Warning Signs

“And He was giving orders to them, saying, ‘Watch out! Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.’” Mark 8:15 NASB

            Warning signs are put into place to protect one from falling into danger. They appear on roads and bridges, on pedestrian walking and biking trails. They are posted in restricted areas, and even your neighbor may have a “beware of the dog” sign on their front door. There are also verbal warnings by way of instruction to warn us of potential dangers we encounter as part of our daily lives. Jesus gave His disciples such a warning recorded for us in the gospel of Mark.

            Jesus’s warning was given as instruction, or giving orders when He said, “Watch out! Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” The warning was of a spiritual nature, but the disciples missed it entirely as we also so often do today. The disciples were exclusively living in the moment of their physical and tangible needs. They couldn’t see past the immediate future as to Jesus’s words having a deeper meaning. They had just witnessed Jesus’s second miracle of feeding thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. When Jesus said to “Beware of the leaven (or yeast)” they wrongly reasoned that He was referring to the fact that they forget to take along bread for their journey. How wrong they were.

            How wrong we are today in our assumptions that all warning signs from our heavenly Father refer only to our physical or material needs at the moment. God’s instructions through His Word to us who believe in Him is to beware of the false teachers who claim to know the truth and who claim to preach Christianity but conveniently ignored certain passages of His Word. He also warns us to watch out for those who hide their hypocrisy, preaching the truth of God’s Word and then engaging in the opposite. This is the leaven of the Pharisees.

            The leaven of Herod refers to the world system of increasing secularism. Sadly, we have seen the moral decline of our world throughout the centuries, but never more so rapidly as in the last few decades. Jesus tells us today, as He told His disciples, “Watch out! Beware.” It is far too easy in our day to get caught up with false teaching and in the effects of the world system.

            The truth is in God’s Word, the Bible. As we read it, study it, and meditate on it, ‘all of it’, we will know the truth and the truth will set us free from false teaching and the secularism of the world through God’s ‘warning signs’!