Mark 7:17 Commentary and Bible Study

The disciples didn't understand, so they asked him privately, when they were back in the house at Capernaum. Jewish people at that time were confused about this notion of ceremonial righteousness. ‘He saith unto them, Are you so without understanding also? Do you not perceive that whatsoever thing, from without, entereth into the man, it cannot defile him, because it doesn't enter into the heart’, and he repeats this in verse 20, ‘That which cometh out of the man,’ – words and behaviour – ‘for from within, out of the heart of men, proceed …’ And then there comes the most dreadful list. What a list! Verse 21, verse 22, verse 23. Broadly, very roughly, it follows the second table of the law, the Ten Commandments, commandments five to ten, the last six commandments. Not in precisely that order, but in roughly that order. This list is more extensive than the Ten Commandments, but everything in it can be traced to those last six commandments. But what a list! Matthew Henry, the commentator, long ago made a very shrewd observation. The list begins with evil thinking, and it ends with unthinking, translated ‘foolishness’. Evil thinking to unthinking. Evil thinking: schemes in the mind. Evil which is planned or relished in the mind, and it ends with unthoughtfulness about God or the soul or eternity, which is translated – and quite fairly – ‘foolishness’, things which are completely unspiritual, unrelated to God. What a list! Everything on this list is ugly, treacherous, destructive, self-serving. Everything on this list is wilful. Sin, temptation – it is not like a spot that arises on your hand or arm or face, because some tiny insect has bitten you. You have been strung, so you have got a little area of inflammation; something has been done to you. It is not like that. This is you, me. This is in us; it is of us. It is sin. Every sin is wilful. Every temptation is consented to. Every one of them is generated, not inflicted, from within us. You consider the human heart, the Saviour's view of the human heart. Think of the coronavirus. They are telling us it may have come from a laboratory or it may have come from a wet market, but originally, they say, perhaps it started in the deep recesses of a cave infested by hundreds of thousands of bats. And there's a lady, a Chinese lady, a great scientist, who has spent her life going into such caves, and she's described the stench of a cave infested by hundreds of thousands of bats. As you stare into the inky blackness, you know that it's thickly lined with bat droppings from decades of infestation. You look at the human heart, when you look at this list, and you think perhaps that illustrates it. The innermost view of the human heart, with all its sin. It has been described in terms of a wasps’ nest. The wasp can be dangerous to many people buzzing about, but the nest is a cauldron of activity. All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.