Compassion for the Outsiders
Matthew 15:29-39
Well, it's a great joy; and I have had a wonderful week after a couple of weeks of rest just studying the 15th chapter of Matthew in preparation of sharing it with you today. So turn in your Bible, if you will, to Matthew 15. We'll look at verses 29 through 39. Matthew 15:29-39 in our ongoing insights into the marvelous presentation of the Lord Jesus Christ made by Matthew.
There's one line in this section of Scripture. It's found in verse 32, and I would draw your attention to it. It says there that, "Jesus called His disciples unto Him and said, 'I have compassion on the multitude.'" And as I studied this text, I was drawn to the fact that that seems to be the theme. That marks out the major lesson taught in this section. The compassion of Jesus Christ. Basically, the word coming from the Latin means to suffer with; but, really, in the English, it's even enriched beyond that, for the English dictionary describes compassion as this: A feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow... accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the pain and remove its cause. For the Latins, it meant to suffer with; but in English, it has come to mean not only to suffer with someone or to feel their pain and their hurt, but to have a strong desire to see its cause permanently eliminated; and I think that's a marvelous definition of what was in the heart of our Lord, who looking upon anyone in need, identified with that need, felt sympathy and sorrow for that need, and had a strong desire to see its cause removed. The Greek term itself is a most interesting term. It...it's basically a verb form added to a word that means bowels or visceral area or guts, stomach; and it means that Jesus actually felt physical pain in His stomach over the needs of people with which He identified and for whom He desired deliverance.
Now, if you learn anything at all about God, you learn in the Scriptures that He is a God of great compassion. He suffers with people. He feels their pain; and, more than that, He seeks to alleviate its cause. That's exactly why He moves in the world. That's exactly why He redeems man. That's exactly why He heals and comforts and extends grace and mercy and loving kindness, in order to reach men in their need and deliver them from it.
In Lamentations, there is a most marvelous statement about the compassion of God. I think it's my favorite one in all the Bible. It says this, "It is because of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not." In other words, if we got what we deserved, we would be consumed; but it is His compassion toward us that restricts that and extends mercy; and it says, "They are new every morning. Great is Thy faithfulness." God is faithful to be always all that He is. He is faithful to be just, faithful to be wise, faithful to be loving, faithful to be omnipotent, and faithful to be compassionate. God is a God of great compassion.
Over and over again in God's dealings with Israel in the Old Testament, you can read it in...particularly I was thinking of 2 Kings 13 and then in 2 Chronicles 36, but many places where God says to His people, "I have compassion on you. I'm withholding My judgment. I'm withholding the trouble that could come upon you because of my compassion." In other words, "When I strike you, I, in a real sense, strike Myself." God even has gone so far as to say that His people are the...the pupil of His eye; and when His people are touched, it's as if He was poked in His own eye. God is a God of great compassion.
In Romans 9:15, it says that God said, "I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion; and I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy." Now, if God is a God of compassion, a God who cares, a God who cares about every small hurt and every small need in every life, if that's the kind of God God is, then we would expect Jesus Christ to be compassionate, would we not? For He is God incarnate, in human flesh; and so when we come to chapter 15 of Matthew verse 32, we are not surprised to hear Jesus say, "I have compassion." We've heard Him say it before. Chapter 14 verse 14, "Jesus went forth, saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion." Chapter 9 verse 36, Jesus looked on the multitude, and it says, "He was moved with compassion, because they were scattered as a sheep without a shepherd."
So God, our God, is a compassionate God; and Christ, God in human flesh, is equally compassionate. Now we see that demonstrated in this wonderful passage, and I'd like you to follow as I read verses 29 to 39. "Then Jesus departed from there and came near unto the Sea of Galilee and went up into a mountain and sat down there. And great multitudes came unto Him, having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, mutilated, and many others, and put them down at His feet, and He healed them, insomuch that the multitude marveled when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed or mutilated to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see. And they glorified the God of Israel. Then Jesus called His disciples unto Him and said, 'I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with Me now three days and have nothing to eat; and I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way.' And His disciples say unto Him, 'From where should we have so much bread in the wilderness as to fill so great a multitude?' Jesus saith unto them, 'How many loaves have ye?' They said, 'Seven, and a few little fishes.' And He commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground. And He took the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks, and broke them was giving to His disciples, and the disciples to the multitude. And they did all eat and were filled. And they took up of the broken pieces that were left, seven baskets full. And they that did eat were four thousand men, besides women and children. And He sent away the multitude, and got into a boat, and came into the borders of Magdala."
Now, lemme give you the setting. Back to verse 29...For a year and a half, at least, Jesus had been ministering in Galilee. He had been serving in that northern area of Palestine among the Jewish people. Miracles, signs, wonders, teaching of the Kingdom of God. But after a year and a half, it was very clear that there was a mounting resistance. There was a mounting rejection. The pressure was on. The one who ruled in that area was a man by the name of Herod Antipas. He was the petty king given the assignment of keeping political peace in Galilee; and Herod was paranoid, as are many petty kings, that someone might usurp his place; and in his pettiness, he had already executed John the Baptist; and now he was in fear of Jesus Christ and His tremendous power, and so would, no doubt, have done the same to Him if he were enabled.
And then there was also the hatred of the scribes and the Pharisees who were the religious leaders. Who, because they had been unmasked as empty traditionalists with only a ceremonial shell of a religion, had begun to consummately hate Jesus Christ and seek His death. They applied pressure to him, as well; and you add to that the fact that the crowds themselves and their popular frenzy was directed to making Jesus King, because they had seen His miracle power and thought that He could lead a revolution to overthrow the hated Herodians, as well as the hated Romans. And you add to that that there were many who appeared to believe on Him and wanted all He had to give; but when He asked from them something, those shallow disciples departed and left.
There's little reason for us to wonder why it says He departed in verse 21 from there into the area of Tyre and Sidon. The resistance of the people to the reality of His message, the shallowness of false disciples, the pressure of the scribes and the Pharisees, the bizarre personality of Herod; and then there was this tremendous need to spend time with the twelve; because, in less than a year from now, they would face the greatest trial of their life in the trial and death of Christ.
All of these things mounted together to cause Him to leave Galilee; and so in verse 21, as we noted last time, He left and went across the border. He left the land of Israel into the region of Tyre and Sidon. In our modern times, this would be leaving Palestine for the land of Lebanon to the north. He sought seclusion. He sought a release from the pressure, which would have, if allowed to, thwarted the ultimate design and plan of God; and so He moved away. But no sooner had He arrived in that Gentile land than He ran into a Gentile woman, verses 22 to 28, who came to Him desiring a healing and who, it says in verse 28, exercised great faith.
And here we see a marvelous contrast between the shallowness, the resistance, the rejection, the bitter hatred, the spiritual pride of Palestine, and the genuine hunger and humility of this Gentile woman. What He could not find among His own, He found among strangers. Only two times so far in Matthew have we hard Him say, "You have great faith," and both times He said that to a Gentile...
Now, this is a very important section of Matthew's Gospel. This woman -- and what also happens from verse 29 to 39 that I just read you -- all happens in a Gentile area. Jesus is reaching beyond the covenant people, beyond the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He's reaching to Gentiles, and He is giving us a prophetic picture of the extension of the Kingdom in the purpose of God to encompass the lost of the world. The intention of Christ coming to Israel was never that that was the end, but that that was only the means to reaching the world. Always the intention was to reach the world.
In fact, if you think about it, when Jesus was on the earth in the three years of His ministry, He did many things that are a preview of the Kingdom. The transfiguration on the mount when He demonstrated His full blazing Second Coming glory was a small glimpse of the glory that would be His when He returned to set up His Kingdom. The fact that He uniquely came and ministered through twelve men from the nation Israel is indicative of the fact that, in His Kingdom, He will rule through those of Israel again. The fact that He came and healed is indicative of what will occur in the Kingdom when He will heal the nations, as it were. The fact that He came and taught of the Kingdom is, again, a preview of the Kingdom when the knowledge of the Lord will fill the earth; and this very brief visit of a few weeks into Gentiles lands was but a preview of the intention of Jesus Christ that the Gospel should extend and the Kingdom should embrace those beyond Israel. So this is an extremely important passage.
Now, let's look at verse 29 and see how it flows. He had been in the area of Tyre and Sidon; and He departed from there. That is the area of Phoenicia. As I said, it's modern Lebanon, the southern Lebanon. It says He left there. Now, Mark, tells us, because Mark records the save incident, Mark tells us that, when He left there, He went through Tyre and Sidon, which meant that He must have gone north, first of all, to cover the Tyre and Sidon area; and then He went east in order to come south along the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee to a place called Decapolis. So we have the Lord, then, on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. He goes north to Sidon, north to Tyre. He goes east across the Hermann Range, across the River Jordan, south down the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee to the southeastern end, to an area known as Decapolis.
Now, it is interesting to note that there was a time gap. Look, for example, at chapter 14 verse...let's see, verse 19. "He commanded the multitude." This is the feeding of the 5,000, the prior feeding of the Jewish people in the land of Israel. "He commanded the multitudes to sit down on the grass." Now, if you'll notice chapter 15 verse 35. "He commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground." Now, the question is what happened to the grass? The answer is summer.
In chapter 14, the feeding of the 5,000 men and women and children who were Jews, it was spring; and the grass in that land only lasts a little into the summer. It's late summer now, and so we know that between the feeding in chapter 14, and the feeding in chapter 15, there have been many weeks that have transpired. We don't know how many of those days He may have spent still in the Galilee area, but surely there were some weeks spent...in Gentile land. It would've taken Him some weeks to have gone through Tyre and Sidon, east over the Hermann Range, across the Jordan, south again on the eastern bank, and down to Decapolis; and so He's been ministering for some length of time among these who are Gentiles.
And may I mention, as well, because seems as though critics have a lot of problems with the two feedings. They think that Matthew sort of muffed the facts at this point, and he repeated the same story with the numbers a little different. The details are very, very different in all cases, but the monumental reality of this story is that Christ was saying that what He gave in provision for Israel is no less than He will also give in provision for those who are outside Israel. It is a...it is a profound lesson, not unlike the lesson of the Book of Acts that when the Day of Pentecost came among the Jews and the Spirit of God descended and the phenomena occurred, when the Gospel then in chapter 10 was taken to the Gentiles, the very same phenomena occurred again; and Peter went back to the Jews and said, "You're not going to believe this, but the same thing that happened to us happened to the Gentiles," and that was the whole point, so that there would be no sense of dichotomy or no sense of God treating men with respect of persons. And so if our Lord was to feed the Jew, He was also demonstrating that He would feed the Gentile.
Alfred Edersheim, the great scholar, Jewish scholar, says, "The Lord ended each phase of His ministry with a feeding. He ended the ministry in Galilee with the feeding of the 5,000. He ended the ministry in the Gentile area with the feeding of the 4,000; and He ended the Judean ministry before His death on the cross with the feeding of His own in the upper room; and the Lord always leaves people fed.
And so we come then to Decapolis. Decapolis is on the southeast edge of the Sea of Galilee. It's not far from the area known as Gadara where Jesus, you remember, delivered two demoniacs and sent the demons into the herd of swine. It's the southern end of the modern Golan Heights. It's not far, frankly, from a little kibbutz where you may have eaten St. Peter's fish if you've been there, just after you've crossed the Sea of Galilee in a little boat, a very familiar spot.
Decapolis means ten cities. Deca is ten, polis is city. There were ten little cities there, small ones. They were wedged in between two territories, really, under Jewish domination. One controlled by Philip the tetrarch, and the other controlled by Herod Antipas, and in the middle was this wedge called Decapolis. And these ten cities were each free Greek cities. The Greeks were big into free city states; and these, each of them, were free; and they were under sort of an overall sovereignty by the governor of Syria. They were not under the rule of Israel or any of its monarchs. And so they were Greeks or Gentiles, sort of wedged in the middle of that Jewish part of the world.
Archeologists who have searched the area have found statues and monuments to Zeus and Athena and Artemis, and Hercules, and Dionysius, and Demeter, and many other Greek gods. So they were into Greek paganism full-blown...and Jesus came there. Now, they were not unacquainted with Jesus. If you look back in Matthew's Gospel to chapter 4, you will note that very early in His ministry, as He began teaching and preaching and healing, it says His fame went throughout all Syria, which was to the east of Israel; and they brought in people who were sick and it names the various diseases. Then verse 25 says multitudes came, and it lists all the regions around. "From Galilee, from Decapolis, from Jerusalem...the only city mentioned there, because of its import...from Judea, and then from those countries beyond the Jordan," which would be Syria, so forth.
So Decapolis had heard, and you know how it is when people start talking about how they've been healed, you can be sure the word spread very rapidly. So they had known of Jesus, and when He arrived again in that region, verse 30 says, "Great multitudes came unto Him," and we don't wonder at that. It was a wilderness area. He came on unannounced. It may have taken some time for all of them to gather, but gather they did, as they always did; and because they knew His reputation as One who could heal anything, they brought with them, it says, "those that were lame and blind and dumb and mutilated and many others, and put them down at His feet...and He healed them."
Now, I wanna take a moment here, if I might, to look at the word maimed or mutilated or crippled. I don't know what it says in your Bible, but it's the last of those words, and it's kuloss. It's used later on in Matthew's Gospel in chapter 18 where our Lord says, "It's better for you to pluck out your eye and to go through life kluss than to offend God." It, therefore, has as its unique meaning, to have something severed or removed and would speak of someone who's lost a limb or whose limb is withered to utter uselessness; but He healed those people. If they didn't have an arm, He gave 'em one. If they didn't have a leg; He gave them one. If they were missing an ear, He gave them one. If they had lost a finger, He gave them one.
It says at the end of verse 30, "He healed them," and that statement is so profound; and it almost passes by unnoticed. "He healed them." And you feel like you ought stop and scream or something to get everyone's attention. It says also in this text that...it says, "They put them down at His feet." Some manuscripts say Jesus' feet, some say His feet. The verb there is to fling in haste. You can see that 4,000 men -- it tells us how many were there later on -- plus women, and you can imagine another, I don't know, anywhere from 4 to 5 to 10,000 women and who knows how many thousand children -- 20,000 would not be a small estimate. And they're all coming, and it says, "They're all throwing these people at His feet." Can you imagine the chaos of this? I mean they were not orderly. They were not in line. They were just getting there in a frantic, knowing He could heal, hoping they would be one that He would heal; and this pile of humanity is being pitched at His feet; and it just says, "He healed them."
I mean people with no arm are going away with an arm. People who had lost their eyes were going away with eyes. People who had never spoken were speaking, and people who had never been able to walk were walking. And this was going on en masse, you see. I mean they couldn't even look fast enough to catch them all; and the result of it was verse 31 -- "The multitude thalmodzo, marveled." I mean they were struck with absolute awe at this scene, because, you see the word thalmodzo or marveling or wonder is a word that says we have no human explanation. There is nothing in our little computers that tells us this can happen. This is not possible. This is beyond imagination. This is incredible.
And they are left with wonder and astonishment at this flurry of spontaneously occurring miracles. This pile of humanity being dumped at His feet, getting up and walking away whole, and may I submit to you that their wonder was greater than the wonder of the Jews, because the wonder of the Jews was always limited by their skepticism. It was always limited by their gross case of spiritual pride. It was always limited by the bondage of their ceremony and tradition; and the blindness that exists on Israel today was there then. But these Gentiles didn't have that; and so when Mark writes of this in Mark 7:37, he says, "They were beyond measure astonished." And he says that, I think, to differentiate between the astonishment of the Gentiles and the astonishment of the Jews who...who were astonished, but not to this degree, because they were so encumbered by the...the attachment to their false religion and their spiritual pride.
And the Gentiles who were beyond measure astonished said, "He hath done all things well." In other words, He did it all perfectly. Everybody was totally whole. Nobody was missed, and nobody was less than complete...They marveled...and the greatness of the result comes at the end of verse 31. "They gave glory to the God of Israel." You see, it wasn't their God. In chapter 9, it says that they...the Jews marveled and glorified God, verse 8. But when the Gentiles glorified this God, it had to be