Mark - Lesson 11...Continued from page 1

DAY TWO: Religion Undermining the Heart of Scripture

Please carefully read Mark 7:8-16 and answer the following questions.

1.  What were some of the other things Jesus said about the religious leaders’ hypocrisy and treatment of God’s Word (v. 8-12)? 

2.  These men had laid aside the Word of God, meaning to send away, to bid go away or depart, to send from one’s self, to let alone, to disregard, to abandon, to leave as behind and done with in order to go on to another thing.  Jesus used the example of corban, which was a regulation they had made that allowed a gift or offering to be set aside for God and prohibit its use by others, even as Jesus alluded to here the rejection of the Law of Moses for supposed religious purposes.[vi]  They seemed to look for legal loopholes to violate the spirit of the Law.[vii] What does this sort of action result in (v. 13)? 

3.  Warren Wiersbe well pointed out the results of such actions for them:   

But they were not only destroying their character; they were also destroying the influence and authority of the very Word of God that they claimed to be defending. Note the tragic sequence: teaching their doctrines as God’s Word (Mark 7:7); laying aside God’s Word (Mark 7:8); rejecting God’s Word (Mark 7:9); finally, robbing God’s Word of its power (Mark 7:13). People who revere man-made traditions above the Word of God eventually lose the power of God’s Word in their lives. No matter how devout they may appear, their hearts are far from God.[viii]

What exhortation and appeal to repent from hypocrisy had these religious leaders ignored or forgotten in Isaiah 1:10-20?  Read the passage and summarize the main points of this strong exhortation by God Himself.

4.  Jesus didn’t want the people to miss the importance of this, which no doubt they had never heard from their own religious leaders who kept them in the dark of their hypocritical religious domination (v. 14-16).  What really matters in God’s Kingdom when it comes to such ritualistic things (Romans 14:16-19)?

Scripture Memory:  Try to fill in the missing words in the blanks below, by memory if at all possible, and then review the passage several times today.

For from within, out of the _______________ of men, proceed evil thoughts...__________ these ____________ things come from within and __________________ a man.   Mark 7:21a, 23 (nkjv)