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Mark 7:1-23
After the feeding of five thousand in our last lesson, we watched Jesus quickly send His disciples away ahead of him (Mark 6:45). Jesus did this because He did not want the crowd, who was proclaiming Him being a worker of miracles, to seek to make Him a king by force (John 6:15). We noted that this was also an important event because it demonstrated that Jesus was confronting an eschatological issue as well. Namely that God’s Rule, The Kingdom of God was the central force of His mission. He was not coming to fulfill a Jewish Eschatological Hope. That hope was centered in the belief that one day the Messiah, the One whom Moses spoke about, would come and throw off Satan, the oppressor, (in this case Rome) from the political neck of Israel and rule the world from Jerusalem forever. Yes, Jesus, the Messiah was coming to bring about a great change, but a change initiated by God alone, not by the force of men. It would indeed include defeating Satan, but the oppressor Jesus came to defeat was not an earthly power, but Lucifer, the Prince and Power of the Air. Yes, Jesus came to establish a rule over His people, but a people redeemed buy the power of His destruction of sin and death at the cross. In this text of Scripture Jesus will confront a massive citadel of the Jewish tradition, the teaching of the elders of Israel, the great citadel of the Mishnah.
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