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Sa hello, friends. Greg Kokel here, your host for Stan Teresen, and I welcome you to the show. Glad you're with me. I look forward to sharing with you as you call in and we chat about things that are on your mind. Just give me a piece of your mind and I'll give you a piece of mine. The phone number 1-855-243-9975. That's 855-243-9975. Now, if you're listening live, you can call in. I'm thinking about through the feed, you know, if you're watching online or whatever, live streaming. That was it. And if not, then you have to dial that number when we're on the air live, which is Tuesdays from 4 until 6, and that would be Los Angeles time. Okay. 855-243-9975. I want to start out solving a problem, a textual problem. I think it's a solution, a good one, to a very, very odd passage in the New Testament. There are a lot of things that Jesus says that are odd, I think. And as I'm reading through the Gospel of Mark, for example, I find lots of places where I'm putting question marks in the margin here. I'm looking at just a couple of pages. There's a question mark. There's a question mark. Why did Jesus. There's another question mark. Why did Jesus say the things that he said? He healed somebody who was deaf and mute and then he told that person, don't go back to your village. Don't even enter your village. You know, why did he do that? I can understand him telling people who he's just healed of something. Don't tell a whole bunch of other people about it. But that's kind of hard when the person he heals is blind and that he can see. You know, I mean, people are going to notice. But in this case, he says don't even enter the village. But that's where his home is. And the reason I think he's telling people don't talk about it, is he's already overwhelmed with lots of people coming to him to have these particular needs met. Now he meets the needs and that's I mean, he's moved with compassion. This is why he fed the 4,000 and the 5,000 move with compassion. He sees the people filled with compassion. They come with all these needs. Demon possession is one of them, as well as all kinds of physical healing. And he's touched by what he sees and he's helping out, but he doesn't need any pr. He's already got people coming from everywhere. This passage I want to talk about is one of those kinds of passages where I'm just wondering, you may have wondered, why did Jesus say this? Okay, now, I mentioned about don't enter the village. I can see him saying, don't tell people. I already have enough business. But when he tells the guy, don't enter the village, don't go back to your own village, that strikes me as odd, question mark here. And here's a passage that I had a question mark for quite a while, and then it got solved. Someone with insight helped me to understand. All right, and this is the passage that's in Mark 7 about the Syrophoenician woman. Now, Jesus went up to the area of Tyre. Tyre is up along the coast in the north of Israel. This is a Gentile area. He enters the house. He doesn't want people to know about it, but he couldn't escape notice. This is all in the text. And people start coming. So he's got international acclaim. And a woman comes to him whose daughter has an unclean spirit, and she fell at his feet. And she's appealing to him to help her by releasing her daughter from the spirit, or I should say releasing the daughter from her spirit, however you want to look at it. Now, the text mentions that she was a Gentile. Okay? Not surprising. Syrophoenician woman from the area of Tyre. And she kept asking him, the text says, to cast the demon out of her daughter. And he was saying to her, in other words, now she's pestering him and he's pushing back, saying, let the children be satisfied first, for it's not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. Now, the children he has in mind here are the Jews. And the dogs is a reference to Gentiles. The Jews would refer to Gentiles as dogs. Okay, not very sweet. But here Jesus is using the language of the community he's from to characterize this Syrophoenician woman whose daughter is demon possessed. And he's putting her off. She's making an appeal. And. And he's saying no, because it's not good to give what belongs to the Jews to Gentiles. So what the heck is going on here? Why would Jesus say this? In fact, there was a meme or a podcast or a piece that was put out that said here that Jesus is racist, that he's actually sinning. He's making this racist remark. Now, of course, obviously, in our pleasant Circumstance that would be considered racist. And it wasn't even nice. Then why would Jesus say such a thing? And another person analyzing it was that the Syrophoenician woman, in her response to him, I'll read it in a moment, was correcting him, speaking, as she put it, truth to power, which I don't think she was doing that at all. But she makes an appeal. Jesus is putting her off. And I read the way he did that it's not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. But she answered and said to him, yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table feed on the children's crumbs. Now, of course, he responds to her because of this answer, go, the demon has gone out of your daughter. And when she got home, the demon was gone. Now, there are two problems with this passage. One problem is Jesus response to this woman. It does look racist, obscene even, the way he put it. And secondly, if he really thinks it's not good to give what belongs to the Jews to the Gentiles, then he has just done the thing that he said was not good to do. And that's another problem. So we got to step back from the passage a little bit because there's, I think, a fairly simple answer to this. And it had to do with God's grand plan and the way the Jews at this time in Jewish history understood their role. God's grand plan was to reach the world. And the core of that strategy is expressed in Genesis 12, 1, 3. And this is called the Abrahamic Covenant, because this is where God sets aside one man, Abraham Abram, at the time and commissions this man to be the father of a nation of people. And God says, I will do this. By the way, I'm setting you aside. I'm going to make a great nation out of you, and I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. In other words, there's a protection that God is going to give on Abraham and his seed that will allow God to accomplish his purpose, which is stated in the third verse of chapter 12 of Genesis. For in you, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. Now, the nations were the Goyim, the Gentiles, that is, God is taking a Semitic person, Abraham, the first Jew, if you will, to build to be the father of the Jewish race, which race would be a light to the Gentiles, so that the gods, God's rescue and plan of salvation would come to all those people. And of course, we know some aspects of it, certainly from the seed of Abraham comes the Messiah, who died for all people, etc. So we see that's God's grand master plan. It's right there in Genesis 12, first three verses, the Abrahamic covenant. And the rest of the text from there to the end of the book, the rest of the 65 books, is an outworking of that plan. Now, when God raised up Israel, he did make them separate. He gave them the law to protect them, to keep them from becoming syncretistic with the other pagan religions. But he didn't want them to be utterly out of contact with them. How are they going to reach them with the truth of the true God of Israel. And there were those that responded. I mean, look at the Queen of Sheba who came to see Solomon's riches and listened to his wisdom. And there are many, many other examples of this. But you see the theme repeated time and time again. Now, of course, early on, the problem with the Jews were that they. They didn't accept this sense of mission because they were more interested in being syncretistic with the other cultures when they weren't supposed to be. They were supposed to be separate from them, to be protected, but still reaching out to them in some fashion. And this syncretism was their downfall for a thousand years longer than that, actually, until finally the time of Jesus. After the Assyrian dispersion and the Babylonian deportation, they had learned their lesson and now they've gone the other direction. They were really bigoted towards the Gentiles and wanted nothing to do with soiling themselves with contact with Gentiles. And you recall Peter in Acts 10, when he was commissioned, his arm twisted actually, to go to see the Gentile Cornelius and preach the Gospel to him. He was reluctant because he wasn't going to cross the threshold of a Gentile. So you have this hostility. Now, what's interesting is two things are going on there in the Gospels. You have a responsiveness from the Gentiles. You have people coming from all over. You have them coming from Decapolis, you have from Tyre and Sidon, you have from east of the Jordan. These are all Gentile regions. They are all coming to the Galilee area because they know about this guy Jesus. And this is a little rough for the Jews, I'm sure, because of their attitude. Now, there's another scene, though, that's relevant here, and that is where you have Jesus at Capernaum, in, what is it, Luke 4, where he is reading the scroll of Isaiah, or at least a portion of it, and he comes to that portion, he's reading that portion that has to do with the Messiah. And as he reads it, he goes halfway through it, stops, sets the scroll aside, and then says, today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Now, you're familiar with this passage. Very dramatic. I would have loved to have been there. But I've seen film characterizations of this, and it's frustrating because in the one that I'm thinking of, there was Jesus who read the scroll from the scroll and then made this comment. And everybody goes berserk in the film. Their response to the comment, today this passage has been fulfilled in your hearing is to get angry, who is this man? Whatever. But that isn't what the text says. When you read the text, it said, wow, they were all speaking, well of him and the wonderful things that were falling from his, you know, his mouth. He was doing a good job. Isn't this Jesus, son of Joseph and Mary and his sisters are here. And, oh, he's a hometown favorite. Look at this. But of course, Jesus knows better, because then he says, you know, a prophet is not without honor in his own hometown. And instead of leaving things as they were, which were pretty good at that point, he makes this declaration. They say, hey, cool. Pretty neat. Everyone's speaking well of him. He says, there were many widows during the time of Elijah, and he only went to one widow in Zarephath to help her out, even though the rest of Israel was suffering from a drought. Now, she was a Gentile, and there were many lepers, but in the time of Elisha, but he went only to the leper who was the Gentile to heal him. So now Jesus is speaking about God's interest not just in the Jews, the chosen people, but to the Gentiles who they were chosen to help go to. And that's when the text said, when they heard these things, then they went berserk. They did go berserk, but not because Jesus was claiming that he was the fulfillment of the passage of Isaiah, but because he was pointing out to them in their own text that God cared about the Gentile. And that freaked them out. And they drove him to the edge of a cliff, and they were going to push him over, because that's the way you executed people. You push them off the cliff, you drop rocks on them, and Jesus found his way out. So you have a conflict now between the Jews, who are thinking he's cool in many ways, but at the same time pushing back on him, especially when he mentions the Gentiles. And you have Jesus who understands that God's goal has always been the whole world, not just the Jews. A blessing to the goyim. So this brings us now to our passage. And here's the way I think it should be understood. And I didn't get this. I didn't figure this one out. Don Richardson, who was a missionary, who wrote Peace, Child and Eternity in Their Hearts, great books, read them many years ago, who was involved with the US center for World Mission, where I was trained many years ago. He gave one of the classes. And he talked about this passage because the emphasis there of the US center for World Mission is everywhere. God sending us everywhere we know that. Go into all the world, make disciples. The world is in view. But he gave an understanding here, an insight that we thought was great. When Jesus said, let the children be satisfied first. For it is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. He was not giving his own opinion. He was parroting the view of the Jewish leadership. And then the woman answered and said, yes, Lord. Interesting. But even the dogs feed on the children's crumbs. The dogs under the table feed on the children's children's crumbs. So she recognizes who Jesus is. He's the one he's pushing back by this statement, which clearly he doesn't believe himself, or else he wouldn't have done the thing that he did, which he just called bad or not good. No, he was parroting the false, bad, distorted, corrupted theology of the Jewish leadership at the time, and then acted in a way that was contrary to it. And she kind of had this idea. She knew there was trouble. The Jews weren't accepting everything. That's why there were crumbs falling on the table. But she's going to be there to get them. And then Jesus responded by delivering her daughter, which, by the way, is not. He had done that for Gentiles all through the Gospels. This is in Mark 7, but there are lots of other places before that and after, and the other Gospels as well. He is delivering those people who came to him, Jew or Gentile. In fact, in, I think, Matthew 8, Amy showed me this. Of course, I'm familiar with the passage, but that's the reference. There you have the centurion who is a Roman soldier, who appeals to Jesus for help for his servant. And Jesus is going to go with him to help the servant. He said, lookit, you know, I'm a man who knows how authority works. All you have to do is say the word and my servant will be healed. And Jesus said, I haven't seen such faith in all the Jews. And those people outside of Israel will come from the east and the west to be seated at the kingdom, but the children of the kingdom will have no place there. The Jews. So we see this theme throughout, and we just see this kind of coy, playful interaction between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman. And no, he wasn't racist. And no, she was not speaking truth to power. That's just silly. That's not what was going on there. I mean, obviously, even if you don't know why it happened, all the detail I just offered you is it's still she's not speaking truth to power. Oh my God, she's not chastising Jesus. Oh my goodness, what people do with the text. Anyway, there's a thoughtful reflection, and I give credit to Don Richardson for that, but I think that's what was going on in that passage. We'll just call that Jesus Feeds the Dogs, if you want a title. All right, let's take a break and we'll get to some of the calls that you have when I return on Standard Reason Would you like an STR.