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The seventh chapter of Mark’s gospel begins with the Pharisees and scribes coming to Jesus, complaining that some of his disciples were eating without washing their hands.
While such behavior may offend twenty-first century sensibilities as well, it was really a much larger problem for the Pharisees that it is for us.
We wash our hands before eating because we know how easy it is for germs and bacteria to travel from our dirty hands to our food and make us very sick.
But they washed their hands as a matter of religious principle: eating dirt from unwashed hands violated their purification laws, and thus defiled a man.
Therefore, they demanded that Jews not only wash their hands, but that they do so in a special way (v.
3).
Jesus responded to their silliness in three ways.
First, in verses 6 through 8 he quoted a passage from Isaiah to expose the hypocrisy of his opponents.
For all their fuss about keeping various commandments and honoring God, they really had no interest in doing any of these things.
In fact, they had replaced the commandments of God with the traditions of men.
As a consequence of this, they had no right or authority to require others to follow their practices.
Next the Lord gave the Pharisees a specific example of how they did this in verses 9 through 13.
God’s law is very clear about the relationship of children to their parents.
The fifth commandment requires us to honor our father and our mother (Exod.
20:12), and the penalty for egregious contempt of one’s parents was death (Exod.
21:17).
But the Pharisees, being more concerned about how to enrich the temple than submitting to the law of God, allowed a man to declare a part of his wealth Corban (i.e., dedicated), which meant that it could not be used to care for his parents.
Thus, a man could claim outward religiosity while denying his parents the love, honor and respect that the law of God requires of them.
Our text for this morning takes us to the third part of Jesus response to the Pharisees, which begins in verse 14.
Here the discussion goes right to the heart of the matter.
If eating dirt does not corrupt a man, what does?
What is the real source of a man’s defilement before God?
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Defilement Originates in Man
In verse 14, Mark seems to make a point of the fact that Jesus, having challenged the reasoning of the Pharisees, summoned the multitude to himself to answer these questions.
He said that he wanted every one of those present to listen to him and understand what he had to say.
But why?
Why would he draw the people unto himself for this particular discussion?
The answer is that this issue touches all of our lives.
Being the sinners that we are, we’re all tempted to excuse our defilement by attributing it to something outside of ourselves.
We behave a certain way, we might say, because our parents did.
We learned our behavior from them.
But that really doesn’t work.
Jesus grew up in a home in which his parents sinned every day, yet the thought of him following their evil example never entered his mind.
Or we blame our sin on the conditions in which we live: we’re too poor, we’re too rich, we don’t have a college education, we have too much college instruction, we have too little responsibility, we have too much responsibility.
The list could go on indefinitely, but no matter what excuse we dream up it all amounts to the same thing.
We just don’t want to admit the real source of the problem.
After summoning the people unto himself, Jesus cut right to the heart of the matter.
He said, /There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man/ (v.
15).
A man isn’t contaminated by the things he eats.
Nor does his sin originate in the things he touches.
The things that a man sees and hears do not cause him to trespass against God’s law.
No, a man is contaminated by what comes out of him, i.e., what he produces.
Here we have one of those classic moments that Mark records.
Jesus could not have been clearer in what he said.
The Pharisees were wrong.
The traditions that they lived by were based on some really bad theology.
But, of course, the people to whom he had been speaking had been taught by the Pharisees for quite a long time.
Pharisaical traditions, although not rigidly observed by all non-Pharisees, still commanded the respect of many Jews.
Jesus’ disciples were no different.
They saw his teaching as so radically different than anything they had heard before that they couldn’t wrap their little minds around it.
And so, after they had entered the solitude of the house (probably the house that served as their headquarters), according to verse 17, they asked him to explain to them this otherwise enigmatic parable.
The Lord Jesus, who is always merciful to the cries of his people, filled in the details that they lacked.
The reason why a man cannot be defiled by eating with dirty hands, he said, is that the food he eats does not enter his heart.
It passes through the mouth, goes on to the belly and is eventually eliminat­ed into the latrine.
But how could Jesus say that what a man eats doesn’t enter his heart?
Didn’t he know that it makes it way throughout the entire body, heart included, after the stomach digests it and before the bowels dispose of it?
Yes, but that’s not what he meant.
You see, the heart as used in Scripture is the seat of human life.
Proverbs 4:23 says, /Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life/.
Likewise, Proverbs 23:7: /For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he/.
Throughout the Bible, the word /heart/ is used synony­mously with such words as spirit, soul, mind, strength, will and life.
Modern synonyms might include the ego, the self, and the personality.
But, in any case, the heart is much more than an internal organ; it /is/ the man.
And no amount of dirt in a person’s food can change his character.
One result of all this is stated at the end of verse 19.
We don’t know whether the words /purging [or purifying] all meats/ were spoken by Jesus or whether Mark added them to clarify for us what Jesus meant, but it doesn’t really matter since Mark wrote inspired truth as certainly as Jesus spoke it.
In either case, the point is the same: the dietary laws would soon cease to govern the lives of God’s people.
They would continue to instruct God’s people as to their need for righteousness in every area of life, but they would not be strictly binding as a way of life.
By identifying the source of corruption as man’s heart and not the food a man eats, Jesus emphasized the spiritual aspect of the law, which the Pharisees had long ago forgotten.
But there are two problems with this.
First, the dietary laws were not a fabrication of the Jewish hegemony.
They were, rather, a subcategory of the Old Testament’s ceremonial laws, written down by Moses under the direction of the Spirit of God.
They are, therefore, the Word of God.
By easing the dietary restrictions, it looked as though Jesus was doing exactly what the Pharisees had done: replacing the law of God with his own ideas.
If so, why should he be given a better hearing than they?
Well, a few things can and should be said in response to this.
To begin with, we need to remember that Jesus is God.
As God, he gave the dietary laws to Moses.
I Peter 1:11 says that the Spirit of Christ testified through the Old Testament prophets.
Therefore, unlike the Pharisees he has the right and the authori­ty to change his own law.
Second, the dietary laws, like the ceremonial laws in general, were intended only to be temporarily binding upon the people.
God had given them to the Jews primarily to prepare them for the coming Messiah, and they did this in three ways: 1) they showed that God will accept nothing less than a perfect purity of both body and soul, which no man has on his own; 2) they put a visible difference between the Israel and other nations; and 3) they identified the Messiah by describing the perfect righteousness of his life.
Now that the Savior has come the dietary laws, which prepared for his coming in these ways, are no longer needed as a rule that continues to govern our lives.
And third, the easing of the dietary laws was also meant to teach us that the gospel itself no longer distinguishes between the biological seed of Abraham and others.
A few years after Jesus spoke these words, the Lord gave Peter a vision of a sheet in which there was a mixture of clean and unclean animals being let down from heaven.
The Lord commanded, /Rise, Peter; kill and eat/ (v.
13).
Peter refused.
Three times this happened before the sheet was taken up into heaven.
Peter was puzzled by this strange event.
Didn’t he understand by then that Jesus had purified all foods?
Probably, but that wasn’t the point.
This vision had something to do specifically with his ministry, but he understand this until Cornelius, a God-fearing Roman, invited him to his house.
Under the Pharisees, contact with non-Jews would have defiled a man.
It was like eating with unwashed hands.
But Peter explained that this was no longer so.
He interpreted his dream as follows: /Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean/ (Acts 10:28).
Every man, woman and child that comes into this world is defiled apart from Jesus Christ.
It’s not our job to decide who should be the recipients of divine favor based solely on their connection to Abraham, but to proclaim the riches of Jesus Christ to all men indiscriminately, so that the Lord can use our evangelism to remove this defilement and equip his people for fellowship with himself.
Thus, the dietary laws were an object lesson that the Jews needed before the coming of Christ.
It taught them the necessity of sanctification in the lives of God’s people.
The removal of the dietary laws in the New Testament is just as instructive to us today.
It shows us that the gospel is to be proclaimed in the entire world as a witness to the mercy of God in Jesus Christ.
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