No One Made You Do It
Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean.’”
After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’? For it doesn’t go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods “clean.”)
He went on: “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’ ” (Mark 7:14–23)
Whenever the comedian Flip Wilson’s character Geraldine was caught misbehaving, he would shout, “the devil made me do it!” Jesus response to such a claim would be, “no he didn’t.”
We human beings are quick to find excuses for what we do wrong. We want to blame our parenting, the television, the web, and the friends we hang out with. We’ll blame our circumstances. But the reality is, what comes in from the outside is not what makes us do wrong. It’s what comes from inside of us. Not all people with bad backgrounds, who play violent video games, become criminals. Two people may be raised in the same circumstances, but while one becomes a criminal, the other becomes a pastor. Our appetites are what drive us, not what we choose to satisfy those appetites. If we weren’t already hungry, we wouldn’t try to eat. If we didn’t hate, we wouldn’t gossip. Porn doesn’t fill people with lust. Lust makes people look at porn. The way that woman looked didn’t make you think those thoughts. You had those thoughts and that’s what made you look at her like that.
Jesus used food to illustrate that what comes into us from the outside doesn’t pollute us. Mark commented that Jesus’ words prefigured what would become explicit later on: the dietary regulations of the Old Testament no longer mattered, since food didn’t actually cause uncleanness. Instead, it was only what came out of people that was unclean.
Jesus warned his hearers, as he warns us, that we have no one and nothing to blame for our misdeeds but us. The devil didn’t make us do it. Violent games didn’t make us do it. TV didn’t make us do it. We made us do it. And we did it simply because we wanted to. You can only be tempted by what you already want.
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