God’s Word for You

Galatians 5:7-9 The yeast of false teaching

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Friday, August 2, 2024

7 You were running well. Who kept you from being persuaded by the truth? 8 This persuasion is not from the one who calls you.

Paul isn’t afraid of using a good sports analogy. He compares the Galatians with a runner who misses an opportunity in some way. Some translators think that we need to add something like “cut in on you,” but a runner can also be defeated in their own mind by failing to trust themselves, or their good information about their opponents. He tells them that they’ve been kept from relying on the truth, like a runner who gives up just short of the finish line.

The passive of peitho (πείθω) is to “be persuaded,” and although it can mean “obey” in certain contexts, “persuade” is the usual New Testament meaning (Acts 18:4, 19:8, 26:28; 2 Corinthians 5:11). We are persuaded by the gospel to trust and to rely on Jesus. To give up on that is no longer to be persuaded by Christ.

God is one who calls us, and he does it constantly; continuously. In John 10, Jesus says “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow them because they know his voice” (John 10:3-4). God calls us constantly, first to faith and then to remain as part of the flock. We don’t need to be baptized again and again, but we do need to keep up a steady diet of the food he gives us, which is the gospel.

The kind of persuasion that the Judaizers were doing was a savage twisting and perversion of the gospel, one which does not come from God. What Paul says is almost like a parent scolding a naughty child: “Why do you keep doing this? Your father certainly didn’t tell you to do this….” But the false teaching of those enemies of Christ in Galatia was getting into everything that they said. Paul describes this as yeast:

9 A little yeast works through the whole batch.

The picture of yeast working through a lump of dough is used several times in the Bible. Sometimes it is a picture of the way God’s word works, small at first, but it eventually works all through us (Luke 13:20-21). Other times it is a warning. Paul is talking about false doctrine, false teaching, and Gospel-twisting. “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy” (Luke 12:1; Mark 8:15; Matthew 16:6-12). Paul recognizes this. He calls false doctrine “the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness” (1 Corinthians 5:8), and in the same verse he calls Scripture itself “the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

What harm can a little error cause? Let’s take a seemingly minor example. Imagine someone who believes that the whole Bible is true, except perhaps the book of Jonah. Could that single idea possibly affect anything else? Consider: If we assume Jonah’s adventure to Nineveh (and in the fish) did not happen, then Jesus’ references to Jonah in the Gospels (Matthew 12:40, 16:4; Luke 11:29-32) are based on a myth, not on an historic prophet. Jesus would be making a mistake when he quotes Jonah as historic fact. Then Jesus would become capable of errors, would cease to be divine, and the basis for our forgiveness of sins would plunge into doubt. And what is more, Jonah is also mentioned in 2 Kings 14:25. That means 2 Kings would contain some myth, and if 2 Kings does, then 1 Kings and 1 and 2 Samuel might—and since Isaiah and Jeremiah contain references to Kings, as do the Psalms, and all of the Minor Prophets, then they might be in error as well. And since Matthew and the other Gospels quote all of these books as fact—the Gospels would be in error, as well as Acts, and Paul’s epistles (including Galatians), and on, and on… until there is nothing left of the Bible.

Or consider the Lord’s Supper. About one hundred years ago, but no earlier than that, some American preachers in California decided that they wanted to open communion up to everybody who said that they were Christian. This so-called “open communion” wasn’t based on anything in the Bible; there is no call for “open communion” in any passage or collection of passages. Even Jesus’ own mother was not invited to the Lord’s Supper when her Son instituted it, even though she was obviously living at least temporarily in the same city (since she was at his crucifixion twelve or fifteen hours later). But when the point of the Lord’s Supper is removed, and the body and blood of Jesus Christ are not recognized as being present, and the warning Paul gives against eating and drinking without recognizing the body of the Lord, then the meal is opened up to people who will eat and drink judgment on themselves (1 Corinthians 11:27-30). Therefore a false teacher who wanted to make his church more popular did it at the cost of people’s souls. And this false teaching is a yeast that still infects churches today. They are the “merchants of the earth with cargoes of the bodies and souls of men” (Revelation 18:11,13).

A little yeast works through the whole batch. It always happens. Inevitably, false doctrine, even just a little bit, will affect everything. It is always catastrophic. Mistaking the power of baptism, Jesus’ presence in the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper, the six-day creation, the Trinity—any teaching that the Bible makes—is all part of an intricate latticework, and all of it is interconnected with one single fact: Jesus paid for our sins on the cross.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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