So we’re reading Mark chapter 7 verses 24 through 37. This is God’s holy word. And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden. But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth, and she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
And he said to her, Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. But she answered him, yes, Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs. And he said to her, for this statement, you may go your way. The demon has left your daughter. And she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.
Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee in the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they begged him to lay his hand on him. And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting, touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, Ephathra, that is, be opened. And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke. And Jesus charged them to tell no one, but the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak. Thus far, God’s holy, inspired, and infallible Word. Thanks be to God.
Father in Heaven, now we take with great seriousness your Word. We want to be careful with it. We want to divide it, as it were, rightly. Lord, we are weak and we are easily distracted, yet we pray your spirit would focus now our attention upon what you have to say to us, that each of us may hear those things that are specifically and particularly important in our lives. But out of it all, Lord, may we learn to glorify you both by word and deed, and we ask this in Jesus’ name.
Amen. I’ve entitled the message today, He Could Not Be Hidden. And you know, at the end of the matter of whether he should be talked about or not, it was said that he could not be hidden. And somebody will say, well, why did he want to be hidden in the first place? And we’ve gone over that before, actually, that the more the people gathered and sort of got in the way and so forth, the harder it was for everybody to listen to what he had to say. And also, he was keeping time, as it were, in his own control so that he would not be arrested and dealt with until it was just the right time. So if those things were of interest to you, you might just keep in mind why he said, at least on this occasion, and we know on others also, Don’t tell anybody, be quiet about it. But we’ll see that also in God’s plan, it was necessary that He be spoken about and that what He had done be told, especially to those who may not have had exposure to Him in any other way.
Jesus has been on the move here in chapter 7 of Mark’s Gospel. Today we find him taking the disciples up into the Gentile region just north of Israel. And so we might identify that area as Phoenicia on the coast in Syria, a bit more inland. And that’s why the woman was called a Syro-Phoenician woman. But as we say, he’s on the move and he takes the disciples up in the northern area of the Gentiles. And this journey is followed by another. And that’s our second paragraph there in the passage, followed by another to the far side of the Galilean Lake and the Jordan River.
And this area was known as the Decapolis, which from Latin means the 10 cities, Latin and Greek together. Well, we cover two miracles of healing. first that of a 12-year-old Gentile girl and of a much older Jewish man who could neither hear nor speak. In both cases, Jesus did not go unrecognized despite being a stranger in both places. In fact, the scripture says, as we’ve just mentioned, he could not be hidden.
So our points today are these. We have the districts, the two districts that we talked about, sometimes called regions. The area to the north of Israel, and then the Decapolis that I’ve just mentioned. Secondly, we have the daughter, and we want to include the mother as well, but I’ve tried to be alliterative here. The districts, the daughter, the next one is the demon. We’ll talk about the demon just a little bit. And then the dogs, the departures, and finally the Decapolis and how that fits into everything. Okay, so we began talking about the districts.
Now Jesus was famous where he had spent a good part of his life. He was famous in Galilee, of course. And part of his ministry was that he tried to go to all the villages and towns in the region of Galilee, which is northern Israel. And then he was spoken of also in Jerusalem. And in Jerusalem, the people from very different regions all came together at least three times a year for what were called the feasts, the Passover and the first fruits and the tabernacles. These were the main feasts of the Jews.
And so he would have been spoken of in connection with these. And we just might say that as well as in Galilee, he seemed to have been well-known in Jerusalem also. And then he was spoken of among the Gentiles. You say, how do you know that he was spoken of among Gentiles?
Because this Syro-Phoenician woman knew about him. She had heard not just a few things about him, but she had heard that he was a worker of miracles. And I believe also she had heard about the Jewish Messiah who was promised, and she wanted a part of that. She said, don’t deny me a part of the coming of the Messiah.
And Jesus, by His short visits in some of these places, had established a reputation. Even over into the Decapolis, which was a kind of out-of-the-way area, although a lot of people traveled through the area. You know, when I was younger, my parents used to go back and forth from North Carolina to California because my father was studying out here. And in going through those different places, well, I remembered one or two that had, you know, things of interest, but mostly I was just passing through. And so there were people who were just passing through Decapolis to get on down to Jerusalem to some of these feasts and other reasons to be there, whether from the Romans or the Jews or whoever had brought them to that place.
But as we’ve seen, wherever he went, he could not be hidden. Now, what’s interesting is that from time to time Jesus would say, let us go apart, let us go somewhere where nobody knows us. Was he surprised? No, I don’t think he was surprised, but he wanted the disciples to say, you know, anywhere we go, Jesus’s name comes up again. Jesus of Nazareth, the one who can do miraculous things, the one who can bring healing when no other medicine, no other healer can possibly do it. He can, and he has a wonderful message. So wherever they went, he could not be hidden, because when he showed up, they said, oh, you’re the one. You’re the one that we’ve heard about. You’re the one that we would like to know more about.
And wherever he went, he manifested, first of all, God, because he was God with us, Emmanuel. And as well as people saying, I believe God is surely in this place. That’s what Jacob said at one point when he was running away from his angry brother. He said, surely God is in this place.
I think many people did that as well. And then also he was the news people heard about him. What’s the news today? I guess they didn’t really have town criers and certainly they didn’t have newspapers, but they had word of mouth. And so people had told, you know, there’s a man from Galilee. There’s a man who is well known over on the other side of the river and he can do amazing things.
And then when he shows up, of course, the people said, yeah, we’ve heard about this ourselves. Well, these are the districts. that Jesus is operating in at this point, by no means the only districts, as we’ve pointed out, but certainly in our passage today, they’re important for us to see.
And then we have the daughter and her mother. Perhaps this daughter was an only child, we’re not told, but I just get that feeling sometimes when I read this, that she was an only child and she was very precious to her mother. Now, I think we could rightly say that in most cases, a child, whether he’s one of many or the only child, is very precious to his mother or parents, if there are two parents involved there.
My mother was an only child, but that’s not exactly true because she had a brother who died in infancy. And so she became the only child of her family. And sometimes I heard criticism, well, you know, she gets so much attention, they spoil her. And I’m sure they did, but she was the only child. And that really makes a difference. Maybe you’re an only child, but it makes a difference. And certainly it made a difference to this woman.
Her dear daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit. And I think it’s not out of line to say that probably this daughter was dying because that’s what the demons did. They destroyed people. Certainly, they destroyed their general situation, they destroyed their mental health, they destroyed them physically, and ultimately, they took their lives and then they went on to somebody else. The Bible says that the devil is a murderer, and all of his henchmen, or hench-things, if you want to speak to the gender of the matter here, they were all interested in destroying people.
And she, I’m sure, threw up her hands many a day and said, what can be done? And she asked this one, and she asked that one, and the other one. And she said, oh, there’s nothing to be done. Just lock her away. And it sounds like something from Jane Austen. Some relatives locked away in the room. And so maybe that was what was counseled to her. Just take her and lock her away. And she said, I think I know something. I’ve heard about it, I’ve studied it a little bit. I think this daughter of mine may be delivered after all.
The Gentile woman wanted the help that had been promised to the Jews. Now, Jesus said in this incident, He said, the Jews get it first. They’re the ones that God had promised long ago, generation after generation, to expect the Messiah. And so this woman would say, well, if that’s where He is, that’s where I want to go. That’s where I want to make contact there. Maybe I can find help because I’ve heard of this man, Jesus of Nazareth. And I would certainly like to meet up with Him.
So she believed. And I think Jesus recognized that however small it was, however lacking it was in some things, she was a woman of faith. She believed that God could do it and that God had sent a person into the world, His only begotten Son, to do that. So I think it’s accurate then to say that the Holy Spirit was at work, not only in Galilee or Judea, not only in the Decapolis, the places that Jews lived, but He was at work in this woman in Syria or Phoenicia, wherever exactly that she lived, but He was at work in her.
And it’s the Holy Spirit that creates faith. Jesus told Nicodemus, you must be born again or you can’t see the Kingdom of God. You can’t enter the Kingdom of God. And the Bible says without faith, no one is going to be in God’s presence, going to be allowed there in any other situation than that of judgment. So the Holy Spirit gave this woman faith in Jesus of Nazareth even though She and her daughter were not Jewish.
And of course, there’s a wonderful lesson there that God’s intent is not just to limit his salvation to one people in one period of history at one time, but it’s for everybody. And that’s one of the reasons that the word needs to get out. And one of the things you see here is that Jesus wants that word to get out to everybody, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
So this woman was determined to get to Jesus. Now she reminds us a bit of a woman in a previous situation who had the issue of blood. In other words, she was hemorrhaging and it wouldn’t stop. And she wanted to get to Jesus and she pushed her way to him just to touch the hem of his garment. And of course Jesus recognized that as faith also. But this woman in, we’ll say in Syria, this woman wanted to get to Jesus and she pushed her way through and she was willing to fight for her daughter. I really admire her for that.
Now she didn’t clench her fists or anything, but Jesus says, We don’t take the good news of God and the blessings of God and give them to the dogs. And I’ll say more about that when we get to the dogs. But she said, I don’t care. I want to get to you, Jesus. Even the dogs under the table get the crumbs.
She was determined to get to Jesus. And I hope it can be said of you and me that we’re determined to get to Him. There are all kinds of things that Satan throws up to turn our attention away and to keep us from Him. But if the Spirit of God is at work in you, you’re going to fight to get through to Him because you believe that He’s the answer to whatever your needs are. I encourage you to think about that today.
Well, we’ve had the districts and the daughter. Now we have the demon. The demon is an evil spirit attacking the woman of faith, and he uses her daughter. You might say, no, the demon’s just working on the daughter, but don’t think of that. The daughter’s there, of course, and the daughter’s in trouble. But this woman has faith, and what does the devil try to do to people who have faith? He tries to undermine that faith. He tries to make people doubt. He tries to make people desperate to the point of giving up or being against, of being bitter, and to have no trust in anything or anybody. Well, that’s the situation. And the demon was about his work here.
And yet, we ask ourselves, how did this woman know it was a demon? Of course, they didn’t have all sorts of medical knowledge in those days, though there was a good bit around. But somehow, again, the Spirit of God had revealed to her that the problem with her daughter was not that she had a certain illness related to germs or viruses or things like that, but she had a demon. And I guess there were ways to figure that out. There were ways to see that this kind of situation is different from an ordinary illness.
But she understood that there was a spiritual war going on, and she was right in the middle of it as well as the daughter. The woman understood also that Jesus had come to destroy the works of the devil. 1 John 3, verse 8. Jesus came into the world to destroy the works of the devil. Isn’t that a wonderful promise? Isn’t that a wonderful reason for Jesus to be in the world?
We’re always under attack from the devil. Even if we’re believers, we may not be possessed, as was the case with this girl, but Satan is after us. We used to sing a little song in Sunday school, one, two, three, the devil’s after me. Well, he’s after us, and we need to be aware of that. It’s not just a figment or something that people make up. There is a real devil, and he would like to destroy us if he could, or certainly to undermine our faith.
And nothing in the Gentile world… And that’s where she came from. She was a Gentile lady. And she had a Gentile daughter. And she was not a Jew and didn’t have all the teaching of the Bible and all these things. But nothing in the Gentile world that she knew anything about, and if she had known, it wouldn’t have helped. But nothing in the Gentile world offered any escape from evil spirits. And it didn’t offer any escape from the fact that they were present everywhere, these evil spirits.
I’ve heard many a missionary and read about many a missionary who says that a lot of the people in the world to whom they go, it may be Africa, it may be South America, it may be even in North America or Asia, they’re all afraid of evil spirits. And right now, part of this New Year celebration that’s going on, the firecrackers, you know why they shoot off firecrackers? To chase away the evil spirits. Now don’t ask me why they believe that, but that’s what they believe. And people are always aware of the fact there are evil spirits around them.
Now maybe in the sophisticated modern world they make up other names for it, psychoses, neuroses, and things like that. And I’m not saying those aren’t real, but I’m saying that evil spirits are real too. and that people are aware that something’s going on to trouble them and to drive them to distraction and even to destruction.
Satan does not give up easily his prey. And at least at this point, this daughter was his prey. He doesn’t give up easily, and so he seeks to hold the Gentiles in his grip. Don’t let them out. Don’t let them get away. And yet we have this wonderful word from the Lord Jesus in the 10th chapter of John, that however you may have been gripped by Satan, God has changed that out if you believe in Him, if you believe in Jesus, and now you’re in His grip. And nothing Satan can do, nothing the evil spirits can do, the devil can do, can pull you out of his hand. Isn’t that a wonderful thing to know today? And Satan would say, oh yes, I’ve almost got you. Just give up. And we say, no, God has me. He’s not going to let me go. Satan does not give up his prey easily. And he seeks especially to hold Gentiles, or may we say people that have little contact with the Scriptures and the Word of God, he seeks to hold them very tightly.
Alright, that brings us then to the dogs. Now, I think the dogs that Jesus has in mind here are a certain kind of dog, and I think they were the predominant kind of dog there. We would call them wild dogs. When I lived in Egypt, every once in a while we’d hear a gunshot, kaboom. And it wasn’t a revolution or anything like that, but the soldiers had been sent out to shoot dogs. Now we would say, oh, horrible that they would shoot dogs, but these wild dogs would rove around, they would menace the people, steal things and so forth. The desire of the people was get rid of them, get them out of the way.
And I think those are the kinds of dogs that Jesus is talking about here. Now, interestingly, there’s a contrast here. There are dogs that are pets and loved and cared for. And these are the ones that are under the table. that eat the children’s bread, the crumbs of the bread that are dropped down to them, whether purposely or not. These dogs have a better reputation. And the woman says, I’d rather be identified with those dogs than with the wild dogs that are menacing our neighborhoods and our people. So Jesus then says to the Gentiles, and it’s not very flattering, but he says, you folks are like wild dogs.
You have no place in the kingdom of God. You have no place among the people of God. And you’re best gotten rid of. And so he says, as the woman asks for help, he says, it’s not good to take the children’s bread, which in this case would be the bread of life, the bread that would be fulfilling, the bread that would be or at least contain the solutions to their problems and so forth. He’d say, you don’t want to take these things and throw them to people who don’t appreciate them, that will not receive them gladly, or if they do receive them, would want just to devour them and would be very much against the whole purpose of my coming and being in the world. The situation here is that Jesus says, I can’t give this bread to a vast, wild people of unbelief as the Gentiles were. It doesn’t mean that some weren’t genteel and that they weren’t nice people to be around, but a lot of them weren’t. As a matter of fact, even the better behaved ones were people who could turn you away from God.
Now this woman had a quick wit, and we might say that’s a gift from God for her. And the quick wit was, here he’s talking about dogs and so forth, but he says, wait a minute, or she says, wait a minute, Jesus. You know, in a household where they’re loved, let us say pets, the children will give some of their bread to the animals under the table there and feed them, and that will just increase the bond between child and pet, parent and pet, perhaps also. But she had a quick wit about this. She was able to answer like that. And I think, again, that’s the work of the Holy Spirit. There are some of us dogs that the Lord cares about. and will bring to Himself, will make His own.
The Jews were a blessed nation. They were granted much grace, but only a few Gentiles, comparatively speaking, were really believers. And so Jesus says, now which is right? To take the things of God and give them to people that don’t appreciate them and turn against them?
Is it right to do something else? And she says, that something else is what I want to be a part of. I want to be one of those little pets. If that’s the only place I can be, that’s where I want to be close to You, Lord, and I want the healing for my daughter. So what we have here is a believing Gentile woman who claims her right. I have a right, she says. Well, how so? Because God has drawn me to you, Jesus. And if He’s drawn me to you, then I have a right to the blessings that you offer, to the healing that you bring.
I have a right. as a latecomer, if you will, but still a right to the kingdom of God. You know, the Apostle Paul, whose original name was Saul of Tarsus, he was a sophisticated, well-educated, very committed Jewish man, but he also said, I’m like one who was born out of due time. In other words, I’m a latecomer.
But God received me and God has used me in ways that I never could have imagined in my younger days. And this woman, I think, has the same attitude. Here is the Messiah of Israel. Here is a man that I would never have had anything to do with, but God has drawn me to Him. I’ve fought my way to Him. I’ve argued my case before Him. And I believe that I’m entitled, therefore, to the things of the Kingdom of God. My friend, it’s worth fighting for.
It’s worth re-identifying, if you will. I think they say re-imagining today. I think re-identifying is a better word. Yes, I’m not a Jew, but I am a believer. I am a follower of Jesus. And Lord, I bring my situation and my daughter’s situation to You this day.
All right, so we’ve gotten by the dogs here. You know, I think I’ve been bitten three or four times by dogs. It’s a preacher’s problem. You go and knock on somebody’s door and come in and you go in and the dog bites you. And so I’m living proof that that happens. But I’m alive, thank God. We come to the departures.
And we have a contrast here, a contrast of these departures that we’ll see with, let us say, the man who’s called the rich young ruler. You remember, he came to Jesus and he said, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, well, you keep the commandments. Oh, he said, oh yes, I’ve kept all the commandments all my life. And then Jesus said, yeah, but what about worshiping money?
It says the man went away very sad because he was a wealthy man. Well, let’s see this contrast here. We have the woman who departed. She didn’t depart unhappily. Now, we might have said, oh, she went to find Jesus. She didn’t find Him, and she went home sad. But no, this says that she went home, and what did she find when she got home? Her daughter was well. And how so?
And Jesus said, because of this statement. Because you said, I want to belong to you. I’m not a Jew. I haven’t had this background, but I want to belong to you. And Jesus says, well, that’s what it takes. That’s what it takes. Your daughter’s well. She went home and there was a daughter lying in the bed, and maybe for the first time in years, this daughter was a sane, loving daughter, unlike anything that she had ever been before. And I think that woman, with the help of the Holy Spirit, said, thank you, Lord. This is where I want to be.
And then we find that the demon departed. Well, that’s good news, isn’t it? He was evicted. Nobody heard Jesus say, come out. In other situations, he did say that. But he just said, you’re going to have what you ask for here. And at that point, the demon said, goodbye, I’m out of here. He left. And whether we heard, the Lord heard, and the demon heard, that it was time to depart. And so He did. So you have the woman who departed in great happiness, the demon who departed reluctantly, but he did go out. And then Jesus departed. And that brings us to the second paragraph here. Jesus departed to Decapolis to give a handicapped man what we might call a thorough going over.
You say, what do you mean by that preacher? Well, I mean he stuck his fingers in the guy’s ears and he spit on his tongue. And if that’s not going over somebody thoroughly and completely, I don’t know what is. But that’s what happened. Jesus departed and went to the Decapolis so that there might also be a departure of this illness or handicap that the man had. And notice, it never says here that he had a demon. It just says that he was mute and deaf. And maybe there are things here that we don’t fully understand, but from what I read here, he was just a sick man. And Jesus healed him.
Jesus made him well. Jesus departed to the Decapolis from the Syrian area. He departed to Decapolis because this man needed him. Because God had appointed that he should go and bring healing and new life to this man. And another thing we might say here is that Jesus departed from his previous method.
He asked for privacy. He did that to fingers in the ears and saliva on the tongue. And then he prayed. He prayed to heaven. This was so different from so many other instances of his healing and helping people. And we might say, why? Well, I can’t tell you for sure. But I think what the Lord wanted to say is there’s a lot of people in this world who will never meet me personally until they get to heaven. What happened to this man in private, without a big fanfare, without casting out demons and these things, this can happen to you and to me.
Because he cares about us and we can be healed and helped just as much. But the main thing is, he just looked up to heaven and he said, set aside another chair up there, because this man is son of Abraham. This man is a believer. This man is a follower of the Messiah. And there’s a place in heaven for such as this. And I just encourage you today, if you want to go to heaven, go to Jesus. He’ll get you there.
Then finally, I want to talk for just a moment about the Decapolis. Because the Decapolis was a crossroads. It was on the other side of the Jordan. It’s very close to the Gentiles. As we said, people were going east and west. They were going north and south. If you were in the Decapolis, you were in a lot of places.
And that fits right in with our desire that the whole world know about the Lord Jesus Christ. Now you see, no ordinary man can open what God has closed, and no ordinary man can close what God has opened. And that’s what you see here. Why did this man have a mute tongue and deaf ears? God had done that, but God had done that for the very purpose of you and I, for you and me, to understand that God can reach our every need in every way. He said, be opened. And I think he was saying not just open ears and open tongues and so forth, but he was saying to the whole world held in darkness, be open to the light, be open to the truth, be open to Jesus.
And that is the answer to the world’s needs today. There’s no demon as we said here. But there is a prayer. I think it’s a prayer for the world. Oh Lord, open hearts in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, all these places, the islands of the sea. Open their hearts to believe. The Decapolis, as much as anywhere else, needed to know that Jesus, the Creator of ears and tongues, Jesus, the Savior of sinners, was there.
And He could not be hidden. Aren’t you glad He’s not hidden? That you can find Him and know Him today? I think that’s where we have to end this passage. He’s not hidden. He’s here. He says, believe on Me. Trust in Me. Follow Me. And I will make you fishers of men or other kinds of servants of mine. I’ll make you what you should be. And that’s the closing remark today.
Let’s pray. Father, help us to come to Jesus, to fight our way to Him. Help us, Lord, to want to be even among the dogs under the table, as it were, to be with Jesus. We pray, Lord, to know your strength and help in everything. May Satan depart. May the Lord himself have residence and control in our lives, we ask in Jesus’ name, amen.