Mark 7:34 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Mark 7:34

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‘Looking up to heaven, he sighed.’ The Greek is ‘looking up into heaven’ more than ‘looking up to heaven’, in other words he is intimate with heaven. Is he indicating this is too hard for his to cure? No, it was a sigh of intense pity, and it was a sigh shared with heaven. He is from heaven and not just a faith-healer. It was heaven’s perspective on the world. If you are with someone and know how a thing needs to be done, and another is doing it all wrong, you both sigh. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit sigh in intense pity. ‘Look what these people have done to themselves’ – so proud of themselves, and he pities us. ‘See how they are cut off, at the mercy of wins, condemned, incomplete persons, not in communion with God.’ If we could only understand the misery of our condition. We attract only the sigh of the Lord. This sigh summaries Christ’s feeling for the world, the feeling that caused him to come into the world. He came out of pity. He didn’t just sigh, but he acted. He sees through all the superficial froth of happiness in the world. He sees that it is without knowledge, and that the true state of mankind is that he is far from God, and heading for a lost eternity. How can a few moments of pleasure in life compensate for that? Here is a case of a man who is deaf and dumb, but Christ takes a deeper view. He relates it to man’s condition under the curse: spiritually deaf, not able to hear; spiritually dumb, not able to pray or praise God. The organs of soul are not functioning. We are so proud of ourselves and he is so sorrowful. This is the tragedy of human life under the weight of sin. Only God can give life to dead souls. This man has lost the power of speech, unique to humans. Imagine someone who has lost this – how isolated they are! We humans have souls and yet we have lost life in the soul, and so this healing is a picture of Christ healing our souls. It was that sigh that meant it could not just turn away and ignore the plight of mankind. He must act; he must come into the world: be born and lay down his life for his sheep.

Application

‘Ephphatha’ – it is an Aramaic word from Hebrew: ‘Be opened.’ We are unable to pray; our spiritual eyes and ears are shut, not functioning. Be opened entirely, permanently, not by degrees. Some teach that conversion is lifelong – Roman Catholic teaches this – you won’t know till the end. Wrong: this man knew straightaway that he was healed. We come to Christ and asked for life and receive it and are changed immediately. The mind is fully open; we yield to his rule and know we are forgiven.

In the case of the soul, it is not just that we cannot hear, we cannot understand what God says to us; we do not want to hear. We understand enough to know that we do not want this message, and we run from it. To heal us, Christ has to open our understanding, and he has to make us willing to hear what he says. He has to make us desire him more than anything else. We must receive what is naturally a very unwelcome message to us – that we are alienated from God, under condemnation, with no prospect of any improvement. We can do nothing to save ourselves, and in our helpless state our only hope is to come to him for life. Christ must go to Calvary and pay the price for our sin. He did not sigh because Calvary was ahead of him, though it cost him more than we can understand. No, he faced that joyfully, knowing the great gain that would come out of it. What he sighed about was the human condition before he saves us from our sins.

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Mark 7:34 Commentary and Bible Study