Mark 7:31-37
And again, departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis.
And they bring unto him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech him to put his hand upon him.
And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue;
And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.
And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.
And he charged them that they should tell no man: but the more he charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it;
And were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.
I think I have read that if you added up all the recorded words of Jesus, and read them all out, it would not take more than a few hours. And if you take all the recorded events of Jesus’ life and put them back to back in time, you really wouldn’t fill up much more than a few months. Yet we know that Jesus ministered for three years. So, the conclusion is the Gospel accounts are selected words and selected events, designed to show us things about Christ and teach us about Him. So when we come to this 22nd of 35 recorded miracles, we must ask, ‘Why did Mark record it? Why did he select this miracle out of three years’ worth of miraculous acts?’ When we understand why something is in the Bible, we will understand what God is teaching us through it.
This passage is there, once again, to teach us of the powerful person of the Lord Jesus Christ – the very Son of God who can heal such conditions as deafness. And part of the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ is His love.
I believe this passage teaches us about Christ’s love.
The doctrine of God’s love has fallen on hard times, mainly because we live in an age where very few pay attention to the meaning of words, and we are drowning in a sea of sentimentality. All around us people croon about how they love this one or love that one, how they will love them forever and ever. We watch cheap and phoney romance movies and ‘soapies’ and serials where adulterous, two timing immoral people tell each other, ‘I love you’. And in between all this the ads tell us we should love McDonalds, love Magnum Ice Cream, love cricket season, and love a certain car.
Do you know the effect of all this? We start to lose the depth of meaning in the truth – God loves. ‘God loves me’ no longer moves people, because the word has been so cheapened that it is like a bumper sticker – ‘I love dolphins’, ‘God loves me’.
Furthermore, the low and idolatrous view of God today portrays God as a harmless, impersonal grandfather God who shape-shifts into whatever someone’s imagination makes him out to be. When such a tasteless, weak, bland god is said to love you, it really does nothing to your soul.
And if we are to feel the awe and joy and relief, and even pain and fear, coming from knowing that God loves us – we need to understand what that means. I believe this passage gives us a number of truths about God’s love.
God’s Love Seeks you and He Goes Out of His Way to Meet you
If you were to imagine a map of Israel in your mind’s eye, Jesus was last in the top left corner. He was in Phoenicia, where He healed the daughter of the Gentile women who asked Him to. Now, He could have gone straight back south east to Galilee. But instead he goes for east, north and east of the Sea of Galilee, and then south to Decapolis, again outside the borders of Judea. It is a strangely long and almost circular route He takes. Why does He do this? Well, one of the reasons was to help this man.
We are reminded of what the Bible tells us in John 4:4 – But He needed to go through Samaria. Now, He didn’t need to – He could have gone around it, as most Jews did – but who did He reach out to and save while in Samaria? And here, in the area of Decapolis, He heals this poor man.
Physically, it was out of the way for Jesus to get to this man. Spiritually, it was out of God’s way to rescue sinners. In this sense, the whole definition of a sinner is someone walking away from God. A sinner is saying, ‘I don’t want you God. I don’t want your ways, I don’t want your law, and I don’t want your Son. I’ll take your gifts, but that’s it.’ So, for a sinner to come to God, God must go out of His way to get him. This is because, like this man, sinners are spiritually deaf and mute. They do not hear God’s Word, they do not cry out to God in repentance and faith.
But love seeks out even those who would otherwise destroy themselves.
Imagine a man who in mercy marries a woman who was a prostitute. He gives her a good home. She bears him children. He treats her in the kindest way possible. But, lo and behold, soon she is back in prostitution, selling her body. What would most men do? What would love do? Love would go and rescue her from that life, and say to her, ‘You will be for me alone, and for no one else’. That’s what the prophet Hosea went through with his wife Gomer. And love sought her out when she was not seeking Him out.
The love of God seeks out lost sinners. This is the love of God – God kindly going after those who are plunging on to destruction.
Rom 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
I think of how Jesus Himself illustrated this heart of God when He went into Samaria to save a woman living in adultery; or when He sought out the tax collectors, Matthew and Zaccheus.
Lost sheep don’t return by themselves. Human shepherds go looking for them. Lost humans don’t find their way back to God. God comes looking.
Try to think back to when you first began seeking God or loving God – when you think ‘God loves me, God came looking for me.’ Spurgeon realised that, as he looked back on his life, every time he thought he was seeking God, he found that it had been God seeking Him first. You and I were not looking for God. God was looking for us. Think of who brought you, of who first spoke to you. Do you realise that was God as well? It was God’s love that these men brought this man to Jesus.
Any time you are looking for God it is because God has already began tugging at your heart, stirring up questions, stirring up desires, stirring up fears of death, stirring up conviction, guilt, stirring up emptiness and loneliness.
God still is drawing some of you. You are running, but He is drawing.
The love of God is not slushy and sentimental. The love of God is deliberate, strong, intentional, determined. The love of God is relentless in its pursuit of man.
God’s Love Deals with You Individually
The crowd brings this man to Jesus, and we read they begged Him to lay His hand on him. It seems they told Jesus what to do for the man.
But instead of following their advice, we read this: ‘And he took Him aside from the multitude’. There is a word in the Greek that is not translated here in the King James Version, it is the Greek word idia; the English word idiosyncrasy which means something unique to an individual. This Greek word carries the same idea – Jesus took Him aside privately, uniquely, individually. Jesus did not heal people on conveyor belts, in long queues, doing the same thing to each one robotically. He takes this man aside and treats Him as an individual.
Indeed, the next things He does, we never find him doing for any other person. He puts his fingers in his ears, He spits, and He touches the man’s tongue. Now some try to find some elaborate symbolism in all this. But there is no need. We don’t need to know what Jesus meant, anymore than we need to know what He wrote in the sand on the occasion when a woman caught in adultery was brought to Him and He stooped down and wrote. What we know is this – He did something unique for an individual. He treated Him personally. Perhaps one explanation is that He was almost doing a kind of sign language. The man cannot hear or talk. So to explain to the man what He is doing, He puts His fingers in the ears so as to say – I am going to open them; He spits and touches his tongue so as to say – I will loosen your tongue to be as free as mine, and then He looks up to pray so as to tell the man the source of this power.
The point is that Jesus seldom used the same methodology for His miracles, because His love is one that loves individuals.
Jesus treated this man as an individual person, and God’s love deals with us as individuals.
The love of God is not like spraying crops – a plane swoops down and releases spray on all the crops. God’s love is not God kind of scatter-gun spraying the world with generic good-will. God’s love is God as a person, seeking the goodwill of another person.
God’s love is not so general as to miss its target. God loves the world, but God loves every individual in the world. And so don’t be afraid of the doctrine of election. It is another way of saying God loves individuals.
To illustrate – there is a world of difference between saying the president loves South Africa, and the president loves me. And when the Bible says God loves the world, it does not mean He has fond affection for the idea of the world. It means God loves individuals. God’s love is not like a massive general spotlight on the world. It is like six billion precise laser beams, each one hitting each individual.
We see this all through Scripture. When Moses and the Lord are in intimate communion, God says to Moses, ‘For you have found grace in My sight, and I know you by name.’
When Jesus is calling His disciples, He says to Nathanael, John 1:47-48, Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward Him, and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit!”
Nathanael said to Him, “How do You know me?” Jesus answered and said to him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.”
To Daniel, the angel comes to him and says, ‘O Daniel, man greatly beloved’.
I love the fact when Mary Magdalene is in the garden of Christ’s tomb and Jesus stands before her unrecognised – all Jesus has to say is, ‘Mary’ and she realises who this is.
For that matter, the Bible tells us that the names of believers are written in the Lamb’s book of life. Our names – individuals – are written. Do you remember what God told Aaron to do?
Exo 28:29 And Aaron shall bear the names of the children of Israel in the breastplate of judgment upon his heart, when he goeth in unto the holy place, for a memorial before the LORD continually.
Do you realise that God is dealing with you as an individual? God knows you by name. God’s love is not a warm emotion for no one in particular. God’s love is the love of a Father for a son, the tender, compassionate focused love that seeks your wellbeing. We need to put off a view of God’s love that is so general that if it were poison it wouldn’t kill, and if it were medicine it wouldn’t heal. This is not supposed to produce pride. It is supposed to produce awe.
Awe and Responsibility.
If God’s love means He is drawing me, I need to come. If God’s love is dealing with you as an individual, you can’t keep hiding behind others. He wants you.
God’s Love is Willing to Bear Your Sorrows
Significant is that sentence – ‘Jesus sighed’. He sighed. The word means to groan within, to feel a burden, to feel the pain or weight thereof. Paul uses it in Romans 8:23, 2Cor 5:2/4.
You’ve done that – when troubles, pains, sadness seem so heavy, you find yourself sighing – as if grief, pain and trouble pushes down on you and you must exhale to let the pressure out.
Jesus only sighed when the pain and weight of our sin, unbelief and its consequences were in front of him.
Mark 8:12 But He sighed deeply in His spirit, and said, “Why does this generation seek a sign? Assuredly, I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation.”
John 11:33 Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, He groaned in the spirit and was troubled.
Here again, He sees the pain that Adam’s sin has brought on the world. A man, deaf and deeply impaired in his speech, living life always on the outside looking in, always handicapped. And the love of God feels grief. And Jesus does more than feel it from a distance; He feels it because His love chose to bear it.
Heb 4:15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
Isa 53:4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
God’s love does more than grieve over our sin-burden – He has carried it. The Lord Jesus did more than feel sorry for us; He became a sin offering for us. Like a lightning conductor – He drew the wrath and anger of God to Himself for our sins, taking away our guilt and our deserved wrath and punishment from God. It was the thought of carrying your and my shame, yours and my defilement and deep evil; the thought of carrying that black burden on His spotless person and having His Eternal Father wince and turn away and pour judgement on instead of love. It was before that burden that Jesus said in the Garden, as we read in Luke 22:43, ‘Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.’
Sentimentality strips love of its glory. Love is powerful. Love is strong. Love is noble and brave and courageous. The love of God was not a soppy, syrupy, affection for adorable humans. The love of God was a humiliating descent into the darkest dungeons, mires of sin itself, receiving and experiencing our sentence, breaking our chains, and ascending with us, bringing captivity captive. This is love – redemption, rescuing, deliverance, salvation.
The hymn writer said, ‘Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all’.
This man’s ears are pictured like a closed vault with nothing entering, and his tongue is pictured like a prisoner on a thick, heavy chain. Jesus says, ‘Be opened.’ The word for ‘opened’, significantly, is the same word used when Jesus opened the eyes of the disciples on the road to Emmaus; it is the same word used to say ‘God opened Lydia’s heart,’ in Acts 16. God does a miracle of immediate opening. And the man’s speech impediment is removed; he immediately speaks normally.
Jesus commands them not to tell. And this was part of His desire to prevent a premature enthusiasm to have Him as king. It was possibly also part of His humble nature – not calling for widespread recognition. Either way – the people did not obey.
But here is the reaction we see – firstly, there is awe – utter astonishment. A very strong word in the original here means – these people were shocked out of their senses. The second reaction is praise – He has done all things well.
Now I wonder if that isn’t a short summary of how we ought to respond to the love of God.
Knowing that God’s love does not produce cheap emotions, superficial gladness; knowing God loves us will astonish us, amaze us, enthral us, complete us, satisfy us, draw us.
We should be utterly amazed, more than anything else. When we sing Wesley’s hymn, it should resonate – ‘Amazing Love! How can it Be, That Thou My God Shouldst Die for Me?’ Or Newton’s hymn – ‘Amazing Grace – how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me’.
Get away from a shallow, weak version of God’s love that evokes no wonder in your heart. Meditate on the God who seeks; the God who loves individuals, and the God who bears our own sin.
The second response is to look at Him and say, ‘He does all things well.’ A heart convinced of the love of God says that – ‘He does all things well. He makes no mistakes. He is not cruel, nor forgetful, neglectful, indifferent, impersonal, apathetic or selfish. He does not shrink back from us, ignore us or deflect us. He pursues us, personally loves us and purchases us.’ And when we are dwelling in the love of God, we do not murmur, complain, doubt, pout or live in near constant anxiety, despair or frustration. We can say – ‘He does all things well, all my life, all the time.’