“True Purity”

Scripture: Matthew 15:1-20

So what does it really mean to live in Jesus? Since the days of the Pharisees, many believe that it means that we live within the law – that we are focused on “being and doing good”. But many others take an entirely different approach, and look to Galatians 5:18 in a literal but disjointed and non-contextual way - that “.. if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law.” And they believe that the life they lead, regardless of what they do, falls under this thought. The truth that both approaches to life seem to miss, though, is that 1) when we follow the Spirit of God, we will be living within divine law, and conversely, if we truly live within the Lord’s law, it is only because we follow the Spirit. The truth of the matter is found in Matthew 5:17-20, in which Jesus tells us that the law (the Law of God, and not necessarily that of Moses and the Pharisees!), will never pass away, and if it is held solely within itself, being incomplete and ineffective, it will also require fulfillment and understanding through him.

This passage takes us back to James 2:26 – “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.” So while God’s commandments for our lives are still absolute and required, we also must have faith in Christ – faith in all that he taught, faith in all he did, and faith in all that he accomplished on our behalf. Both are absolute necessities.

But what do we do about the discrepancy between the law of Moses and the Law of God? How do we know which is what, especially when there is overlap? The solution is that when we are in doubt, we need to ask ourselves “So what did Jesus teach?” And that is always the best starting point.

Read Matthew 15:1-9

The problem with the law is that it is neither sufficient nor effective, in and of itself. No matter how extensive a law is, there will almost always be a loophole so large that you can drive that proverbial “Mack truck” through it. And people spend hours of their time looking for those gaping holes in both the law of our legal system and in the commandments of God, instead of looking for the truth and heart of it all, and following that!

So what was the big deal regarding washing your hands before you ate?

A story.
A young couple moved into a new neighborhood. The next morning while they were eating breakfast, the young woman saw her neighbor hanging the wash outside. "That laundry is not very clean," she said. "She doesn't know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap." Her husband looked on, but remained silent.

Every time her neighbor would hang her wash to dry, the young woman would make the same comments. About one month later, the woman was surprised one morning to see a nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband, "Look, she has learned how to wash correctly. I wonder, who taught her this?"

The husband said, "I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows."
(From Homiletics Online)

Yes, guys, first our mothers, and later our wives, have taught us that we must always wash our hands before coming to the supper table, but the Pharisees weren’t talking about issues surrounding personal hygiene. The “washing” that they were talking about was a tradition that the Pharisees had set in place. It wasn’t a law for the people, and it wasn’t even about the elimination of germs – it was a requirement that the Pharisees developed, presumably to mimic the law regarding priestly preparation to be ritually clean before serving in the temple. (Leviticus 21:24 – 22:3) If it was good enough for the priests, then it must be good enough for the Pharisees, and if they had to do it, then everyone should be doing it!
Washing your hands before eating had nothing to do with health or faith – it was all about one class of people imposing an unreasonable demand upon the others. No wonder that Jesus was upset with them!
And Jesus also calls them on an unrelated issue – that of setting themselves above the 5th Commandment – “Honor your father and mother.” They had created a loophole, again with their tradition, which they could use, and presumably did, to avoid addressing the needs of their own family. After all, they could look better by giving to the temple where others would see them, than to their own parents where it would have been in a much more private setting!

And humanity’s attempts to justify their “false worship” continues unabated, even to today.

Read Matthew 15:10-14

The Pharisees had been using the word and concept of being “unclean” as a synonym for “sinfulness”. So now, the Lord uses this interchange as a teaching moment to show the crowd (no longer just the Pharisees and scribes) what true sinfulness is all about.

Sin isn’t the condemnation of some issue that the world and the people of earth have determined to be wrong - it is any act that goes against the will of Almighty God. Sin, therefore, is defined not by human or worldly context, but by God, and Jesus begins to teach the truth.

So no matter what your mother told you, it is not a sin to eat with dirty hands. It may not be a wise thing to do, it may not be a healthy thing to do, but the Lord has not put it into a commandment. Now note that Jesus never says that we shouldn’t wash our hands – he simply says that it isn’t sinful to not do so.

And in verse 12, Jesus’ focus changes again – this time from the crowd that has been following him, to his own disciples. And their concern? That the Pharisees may have become angry over Jesus rebuke of their “law”. Have you ever noticed that the Jewish hierarchy were so set in their ways, and so hardened against all that Jesus teaches, that the word of God no longer means anything to them?
For the most part, I truly believe that they thought that they were bringing honor to the Lord God of Israel, when the reality was that Satan had hardened their hearts and had turned them against the truth of the Lord. This is the point of the story we heard a few minutes ago regarding the woman who was judging her neighbor falsely because of the filth on her own dirty windows.

So let’s think about our own “dirty windows” for a moment. How does our sin effect the way we see and treat others? After all, that’s what prejudice is all about, isn’t it - (“My way is right and your way is wrong!”) - and that does go against Jesus words – “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” (John 13:34-35) The Lord never withheld anything from the crowds, and quite honestly, he never withheld anything from the Pharisees, either – it’s just that they wouldn’t accept the love of Christ that was right there, waiting for them, all the time.
Of course, loving others as Jesus loved us is a pretty daunting task, to say the least! Remember that when Jesus went to Calvary, it wasn’t just for those who loved him and honored him – his passion and salvation were being offered for every man, woman and child, everyone who would ever live, throughout the entire world, regardless of who we are or what we have done! It required tremendous sacrifice on his part, and as he hung on that cross, he took the penalty for our sin (Luke 23:32-34) – all of it – all that the world would commit, with no caveats whatsoever, and all we have to do is accept it through faith in him.
And the third commandment in the Great Commission is to teach one another to obey all that the Lord has taught us. (Matthew 28:18-20) We have a long way to go before we finally get there, don’t we!

Read Matthew 15:15-20

Isn’t it interesting that Christ seems to connect evil thought with murder, sexual sin with theft, false testimony with slander. And rightly so. Evil ideas have a way of destroying, of ripping the life out, of our relationship with Almighty God; an immoral sex act steals the relationship that we should rightly have with our spouse, and deposits it firmly in the lap of an undeserving person; both false testimony and slander are lies that we tell against another person. And when we commit each one of these, we nullify the love that we are supposed to be showing to the very people who come into our lives.

And Jesus uses the analogy of digestion as a means to describe what should happen to the “dirt” of the world – that it must be allowed to become waste so that the “body”, our soul, can expel it from our lives. But when it doesn’t pass out, when we nurture it instead of wasting it, the analogy tells us that it settles in our heart, and that is where sin will fester and grow.

The point, of course, is that it is the things of God that should be growing and thriving within our lives, and not the sickness and disease that the world tries to feed us. But the problem is that the “false testimony and slander” of earth clouds our judgment, making it impossible to separate the dirt of earth from the goodness of God. We need to be constantly on guard against Satan’s deceit, and prepared to use our knowledge of the will of God to defeat his hateful ways, to allow them to become waste, and to pass out of our lives.

Are the “windows into our soul” clean and clear? If not, then we need to take our spiritual Windex, that which we know as “faith in Jesus Christ”, and let him clean up our vision.