John woke up at 3 AM with a start. As he tossed the covers from his pounding chest, a wave of dizziness swept over him.
Scritch, scratch, scuffle, scuffle.
What was that?
John stuck a leg over the side of his bed. Instead of stepping into a bedroom slipper as he expected, he fell over a body.
“Ow!” What was that?
“Don’t hurt me!” yelled the man who had made him fall. It was too dark to see who it was. John felt his way to the door and flipped on the light switch. The unwelcome visitor was huddled in a ball by a corner of the bed, his brown eyes lit up with fear. His blond hair was a mess. The ragged shirt and pants he wore looked like they’d come from a dump.
“What are you doing here?” John asked.
“Just having a little snack,” the man replied, eyeing a plate full of crumbs that sat on a nearby nightstand. John could have sworn he’d seen the guy somewhere before. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Just your friendly neighborhood Sadducee,” replied the frightened man. “You can call me Sad Sam, because I’m always sad, you see. Nothing ever goes right for me and…”
“Hey, wait a minute! Haven’t I seen you in church?” John exclaimed.
Sad Sam sat up Indian-style. “Uh, probably not.”
“Yes! That’s exactly where I’ve seen you. You’re the guy who doesn’t believe in miracles. I’ve heard you say things like ‘Money doesn’t just drop out of the sky’ and ‘God doesn’t do signs and wonders anymore. He uses modern medicine and up-to-date technology to get things done.’”
Sam’s eyes darted every which way. “Well, you know, I am a down-to-earth sort of guy. Can I go now?”
“Not until you tell me what you’re doing here,” John said.
Sam shot him a plastic smile. “Having fun?”
John took a menacing step toward him. “Not likely, sad guy. Now tell the truth and maybe I won’t have you arrested for breaking into my house.”
Sam Sadducee cleared his throat. “Well, if you must know, I’ve been living in your closet for quite some time now, ever since my wife kicked me out for causing too many catastrophes. She claims the negative things I said are what caused our roof to spring a leak, the floor to collapse, both our cars to get smashed, and some stray dog to bite her in the leg. She says she’s had it with me. I didn’t know where else to go, so I climbed in the open window of your bedroom one day and decided to camp out here. It’s a lot safer than being at home.”
John shook his head. “So, you’re the one who jinxed me with all those nightmares!” He eyed the nightstand and the plate full of crumbs. “Now I know where all those crackers came from too. And here I thought my Aunt Martha left them there. She’s really sneaky and she wants me to gain weight, so it seemed like something she would do. But now I find out that all this time it was really you! I thought those crackers tasted strange. They made me sick to my stomach but I ate them anyway, just to make her happy. Oh, what a fool I was! Why didn’t I investigate the source of those rotten munchies? Why?”
“Well, maybe you would have found out if you’d bothered to actually hang your clothes up in the closet instead of leaving them lying around everywhere,” Sam Sadducee suggested. “And by the way, they’re not crackers. They’re stale pieces of bread I brought with me when I came here. They just look like crackers because the bread never rises the way I expect it to. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the yeast. Instead of making the dough expand, like most yeasts do, it seems to suck the life out of it.”
“Just clean up your crumbs and get out of here. I’ve had it with your poisoned bread,” John said.
The end – or was it?
Jesus warned his disciples to beware the leaven of both the Pharisees and Sadducees, but He wasn’t talking about real leaven that is kneaded into real bread. He was speaking of their teaching.
For “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4)
God’s words only do us good if we understand them. False teaching distorts God’s words and makes them spiritually inedible. You can get a stomach ache from bad teaching. That’s why it’s important to examine every teaching very carefully to discover whether or not it is from God.
Signs, Wonders, Miracles 