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bigmike

Mark 7:5 (LSB) 5 And the Pharisees and the scribes asked Him, “Why do Your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat their bread with defiled hands?”
As Jesus become more well-known, and the religious leaders of His day became more zealous in their efforts to discredit Him, they presented Him with many questions that they thought would cause Him to stumble in His answers and expose Himself as a false prophet or teacher.
The question above was one of the questions that they used to accuse Jesus of not properly educating His disciples.
What they failed to discern and prepare for was the ability of Jesus to know their hearts, and the fitting responses He so quickly fired back at them.
In this case, Jesus didn’t address the lack of hand-washing on the part of His disciples.
Instead, He scorched the religious leaders with their insistence on putting the useless traditions of man before the commandments of God.
Mark 7:6 (LSB) 6 And He said to them, “Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: ‘This people honors Me with their lips, But their heart is far away from Me.
Jesus immediately rebuked them with the words of Isaiah, proclaiming their hypocrisy. For they honored God with their lips despite their hearts being far from Him.
And a short time later He explained to the crowd exactly what He meant.
Mark 7:14-15 (LSB) 14 And after He called the crowd to Him again, He began saying to them, “Listen to Me, all of you, and understand: 15 there is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him; but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man.
His point in this was that what defiles us (causes us to be dirty) is what comes out of our hearts, not what goes into our mouths.
But the larger emphasis was on the hypocrisy of the religious leaders’ failure to love God’s commandments and laws as much as they loved their traditions.
Interpreting this into New Testament lingo means loving God wholeheartedly, and putting Him FIRST, before our habits, traditions, routines, and rituals.
This is what God asks and expects of us. Let us gain understanding in this and apply it to our lives daily 🙏

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