The Chosen Key Word in this Chapter is “Be opened” it comes from the Aramaic Word “Ephphatha” which means “be opened.”
A foreign woman’s daughter gets healed, and a deaf man hears the word ‘be opened.’ Welcome to Bible Life Basics Chapter Reviews, I am Chris and this is Mark 7.
Pharisees and scribes criticize Jesus’ disciples for eating without ceremonially washing their hands, following the tradition of the elders. Jesus responds sharply, quoting Isaiah about honoring God with the lips while the heart remains far away, and accuses them of setting aside God’s actual commandments in favor of their own man-made traditions. He explains to the crowd that nothing entering a person from outside can truly defile them, since it enters the stomach and passes on, but “those things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man,” listing evil thoughts, theft, murder, and deceit as what genuinely comes from within the heart.
Traveling into the region of Tyre and Sidon, a Greek woman of Syrophenician descent begs Jesus to cast a demon out of her daughter. Jesus initially responds that He was sent primarily to Israel, comparing it to not taking the children’s bread and giving it to dogs. The woman answers with humble persistence, “Yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs.” Moved by her response, Jesus tells her the demon has left her daughter, and she returns home to find it exactly so.
Traveling on, people bring Jesus a man who is deaf and has a speech impediment. Taking him aside privately, Jesus puts His fingers in the man’s ears, touches his tongue, looks up to heaven, sighs, and says, “Ephphatha,” an Aramaic word meaning “Be opened.” Immediately the man’s ears are opened and his tongue is loosed, and he speaks plainly. Despite Jesus’ charge to tell no one, the news spreads rapidly, and the people, utterly astonished, declare, “He hath done all things well.”
Jesus consistently redirected attention away from external ritual and toward the heart’s true condition. What defiles a person was never about unwashed hands. It was always about what genuinely lives inside. The same God who opened a deaf man’s ears is still in the business of opening whatever in us has been closed off.
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