Week 37 Matthew 15
The Lord told people publicly: you are not defiled by what you eat. Peter thought people were defiled by what they ate. So he asked the Lord for clarification.
The Lord gave Peter a quick description of the digestive tract. One of the natural systems in the body processes food. I chew a mouthful of food & swallow it. My digestive system automatically takes over. Down-the-hatch to my stomach. Large intestine. Small intestine. Some digestive processing to extract what’s good and reject what’s useless. At the end of the road the system leaves me with a bunch of waste product to egest. Gone.
That’s System #1. The Lord describes it and then compares it to a different processing system: System #2. System #2 is similar to System #1 because it has raw material on the inside that it gets rid of – expels it from inside to outside. But System #2 is different from System #1 in one way. With System #2 there’s no raw material intake process. Raw materials are already inside – the non-natural / non-material food-of-the-heart. And if my natural heart is evil then System #2 will just naturally egest evil: evil thoughts murder adultery theft lying slander – thing like that.
The Lord gave Peter at least three things to think about: a) good food doesn’t healthy-up your heart so b) don’t get all twisted-up about your diet because c) there’s another whole system in play that takes priority over food.
Note: Matthew 15:11 19 (NLT)