Matthew 15:25 Commentary and Bible Study

‘Lord, help me’, she cries. What she has heard him say to the disciples has not put her off. There must be a way through these barriers, given who he is. But again he gives a discouraging answer. He says to her, ‘Is it right to give the children’s bread to the dogs?’, and she is taken aback. The children’s bread?Mark says that she ‘came and fell at his feet’ in a posture of complete submission and helpless dependence, and Matthew tells us that she worshipped him and again called him Lord. There is no question that she knew him to be the Messiah. She worshipped him and her worship was genuine. This too was an argument with him. She was a Gentile, but couldn’t she also praise God and her worship be acceptable to him?Finally, he does say something to her directly, and what he says is very discouraging. Mark records a slightly longer reply: ‘Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it unto the dogs.’ It sounds an awful thing to say. Down in Israel we are told by the experts that the families tended not to keep dogs. There were dogs in the villages of Israel and in the towns, but they were rough creatures and scavengers; few households kept dogs as pets. But up in Phoenicia it was quite difference. Almost all the households had pets. So these were dogs of a different character. They were docile, as dogs kept as pets can be. They lived under the table, as it were; they received the scraps, and what the Lord says, is quite reasonable: let the children first be fed. What is he doing? Why is he hesitating to help the woman? There are several reasons. One was the reason he stated. The Lord was not commissioned for the first part of his ministry to preach to the Gentiles. He was to focus on the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and there was a reason for that. There was no church yet. There were no teachers yet. If converts had been found among the Gentiles nations, the pagan nations, how would they have been looked after? Who would have taught them? They would very quickly have fallen prey to false teaching and spiritual scavengers. The reaching of the Gentiles was to wait a little while until after Calvary, until the cross of Christ when Christ died for sinners. It was to wait until the message was plain, until the day of Pentecost and the conversion of many Jews who were steeped in the word of God. They would be the first generation of teachers even in the Gentile churches and would go everywhere, proclaiming the word: the word would then go out and travel. That was the time when the Gentiles would be gathered in, not yet. The general call for the Gentiles had to wait until the Jews started to be saved. So the Lord’s commission is to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And yet he intended to bless this woman in his mercy. She is going to be a token of the fact that the gospel and the blessing of salvation is for Gentiles also. But there is a delay in her receiving help from the Lord, and many obstacles that might have made her give up, obstacles that seem to come from the Lord himself..There is also another reason why he seems to hesitate and put her off. It is to draw out her faith. She believes in Messiah; she believes he has all power; she believes he is the compassionate one, but she must express it. Her faith must be drawn out, as it were.