Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 15-17.

I am going to start today by commenting on the story about the feeding of the four thousand.  The main thing I want to point out is that Matthew does not speak about what Jesus taught that day.  He does tell us that Jesus healed many who were brought to Him that day.  So, perhaps Jesus spent those three days just healing people, but I think it more likely that He spent those three days repeating things He had said during the Sermon on the Mount.  My point is that we often interpret the Gospel accounts as if the only things Jesus said were those the Gospel writers recorded.  We need to realize that just because a teaching in one of the books of the New Testament is not directly based on the “red-letter” words of Jesus does not mean that it is not based on Jesus’ teachings.  Having written that I want to go back to the beginning of today’s passage.  When Jesus explained to His disciples why eating with unwashed hands does not defile us, He said that evil thoughts which come out of the heart are what defile us.  He listed murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander.  Now what is interesting is that most of those are not thoughts as we normally think of them. For example, murder is an action.  Which brings me back to my point about Jesus not only teaching at the times when the Gospel writers recorded that He taught.  If we go back to the Sermon on the Mount, we see that Jesus taught that hating someone is just as much of a sin as murdering them.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.