Matthew 15:21 Commentary and Bible Study

This passage answers the question, ‘What is saving faith?’ In this passage a great lesson is given to us through this Syro-Phoenician woman, and it is a notable case because it is one of those instances where the giving of the blessing, which was the healing of her daughter, the casting out a demon, was delayed. The Lord appears to hesitate, and even appears to the refuse to hear her and her request. But we see soon enough that there is a purpose in his doing so. It is a passage which helps greatly in the matter of seeking the Lord. It helps especially when someone is waiting a while at the door of Christ, and there seems to be no response. That person is repenting of sin, and seemingly trusting in Christ, and calling upon him the salvation, but without response. He has been in Capernaum and at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee and now he ‘went into the borders of Tyre and Sidon.’ Now as the crow flies, if he was to go to the most southern of those cities, it would be some thirty-five or thirty-six miles, but it's a route far more laborious than that suggests. It is a three-day journey through the hills, and a very irregular route to Tyre and Sidon. Tyre was a Mediterranean port some twenty miles to the north of the Sidon, and between them is a notable place, Zarephath, where in previous centuries Elijah was fed by the widow woman. It was up there in Phoenician territory in the time of Ahab that Jezebel, who was a daughter of a Sidonian king and one of the most wicked enemies of Israel in ancient times, took many, many lives. It was heathen territory, pagan territory, and yet here is a woman who seems to be greatly affected by the teaching of the Israelites, more affected than many of them were themselves.Mark adds, ‘And [he] entered into an house, and would have no man know it: but he could not be hid.’ Why was that? He wished to be unannounced, he wished to be left alone, because he knew of course that he was going to have a particular visitor, a very persistent woman crying out for help. He appears to have made this journey for this single purpose, and after the healing, the casting out of the demon from the Syro-Phoenician woman's daughter, he proceeds back to Galilee and from there on to Decapolis. So he had one call, one purpose, up there. He who could command vast crowds wherever he set foot, made this journey for the sake of one person, and made himself available to no one else. But he could not be hidden as far as this woman was concerned. ‘For a certain woman whose young daughter had an unclean spirit, heard of him’, Mark tells us.