Inward or Outward (Mark 7:1–23)

The Pharisees are into ceremonial cleaning.

Verse 4, hands and cups and pitchers and kettles and maybe couches, if you look at the footnotes.

We are clean.

So verse 5, why aren't your disciples clean? That's what they ask.

And Jesus has the fight.

Something about this, it is so important that gentle, kind Jesus, he cannot leave them confused.

He must confront them.

He says, you look clean, certainly, but verse 6, you are the hypocrites that Isaiah warned us about.

You're clean on the outside, but defiled on the inside.

So let me read verse 6 again.

It says, Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites.

As it is written, these people honor me with their lips.

That's on the outside.

But their hearts are far from me.

And we'll see the same thing again in verses 14 to 23.

Those are the verses we're adding to Ollie's passage from last week.

So look at verse 15.

Nothing from outside a person can defile them by going into them.

Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.

And it's the same again in verse 18, but with an explanation in verse 19.

Verse 19.4, it doesn't go into their heart, but into their stomach, and then out of the body.

And in saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.

Now, when we preached on this a few years ago in the evening, I lowered the tone like this.

So I said, when it comes to human digestion, Jesus, he understands that you and I, we are much more like a tube than we are like a bag.

if you know what I'm saying.