WWUTT 2181 Jesus Heals a Gentile Woman's Daughter (Mark 7:24-37)

Jesus Rebukes the Pharisees and Teaches What Defiles a Person

Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for their false teaching. The Pharisees, the scribes, they would not listen to Jesus. So Jesus goes into a Gentile region, a woman comes to him and he grants her request. When we understand the text.

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Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. In our study of the gospel of Mark, we are in chapter seven. Going to finish up the chapter today, in fact. So I'll read verses 24 to 37 out of the Legacy Standard Bible. Hear the word of the Lord.

Now Jesus stood up and went away from there to the region of Tyre. And when he had entered a house, he was wanting no one to know of it, yet he could not escape notice. But after hearing of him, a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately came and fell at his feet.

Now the woman was a Greek of Seraphim descent. And she kept asking him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And he was saying to her, let the children be satisfied first, for it is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.

But she answered and said to him, yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table feed on the children's crumbs. And he said to her, because of this answer, go, the demon has gone out of your daughter. And going back to her home, she found the child lying on the bed, the demon having left.

And again, he went out from the region of Tyre and came through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee within the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to him one who was deaf and spoke with difficulty. And they pleaded with him to lay his hand on him.

And Jesus took him aside from the crowd by himself and put his fingers into his ears. And after spitting, he touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven with a sigh, he said to him, Ephaptha, that is be opened.

And his ears were opened and the impediment of his tongue was removed. And he began speaking plainly and he gave them orders not to tell anyone, but the more he was ordering them, the more widely they continued to proclaim it.

And they were utterly astonished, saying, he has done all things well. He makes even the deaf to hear and the mute to speak. Now, before getting to this section, I kind of teased this out a little bit last week.

So let me bring this all into context as all of chapter seven goes together, of course. We began the chapter reading about the false teaching of the Pharisees who were not following the commands of God, but they were teaching the people that they needed to wash their hands before eating.

If they ate their food with defiled hands, then they would become unclean. Now, this didn't have anything to do with hygiene. It was the belief that if your hands had anything dirty on them and you touched your food, well, it would defile your food.

And then going into your body would make you spiritually unclean. Was even condemnable to do such a thing, which was why the Pharisees had asked Jesus, why his disciples ate their food with unclean hands.

Jesus rebuked the Pharisees because they elevated their tradition above the commandment of God. And then he tells the people what goes into a person cannot make him unclean, but it's what comes out of a person that makes him unclean.

The disciples asked for an explanation. So Jesus said, when a person eats food, it goes into their stomach and is expelled. And so it cannot make a person unclean. The body filters it out. Whatever uncleannesses would have been in the food.

And we had the statement in Mark 7, 19 that Jesus declared all foods clean. Then he explains to the disciples the uncleannesses that come out of a person and this is what makes a person unclean. So it was on Tuesday of last week that I explained the reason for the dietary laws.

It wasn't simply ceremonial cleanliness. It wasn't simply about how these animals are impure and these animals are cleaner. There are some of the animals on that list when you go to the dietary laws in Leviticus 11.

Some of the animals, like we don't even eat today because they're unclean animals. Nobody wants to eat a bat, for example, unless you're going to a wet market in China or something like that and they have the bat stew.

Sometimes diseases have ended up coming from that. We should learn from that. Bats are unclean, don't eat them. But it wasn't so much a matter of these animals are clean and these animals are unclean.

God gave the dietary laws to the children of Israel so that they would be separate. They would be set apart. That's what it means to be holy. And when they go into the land of Canaan, they were not eating foods that would therefore cause the Jews to have to intermingle with the Canaanites or the pagans that inhabited that land.

They would sacrifice their food to their false gods and then the food that wasn't sent up to their gods, they would eat. And so to keep the people of Israel from eating with the Gentiles and eating food that was defiled in the sense that it had been offered to false gods so that the Jews wouldn't be tempted to worship those false gods.

It's a constant warning that comes up in the book of Deuteronomy, for example. So to keep them pure, God gave them these dietary laws. It was really to separate the Jews from the Gentiles. It wasn't about these foods are clean and these foods are unclean.

There was a distinction between Jew and Gentile. Now in Christ, that separation is torn down, just like is talked about in Ephesians chapter two, the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile has been torn down by Christ.

He means to reconcile a people to God and even to each other from every tribe, language and people on earth. Now that of course is going to be fulfilled in its good time, but in the process of that, as Jesus is bringing that to a fulfillment, thus he declares in the teaching that we had just read in Mark seven, that all foods are clean.

Foods do not make you defiled. It's what comes out of a person that defiles the person. Since Jesus was going to be breaking down those things that separated Jews and Gentiles, foods were not to be considered unclean anymore.

Peter, if you'll recall the way that Paul talks about confronting Peter in his letter to the Galatians, in Paul's letter to the Galatians, he said that Peter had a moment of weakness where instead of eating with the Gentiles, went to eat with his kin, the Jews, because he didn't want to be looked down upon by the Jews.

So he played favorites and Paul rebuked him for that because that was discriminatory for him to neglect the Gentiles and make them feel once again, like they're less than, but these dietary laws were not to separate one another anymore.

So Peter should have considered himself able to eat with the Gentiles. As Jesus had given the revelation to Peter in Acts chapter 10 of the sheet coming down from heaven and all the different kinds of animals that are on the sheet and the command from heaven that said, rise, Peter, kill and eat.

And this was to show Peter that he shouldn't consider being in a Gentile home, an unclean act. For the dietary laws had been removed, they had been fulfilled and all that Christ had accomplished in his life and in his death.

And so therefore no distinction anymore, separating Jew and Gentile, especially when it comes to those who are in Christ Jesus. Christ had broken down the dividing wall of hostility. So as we were reading about that last week, I teased it out to say what we're gonna see next in that final section in Mark chapter seven is Jesus going to the Gentiles, Jesus going to those who would listen to the word when the Pharisees would not.

So we're getting a contrast here between those Jewish leaders, the Pharisees, the scribes who were adding to God's law. They were elevating their traditions above the commandments of God. They were not recognizing Jesus as Lord.

And so now Jesus goes to a different group of people where the Pharisees would not receive him. This group of people will, where the Pharisees considered it unclean to eat with a Gentile. Here is Jesus in a Gentile home right here in Mark seven, beginning in verse 24.

And so we'll look at these two sections because we have here with the healing of the demon possessed girl, Jesus in the company of Gentiles, of pagans. And then you have in the next account with Jesus healing the deaf man, him opening the ears of the deaf that they may hear and understand.

Remember Jesus' statement to his disciples before, are you lacking understanding this way as well? Do you not understand? And then explains to them the teaching. So that's going to be kind of the picture that we see in the deaf man being healed, Jesus opening the ears of the deaf that they may hear and understand.

So back to verse 24 here. Now Jesus stood up and went away from there to the region of Tyre. And when he had entered a house, he was wanting no one to know of it, yet he could not escape notice. So this was apparently some sort of a home that may have been occupied by multiple people.

And Jesus was welcome there for whatever reason, we don't know. We actually are not given the reason why Jesus goes to this area. He had previously sent out his disciples and told them not to go to the Gentile areas, but to go only to the house of Israel.

So why is Jesus going here into a Gentile area? There's nothing in the text that explains it to us, even in Matthew's account of this same exchange. But for obviously reasons of providence, God had his reasons that Jesus was to be there at this time, speaking to this woman and healing her daughter.

Now we're supposed to understand by reading this, why would Mark even include it? Why do Matthew and Mark include it? If it's such a small kind of deviation from everything else, and we don't read about anything else that Jesus did while he was in the region of Tyre and Sidon.

So why would they even include this? Well, it is to show, to foreshadow, how Jesus is going to come to the nations, not just to the Jews, but even to the Gentiles. That's what we understand from this account.

So he's in a home where people notice him, his fame is extended even to these Gentile areas. And after hearing of him, a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately came and fell at his feet.

Now there's nothing here that explains the condition of the little girl. Sometimes we'll get some explanation of what the demon possession looks like. Like for example, the father whose son would throw himself into flames because he was possessed by an evil spirit.

No details are given to us, but just that she has an unclean spirit. And it would be clear to everybody that there was something supernatural going on with this girl and something evil on top of that.

Jesus Heals the Syrophoenician Woman's Daughter

So the woman was a Greek, it says in verse 26, of Seraphim descent. Now that word Greek can be pretty broadly applied. It doesn't necessarily mean that she was Greek by nationality, could just mean that she was a Greek speaker.

So she spoke Greek, that was her first language. It could also be just synonymous with Gentile. For remember that the apostle Paul says in Romans 1 .16, I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

So that's the distinction being a Greek as just being a non-Jew. It could be synonymous with Gentile, pagan, heathen. It doesn't necessarily have to be someone that is from like the Athens area or something like that.

So this woman was a Greek of Seraphim descent. Now that is significant. So Greek could just be broad. Seraphim is very specific. Who else in the Bible, like what would be the most famous Seraphim in scripture?

Do you know the answer to that? It would be Queen Jezebel. So Ahab's wife in the book of first Kings and likely Ahab marries this woman to have some sort of a connection with the Phoenicians. And so, you know, kind of uniting two kingdoms or making a partnership of some kind.

But Jezebel ends up introducing Baal worship into Israel after marrying Ahab, this incredibly wicked woman and the pagan things that she had done in Israel so that she even had Baal priests that would lead the children of Israel in Baal worship.

She was an awful woman, one of the worst rulers in the history of Israel along with her husband, Ahab. And so to see here that a woman of Seraphim descent falls at his feet, it's kind of like things are coming full circle here.

This woman who had been such a curse upon Israel, who was a Seraphim, you know, referring to Jezebel and here in the descendancy of the Seraphim, you have this woman falling at the feet of Jesus. For as it is said in Philippians 2, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

So the woman kept asking him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And Jesus said to her, let the children be satisfied first, for it is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.

Now, remember again, when Jesus sent out his disciples into the area towns and told them that they were going to preach and cast out demons and heal the sick, then he said to them, go only to the children of Israel, the children of the household of Israel.

So calling them the children and then those who are outside of Israel, the Gentiles, the pagans, they're called dogs. And that is pretty consistent through the scriptures. We see that in the Old Testament, we see it in the New Testament.

The Apostle Paul will even say later in Philippians 3, watch out for the dogs. And he's making a reference to the Gentiles. Watch out for those who are still pagan in their attitude and their behavior.

Though there are some that will profess to be Christ followers, they still hold on to their pagan ways. And this particular woman, Jesus references as a dog, a dog in the sense of being a Gentile. It was a disparaging term that was used by Jews, but this Jesus is saying to test the woman.

And you see how she responds to what it is that Jesus says. How far is this woman willing to go to have her daughter healed? Is she going to take up a fence? Oh, I'm offended that you just said that and leave.

And therefore her daughter is going to die because the woman decided to be sensitive over the statement that Jesus made, which was perfectly normal for a Jew to make such a statement. But she responds very humbly to what it is that Jesus says.

She said, yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table feed on the children's crumbs. She's basically saying, I will take whatever you give me, anything. If you heal my daughter, that's but a crumb. You don't have to come and heal all the people in Tyre and Sidon.

Just heal my daughter. Just give me a crumb under the table. That's all that I'm asking for. A very humble response that the woman had. Not trying to fire back at Jesus with insults about Jews, but instead says, you're right, I am a dog.

Even the dogs will eat the crumbs from the children. So can you please give me a crumb? It is an incredibly wonderful and humble statement. Now there are some people out there, this is more like on the woke side of things, critical race theory, you know, things like that.

There are some people that will read this story and they will even make the claim that Jesus was wrong. It was wrong of him to call this woman a dog. And she put him in her place and so therefore should be lauded for it.

No, that's not what she did at all. She did nothing to put Jesus in his place. It was as if Jesus to say, ma 'am, you're a dog. And she goes, yeah, you're right, I am, I am. Please heal my daughter. It was a very humble reply.

And that's something that we should all take lesson from, that we should all be humble before the Lord. God, I will take whatever you give me. You've already given me more than I deserve. Please heal, please move, please answer my prayer.

As it said in James, you don't have because you do not ask. And you ask, but you ask with wrong motives. And so that's why you do not have. So let us come with humble hearts before God and ask for his kindness and his generosity to us.

Now, the statement that Jesus made in verse 27, where he said, let the children be satisfied first, this implies that there is blessing that will come to the Gentiles. It is coming, it's just now is not the time.

But because of this woman's humility, Jesus grants her request. Because of this answer go, the demon has gone out of your daughter. And verse 30, and going back to her home, she found the child lying on the bed, the demon having left.

Jesus Opens the Ears of the Deaf and the Tongue of the Mute

Okay, quickly, let's cover this last miracle here. Now, verse 31 is a little confusing, and I'm not sure that I really understand exactly what's being said here. And again, he went from the region of Tyre and came through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee within the region of the Decapolis.

Well, Sidon is way north of Tyre. So it's like Jesus would have had to have left Tyre, which is already north of the Sea of Galilee, gone further north to Sidon. And then as it says, he went through Sidon to come to the Sea of Galilee.

So there's a couple of possibilities here. Either it should be understood that Tyre and Sidon were a region. And so Jesus is coming from that region to the Sea of Galilee and not going further north. Why would he continue up the coast to go to yet another pagan city?

So that's one possibility is it's just being referred to as a region. The other possibility is it means exactly what it says. It is literally that route that Jesus took and he ran a kind of a circuit.

So he goes from Tyre to Sidon and maybe had other encounters there before he left there and came back into the land of Galilee and goes to the Sea of Tiberias, which was also the Sea of Galilee. So it's not quite understood what the geographical layout that Mark is presenting there.

And I've read different things from different commentators. So there are some different opinions on the wording of this. The Decapolis was a region that included 10 cities and that's why it's called the Decapolis, deca meaning 10.

So as though to say Jesus went from one region of Tyre and Sidon to another region, which is the region of the Decapolis. Not necessary to have to wring our hands over it, but that's all just to say that it is kind of a confusing statement.

And if Jesus was indeed spending time in Tyre and going up to Sidon and coming back around, and yet we have no account of it. Nothing is said in any of the gospels of what Jesus might've been doing in that region for that period of time.

We don't read of any miracles that he did there other than healing this Seraphim woman's daughter. And remember that toward the end of the gospel of John, that John says, Jesus did many, many other things.

And if everybody were to write down all of the things that Jesus did, there would not even be enough manuscripts in the world to contain all of it. And so this is likely evidence of some of that where Jesus traveled pretty extensively and even went into Gentile regions and whatever he was doing with the Gentiles or preaching to them or whatever, scripture doesn't record for us.

But we know that Jesus did many amazing and wonderful things. So verse 32, and they brought to him one who was deaf and spoke with difficulty, and they pleaded with him to lay his hand on him. So we have a man who is deaf and he also cannot speak well.

And this remember is comparable to the question that Jesus asked of his disciples, do you not have understanding in this? So they heard, but they didn't understand it and nor are they able to articulate it to anybody.

So as Jesus is able to heal this man of his deafness and even give him words to speak, so we understand his power even over the human spirit to give us understanding, to be able to discern the word and not just hear it, but even be able to articulate it and pass it on to somebody else.

That's all demonstrated in Christ's power over this man's condition here in this section. So Jesus took him aside from the crowd by himself and put his fingers into his ears. And after spitting, he touched his tongue.

That's really gross, but he's gonna heal the guy. So who is the guy to complain? And we kind of weird if somebody walked up to you and stuck their fingers in your ears, right? And then you may have been bullied as a kid with wet willies.

Yeah, sorry for bringing up that picture. I'm sure I've awakened somebody's bully trauma from the past. So anyway, continuing on verse 34, looking up to heaven with a sigh, he said to him, ephaphtha, that is, be opened.

And this is Christ looking up. He is looking up into the heaven, knowing that our understanding of the scripture only comes from above. Our understanding of the ways of God, understanding of what he has said in his word.

Remember that 1 Corinthians 2 .14 says, the natural person does not accept the things of the spirit of God, for they are folly to him and he is not able to understand them because they're spiritually discerned.

And it is the spirit of God that gives us understanding of the word of God. So Jesus looking up to heaven says this proclamation that means be opened. And his ears were opened and the impediment of his tongue was removed.

So he can hear and he can speak clearly. And friends, when the Holy Spirit comes into us, you might see that same kind of transformation, an understanding of God's word and an ability to communicate it to somebody else is indeed a gift of the spirit of God.

The man began speaking plainly, but Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone, but the more he was ordering them, the more widely they continued to proclaim it. And they were utterly astonished saying, he has done all these things well.

He makes even the deaf to hear and the mute to speak. And he has made your deaf ears to hear and your mute tongue to be able to articulate as we all have a responsibility to help and encourage one another in the word of God and even pass on the message of the gospel to others.

Jesus who died, who rose again, who ascended to heaven is seated at the right hand of God is coming back again to judge the living and the dead. All who believe in him will not perish but have everlasting life.

And it is through his life and his death that Christ has accomplished reconciliation between us and God and even between one another. No hostility between Jew and Gentile anymore. We are all one in Christ Jesus.

Heavenly father, I thank you for what we have read here today and I pray that we understand what you have done for us. You have cast the evil out of our lives. You have given us ears that might be able to hear your word and understand it and words that we may communicate this or pass this on to others.

And in all that we say and do, may we be an honor to Christ our King. It is in Jesus name we pray, amen.

Thank you for listening to When We Understand The Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website, www .wutt .com. Join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study when we understand the text.