MATTHEW 15
CAC It was grievous to the Lord to see people occupied with external things of no importance while setting aside what was of great importance in God’s sight.
The leaven of the Pharisees is an important thing to beware of for we are all naturally Pharisees. There was idolatry with the people from Judges to Acts, but after wards they fell into something worse. They were really worshipping the worst idol there ever was — self! Their heart was far from God. If we are near to God we know that it is moral and spiritual things that count. Their religion was against the commandments of God. If a man gave to the temple what he might have given to his poor old father they excused him.
Rem If they had been near the Lord they would love His commandments.
CAC And that leads into liberty. The disciples were in liberty; they did not wash their hands when they ate bread. They were set at liberty from what men count important things; being in His company set them free from things that held other people in bondage. It was a very vital matter according to the commandment that a man should honour his father and mother; if he did he would live long in the land. I have observed that when people begin to be particular about trifles they are generally lax about a big thing. Legal persons are generally very particular about trifles that do not matter, but will do the most God-dishonouring thing. The household order precedes the house order. I suppose all the disorder in the world today grows out of the fact that children are extremely lawless [p. 112] with regard to parents. The divine order is that parents are to be honoured, not merely obeyed, and it is displeasing to God when that order is not honoured. So the Lord takes this opportunity to discard the legal system altogether; that is, it is setting aside Leviticus 11. No doubt Peter was astonished; he called it a parable (verse 15). What is in the mind of God has to be understood spiritually, but the Jew takes it up literally. Peter said, “I have never eaten anything common or unclean”, Acts 10: 14. He would never have said that if he had paid attention to this, but he could not say that nothing common or unclean had ever come out of his mouth. It is quite possible for religious flesh to take up outward things, but it is the state of the heart that God looks at and boasting in what is of no value. The Lord exposes the human heart; it is the fountain of every evil thing. J.B.S. used to tell us that this is education for the assembly, and we need to know that nothing comes out of the heart of man but evil continually: so there is a necessity for the Father of Christ to do some planting. Nothing man does is good because his heart is a fountain of evil, so the Lord says very solemnly, “Leave them alone”. It is a question now of what the Father has planted, and they are the ones that are of value. It is more the kingdom idea. The Lord is setting all the Pharisees aside, and we go on with the Lord as we accept what the natural heart is. It is not a very bright thing to consider, but we are to consider it — to recognise the natural product of the human heart and to take it in, so that we should not have to consider it any more.
JND said he never thought of himself but as utterly vile, and it was the greatest help to him all his life. We are all Pharisees. It comes out in Peter when he said, “I have never eaten anything common or unclean”; he is a real Pharisee, and the Lord had to knock it out of him as He has to knock it out of each one of us. This is instruction [p. 113] to discount what comes out of our own human hearts; that cannot be taken up for any service of God whatever. So we really come in on the footing of the Syrophenician woman (Mark 7: 26).
God would furnish us with a supply of new thoughts. The only thoughts in my heart that are right are what God has put there. We are taken up to have an entirely new system of things put in our hearts, that which is moral and pleasing to Him. These plants are not marked by evil thoughts and so on, but Paul says, “We ... were children, by nature, of wrath” (Ephesians 2: 3), and he was a man who had been a Pharisee of the Pharisees. It moves us over in a very fundamental way from the old to the new. We want to go on with the holy thoughts that God has put in our hearts, thoughts of God and of Christ. It is a great comfort to go on with true and holy thoughts. If we do not maintain the sentence of judgment on the old man we shall bring out his thoughts but we are to go on with what is new. All these plants are suitable for the assembly. So that the heart is purified by faith; no one gets the Spirit until that takes place. “The heart-knowing God”, it says, “bore them witness, giving them the Holy Spirit as to us also ... . having purified their hearts by faith”, Acts 15:8,9. God could look into the heart of Cornelius which was purified. The heart that has admitted Christ is a pure heart, and God has made it possible for the christian to have a pure heart that delights in having occupation with what is pure and holy and of God. It is purely a work of grace.
Rem “Those that call upon the Lord out of a pure heart”, 2 Timothy 2: 22.
CAC Yes, the saints as such are persons “that call upon the Lord out of a pure heart”, that is, they are not hypocrites. The Scriptures help us; what we gather up from the Scriptures is pure, is holy, is of God. So we need to use all available means to maintain purity of heart: — [p. 114] Scripture, prayer, the company of the saints, and getting together as we are now.
Rem If we live in a pure atmosphere we take character from it.
CAC This was great instruction for the disciples who were accustomed to live as Jews. I do not think it could be understood by a company of christians until after the Spirit came; that is the teaching of Leviticus 11. We cannot be too particular in paying attention to every detail of Scripture. “Every word of God is pure”. So with Leviticus 11 (which was intended to be instruction for us, not for the Jews) then we can read it spiritually. Everything that God commanded was for man’s good. The law was all for man’s good, and if they had kept the law they would have been very happy.
Rem In a future day they will keep it as in Psalm 119.
CAC There is nothing wrong with the law, it is excellent at every point; the trouble is that man is in such a state that he cannot be subject to it! The knowledge of God revealed in love is the spring now. There is a new motive — spring in the heart of man. If you get into the heart of a believer you find praiseful and adoring thoughts of God and Christ. Normally, it is occupied with the revelation of God in love and grace in His Son and they become the spring of conduct. You do not think of studying anything. God’s thoughts towards His people cannot be numbered; we have all that to go on with. So there is no excuse for going on with evil thoughts.
An evil thought comes into the mind, do we give it a chair and tell it to sit down or do we judge and disown it? And evil thoughts give christians great distress — no pleasure. Do these thoughts please you? Oh no, you say, ‘I wish I could get rid of them’.
CAC What we have here is something like the branch of the wild olive being grafted into the good olive. I think [p. 115] of the Lord having Israel before Him, but having made known that the Gentile was to be brought in, but with due recognition of Israel’s place.
Rem It says the daughter of Tyre shall be there with a gift. This woman brings a choice gift with her faith.
Ques Does the four thousand give a universal setting?
CAC They were a very superior company to the five thousand; although smaller they were a better company. Chapter 11 in Romans is a special epistle to the Gentiles; but Paul turns round in chapters 9 and 11 to say, ‘Now you owe it all to Israel. So do not be high-minded or conceited. You owe it all to the promises given to another people’; a warning is added too, to prevent us being conceited. We get off the ground of mercy if we entertain high thoughts of ourselves; and if we do we are no good for God.
Rem The woman speaks of His compassion here.
CAC It is delightful. She was a little presumptuous in making some claim to the Son of David, so the Lord had to treat her with a certain amount of reserve and coldness. These incidents are leading up to what the Lord says of the assembly in the next chapter. The Lord knew that the assembly was going to be largely composed of Gentiles. God had committed Himself in the way of promise to a certain family — to Abraham, who was really the root of the tree of promise. And all blessing depends on coming into that line. If not on a natural line we have to come into it in a remarkable way. Faith on his part laid hold of the promises. God did not make any promises in the garden of Eden. He told the serpent that the Seed of the woman should bruise his head; but He made no promise to Adam and Eve. He never committed Himself to any one before Abraham, that is to say, the world had then gone on about two thousand years.
Rem Whatever promises there are were made to Christ, [p. 116] that is, to the Seed.
CAC That is very important — and to “thy seed”. Paul bases his argument on one letter — ‘s’. Well, they cannot break down if made to Christ! They would all break down if they were made to me, because of the unsatisfactory character of the person they were made to. If not exactly made to Him, He was the depository of the promises. This woman represents the Gentiles, that is, all of us Gentiles. She had to own that she had no claim whatever. (Pity brings in the idea of feeling, which mercy perhaps might not have).
She has to fall back on this universal title of “Lord”, and He is the same Lord over all. The Gentiles were in that miserable condition, pictured by the daughter, having no knowledge of God, worshipping demons, with no promises, and no covenants to lay hold of; as the apostle says, “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world”, Ephesians 2: 12. But it is very comforting that God does produce in a few Gentile hearts some sense of it; it is a great thing to have a sense of it, and a desire to know something of that connected with the olive tree of promise. It was depressing on another line because the Gentiles had not any title on that line. He was no more entitled to the promise than a dog to the bread of the children. This needs care; the nations were to come in. The Lord is severe, is He not? There is bread for the children, but none for you! We are not always prepared to say ‘Yes’ to the Lord, but we have to come to it! Her faith was marvellous, because it rose right above all that the Lord said. That might have depressed any confidence she had, but she rose right above what He said and replied: ‘Thou canst not say there is not a crumb from Thy table even for a dog’!
Rem It says, “Jesus, going forth from thence, went away into the parts of Tyre and Sidon”, whence she had [p. 117] come. It reminds one of Luke 10 — He “came up to him”. He put Himself within her reach.
CAC That is beautiful. I suppose she read something into that. And she accepted His correction. No, ‘I have no title to the promises’ but in her mind there was something greater than the promises. As rejected by Israel He was set free to let the branches run over the wall (verse 24). We want a moral answer in our souls to this; that is the great point; so that we are in the assembly not on the ground of the promises but simply on the ground of the goodness of God, what He is in Himself. The woman says, ‘I cannot claim anything on the ground of the promises, but Thou art greater than the promises’; and because of what He was, she put in her claim. He could not say He had not a crumb from His table; it would be denying Himself, and that would be worse than denying His promises!
We were seeing last Wednesday in Micah 7 that there is something greater than all the promises; it is the Promiser. The Promiser must be greater than the promises, and that sets us at liberty. If there is a new covenant, it is what sets us at liberty. We can take account of all we have been, but the blessed God is known to us in the absoluteness of His own Being, and He says, ‘I will consummate that covenant with you, and will not remember one of your sins’. If I have ‘twice ten thousand sins’ I have come to the blessed God and I find that He loves me, and His love is expressed in forgiveness; it is what is in His heart.
We were greatly impressed on Wednesday by the thought of God known in forgiveness; at least one person was — I was! It is greater than the house or the kingdom, or the millennium; to know God is greater than all the promises. Under the new covenant they get the knowledge of God. With sins gone, I can go right into the holiest; if that is the position, I am not afraid!
[p. 118] The great danger of the Gentile is that he does not continue in the goodness of God. This woman started with the goodness of God; she had no title or claim. Now we are to stick to that; that is, everything depends on what God is, not one single bit on what I am. “O woman, thy faith is great”. Her faith was great enough, in spite of all her disabilities, to reach up to the blessed God. The only thing on my part is the desire for it; that is my claim for it. The poor unconverted sinner has no claim, but he can say — ‘But I want it, and Thou art good enough to give it’ — there is not much difficulty in that! And this is the testimony that the Lord leaves in a Gentile world, for this woman was a daughter of Tyre.
Rem Jesus sat down on the mountain, it says here.
CAC Verse 32 shows that more spiritual conditions had come about than when He fed the five thousand. Fancy stopping with Him three days without anything doing; the five thousand had only been one day. It sets forth a very spiritually minded company — they were with Him three days without ever feeling hungry; they were fed spiritually. That is why the number seven (verse 34) comes in I suppose.
Rem They were continuing in the goodness of God.
CAC I am glad you said that; there is the principle of their going on with it with this company. There was no grass there; that is, these people are not fussy about being comfortable. They are so taken up with the Lord that they are independent of any special comfort. The Lord was so much to them that He says. “they have stayed with me already three days”. When on the line of grace (the number five of human weakness comes in there) the Lord provides comfortable conditions for His people. This nice little room is a bit of the grass; but we ought to be so attached to Him that we should be there if there were very poor conditions. It is not now a question of grace but the perfection [p. 119] of divine supplies; spiritual supplies are there in abundance. There is a little larger supply of fish too. I think the fish represent what is found in man for God, and the loaves what is supplied by God for men. The fish is never equal to the bread supply, but there is a testimony to it; there were two in the first case. A few small fishes caught show what is there, and so today, there is not much to say on our side, but there is something secured in the saints for the pleasure of God.
They came out to where the Lord was, and we have had to learn that we could not get light and blessing in our natural surroundings, but in association with Him in an outside place. Many people like to read our books but do not get much help from them. Healing comes before feeding. Many with us are attracted to the Lord on the line of infirmity so we cannot be fed before being healed — healing first then feeding!
Ques The dumb speaking comes first?
CAC That is very fine. We often find that infirmity. If only we let Him have a free hand, He can deal with any case! Verse 30, “they cast them at his feet”. The only thing is to get it to His feet. He will deal with it! It is a great triumph when the dumb speak.
In verse 36, in giving thanks He recognises the Father as the source of all. In this giving thanks He takes His place as Head, that is, His place Godward. It was the most wonderful thing the disciples heard — far more wonderful than the miracles — when they heard Him speak to the Father! They would never forget it. How it would come back to them afterwards. Mr Raven, though greatly valuing J.N.D.’s teaching, said how much he valued his prayers. The saints are still speaking to the Father through those wonderful hymns J.N.D. wrote.