Mark 7a (10-22-25)

Hey everyone, it's Pastor James. Welcome back to our midweek Bible study. Today we're

going to be starting chapter 7 and this is a great passage as it reveals many key

things about Jesus' ministry and this gospel. So read with me Mark 7. Let's

start out with verses 1 through 8 as Jesus talks about inner purity. One day

some Pharisees and teachers of religious law arrived from Jerusalem to see

Jesus. They noticed that some of his disciples failed to follow the Jewish

ritual of hand washing before eating. The Jews, especially the Pharisees, do not

eat until they have poured water over their cupped hands as required by their

ancient traditions. Similarly, they don't eat anything from the market until they

haven't immersed their hands in water. This is but one of many traditions they

have clung to such as their ceremonial washing of cups, pitchers, and kettles.

So the Pharisees and teachers of religious law asked him, why don't your

disciples follow our age-old tradition? They eat without first performing the

hand washing ceremony. Jesus replied, you hypocrites, Isaiah was right when he

prophesied about you, for he wrote, These people honor me with their lips, but

their hearts are far from me. They worship as a farce, for they teach

man-made ideas as commands from God, for you ignore God's law and substitute

your own tradition. Alright, so here we see the religious leaders have come all

the way from Jerusalem to observe and look for faults in Jesus' ministry, and

this is one more example of the stubborn heart of the religious leaders

and how they were trying to condemn Jesus. They couldn't find anything in

the law, so they immediately start looking for all the things that he's not doing

that is dishonoring their traditions. So the other thing is that we see they

are very focused on their traditions more than anything else, really more than

the law, if you pay close attention to the Scriptures. They didn't say anything

to Jesus about breaking the law because he hadn't broke any, so they started to

complain about why Jesus and the disciples were not following their

traditions that they had made to be so important. And this is one of the

passages that revealed to us that the reader, that the readers were most

certainly not Jewish, as Mark feels the need to explain the Jewish traditions and

rituals. So if Mark was writing to a Jewish audience, they would have

known the rituals. They would have known the traditions, but this is one of the

reasons why we know that Mark was writing this to non-Jewish people

because he felt the need to explain the traditions to these people. So if the

readers were Jewish, they would have known. The interesting part of this is

that the religious leaders questions do not seem out of the way or rude or

challenging, and in some ways it seems like legitimate questions if you were to

just read this at surface level, but Jesus immediately lays into them, calling

them hypocrites and taking the prophecy from Isaiah 29 verse 13 and applying it

Isaiah 29:13

to them. Now, this prophecy is harsh and calls out the conditions of their hearts

rather than their extreme efforts that mean nothing. So these religious leaders

were doing a lot of stuff, trying to honor the Lord, doing what they had

been taught, clinging to the things that they had been taught, but really

there's a big difference between doing what you've been taught versus doing

what the Lord wants you to do. And I think Jesus really does a good job of

clarifying that in this situation. You can do all the right things or all the

things that you've been told to do, but if your heart isn't right, it really just

does not matter. Jesus wants people who genuinely love him, who genuinely want to

follow him, who genuinely want to serve God. So just because you're doing all

the right things does not mean that you actually know God or are in tune

with his heart and his desire, and this is what Jesus is saying in this

passage. The truth of the matter was that they substituted God's laws and put

their own traditions and desires in the place of God's laws as more important

than God's laws, and that was a pretty big deal. Like, that's a

big no-no. This is one of those things that, for whatever reason, these people

felt obligated or the need to do this, felt like they had the right to do

this, and really Jesus is calling them out on it because it is very, very wrong. So

be careful in your life that you don't put man-made expectations or man-made

rules in place of God's Word and God's laws, because when push comes to shove,

God is very much going to want his laws observed and his heart deserved much

more than he does for anything we could ever come up with. Alright, so let's read

you skillfully sidestep God's law in order to hold on to your own tradition.

For instance, Moses gave you this law from God, honor your father and mother, and

anyone who speaks disrespectfully of father or mother must be put to death,

but you say it is all right for people to say to their parents, sorry I can't

help you, for I have vowed to give to God what I would have given to you, and

this way you let them disregard their needy parents, and so you canceled the

word of God in order to hand down your own tradition, and this was only one

example among many others. Then Jesus called the crowd to come to hear. All of

you listen, he said, and try to understand. It's not what goes in your body that

defiles you. You are defiled by what comes from your heart. Then Jesus went

into the house to get away from the crowd, and his disciples asked him what

he meant by the parable he had just used. Don't you understand either, he asked.

Can't you see that the food you put into your body cannot defile you? Food doesn't

go into your heart, but only passes through your stomach, and then goes

into the sewer. By saying this, he declared that every kind of food is

acceptable in God's eyes, and then he added, it is what comes from inside that

defiles you from within. Out of a person's heart come evil thoughts, sexual

immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, lustful desires, envy,

slander, pride, and foolishness. All these vile things come from within. They are

what defile you. So the scary part of this is that Jesus said that they

skillfully sidestep God's law. This is a huge moral failure because to become

skillful at something requires a lot of thought, a lot of time, and a lot of

practice, and you don't just become skillful in anything overnight. It is

something that is developed over time, and these religious leaders have honed

their skill of finding loopholes, avoiding the true laws, and cutting

corners in order to fulfill their own desires with their own traditions. So

Jesus immediately gives them an example of how they do this. His chosen example

goes right to the heart of the law with one of the Ten Commandments. The

Father's is one of the utmost importance. It is the only commandment that comes with

a promise which is a long life, and truthfully it is hard to honor our

Heavenly Father if we cannot honor our earthly mother and father. So the

religious leaders had allowed the people of Israel to neglect their mothers and

fathers in order to benefit from what they had vowed to give to God in the

temple. And not honoring your father and mother, even speaking disrespectfully of

them, must be put to death by stoning. So this was a very serious offense. This

isn't just something that is, this isn't something you just sweep under the

rug or throw in the river and let it wash down. This is something that must be

dealt with. To put a child to death for dishonoring their mother and father

was what was required by the law. And so the religious leaders had allowed the

people of Israel to neglect their mothers and fathers, but yet they were

asking them to obey all these little traditions that they had come up with.

And after this response, Jesus called the crowd together to explain that it's

not what goes in your body that defiles you, but it's what comes out of your

hearts. So a long story short, true defilement and rebellion against God

come from within out of the depths of our innermost being. Your rebellion

against God isn't by the sin that is committed by your hands and your feet.

The sin that defiles you, the sin against God, comes from our hearts from within.

It comes from the thoughts. It comes from the wicked evil desires thinking

that we deserve something more than what we actually do. And so in this I think

it's very very important that we remind ourselves sin starts within. Sin starts

from within who we are. Now in verses 17 through 19 we see that even the

disciples didn't understand what Jesus was trying to say, but Mark gives us

the clearest evidence in parentheses by saying that all food is acceptable in

God's eyes, and this is a huge issue in the early church. So it's not so much a

big issue in the Gospels, but Mark puts this in parentheses and he talks about

this because Mark is going to be one of the leaders of the early church and

he's going to know that this issue of talking about what you can and cannot

eat due to different reasons why and traditions and the law of God, it's

going to be a big deal. And this is why he talks about this because it's a huge

challenge in the early church as far as what's acceptable to eat and this is a

big argument between Jews and Gentiles. And in fact as Mark gets the info for

this gospel from Peter, remember it is Peter that Christ gives the vision to

on the rooftop of the animals in the sheet and God proclaiming all of his

creation as being clean and acceptable. So Mark is getting his information from

Peter and Peter is the one who actually has the vision that all food is

acceptable because God has proclaimed it to be acceptable. Now in verses

22-23, these provide further clarity. It's not as much about what we do as

what is within that has a tremendous impact on our spiritual lives. Now we've

said that, we've talked about that already, but we'll say it again. We are

defiled by the sinfulness that lurks deep within our hearts. This is why it's

absolutely necessary that Christ comes into our hearts and cleanses us from our

sins and he gives us a new heart. We are reborn as new creations and we need to

be filled with the Holy Spirit. And if those things do not happen, we are

doomed without that. We must have new hearts. We must be new creations. We must

be cleansed from within because out of within the heart comes sinful things. And

so only Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit can remove that and cleanse us from it

and make us new. That's why we need to be in tune with God all the time. Having

Him fill us, cleanse us, guide us, and continually making us new day after day

after day. Because if not careful, we will allow that old sinful nature to take

over and Christ wants to put that thing to death. He wants to make us in a new

creation. So it's from within that files us all the evil things that lurk within

our hearts. That's what makes us simple in the eyes of God. Alright, let's pray

together and I'll let you go. Father in heaven, thank you again for another

beautiful day and for everything you blessed us with. Lord, thank you for the

opportunity to read your Word. Dive in and see the many wonderful things that

you have for us and how you want to teach us and grow us. And I pray God that

you would help us to learn your will in your ways. Lord, not to pay attention

to our own traditions or what we think is right, but Lord to truly know what

you have said is right and wrong. Cleanse us, make us new, fill us with your

spirit, help us from within to be pure and holy in your eyes. Lord, we love you and

we thank you and we ask all this in Jesus name. Amen. Alright guys, thanks for tuning

in for another week. We love you. We're praying for you. Catch us on Facebook

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Hope you have a great week.