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ceremonial washing, clean, cleansing, dietary laws, foods, heart, Kashrut, kosher, meats, mind, natural health, physical health, purging, ritual purity, sound spiritual health, Spirit, spiritual defilement, spiritual purification, spiritual purity, stinking thinking, unclean
And He said to them, “Are you then also lacking understanding? Don’t you grasp that whatever goes into the man cannot make him unholy? For it does not enter into the heart but into the stomach, and then goes out into the sewer, cleansing all foods.”
And He continued, “It is what comes out of the man that makes the man unholy. For from within, out of the heart of men, come evil intentions, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, lustfulness, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these evil things come from within and make the man unholy.” – Mark 7:18-23, TLV
Just because in some English translations of Mark 7:19 there is the parenthetical statement “(In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean),” that doesn’t mean that Yeshua actually said it. If Yeshua said everything we eat is clean, then He would have been contradicting YeHoVaH, His Father, who in Leviticus 11 specifically names certain animals, fowls, seafood, and every creature that creeps on the earth as unclean to eat for dietary purposes.
YeHoVaH’s dietary laws that pertain to the forbidden Unclean Meats are still in effect because the listed unclean meats affect our natural/physical health. However, neither YeHoVaH’s law concerning Unclean Meats nor any of the biblical kosher Food laws (i.e., Kashrut, which refers to the body of Jewish law that deals with the foods Hebrews can and cannot eat and how those foods must be prepared and eaten) has anything to do with YeHoVaH’s Children’s spiritual purification, and this divine truth is the point Yeshua makes in Mark 7:18-23.
Once again, Yeshua does not say EVERYTHING we eat is clean. More important, neither meat nor food laws are what was being questioned in Mark 7:1-23. The topic of discussion is ritual purity – the ritual purity that is based on the religious traditions of the oral law.
What Yeshua says concerns ritual purity. He declares that ritual purity (i.e., ceremonial washing) does not affect what goes into the body (does not affect what we eat). Yeshua makes it clear that NOTHING we eat, whether with clean hands or dirty hands, can make us holy or unholy because what we eat goes into our mouths, down our throats and esophagi, and then into our stomachs. While in our stomachs, the foods we ate are mixed and ground until the proteins, starches, and fats become amino acids, simple sugars, fatty acids, and glycerol.
Next, our liquidy or pasty broken-down foods enter our small intestines where the breaking-down process continues until our bodies are able to absorb the nutrients from our broken-down foods – absorb the nutrients that our bodies need. Our stomachs and small intestines’ digestive processes are our cleansing/purging processes because the wastes from our eaten foods are separated from our needed nutrients. The waste parts of our broken-down foods are what our bodies can’t use and, thus, don’t need. That is why the waste parts leave our bodies as feces.
Everybody’s individual digestive process, then, is why whatever enters each person from outside of him or her cannot defile him or her because everybody’s digestive process has no effect on each person’s heart/spirit or mind. Put differently, the point Yeshua makes is that ceremonial washing is not necessary for spiritual purity or sound spiritual health because unwashed hands do not defile anybody’s “heart”/spirit or mind. It each person’s stinking thinking that spiritually defiles his or her own “heart”/spirit or mind.
The bottom line is that since spiritual purification involves the heart/spirit, ceremonial washings are ineffective and unnecessary in preventing spiritual defilement. Shalom . . . .
Gone Fishin' 