Heads Up

Every chapter of the Bible is important, but you know what they say about all persons being born equal: “Some are equaler than others.” So also with the Bible. Some chapters are more important than others, though all are important. Matthew 16 is one of these “more important” chapters. It is the central chapter in…

In Matthew 15 the story of Jesus’ response to the Canaanite woman is followed by an account of His feeding of four thousand people near the Sea of Galilee, much as He had fed a somewhat larger group earlier. What are we to make of this story?

It is not only Jesus’ silence that seems to be a problem in Matthew 15. It is also the words He used when He spoke to the woman. His first words were, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” and He followed that “politically incorrect” statement with the explanation, “It is not…

Nothing troubled the religious leaders of Israel more than becoming ceremonially unclean, and nothing made them more unclean than contact with “unclean” Gentiles. Yet in this next section of Matthew, Jesus leaves Israel to enter Gentile territory, where he helps a Gentile woman.

The last of the three conversations in Matthew 15.1-20 is between Jesus and His disciples, and it seems to have been private. The disciples come to Jesus to say that the Pharisees were offended by His teaching. Of course, they were offended by His teaching! Self-righteous persons are always offended when we speak of their…

The point of Matthew 15 as a whole is that the kingdom of God is for Gentiles as well as Jews because Christianity rests on an entirely different foundation than did Judaism.