Mark 7:10 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Mark 7:10

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Here is the example: their care of parents. ‘For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother;’ – which includes look after them when they are aged – ‘and, Whosoever curseth father or mother,’ – finds a way of rejecting them, rather than supporting them – ‘let him die the death’. That second quotation Moses also said, in other words such behaviour makes them worthy of judgment and condemnation. ‘But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban [a Hebrew term, which is immediately translated for us by Mark], that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; he shall be free.’ This is an example of the Pharisees’ disregard for the principles of the word and substituting their own human tradition. The man in this illustration might be quite wealthy: he has got means; he has prospered. But his parents are now elderly and they are poor, and for some reason he has got a heart of stone, or he has fallen out with them and does not want to help them in their lives. He is a bitter, hostile individual, perhaps. Or he is just mean and he doesn’t want to part with anything which is his. So what he says is, ‘All I possess is Corban.’ That is to say, it is dedicated to the Lord and to sacred purposes. What he means is, ‘When I die, everything will be available to the temple, or to the synagogue. By saying this – ‘it is dedicated to the Lord’ – I can avoid giving it to my parents. I have made a vow, everything is ring-fenced, because it is under a vow of dedication, so I don’t have to help them.’ You leaders, says Christ, allow this. You allow this idea that if I consecrate something by a vow to the Lord, I don’t have to honour the Ten Commandments, I don’t have to look after my parents. You have taken a human idea and you have made it more important than the commandments of God. So apart from the eating, he points to this example of their sinfulness in setting aside the word and putting human things in their place.‘Ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother,’ – this is the clever way; how brilliantly you get out of obeying the Scripture, Christ says to them – ‘It is Corban’, which is a Hebrew word which means, ‘See it as a gift’, ‘Rate it as a gift’. What has happened is that the people who should be looking after their aged parents have at some stage shouted at them – this is what they did. They would shout this word out: ‘This property, or this extra house that I own, or this farm, or field, or smallholding, is a gift to the Lord.’ So, having said that, it released them from the obligation of ever using it for the care of their parents.’ Making that declaration in the presence of the parents – ‘All this is a gift of God’ – is your way of saying to them, ‘You are going to get no care from me’. Well, that’s terrible. So they had invented a tradition which really meant they no longer needed to obey the law of Moses, and Christ condemns them for it. ‘He shall be free’ – that is in italics. Our translators have inserted those words, so that you get the sense.

Application

I have heard preached years ago, then I have read it again, and again, and even recently I heard of somebody taking the following line of interpretation of this passage. It is preached this way, and this is appalling; it's almost wilful misinterpretation. It is said that what this passage means is that Christ condemned them – the scribes and the Pharisees – for making more laws than the Scripture made. This is how these interpreters choose to look at it. The Scripture gives you the Ten Commandments and then the scribes and the Pharisees, or the traditional rabbis down the last few centuries before Christ, added a whole heap of extra regulations. So Christ is saying, ‘How dare you make more regulations than God made!’ Now you can see where this is going. The preacher then takes this and he says, ‘So therefore, these people who say, “Oh in the Christian life, you mustn't do this, and you mustn't do that, and you mustn't do something else. This is what you should do; this is how you should walk.” Don't listen to them. They are adding to what God says. Just keep the Ten Commandments; keep the basic laws that you find in the Scripture. You can drink and dance and smoke, and watch every soap you like and every dubious and even unclean film you like. You can be as worldly as you like, you can dress how you like, behave how you like, do what you like. So if the preacher starts saying, “No, Christians should behave like this. They should abstain from this practice and that practice in obedience to the Scripture, and should seek to follow this and that objective”, they are like the scribes and the Pharisees. They are adding to the Scripture.’ So these modern interpreters twist this passage to say something like that to people. You hear this great antagonism among Christians sometimes: ‘Oh we have got liberty today. Rules and regulations in the Christian life? Rules to follow? No, we've got liberty’, and this passage is pressed into service.

But the passage isn't saying anything like that. In fact, it’s saying the opposite. The Lord is distinguishing between ceremonial righteousness and real righteousness. He is criticising the Pharisees for thinking that conformity to the externals of the ceremonial law is enough to make a person acceptable to God. He is also criticising them for inventing commandments for themselves, and even daring to invent commandments which contradict the commandments of God. Now that comes much closer to those who try to impose new forms of worship on God’s people which violate the principles of Scripture; it comes much closer to this than does the insistence that Scripture gives us standards of holiness that we should live by, and teaches us reverence in coming before God Almighty. The Scriptures need to be applied in our day to oppose the corruption of worship that Satan is trying to bring into the church.

Saul of Tarsus was an example of false reliance on externals. He believed in ceremonial cleanness, and he didn't worry too much about moral cleanness. There was a time when he didn't worry about his pride or about his covetousness and his vain ambitions and selfish desires to be someone big in the Jewish church. He wanted to be a leading persecutor and cleanser of Israel. It was being ceremonially clean that was important, carrying out to the letter the ceremonial. But he came to the point where he understood they were all teaching symbols. They did not actually affect real righteousness in him at all. So he saw the difference between so called ceremonial righteousness, and moral purity, real righteousness, and that's what this passage in Mark 7 is about.

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Mark 7:10 Commentary and Bible Study