Many of you have read the passage in Matthew 7:6 and, if you're like me, you wondered what this is referring to and why it was included in the spot.
Y'shua did not speak out of context. Everything He said had a purpose, including when He spoke it. When you read Matthew 7, we go from the guiding statement on judging to this passage about casting before the dogs what's holy and pearls before swine. What does that have to do with judging before the statement or asking God for things after this statement?
When we return to the Aramaic we start to close in on the context of this passage. In talking about judging and looking at the twig in your brother eye versus the log in your own, Yshua says…
" First remove the beam from your eye, AND THEN DECIDE FOR YOURSELF to remove the twig from the eye of your brother. You should not hang earrings on dogs and you should not place your pearls before pigs that they should not trample them by their feet and they overtake and wound you." (Matthew 7:5-6 AENT)
Missing from the majority of text is the portion I have capitalized, "Decide for yourself". With this included we start to see context to what Y'shua was talking about.
When we remove the plank from our eye we can then see better to help remove the twig from our brother's eye. But, we must decide if it's even worth the time.
Verse six is written in a literary form called a chiasm. It's a specific literary structure that I may teach in a study further down the road. What the statement is telling us is that the dogs are apostate jews and the pigs are apostate gentile. If you try to give an apostate person valuable things they will not appreciate the value of these items. The apostate gentile will disregard the value, trampling it under its feet, and the apostate jew, or religious person, will turn at attack you.
I watch as people try to convince others on social media of scriptural and spiritual truths only to be wasting their time. We are to decide whether this person will value the gift or trample it. God gave us a limited time and we are to spend that time for His purpose and Glory and not waste it on those who refuse truth.
This is a hard topic and a hard truth but it's exactly what Y'shua is talking about out in this text. After we can see clearly, we need to "decide for ourselves" whether the person with a twig will appreciate the value of the truth given. This is an interesting concept considering that this section of passage on judging is what is used by people living in sin who want to condemn those who want to restore them to God through repentance. What a wonderful definition of irony.