meant that they shouldn't take bread provided by the Pharisees and Sadducees. They know Jesus was always having running verbal battles with them so they may think, don't take food from them.

Of course, sitting here in the 21st Century reading my Bible it is easy for me to remember they had just recently seen the feeding of the 5000 (Matthew 14:13-21) and the feeding of the 4000 (Matthew 15:32-39). This confusion on the part of the disciples made them look pretty dense! Jesus rebuked them along those lines in vv. 8-11.

They eventually realized that Jesus was using yeast as a metaphor in this case for false teaching (see v. 12).

Yeast are little things. Words are little things. But yeast put into a lump of flour has an effect resulting in bread we can eat. Words are little things but when strung together into words of false teaching they can be damaging. Words are little things but when strung together into words of true teaching they can be a great thing. Jesus had used the yeast metaphor before back in Matthew 13:33-34 to say the kingdom of God is like yeast.