Last week, we covered the first 13 verses of Mark 7, and focused on the heart problem of the religious leaders. On the outside, they looked and sounded spiritually healthy, as though they had a heart relationship with God. But, in reality, they were spiritually dead! They had a way of taking God’s rules and changing them to fit themselves. I read recently of a very tempting perspective on changing the diet rules. Since I am somewhat on a diet right now, this really appealed to me:
Rule 1: If you eat something, but no one else sees you eat it, it has no calories.
Rule 2: When drinking a diet soda while eating a candy bar, the calories in the candy bar are canceled by the diet soda.
Rule 3: When you eat with someone else, calories don’t count as long as you don’t eat more than they do.
Rule 4: Foods used for medicinal purposes never count. Examples: hot chocolate, toast, Sara Lee cheesecake
Rule 5: If you fatten up everyone else around you, then you look thinner.
Rule 6: Movie-related foods do not have calories because they are part of the entertainment package and not part of one’s personal fuel. Examples: milk duds, buttered popcorn, junior mints and Tootsie Rolls
Rule 7: Cookie pieces contain no calories. The process of breaking the cookie causes calorie leakage.
Rule 8: Late-night snacks have no calories. The refrigerator light is not strong enough for the calories to see their way into the calorie counter. Rule 9: If you are in the process of preparing something, food licked off knives and spoons have no calories. Examples: peanut butter on a knife, ice cream on a spoon
Rule 10: Food of the same color have the same number of calories. Examples are: spinach and Mint chocolate chip ice cream, mushrooms and white chocolate. Additional note: Chocolate is a universal color and may be substituted for any other.
I like those! But, of course, changing the diet rules to please my own selfish desires defeats the purpose of the diet in the first place. The religious leaders were doing the exact same thing with the commands of God. They acknowledged the commands were there; but they made up their own traditions and used those to escape the expectations of God. They changed the rules for their own satisfaction.
And Jesus responded to that, by saying this: Mark 7:6-8 – “And he said to them, well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”
