In these verses, Jesus began to address the question
that the Pharisees from Jerusalem had raised. They asked Jesus why His
disciples didn’t wash their hands before they ate. Jesus answered them by addressing the crowd,
through a riddle-like parable. His answer needs unraveling that even Peter
needed an explanation from Him.
The disciples of the Lord told Him that the Pharisees
took offence with His statement. Jesus’ answer indicates to some alluded lessons
of the parables He spoke earlier. He, Jesus our Lord, came to sow the seed of
the Kingdom. Then there were others who came to sow seeds of a different kind,
with other agendas. They pushed for the option of keeping the purity of the law
and were unwittingly barking up the wrong tree. They will be uprooted
eventually. Each one of these teachers was like a blind man trying to lead others
who were equally blind around the direction in life. Consequently, both the teachers
and followers would fall into a pit on the way.
The disciples of the Lord told Him that the Pharisees
took offence with His statement. Jesus’ answer indicates to some alluded
lessons of the parables He spoke earlier. He, Jesus our Lord, came to sow the
seed of the Kingdom. Then there were others who came to sow seeds of a
different kind, with other agendas. They were planting different kind of trees.
Their pushing for the option of keeping the purity of the law and made them
unwittingly barking up the wrong tree. They will be uprooted eventually. Each one
of these teachers was like a blind man trying to lead others who were equally
blind around the direction in life. Consequently, both the teachers and
followers would fall into a pit on the way.
Jesus maintains that it’s not what enters one’s mouth
that would make him unclean. It is what comes out of his inner being. We know
Jesus wasn’t talking about undigested foods and vomits. He was referring to
words that one speaks. Why? Because words reveal what the person is made up of
at the heart of his being. What make a person unfit for God’s presence are in
the list shown in verse 19: evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornication,
theft, false witness, slander - and much more. And all these actions are
motivated by the thoughts, and they are revealed through one’s words that come from
the depth of one’s personality. Our words indicate what’s at the depth of our
being. It tells us what must be changed to help us become what is acceptable to
God.
In this discussion Jesus was driving at something
deeper still. It is not about keeping tradition which the Pharisees maintained
and were teaching the Jews to do. It’s about the sort of pure people God wants
us to be and how a pure desire can be attained. The heart of the matter is
about how a person’s heart can be made pure. It certainly cannot be
accomplished by following a set of regulations. If we think it can, we are
sorely mistaken. It reveals how lack of understanding we have about the level
of human wickedness. It reveals how lack of understanding we have about the
menace that lies underneath our personality. Every one of us, none excluded, is
capable of what Christ had listed in verse 19 and much more.
The
point is this, through all that Christ is doing, God is giving us humans, a
cure to the deep seated root of impurity. Merely treating the symptom can never
get rid of the disease that’s festering at the root. As followers of Christ, we
need to ask, are our thoughts, our intentions and the words we casually express,
indicative of the level of our purity? What are we doing about it? We must
certainly realize that the real remedy to all these lies in our relationship
with Christ. It’s in knowing Him and His Word, and applying the liberating
truths that can indeed set us free to be the version of “me” God is looking for!
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