Lesson 6: “Inside Out”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Life Assurance Ministries
Problems with they lesson:
- The lesson misses the Jews’ hypocrisy of proof-texting some passages of the Law to ignore other passages.
- The author denies that Jesus declares all foods clean, missing that Jesus was preparing the disciples to minister to gentiles.
- The lesson says Jesus’s healing a deaf man illustrated God limiting Himself to protect human freedom.
This week’s lesson covers Mark 7 through Mark 8:21—a passage which includes the accounts of the disciples’ breaking some of Judaism’s core traditions as well as some of Jesus’ most important miracles which He performed among gentiles. While the lesson acknowledges that some of these events were directed toward gentiles, the studies do not explain what Jesus was teaching His disciples or what He was revealing about Himself.
The lesson attempts to explain Jesus’ ministering to these gentiles as the demonstration of His acute social justice awareness, the fruit of His teaching which supposedly was breaking down the disciples’ prejudice toward “outsiders”: those unbelieving gentile dogs. Yet the lesson misses the fact that the Law had strictly forbidden the Jews from associating with gentiles, from eating together or from having intimate relationships.
Jesus did not come as an enlightened teacher to show His disciples a better way; He came to reveal that He had come to fulfill the law and to usher in what the Old Testament had prophesied: a new covenant in His blood that would open up a new, living way to the Father and break down the barriers of the law that separated Jews from gentiles.
Pitting the Law against the Law
Ironically, the lesson opens with Jesus’s rebuking the Pharisees for misusing the law in order to get out of their responsibility to honor and care for their elderly parents. The lesson does not explain the way the Pharisees invented their “proof-texting” to misuse one passage in order to manipulate another.
The similarity between the Pharisees manipulation of Scripture and that of Seventh-day Adventism is striking, but as Jesus said in Mark 7:6, 7:
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. ‘BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE COMMANDS OF MEN.’”— Mark 7:6-7 LSB
Jesus was rebuking the scribes and Pharisees for the rabbinic arguments the Jews had adopted over the centuries since their Babylonian captivity. During those bleak years when they were deprived of their temple and their sacrifices, the rabbis had begun to write out their interpretations and explanations of the law. These collections of rabbinic writings had become known as “mishna”, and eventually the mishna became the main text of the Babylonian and then the Palestinian Talmuds.
These rabbinic interpretations of the law became the accepted commentary that gave the Jews of Jesus’ day and beyond their unique practices and understandings of the Law. In a way, we might compare the Jews’ dependence upon these rabbinic commentaries to the way Adventists depend upon Ellen White’s interpretations of Scripture (to use an extreme, cultic example) or to the way the Catholic and the Orthodox churches depend upon their magisterial interpretations of Scripture.
So, in Mark 7:1–13 we see Jesus exposing these self-serving traditions as He said,
“For Moses said, ‘HONOR YOUR FATHER AND YOUR MOTHER’; and, ‘HE WHO SPEAKS EVIL OF FATHER OR MOTHER, IS TO BE PUT TO DEATH’; but you say, ‘If a man says to [his] father or [his] mother, whatever you might benefit from me is Corban (that is to say, given [to God]),’’you no longer leave him to do anything for [his] father or [his] mother; [thus] invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down; and you do many things such as that.”— Mark 7:10-13 LSB
The Jews hadn’t just invented this argument out of their heads, as I used to think they had. Quite the opposite—and even more deceptively—they misused Numbers 30:1, 2 to come up with their cruel arguments:
Then Moses spoke to the heads of the tribes of the sons of Israel, saying, “This is the word which Yahweh has commanded.
“If a man makes a vow to Yahweh or swears an oath to bind himself with a binding obligation, he shall not violate his word; he shall do according to all that proceeds out of his mouth.”— Numbers 30:1-2 LSB
Jesus was calling out the Pharisees for using Moses’ command that if any person made a vow to God, he was bound by a solemn oath to keep that vow. The Pharisees had used this command and had manipulated it to endorse their vowing to give their money “to God” in order to get out of helping and honoring their elderly parents as the fifth commandment instructed. Furthermore, the Pharisees had applied the law’s requirements for the priests to ritually wash their hands and to purify themselves before handling the sacrificial food to all Jews, and they bound observant Jews to extra-biblical rituals that made even eating an exercise in hand-washing.
In this way the Jews were justifying not submitting themselves to God’s law by claiming they were keeping the law! Their dishonest hypocrisy was evil, and Jesus exposed them.
Yet the lesson does not explain what they were really doing but says, “They have placed human tradition above the Word of God and, in so doing, have sinned.” Sunday’s lesson then concludes,
The response of Jesus implies that He does not find convincing their insistence on hand purification as necessary to be in accordance with the will of God. Instead, His response clearly supports the commandments of the Law over against human tradition.
Here the lesson is intended to convey the idea that Jesus was teaching the continuation of the Ten Commandments. Jesus rightly condemned the Pharisees for imposing these crippling restrictions on the people, but the author of the lesson is completely blind to the way Adventism does the same thing. On the authority of Ellen White, Adventism uses Scripture against Scripture and proof-texts its own cultic requirements so that its members have no idea that Scripture does not require Christians to keep the seventh-day Sabbath or the levitical food laws! In fact, most Adventists have no idea that the Bible does NOT teach an investigative judgment or a great controversy between Christ and Satan.
Adventism does exactly what Jesus condemned the Pharisees of doing—and its people are blinded and bound by false interpretations of Scripture which inoculate them against perceiving truth when it is right in front of them.
All Foods Are Clean
In Mark 7, right after Jesus condemns the Pharisees for their unbiblical rules for the people, Jesus called the crowd to Him and taught them that evil and uncleanness are never external things that defile a person. He made the point that eating food without washing their hands—in fact, eating any “unclean” thing—could not defile anyone.
Jesus was clear about this fact:
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.)— Mark 7:18-19 LSB
In fact, Jesus went on to say that all manner of sins including murder, adultery, theft, coveting, envy, pride, and more flow out of a person’s heart. These are the things that make people unclean, not the food that goes into one’s mouth and stomach!
The lesson denies that Jesus was literally declaring all foods clean; it says,
[W]hat Mark 7:19 means when it says that Jesus cleanses all food is not that the food laws are abolished but instead that the tradition of touch contamination that the Pharisees had made was invalid.
Yet the words mean what the words say. The lesson fails to point out that in this chapter and the chapter following, Jesus is systematically introducing his disciples to ministry among gentiles. In declaring all foods clean, Jesus is preparing the apostles for taking the gospel to the gentiles and to help them overcome their traditional aversion to gentile association.
In fact, this passage in Mark 7 foreshadows the vision of the sheet filled with unclean beasts which Peter will receive as recorded in Acts 10:9–16. Peter will be prepared by God to go to the gentile Cornelius’s house, and he is not to call either Cornelius nor the gentiles food he will eat, “Unclean”. The Lord Jesus is fulfilling the law’s requirements and will remove the barrier of the law when He hangs on the cross and fulfills its death sentence for sin. His blood will cleanse the sins of all who believe—Jew and gentile—and believers are not to divide over ethnicity or food. No longer will gentiles be unclean, and no longer will unclean food be unclean. In Christ all will be clean!
Healing and Feeding the Gentiles
Mark 7:31–37 describes Jesus healing a gentile who was deaf and mute, and the account then moves into Mark 8:1–21 which records Jesus’ feeding of the 4,000. These accounts are related and significant, but the lesson misses their importance.
In these passages Jesus is ministering not primarily to the lost sheep of Israel but to the gentiles—a focus of His ministry which had always been foreshadowed but which upset everything the disciples thought about proper Jewish living.
As He healed the deaf mute, Jesus was literally fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah 35:5–6:
Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, And the ears of the deaf will be unstopped.
Then the lame will leap like a deer, And the tongue of the mute will shout for joy. For waters will break forth in the wilderness And streams in the Arabah.—Isaiah 35:5-6 LSB
Mark 7:34 says that Jesus sighed as He looked to heaven and commanded that the man’s ears be opened. This healing was a direct fulfillment of prophecy and identified the Lord Jesus as the promised Messiah—but the author of the lesson completely misses this fact. Instead, because of Ellen White’s interpretation of this account, the lesson says this:
Jesus touches the affected parts of the man that He will heal, but why the sigh? “He sighed at thought of the ears that would not be open to the truth, the tongues that refused to acknowledge the Redeemer.”—Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 404.
Jesus miraculously restored the man’s hearing and enabled him to speak clearly. His sigh illustrates the limits that God has placed upon Himself in regard to the free choice of humanity. He will not force the will. All humans are free to choose whom they will have lead their life—the Prince of Life or the prince of darkness. Jesus could open deaf ears but would not force unbelieving hearts to acknowledge His messiahship.
There is absolutely NOTHING in this account suggesting that God is limiting Himself! Jesus’ sigh was not about His sadness that God wouldn’t be able to make more believe choose Him! Adventism has made a god out of human free will, and they have made a god who limits himself to accommodate their freedom.
The Adventist god’s highest value in the universe is human free will, but the highest value in the universe of the God of Scripture is His own glory. God is sovereign over everything. The God who created the world and named the land, the sea, the night, the day, and created mankind in His image does not limit Himself.
Furthermore, the lesson says almost nothing about Jesus feeding the 4,000 in the region of the Decapolis—ten Greek cities on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire. This area was largely gentile, and Jesus takes His disciples to preach and to feed this gentile crowd.
Jesus would soon be sending His disciples into the cities of Asia and Europe and beyond, taking the gospel to gentiles because He had destroyed the barrier of the law that separated Jews and gentiles. Because of His blood, all who believed in His completed atonement would be born again and brought into the church. They would all be part of the His own body.
Jesus was preparing His disciples to minister to gentiles and to not be afraid to eat with them. The coming new covenant in His blood would make all foods clean and all people clean, and He was having His disciples help Him distribute the bread of life—both spiritually and physically—to GENTILES!
All of these accounts are related, and the Lord Jesus was training His apostles to do the work He had prepared in advance for them to do: to make disciples of ALL men.
The lesson utterly misses these things. In fact, at the end of Friday’s lesson it asks these questions:
What Christian practices have you found that help to keep the heart clean? Who are the “unclean” people in your community? What can you do to help draw them to the gospel? Ponder, as a class, what you can do to foster sharing the gospel in simple ways with your neighbors.
These questions completely miss the point of the passages in Mark. First, Adventism does not have the biblical gospel. The Adventist “gospel” of the seventh-day Sabbath, the investigative judgment, and the health message is simply not in the Bible.
Furthermore, the Adventist view of the nature of man—that we are physical beings with no immaterial spirits—keeps members from understanding the true nature of their sin and of their true need: to be born again and brought to life by the Lord Jesus when one believes that His death, burial, and resurrection have fully paid for all our sin.
In fact, every one of us is born “unclean”—dead in sin and by nature children of wrath. Adventists are not taught that they themselves are unclean—that their pious practices and clean eating do not render them “clean”. They are as unclean as are any they might label “unclean” in the community.
There is no practice that can make a heart clean or keep a heart clean. Only the Lord Jesus can give us clean hearts, and clean hearts come only when we believe and are indwelt by the Holy Spirit of promise.
The Gospel of Mark reveals a sovereign God and a sovereign Lord Jesus who does not limit His power. He has complete authority over demons and disease; He has complete authority over nature—and He has complete authority over human hearts. In His mercy He asks us to believe, to trust His death and resurrection which brings us real life, but He must give us even the faith with which we believe.
Jesus exposed the great sin of man-made religion that manipulates Scripture to gain control over people. He declared that the laws of clean and unclean are fulfilled in Him: all foods are clean, and all people are united to Him and to each other when they trust His finished work. It is not His philosophy nor His teaching that puts an end to racial and cultural hostility; it is His spilled blood.
Adventism uses Jesus as a moral teacher who showed us how to live; the Bible reveals Jesus as the Savior and Substitute who shed His blood to destroy the barriers of the law and to make one new man in Himself.
So I ask you: how do you see Jesus? Who is He, and what did He really do?
I ask you to pull out your Bible and begin reading through the book of Mark, one chapter at a time, asking the Lord to teach you what you need to know.
If you haven’t trusted Him, let today be your day. He died for your sin; bring all your guilt and shame to Him and lay it at the foot of His cross. Thank Him for taking your sin in His body on the cross, and confess your need of Him. Confess that you need a Savior, and believe that He has paid for your sin and broken the curse of your death. Thank Him for being your Savior—and you will know the miracle of being born again.
Trust in Him today, and you will pass from death to life. You will be reconciled to our sovereign God, and you will never die. †
This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
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