Clean or Down the Drain?

Many students of  Scripture consider Mark 7:19 to be a slam dunk indicating that God considers all food clean and available for eating. Rabbi Dr. John Fischer provided the most succinct analysis of Mark 7:19 that I’ve ever encountered. This is significant because analyzing the passage can be a very complicated exercise.

His article “Jesus Through Jewish Eyes” is excellent it’s entirety, but the Appendix “Are All Foods Clean? or Down the Drain!” can be found by scrolling to the bottom of the page.

A Strictly Literal Rendering of Mark 7:19

"…because it enters not of him into the heart but into the belly, and into the drain goes out, purging all the food."

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Contextual Analysis of Mark 7:19

1.  "Food" by definition in Yeshua’s context is only what is kosher!

2. The context of this text deals with hand-washing not eating food or what is kosher.

3. The point of the passage (as emphasized by Mt. 15:20b) is "eating with unwashed hands—not eating non-kosher food—does not make a person unclean."

The American Dream is Dangerous

I heard this morning that the United States is now the third largest mission field in the world. How did this happen? Amazingly to most of us, the Torah anticipated just such a scenario:

[T]he author [of Deuteronomy] was writing to well-to-do landowners. He was concerned that they remember from whence they came and on whom they needed to rely. He treated their economic prosperity as a threat to their required humility before God. He sought to counter this tendency to self-sufficiency by reminding them of their past slavery; and of their dependence on God for a bountiful harvest. He limited their ambitions by emphasizing the need for sabbath rest, and sabbath years. The requirement to rejoice and hold feasts also served to restrict their utilitarianism. He believed that they themselves were not ultimately responsible for their prosperity, and that they would be in the position of the widow, fatherless and alien if tragedy befell them.^[1]

Something about the way I’m wired means that everywhere I look I see the consequences of bad theology. To me it’s like looking at heat under infrared, the connections are so glaring and direct. America was settled on the basis of a dangerous and diabolic theology called Manifest Destiny (more on that in another post), and when the impetus of that cooled a new twist was thrown into our lives during the 1950s. Having driven men to misinterpret the Torah, the Adversary now drove them to ignore it. Loosed from our moorings, without an eternal standard of morality, we lost any ability to accurately recognize injustice, and lost the benefit of the practical life instruction God had included for His people.

These days, gratitude is a thing of the past; I see more athletes pound their own chest after a great play than point a finger toward heaven. I hear even pastors talk about how they were a “champion for Jesus” and you can be one too, if you’ll just pull yourself up by your own boot straps and take the initiative like they did.

Today overwhelming percentages even of the well-to-do can be described as fatherless, and waves and waves of people feel lost and alien in their own culture. We have lost our way and substituted the American Dream for the biblical prescriptions; often by reinterpreting biblical language to support our misguided priorities.

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^[1]Christiana van Houten, The Alien in Israelite Law (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 106.

The Consequences of Theology

Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. can really get my blood pumping! What I’m going to quote below is an excellent example of why. The context is this, Douglas Moo, a respected theologian who fervently believes in Jesus, has just finished articulating an understanding of discontinuity between the old and new testaments and the firm replacement of the Law of Moses by the Law of Christ. Kaiser concludes his response to Moo in the following paragraph, and provides an excellent example of the dire necessity of reforming the too often errant theology of the contemporary Church on this issue of the relationship between law and grace or law and gospel.

Moo concludes that the Mosaic law “is not a direct [or] immediate source of guidance to the new covenant believer.” However, he suggests that there is an “essential ‘moral’ content of the Mosaic law [that] is … applicable to believers.” But this confuses me still more, for now the moral aspect of the unified law can be ascertained and is applicable, but not in any direct or immediate way. Moo concludes, “I am no Marcionite.” For this I am glad; but please tell me how his disciples are going to be able to resist Marcionitism, given the force, direction, and logic of his position? Ultimately, Moo is bound only by what is clearly repeated within the New Testament teaching. What advice will he give on marriage to close relatives (cf. Lev. 18), involvement with forms of witchcraft and various forms of the occult (cf. Lev. 19), the case for capital punishment (cf. Gen. 9), or the proscription against abortion (cf. Ex. 21)? Did Americans not learn in 1973 that a New Testament exclusivistic ethic landed us squarely in one of the largest legalized murdering ventures in recent times—now exceeding Hitler’s six million Jews sent up a chimney by four times over with some twenty-four million babies going in a bucket? What will it take to wake us up to the narrowness of our views? If this is not a Marcionite view, it is at least semi-Marcionite—and the disciples of our teaching will soon prove what direction it was that we were heading in if we refuse to fully follow the implications of our own thought.^[1] [emphasis mine]

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^[1]Greg L. Bahnsen, Walter C. Kaiser, Douglas J. Moo et al., Five Views on Law and Gospel, Zondervan Counterpoints Collection (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999), 393.

John Wimber on Demonstrations of the Spirit

Peter Jenkins: Are you utterly, totally convinced that it always is the Holy Spirit?

John Wimber: No, I’m largely convinced it is the Spirit. But, I believe it is a mixture of humanity and Spirit.

Peter Jenkins: So you do think that there are instances where behavior in the church is too extreme?"

John Wimber: "Yes. Remember, not everybody that walks into our building’s real healthy, Peter. Some people have gone through some pretty tough things in life. They’ve been beaten, they’ve been abused, they’ve been sexually molested, they’ve gone through long difficult histories with addiction. And so, the Spirit of God touches them and they do things that you and I wouldn’t probably do, and we don’t want to endorse or encourage.

- "In the Name of God" ABC, 1995

The thought behind the liturgy

A liturgical example of the multiple purposes of the Law, and of the thought which is behind the liturgies we use, too often thoughtlessly:

In the Lutheran context, the Commandments were usually read as preparation for the confession of sin, thus serving one of the functions of the law: to convict us of our sins so as to open our hearts to confession and God’s forgiveness. Similarly, up to the modern era the Anglican Book of Common Prayer has called for the repetition of the Commandments by the priest while the people would respond to each commandment with “Lord, have mercy.” While the Reformed tradition did not worry too much at first about where the Commandments belonged in the liturgy, because they were understood to function primarily catechetically, Calvin and other Reformed leaders came to have the Commandments sung or read after the confession of sin and the words of absolution, as a guide to living according to God’s instruction.[1]

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[1] Miller, Patrick D. The Ten Commandments: Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. 11

Our Real Commandments

The following is directly quoted from Philip Graham Ryken’s book Written in Stone: The Ten Commandments and Today’s Moral Crisis; I customarily comment upon quotes that strike me, but what more is there to say than what follows below?

In their book The Day America Told the Truth, James Patterson and Peter Kim lay down the law for postmodern times. They observe that today there is “absolutely no moral consensus at all.… Everyone is making up their own personal moral codes—their own Ten Commandments.” Patterson and Kim proceed to list what they call the “ten real commandments,” the rules that according to their surveys people actually live by. These rules include the following:

• I don’t see the point in observing the Sabbath;
• I will steal from those who won’t really miss it;
• I will lie when it suits me, so long as it doesn’t cause any real damage;
• I will cheat on my spouse—after all, given the chance, he or she will do the same;
• I will procrastinate at work and do absolutely nothing about one full day in every five.¹

These new commandments are based on moral relativism, the belief that we are free to make up our own rules, based on our own personal preferences. The law is not something that comes from God, but something we come up with on our own. And our laws usually conflict with God’s laws. It is not surprising that what Patterson and Kim call the “ten real commandments” generally violate the laws that God gave to Moses: remember the Sabbath, do all your work in six days, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, and so forth. We have become a law unto ourselves.

One would hope to find that the situation is somewhat better in the church. Surely God’s own people honor the permanent, objective standard of God’s law! Yet the church is full of worshipers who do not even know the Ten Commandments, let alone know how to keep them. This problem was documented in a recent report from The Princeton Religion Research Center. The headline read, “Religion Is Gaining Ground, but Morality Is Losing Ground,” and the report showed how recent increases in church attendance and Bible reading have been offset by a simultaneous decline in morality.²

How is this possible? How can people be more interested in God and at the same time less willing to do what he says? The only explanation is that people do not know the God of the Bible, because if they did, they would recognize the absolute authority of his law. Respect for God always demands respect for his law. And whenever people have a low regard for God’s law, as they do in our culture, it is ultimately because they have a low regard for God.^[1]

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¹ James Patterson and Peter Kim, The Day America Told the Truth (New York: Plume, 1992), 201.

² “Religion Is Gaining Ground, but Morality Is Losing Ground,” Emerging Trends, Vol. 23, No. 7 (September 2001), 1-2.

^[1]Philip Graham Ryken, Written in Stone : The Ten Commandments and Today’s Moral Crisis (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2003), 11.

In the World Not of the World

It is instructive to understand (and worth imitating) that the author of Hebrews was clearly formed by Jewish apocalyptic thought, yet was obviously conversant with middle-Platonic thought, and was therefore speaking from the worldview that had formed him, but in a language that made sense to the society in which he resided.