Chapter 41 - Empty Worship: Confusing the Traditions of Men with the Doctrine of God (14:24-15:20)

41 Empty Worship: Confusing the Traditions of Men with the Doctrine of God (14:34-15:20)

And when they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret. And when the men of that place recognized Him, they sent into all that surrounding district and brought to Him all who were sick; and they began to entreat Him that they might just touch the fringe of His cloak; and as many as touched it were cured.

Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem, saying, “Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.” And He answered and said to them, “And why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and ‘He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him be put to death.’ But you say, ‘Whoever shall say to his father or mother, “Anything of mine you might have been helped by has been given to God,” he is not to honor his father or his mother.’ And thus you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, ‘This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’” And after He called the multitude to Him, He said to them, “Hear, and understand. Not what enters into the mouth defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man.” Then the disciples came and said to Him, “Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this statement?” But He answered and said, “Every plant which My heavenly Father did not plant shall be rooted up. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” And Peter answered and said to Him, “Explain the parable to us.” And He said, “Are you still lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that everything that goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and is eliminated? But the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. These are the things which defile the man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile the man.” (14:34-15:20)

One of God’s supreme commands is: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain” (Ex. 20:7). That command obviously prohibits profanity or vulgarity in which the Lord’s name is used. It also obviously prohibits flippant, irreverent use of His name. But more than those obvious things, it also forbids any use of God’s name that is superficial, indifferent, insincere, or hypocritical.

It has been said that God’s name is taken in vain more often inside the church than outside. His name is taken in vain whenever it is mechanically used in repetitious prayers and liturgies, in singing His praise while having no thought of Him, and in praying thoughtlessly and without genuine devotion. His name is taken in vain through empty worship perhaps more than in any other way.

Hypocritical worship was among the worst offenses of ancient Israel. The Lord declared through Isaiah, “Bring your worthless offerings no longer, incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies—I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly. I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts, they have become a burden to Me. I am weary of bearing them. So when you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide My eyes from you, yes, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered with blood” (Isa. 1:13-15).

Even the ceremonies and observances God Himself had ordained became unacceptable, because they were offered hypocritically and without meaning. Isaiah continued: ‘“Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from My sight. Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, reprove the ruthless; defend the orphan, plead for the widow Come now, and let us reason together,’ says the Lord, Though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they will be like wool’” (vv. 16-17).

Unless the heart of the worshiper is cleansed and purified, he cannot worship God acceptably, because he cannot worship God honestly and sincerely. The person with a sinful heart is opposed to God and it is not possible for him to worship rightly. Isaiah ends his prophecy with much the same warning as he begins it: “To this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at My word. But he who kills an ox is like one who slays a man; he who sacrifices a lamb is like the one who breaks a dog’s neck; he who offers a grain offering is like one who offers swine’s blood; he who burns incense is like the one who blesses an idol” (Isa. 66:2-3; cf. Prov 21:27). As they went through the pretensions of offering sacrifices, the people were no better than criminals and pagans, because their hearts were not humble and contrite, but proud and rebellious.

Through Amos, the Lord proclaimed the same message: “I hate, I reject your festivals, nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer up to Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them; and I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fadings. Take away from Me the noise of your songs; I will not even listen to the sound of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:21-24). Malachi declared that to offer blemished and unworthy sacrifices was to despise God’s name (Mal. 1:6-7).

In Matthew 14:34-15:20 Jesus preaches the same message as those prophets: Hearts that are not right with God cannot worship Him. Jesus was still popular with the multitudes of common people, but it was not because they trusted in Him as their Messiah-Savior but because He fed and healed them. Their interest in Him was selfish and their devotion to Him was superficial. They had no desire to follow Him as Lord but only to get from Him what they wanted. They did not want to serve Him but rather wanted Him to serve their every whim.

Most of the religious leaders were already openly hostile to Jesus and had been plotting for some time how to kill Him (12:14). But to keep from antagonizing the common people who still followed Jesus, the leaders tried first to discredit Him before they openly attacked Him.

In the present passage Jesus confronts the Jewish religious system of His day head on, showing, above all, the emptiness and worthlessness of its worship. In doing so, He further crystallizes the irreconcilable conflict between His gospel and that system. As the conflict unfolds, Jesus is first seen as the compassionate Healer (14:34-36), then as the condemning Judge (15:1-9), and finally as the correcting Teacher (vv. 10-20).

THE COMPASSIONATE HEALER

After Jesus stepped into the boat with Peter, the storm immediately stopped (Matt. 14:32) and the boat immediately arrived “at the land to which they were going” (John 6:21). The land was Gennesaret, a small but very beautiful plain located between Capernaum and Magdala. According to Josephus it was a lush and extremely fertile area that produced a wide variety of crops. The fields and vineyards were irrigated from no less than four large springs, enabling farmers to produce three crops a year. Because the soil was so rich, it was all devoted to farming, and the area contained no towns or villages. It was therefore a quiet, peaceful region, inhabited by many kinds of birds and offering a good place for retreat and rest.

Jesus probably intended to spend some time there alone with His disciples; but again His plans were interrupted, because when the men of that place recognized Him, they sent into all that surrounding district and brought to Him all who were sick. Although Jesus had previously healed thousands of people in that general area, there were obviously still many others who were sick with various afflictions.

The people’s confidence in Jesus’ miraculous powers was now so firmly established that they began to entreat Him that they might just touch the fringe of His cloak. They may have heard of the woman with the hemorrhage who had been healed by that act (Matt. 9:20) and assumed that anyone could be healed in the same way. Whatever their thinking and motives may have been, Jesus had compassion on them and honored their expression of faith, because as many as touched it were cured.

But Jesus wanted to do much more for them. Above all, He wanted to heal their sin-diseased hearts. That same day He offered Himself to them as the Bread of life which came down from heaven, which to eat would cause them never to hunger or thirst again and would give them eternal life (John 6:33-35, 48-51). But when they realized what it meant to eat that heavenly food and drink that heavenly drink, many of the shallow followers were offended and left Him (vv. 52-60, 66). Like so many people today who look to God only for what they want and care nothing for what He wants, most of the multitude had little to do with Jesus after He healed them.

Although He did not withhold it from them, Jesus was grieved that the people sought no more from Him than physical healing. Because they did not ask for a full meal, He did not refuse them a piece of bread. Because they did not ask for spiritual help, He did not refuse them physical. In spite of their superficiality, ingratitude, and self-centeredness, He mercifully healed them in order to reveal the compassionate heart of God.

THE CONDEMNING JUDGE

Just as Jesus offered compassion for the fickle crowds who wanted only food and healing from Him, He offered condemnation for the self-righteous, hypocritical religious leaders who wanted nothing from Him. They wanted nothing at all to do with Him, except what was necessary to discredit and destroy Him.

In this crucial passage we see the antithetical nature of the gospel message in Jesus’ teaching: The God of compassion is also the God of condemnation. Just as He heals those who come to Him, He condemns those who reject Him. In these nine verses we first see Jesus’ confrontation and then His condemnation of the unbelieving and rebellious scribes and Pharisees.

THE CONFRONTATION

Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem, saying, “Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.” (15:1-2)

Then is indefinite and does not precisely indicate the time sequence between the healings and the approach of the Pharisees and scribes. It is possible that this confrontation occurred several days after the healings. From John 6:4 we know it was the Passover season and that many Jews were traveling through Galilee on their way to Jerusalem for the feast. It was the third Passover of Jesus’ ministry, a year before His final celebration of it with the disciples in the upper room.

Since Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem would not normally carry on their work in Galilee, it is likely their fellow religionists there had requested help in confronting Jesus, possibly channeling their request through the Sanhedrin, the high Jewish council. Jerusalem was the location of the Temple and of the most eminent schools of Judaism; and therefore this delegation doubtlessly carried heavy ecclesiastical weight. And because these Pharisees and scribes had prestige and learning superior to that of their counterparts in Galilee, Jesus treated them with greater severity.

These men were familiar with Jesus’ teaching and ministry and came to Him with the specific purpose of proving Him to be an offender against their tradition. As soon as Jesus had begun to preach and teach, the leaders of the religious establishment realized He posed a severe threat to their legalistic system. Their religion was intentionally external and superficial, because it could be outwardly practiced with great zeal and diligence no matter what the condition of the heart or soul. It was a religion of ceremony and tradition that the most hardened unbeliever could follow. It was concerned with covering up sin, not exposing and cleansing it, with appearing righteous, not being righteous. Even before Jesus unequivocally proclaimed the truth in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:20), the Jewish leaders sensed that His kind of righteousness and theirs were diametrically opposed. The conflict ultimately resulted in the crucifixion—which they considered to be the victory of their way, whereas it was really its death knell.

The visiting leaders first asked Jesus, Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread. They did not try to hide the fact that Jesus’ offense was against the tradition of the elders rather than God’s law In their minds the tradition of the elders was superior to Scripture, in the sense that it was the only reliable interpretation of God’s Word. Just as Roman Catholics look to church dogma to discover what Scripture “really means,” most Jews of Jesus’ day looked to the tradition of the elders. In much the same way, many Protestants give more authority to the pronouncements of their denomination than to the Bible.

The Talmud, which is the repository of Jewish tradition, teaches that God gave the oral law to Moses and then told Moses to pass it on to great men of Israel. These men were then to do three things with the law they had received. First, they were to deliberate on it and properly apply it. Second, they were to train disciples in order that the next generation would have teachers of the law Third, they were to build a wall around the law in order to protect it.

Because their hearts were not right with God, the rabbis’ wall-building “protection” of His law actually undermined and contradicted it. Their purpose was not to lead the people to worship and serve God from pure hearts made clean by Him, but to worship and serve Him by human means and from unchanged hearts. To provide the means for superficially keeping God’s commandments, regulation after regulation and ceremony after ceremony were added, until God’s own Word was utterly hidden behind the wall of tradition. Instead of protecting. God’s Word, the tradition obscured and perverted it.

When the northern kingdom of Israel and then the southern kingdom of Judah were taken into captivity, the Jewish people felt as if God had abandoned them. The real reason for their captivity, of course, was that they had abandoned Him. They were suffering God’s judgment, just as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other prophets had repeatedly and vividly warned they would.

While the Jews were in exile, scribes (the first of whom was Ezra) began to assemble and copy the various books of Scripture written to that time. They also began to make comments on various passages that seemed unclear; and gradually a larger and larger accumulation of interpretations was developed until there was more interpretation than Scripture. The distinction between Scripture and the traditions based on interpretations of Scripture gradually became less and less distinct, and before long tradition was more familiar and more revered than God’s own Word.

By Jesus’ day, the tradition of the elders had for many years supplanted Scripture as the supreme religious authority in the minds of Jewish leaders and of most of the people. The traditions even affirmed that “the words of scribes are more lovely than the words of the law,” and it became a greater offense in Judaism to transgress the teaching of some rabbi such as the revered Hillel than to trangress the teaching of Scripture.

In the thinking of the Pharisees and scribes who approached Jesus on this occasion, it was therefore an extremely serious matter that His disciples would transgress the tradition of the elders. Jesus and His disciples disregarded all the rabbinical traditions, and the particular infraction cited here was simply representative of many others that could have been mentioned. But the disciples’ failing to wash their hands when they ate was considered to be an especially serious offense.

Wash had nothing to do with physical hygiene but referred to ceremonial rinsing. The purpose was to remove the ritual defilement caused by having touched something unclean, such as a dead body or a Gentile. Some of the rabbis even taught that a certain demon named Shibtah attached itself to people’s hands while they slept and that, if he were not ceremonially washed away, he would actually enter the body through the food handled by defiled hands.

The value of ceremonial rinsing was held so high that one rabbi insisted that “whosoever has his abode in the land of Israel and eats his common food with rinsed hands may rest assured that he shall obtain eternal life.” Another rabbi taught that it would be better to walk four miles out of the way to get water than to eat with unwashed hands. A certain rabbi who was imprisoned and given a small ration of water used it to wash his hands before eating rather than to drink, claiming he would rather die than transgress the tradition.

God had instituted certain prescribed ceremonial washings as part of the covenant given through Moses, but those were never more than outward symbols or pictures of spiritual truths. The Old Testament nowhere holds them up as having any merit, value, or blessing in themselves.

Water jars were kept ready to be used before every meal. The minimum amount of water to be used was a quarter of a log, enough to fill one and a half egg shells. The water was first poured on both hands, held with the fingers pointed upward; and it must run down the arm as far as the wrist and drop off from the wrist, for the water was now itself unclean, having touched the unclean hands. And if it ran down the fingers again it would render them unclean. The process was repeated with hands held in the downward direction, the fingers pointing down. And finally each hand was cleansed by being rubbed with the fist of the other. A strict Jew would do this before every meal and between every course in every meal. (For a fuller discussion read Alfred Edersheim’s The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, vol. 2, pp. 10-13.)

Throughout history, man-made religion has attached great significance and benefit to ceremonies and ritualistic acts. Commenting on this universal tendency of man, Charles Spurgeon is reported to have facetiously asked his congregation, “If there were no Sunday morning service at eleven, how many of you would be Christians?”

THE CONDEMNATION

And He answered and said to them, “And why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and ‘He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him be put to death.’ But you say, ‘Whoever shall say to his father or mother, “Anything of mine you might have been helped by has been given to God,” he is not to honor his father or his mother.’ And thus you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, ‘This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’” (15:3-9)

Before answering the Pharisees’ charge, Jesus gave a counter charge. He did not deny that His disciples disregarded the rabbinical traditions; and He later explained to the multitudes (v. 11) and then to the disciples (vv. 17-18) why this particular tradition was worthless and meaningless. But He gave no answer or explanation to the accusing Pharisees and scribes, dismissing their question as irrelevant. Instead, He asked them the immeasurably more important question, Why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?

Just as the Pharisees mentioned failure to wash their hands ceremonially before eating as an example of the disciples’ breaking tradition, Jesus mentioned the Pharisees’ overturning the fifth commandment, honor your father and mother (see Ex. 20:12), as an example of their breaking the commandment of God. He also reminded them of God’s penalty for breaking that command: He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him be put to death (see Ex. 21:17).

Bound up in honoring father and mother is the responsibility to show them respect and love and to help meet their needs. One tradition taught that “a son is bound to support his father even if he has to beg for him.” But another tradition had come to supersede that one as well as the fifth commandment. It taught that whoever shall say to his father or mother, “Anything of mine you might have been helped by has been given to God,” he is not to honor his father or his mother.

The scribes and Pharisees knew the Ten Commandments well and could recite them easily from memory. They were the most educated of all Jewish men and were considered the supreme authorities on Scripture as well as tradition. They could not possibly have failed to see that this tradition directly violated God’s commandment to honor one’s father and mother. They knowingly replaced God’s specific command with their own contradicting tradition.

Anything of mine translates dron, which means gift. Mark uses the more technical term korban (7:11), which refers to a gift or sacrifice specifically offered to God. Sometime in the past, a tradition had developed that allowed a person to call all his possessions korban, thereby dedicating them to God. And because Scripture taught that a vow to God must not be violated (Num. 30:2), those possessions could not be used for anything but service to God. Therefore, if a man’s father or mother asked for financial assistance, he could tell them, Anything of mine you might have been helped by has been given to God. The Greek text of the next phrase is more emphatic than the English suggests. He is not to honor might better be rendered, “He must not honor.” The vow did not simply allow withholding help from father or . . . mother but actually forbade it.

Except for what may have been actually given to the Temple or synagogue, however, the korban possessions remained in the person’s hands. And when he decided to use them for his own purposes, tradition permitted him to do so simply by saying korban over them again. In other words, the tradition was not designed to serve either God or the family but the selfish interests of the person making the hypocritical vow To avoid giving up his possessions in order to support his parents, he could declare those possessions sacred and unusable; but as soon as he wanted to use them for himself he could just as easily reverse the vow The covert purpose of that tradition was to invalidate the word of God by circumventing the fifth commandment.

Angered by the callous selfishness of that tradition, Jesus said, You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me” (see Isa. 29:13). What Isaiah said of the people of his own day applied to the hypocrites of Jesus’ day as well, and to those of our own.

An ancient rabbi said, “There are ten parts of hypocrisy in the world, nine at Jerusalem and one everywhere else.” The same might be said of much of the church. Satan has no greater allies than hypocrites who go under the guise of God’s people. And hypocrites have no greater ally than tradition, because tradition can be followed mechanically and thoughtlessly, without conviction, sincerity, or purity of heart. Because traditions are made by men, they can be accomplished by men. They require no faith, no trust, no dependence on God. Not only that, but they appeal to the flesh by feeding pride and self-righteousness. Often, as in this case, they also serve self-interest.

Because traditions require no integrity of heart, they are easily substituted for true worship and obedience. That is why it is easy for people to honor God with their lips while their heart is far away from Him. And that is why ritual, ceremony, and other religious traditions are more likely to take worshipers further from God than bring them closer. And the further a person is from God, the more vain his worship becomes.

The only heart that can worship God in spirit and in truth (John 4:24) is the heart that belongs to Him; and the only heart that belongs to Him is the heart cleansed from sin and made righteous by Him. It is this divine cleansing that God has always offered to those who trust in Him. “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you,” He said through Ezekiel, “and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances” (Ezek. 36:26-27). Unless that transformation happens within a person, his righteousness cannot exceed the hypocritical and superficial righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees—in which case he can never enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 5:20).

Jesus was condemned and crucified because He exposed the vileness of religious hypocrites who rejected God’s holy doctrines of grace in favor of their own sinful precepts of self-righteous works.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with tradition as such. Many traditions help us to remember, cherish, and honor things that are noble and beautiful. But when traditions are substituted for, or in any way distort or distract from God’s Word, they are an offense against God and a barrier to right worship and living. When the precepts of men are taught as doctrines, man’s wisdom is elevated above God’s—which is the very root of all sin. It was Satan’s inducing Eve to trust her own wisdom above God’s that led to the Fall and to every subsequent sin and evil in the world.

THE CORRECTING TEACHER

And after He called the multitude to Him, He said to them, “Hear, and understand. Not what enters into the mouth denies the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man.” Then the disciples came and said to Him, “Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this statement?” But He answered and said, “Every plant which My heavenly Father did not plant shall be rooted up. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” And Peter answered and said to Him, “Explain the parable to us.” And He said, “Are you still lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that everything that goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and is eliminated? But the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. These are the things which defile the man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile the man.” (15:10-20)

Pollution has become a major problem in the modern world, and we read and hear much about it. The air, the soil, the rivers and lakes, and even the oceans have become polluted to a degree thought impossible a generation ago.

The Bible also has much to say about pollution, but this pollution has plagued mankind from its beginning. It is a pollution that cannot be seen, smelled, tasted, or measured. Yet it is more lethal than anything modern environmentalists oppose. The New Testament uses five different verbs, three nouns, and one adjective to represent the idea of pollution, or defilement, and various forms of those terms are used dozens of times. The five uses in the present text of defile and defiles (vv. 11,18, 20) are all from the verb koino, which means to make common, unclean, or polluted.

God is concerned about the defilement of all of His creation, but especially about the defilement of man, who is made in His image, and most especially about the defilement of His own redeemed children. James admonishes Christians to hold to “pure and undefiled religion” (James 1:27), and Paul warns against consciences that are weak and defiled (1 Cor. 8:7). It is a terribly serious matter for Christians to defile themselves, because their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16-17). The Lord commends the church at Sardis for not having soiled, or defiled, its garments (Rev. 3:4), and in the eternal heavenly kingdom there will be no object or person who is defiled (Rev. 14:4; 21:27). But even in our present earthly life, we are commanded to grow into the likeness of our Lord Jesus Christ (Eph. 4:13), who is “holy, innocent, undefiled” (Heb. 7:26). Like His Son, God’s people are to be clean, pure, holy, spotless, unpolluted, and undented (2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:27; 2 Pet. 3:14).

In Matthew 15:1-20, Jesus first states the principle of spiritual defilement, then describes the violation of the principle, and finally elucidates the meaning of the principle.

THE PRINCIPLE STATED

And after He called the multitude to Him, He said to them, “Hear, and understand. Not what enters into the mouth defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man.” (15:10-11)

Because the time sequence between chapters 14 and 15 is not clear, we cannot be certain about the identity of this multitude; but it is probably the group described in 14:34-36 who had come to Jesus for healing.

This period of healing and teaching (see John 6:26-71) apparently lasted for many days, because it carried Jesus to numerous villages, cities, and countrysides (Mark 6:56). Sometime during this period the delegation of scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem had come to Galilee to discredit Jesus and had instead been discredited by Him.

The multitude had been standing on the sidelines, listening to Jesus condemn the religious leaders. Now He called them to Him in order to explain what He had just said about unscriptural traditions and empty worship.

Hear, and understand was a common idiom that meant, “Listen carefully and pay close attention,” and was used to precede a message of great importance. It was not that what Jesus said would be hard to understand but that it would be hard to accept. The greatest stumbling block to salvation has always been lack of acceptance and belief of the gospel, not lack of understanding it. It is precisely when the gospel is clearest—as when it was taught by Jesus Himself—that it is also likely to be the most unacceptable.

As usual, Jesus’ illustration was simple and based on the common knowledge and everyday experiences of the people. Not what enters into the mouth defiles the man, He explained, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man. Spiritual defilement is a matter of the inside, not the outside. No spiritual or moral contamination can result from what we eat. The physical has no way of defiling the spiritual. “Don’t be deceived and misled by the foolish traditions you have been taught,” Jesus was saying. “The practice of washing your hands before you eat has nothing to do with making you undented. What matters is what is in your heart. It is the evil in the heart, which eventually proceeds out of the mouth, that defiles the man.”

No Jew should have been shocked at what Jesus was saying. Just as in the Sermon on the Mount, He was not teaching new truths but was simply reinforcing truths that God’s Word had always taught. Even the most unlearned among the crowd had doubtlessly heard the story of the Lord’s choosing David to be Israel’s king in place of Saul. When Jesse brought his sons before Samuel, the prophet thought that Eliab, the eldest, was “‘surely the Lord’s anointed.’... But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart’” (1 Sam. 16:6-7).

Circumcision was the mark of the covenant given to Abraham, and it was looked on with the greatest possible reverence by Jews. But even before Israel entered the Promised Land, God declared through Moses, “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require from you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the Lord’s commandments and His statutes which I am commanding you today for your good? . . . Circumcise then your heart” (Deut. 10:12-13, 16). The Old Testament repeatedly declares that the only religious ceremony or activity that pleases God is that which comes from a contrite, pure, and loving heart (Josh. 24:23; 1 Kings 8:23; 2 Chron. 11:16; Isa. 51:7; 57:15).

The expression proceeds out of the mouth ties in closely with the idea of not eating with unwashed hands. But Jesus was referring not simply to what a person says but also to what he thinks and does. In the parallel passage in Mark’s gospel, Jesus says, “The things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man” (Mark 7:15, emphasis added). A person’s denied heart is expressed both in what he says and in what he does; but the mouth is the more dominant revealer of internal pollution, because it is through our words that hatred, deception, cruelty, blasphemy, and most other evils are most clearly manifest.

Mark also tells us that, in overturning this superficial, unscriptural tradition of hand washing, Jesus “declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19). Jesus’ teaching that not what enters into the mouth defiles the man may therefore have been the most astounding thing the people had ever heard, because few things were more sacred to the Jews of that day than their dietary laws. Form was everything. Following the teaching and example their religious leaders, orthodox Jews lived entirely by externals—which are the marks of every false religion.

Jewish traditions had multiplied so much by Jesus’ time that it became impossible for anyone, even full-time religionists such as the scribes and Pharisees, to keep all of them. The rabbis had therefore developed “the law of intention.” If a person arose in the morning and said, “I intend to be pure all day,” he could waive the Ceremonies and consider them fulfilled because of his good intention. The intention, of course, was not good at all, because its purpose was to evade rather than fulfill the tradition showing that the Jews were hypocritical even about their own man-made standards:

In fairness to the Jews, many ceremonies and restrictions had been given to them by God as expressions of their covenant relation to Him. The book of Leviticus is filled with prescribed rituals and procedures for the priesthood in regard to the sacrificial system. God also declared certain animals unclean for any Jew to eat; and even many acceptable foods had to be prepared in carefully prescribed ways before they could be eaten. Many things were forbidden even to be touched; and certain diseases, such as leprosy, and some physical conditions, such as menstruation, were considered ceremonially defiling. But none of those ceremonially or symbolically unclean things or conditions are ever in themselves called sinful. They were to act as vivid pictures representing sin. Under the Old Covenant, being involved in or having contact with a ceremonially unclean thing rendered a person unfit to participate in certain worship ceremonies or certain social activities. But that external unfitness is never called sin. It needed ceremonial cleansing but not divine forgiveness. Yet it illustrated in a practical way the spiritual defilement of sin, as circumcision illustrated the need for a heart to have the sin “cut away.”

If those ceremonial requirements and restrictions were entirely external, we might ask, why did God require them? God gave those outward signs in the early days of the Old Covenant, immediately after His people had spent four hundred years among the pagan, idolatrous, and morally corrupt Egyptians. The Ten Commandments were Israel’s first written communication from God, and before that time they had only limited knowledge of His character and will. After He called Abraham to be the head of His chosen people, the Lord gave specific instructions and directions to select leaders of His people from time to time, but He had not revealed Himself in any detail. And just as parents use pictures to help teach their young children, God used those symbols and pictures to help teach His truth to the children of Israel, who were then young in His ways.

God’s forbidding a person to sacrifice while ceremonially unclean was a picture of not coming to worship Him when not spiritually clean from sin. Outward cleanliness was a picture of inward cleanliness. The Old Testament nowhere teaches that circumcision, ceremonial cleansing, refraining from certain foods, or any such outward act—even though prescribed by God—could save a person and make him right with the Lord. As Paul makes clear, Abraham was counted righteous on the basis of his faith—before the rite of circumcision, or any other rite, was established. Circumcision was but “a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while uncircumcised” (Rom. 4:1-12). That is why, even from the earliest days of the nation Israel, God’s command was to “circumcise . . . your heart” (Deut. 10:16; cf. Jer. 4:4).

The book of Hebrews is a commentary on the book of Leviticus, and neither can be properly understood without the other. The writer of Hebrews continually reminds his Jewish readers that the Old Testament sacrifices were but pictures of the real, true, perfect, and complete sacrifice that Christ made on the cross. The Old Testament priests were “a copy and shadow of the heavenly things” (Heb. 8:5). The Tabernacle and its Holy Place were “a symbol for the present time. Accordingly both gifts and sacrifices are offered which cannot make the worshiper perfect in conscience, since they relate only to food and drink and various washings, regulations for the body imposed until a time of reformation” (9:9). The time of reformation was the time of the ministry and sacrifice of the Messiah, God’s Son. The Old Testament law—holy, righteous, and good as it was (Rom. 7:12)—nevertheless was “only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things” (Heb. 10:1). It was always God’s desire and intention that His people “draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having [their] hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and [their] bodies washed with pure water” (10:22).

Hebrews 5:12 through 6:8 is devoted entirely to appealing to Jews who were considering the gospel, and perhaps had taken some tentative steps toward acceptance, to leave behind their symbolic ceremonies and sacrifices and come all the way to the living Reality to whom those symbols pointed. (See the author’s commentary on Hebrews.)

From the time the Old Covenant was first given to them, God’s people were more concerned with outside ritual than with inside righteousness. Ritual requires no change of heart, no forsaking of sin, no repentance before God. It allows a person to display symbols of religion while holding on to his sins. It is religion of form rather than faith, and is therefore empty and hypocritical.

The people of Israel not only failed to appreciate the spiritual truths pictured by God’s prescribed ceremonies and restrictions but they also added their own pictures to God’s. And the more they multiplied the pictures, the more they trusted in the pictures and the less they trusted in God. Instead of pointing them to God, the traditions led them further from Him. Instead of enhancing faith, the traditions stifled faith and enhanced self-reliance and self-righteousness. Therefore, when God’s perfect Reality came to earth, His people were so enmeshed in their traditions and so far from His Word, that they crucified God incarnate.

The matter of externals was so deeply ingrained in Jewish thinking that even Jewish believers in the early church often had great difficulty forsaking them. Several years after Pentecost, Peter still could not accept the idea that all foods were now clean. It required a special vision from God, instruction repeated three times, and a special demonstration of the work of the Holy Spirit to convince Him that both all foods and all people cleansed by God are acceptable to Him (see Acts 10:1-33). Even years after that experience, Peter slipped back into his old mind-set and for a while “began to withdraw and hold himself aloof [from Gentiles], fearing the party of the circumcision” (Gal. 2:12).

Paul warns that

the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron, men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods, which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer. (1 Tim. 4:1-5)

THE PRINCIPLE VIOLATED

Then the disciples came and said to Him, “Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this statement?” But He answered and said, “Every plant which My heavenly Father did not plant shall be rooted up. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (15:12-14)

From Mark we learn that Jesus and His disciples “entered the house” (Mark 7:17), probably the home where they had been staying in Capernaum. They were now away from the crowd and the Jewish leaders from Jerusalem, and the disciples said to Jesus, Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this statement? Jesus knew very well that His statement about ceremonial washings undercut the very foundation of the legalistic system of the Pharisees and that they would be greatly offended by it. He meant to offend them.

Just as their opposition to Jesus would continue to increase until they finally put Him to death, so would His accusations against them. He would accuse them of not entering the kingdom and of preventing others from entering, of devouring widow’s houses while making a pretense of prayer, of making their converts twice as much sons of hell as themselves, of carefully tithing their smallest herbs but of neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness, of appearing clean on the outside but of being full of robbery and self-indulgence, of being whitewashed tombs that contained filthy bones of dead men, of being full of hypocrisy and lawlessness, and of being of the same character as their forefathers who killed God’s prophets (Matt. 23:13-30).

The Pharisees so idolized their system of tradition that they actually taught that God spent all day studying His own law and all night studying the Mishna that interpreted the law Some believed God presided over the heavenly Sanhedrin, that the rabbis sat next to God according to their holiness, and that together they studied the Halakah (the legal part of the Talmud) and made decisions. They taught that, after God had spent such hard work studying the law and the Mishna, He spent three hours each evening playing with leviathan. The Lord was so distraught at the destruction of the Temple, they claimed, that in each of the three watches of the night He roared like a lion; and when He cried, His tears fell into the ocean and caused earthquakes. They even taught that, like themselves, God wore a prayer shawl and phylacteries. Worst of all, they taught that when Moses died, God touched his body and was therefore Himself defiled and had to be cleansed by Aaron, the first high priest. They had carefully boxed the Creator of the universe within their imaginative, petty, foolish, and wicked system.

The first truth about hypocrites that is evident from this passage is that they are offended by the truth. People who live in spiritual and moral darkness cannot stand to be exposed to the light and be shown for what they really are. The truth tears off their masks and reveals the sinful, ugly reality behind it.

Second, hypocrites are destined for judgment, because, Jesus said, every plant which My heavenly Father did not plant shall be rooted up. Those plants are the ungodly tares, which God now allows to grow alongside the godly wheat. But at the end of the age, the tares will be “gathered up and burned with fire” as God’s angels “will gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those who commit lawlessness, and will cast them into the furnace of fire” (Matt. 13:40-42).

Hypocrisy is so reprehensible in God’s eyes that Jesus condemns the sinner along with the sin. Jesus’ most constant and repeated charge against the scribes and Pharisees was their hypocrisy. They were so far from the kingdom and such intransigent enemies of the kingdom that the King said, Leave them alone, which could also be translated, “Keep away from them and have nothing to do with them.” In a similar way, when Ephraim had joined itself to idols, God said, “Let him alone” (Hos. 4:17), as if that people were abandoned to judgment.

It is spiritually dangerous to stay around apostates and others who steadfastly reject and oppose the gospel of Christ. If there is opportunity to witness to them, it should be done with the greatest of caution, “snatching them out of the fire,” as it were, and being careful not to get burned ourselves in the process (Jude 23). We should not even listen to “the opposing arguments of what is falsely called knowledge” (1 Tim. 6:20). Exposing ourselves to such people and such teaching risks spiritual disaster (cf. 2 John 8-11).

Even Jesus did not debate the ungodly scribes and Pharisees. When He responded to their questions or accusations, it was always in the form of correcting their doctrinal error and of condemning their spiritual and moral wickedness.

Perhaps the disciples were told to leave them alone also in the sense of not trying to judge men in order to weed out those who seem to be tares. Human judgment is imperfect and would inevitably uproot some good plants with the bad (Matt. 13:29). Concern for the purity of God’s church sometimes makes believers want to take judgment into their own hands; but the Lord forbids that. In the first place, believers are not qualified for it; and in the second, it is not yet the time.

Third, hypocrites always lead others to disaster. It is bad enough that they themselves cannot and will not see the truth; it is even worse that they recruit others to their ungodliness. They are not only blind but blind guides of the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit.

The pit physically referred to holes that were dug in a field or pasture and filled with water for use as drinking troughs for animals. A blind man walking through a field would eventually fall into a pit. But the spiritual meaning of pit is hell. The blind guides are the Pharisees themselves, and the other blind are their converts, who become twice the sons of hell as their teachers (Matt. 23:15).

Jesus’ calling the Pharisees blind guides was a play on their own description of themselves as “leaders of the blind.” Jesus was saying, “Yes, you are leaders of the blind; but you are in the same condition as those you lead. You yourselves are blind.”

THE PRINCIPLE ELUCIDATED

And Peter answered and said to Him, “Explain the parable to us.” And He said, “Are you still lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that everything that goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and is eliminated? But the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. These are the things which defile the man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile the man.” (15:15-20)

The parable that Peter wanted Jesus to explain refers to the illustration of verse 11. It was not so much that the disciples did not understand what Jesus meant as that they found it hard to accept—just as had the crowd and the scribes and Pharisees. As already mentioned, even years after Pentecost, Peter was not able to accept fully the idea that all foods were clean (Acts 10:14; Gal. 2:11-12).

In what must have been a tone of grief, Jesus replied, Are you still lacking in understanding? “With all I have taught during the last two years,” the Lord was saying, “are you still like the multitudes who do not know what I am talking about? Do you still fail to comprehend the absolute superiority of spirituality over formality, of the internal over the external, of reality over the shadow?”

Continuing with the figure of eating, Jesus said, Do you not understand that everything that goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and is eliminated? In Mark’s account, Jesus’ adds, “because it does not go into his heart” (7:19). Because food is only physical, it can only affect the physical. It cannot defile the inner person, represented by the heart, because the physical and the spiritual are of two different orders. Physical pollution, no matter how corrupt, cannot cause spiritual or moral pollution. Ceremonies, rituals, and other external practices cannot cleanse a person spiritually, and failure to observe them cannot defile a person spiritually. Ceremonial cleansing, even under the Old Covenant, never did more than picture spiritual cleansing.

Rather, Jesus said, it is the things that proceed out of the mouth and come from the heart that defile the man. The heart represents the inner person, his thoughts, attitudes, desires, loyalties, and motives. When the heart is filled with evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders, and other such ungodliness, these are the things which defile.

It was the Pharisees’ inner unrighteousness—shown in the extreme by their evil thoughts to destroy Jesus—that corrupted them. The central moral thrust of the Sermon on the Mount is that the basis of all sin is the inner thought, not the outward act. A person commits the sin when he wants to do it, whether or not he ever carries it out in action. Murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders, and all other sins begin in the heart (see Matt. 5:21-37).

The things that defile the man come from an unwashed heart, not from unwashed hands. The need is for God to cleanse men’s hearts, not for men to wash their hands.

Paul warned Titus that “rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision,. . . must be silenced because they are upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach.... For this cause reprove them severely that they may be sound in the faith, not paying attention to Jewish myths and commandments of men who turn away from the truth” (Titus 1:10-11, 13-14). The apostle then goes on to say, “To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled. They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient, and worthless for any good deed” (vv. 15-16).

When a person is defiled on the inside, what he does on the outside is also defiled. But when a person is pure in heart—undefiled on the inside—he will see God (Matt. 5:8).