COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
I know how weary people are by the end of New Year’s celebrations. If you’re like I am, the new year was rung in quietly, and the decorations came down yesterday. If you’re like I am in another way, you may not make new year’s resolutions anymore because history has proven they don’t hold up over time.
I’ve discovered, as I’ve grown in the Lord after trusting the true gospel, that learning to live by the Spirit is very different from summoning my will and committing to self-improvement every new year. Learning to live by the Spirit is actually a living relationship, and it doesn’t rest on my ability to muster my self-discipline.
Today I have just one idea to share as we start another year. A women’s Bible study has been meeting in our house twice a month, and we are currently studying through the gospel of Mark. Last night I pondered Mark 7:14–23:
And after He called the crowd to Him again, He [began] saying to them, “Listen to Me, all of you, and understand: 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. [“And if anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.”] And when He had left the crowd [and] entered the house, His disciples were asking Him about the parable. And He said to them, “Are you lacking understanding in this way as well? Do you not perceive that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and goes to the sewer?” ([Thus He] declared all foods clean.) And He was saying, “That which proceeds out of the man, that is what defiles the man. “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, [and] foolishness. “All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.”—Mark 7:14–23 LSB
This passage is paradigm-shattering for former Adventists because in verse 19, Mark clearly says parenthetically (so no one can miss his point) that Jesus “declared all foods clean”. This statement alone is enough to launch a new year in the right direction!
The context of this passage is that the scribes and Pharisees were criticizing Jesus and His disciples for not ceremonially washing their hands before eating. This ceremonial practice did not derive from the Mosaic law but rather from the rabbinic legal interpretations that had accreted to the law through the Babylonian exile and onward as Israel lived through the political upheavals that God had revealed to Daniel in Daniel 11.
The hand-washing had never been about hygiene but about ritual purity: washing off all gentile and secular “uncleanness” before eating so that one did not defile himself with unsanctified dirt carried by unwashed hands.
Jesus directly challenged the Pharisees’ traditions and called them out for neglecting God’s laws in favor of their own. Yet He didn’t stop there. His disciples were a bit disoriented by hearing Jesus de-leigitmize the traditions of the elders that had become as much a mark of Judaism as were the feasts and Sabbath!
Stripping off the man-made rules, Jesus then addressed, in the same breath, the legitimate Mosaic rules about clean and unclean foods. WHAT??
Food Can’t Defile
Notice again what Jesus said in verses 18 and 19: “Do you not perceive that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and goes to the sewer?” ([Thus He] declared all foods clean.)”
Yet God had specifically told Israel that whole categories of foods were unclean. Pig, shellfish, animals that did not both chew the cud and have split hooves—all these were unclean for Israel! And now Jesus says that NOTHING that goes into the mouth can make one unclean! He even goes as far as to say that whatever we eat is processed and expelled from the body. The power of “clean” and “unclean” is being exposed: no food whatsoever has the power to defile us!
Can this Jesus actually be the same Yahweh who gave those commands to Israel?
Now Jesus goes farther. The law never explained the clean and unclean restrictions at this deep level. The only thing that can make a man unclean, Jesus says, is what comes out of the heart—and then he names a series of behaviors and attitudes that are all too familiar. Who has never experiences at least one of these unclean desires—or acted on them? Notice again what Jesus said in verses 21–23: “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, [and] foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.”
What is different? Why is Jesus apparently dismissing the law and holding every person alive accountable for the desires and thoughts that spring up, unasked, from deep within a person’s heart? At least the law created a barrier to people’s depravity! At least it kept them away from the pagans who practiced these evils—and the food laws were a powerful deterrent to fraternizing with the pagans!
Jesus: The Fulfillment and the Savior
Jesus was teaching His disciples that something new was coming. He was here! The law had protected Israel from themselves and preserved their separation from the pagan worship of the Canaanites and from the defilement of the holy seed which God was preparing in His nation Israel. He had created a nation which would worship Him, and He would place His presence with them. They were to keep themselves separate from the evil of the pagan nations who did not honor God.
Now God had sent God the Son to the world, and as an Israelite Man, Jesus lived among the sinful people who comprised both the gentile world and his own unbelieving nation. Now God had sent the answer to the helpless drift into sin which Israel had experienced for centuries.
Jesus was teaching His disciples that in the coming new covenant, sin would not be addressed by law because law couldn’t stop people from sinning. Furthermore, the law carried a death sentence. Every time an Israelite broke the law—even the food laws——they were worthy of death.
Jesus was on His way to taking the world’s sin into Himself and enduring God’s wrath for that sin. Jesus Himself was going to pay for sin and open a new way to God: His own blood.
In the soon-to-be-inaugurated new covenant, the shadows of clean and unclean food would be rendered obsolete as Jesus took the legal penalty for sin and tore down the legal barrier between Jew and gentile.
In the soon-to-be-inaugurated new covenant, the shadows of clean and unclean food would be rendered obsolete as Jesus took the legal penalty for sin and tore down the legal barrier between Jew and gentile (see Ephesians 2:14). Jews and gentiles would no longer be separated from each other by the terms of the law; now they would be on a equal playing field. Now, after Jesus died and rose again, each person would answer to God not on the basis of the observance of the law but on the basis of trust in Jesus’ blood atonement.
Jesus was emphasizing, in Mark 7, that every single person—Jew and gentile—had sinful desires and tendencies inside their own hearts. Those desires spring from what Paul calls, in Romans 7:23, “the law of sin which is in my members”.
Because each of us is born dead in sin, by nature “indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind” and are “by nature children of wrath”, we needed some way to be clean aside fromour own good intentions and focussed will power. Our dead spirits and the natural “law of sin in the flesh” cannot be overcome by good intentions and effort.
We need a rescue—and this rescue is what Jesus was teaching His disciples.
By nature, we all produce evil desires and inevitably act on many of them. Oh, we may be convinced they are sinful desires, but on our own, we can’t overcome them.
In fact, this reality about human nature is why God gave Israel the law. They would have been left entirely to their own sinful desires, as were the Canaanites and pagans around them, if He hadn’t revealed His holiness to them and given them His law describing moral behavior. Even more, that law He gave them provided the means of blood sacrifices for sin—a constant reminder to Israel that their sin was punishable by death, but Yahweh was providing a way for them to atone for sin through offering sacrifices to the appointed levitical priests.
Now, though, Jesus is revealing that a more powerful remedy is coming: His own death and blood. Meanwhile, He emphasizes that the natural law of sin in each of us yields behaviors that, when indulged, actually put a barrier between us and fellowship with our God.
Are You Clean?
Israel lived as God’s people before Jesus came and atoned for sin. Their entire history and their law witnessed to and foreshadowed the work of the promised Messiah. The law was God’s grace to Israel in a pre-cross world. It identified sins and protected them from dangerous behaviors.
The law, however, could not give Israel new hearts in the same way the new covenant promised. Yes, God could give people the faith to believe Him and to live according to His will, but His provision for them was always based on the terms of His national covenant with them.
Now, Jesus was about to inaugurate the new covenant and open the way for all who hear His voice to believe and to be born again, as He explained to Nicodemus. Now, those who hear the gospel and believe are sealed with the Holy Spirit:
In Him, you also, after listening to the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation–having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, unto the redemption of [God’s own] possession, to the praise of His glory.—Ephesians 1:13, 14 LSB
When we trust and believe in the finished atonement of our Lord Jesus, placing all our weight of sin and need on Him, He grants us spiritual life. We pass from death to life, and we do not come into condemnation.
Now we have the indwelling Holy Spirit, and our own identities—our now-living spirits—are “hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). Now we have the ability to lean on our Lord Jesus when those internal desires flare up—and He keeps us trusting Him, relying on Him instead of indulging our flesh.
Yes, we still have that “law of sin” in our flesh. This fact is why God credits us not with personal righteousness when we believe but with the alien-to-us righteousness of God (Phil 3:9).
Now we are counted CLEAN and holy, alive with the resurrection life of Jesus and credited with God’s own righteousness. Now we can understand that no clean or unclean foods have any effect on us: we are not more spiritual if we eat them nor if we don’t. Now we can see that the food laws were a shadow. The reality is Christ Himself. He makes us clean
When we are alive in Christ, we have, for the first time, the ability to avoid acting on our sinful desires not because we have more will power but because God Himself indwells us! His life and presence in our now-alive spirits is far stronger than our mortal flesh.
This year year the most important thing we can do is to trust God with ourselves. The Lord Jesus has paid for our sin; He has broken our curse of death. He has inaugurated the new covenant in His blood.
Be sure that you have trusted Jesus alone—and live by the Spirit of God instead of by the unclean desires of the flesh. Happy New Year—and enjoy that bacon! †
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