A few weeks ago I preached on Mark chapter seven. This sermon actually spurred a lot of conversation around Gateway, but unfortunately the podcast didn't work. Below is a somewhat condensed version of my message.
At Gateway we’ve been looking at the book of Mark and the life of Jesus within the book of Mark. One of the ways Mark reveals Jesus is by contrasting him with the religious authorities of his day.
In Mark’s depiction, the religious authorities are blind and deaf to the rule of God in Jesus. They do not see or hear what is before them. So they see a paralyzed man walk, a man’s withered hand restored, but they do not perceive God at work. They are a generation that is always seeking “signs & wonders” but they don’t have eyes of faith to discern the signs that Jesus does give.
In Mark chapter seven we discover their blindness stems from the way they interpret scripture. They believe it is central to honor God by keeping laws, following rules. In fact they focus so much on the rules that they forget about the reasons and they become blind to their own hypocrisy.
In this section, Jesus says three remarkable things about the Bible: 1.) We must adjust to the Bible’s authority, 2.) we must also grasp its purpose and 3.) we must fall in love with the person at its center.
1. We must adjust to its authority.
Jesus five times in this passage criticizes the tradition of the elders. Jesus is not against tradition all together. In fact, you can’t really have a life, a human community, emotional health without traditions. But Jesus is criticizing the tradition of the elders and religious leaders.
These are a set of rules and regulations that over the years had grown up around the Bible. They weren’t in the Bible. But there were areas of life in which the Bible gave no specific direction. So the teachers and scholars had developed the traditions - rules about the Bible - and they had added them to the Scripture as binding, authoritative regulations for life.
For example teachers would ask, “What does it really mean to rest on the Sabbath?” “What is the best way to maintain ritual purity?” “What is the best way to observe the Passover?” These are all very legitimate questions. However, in every case the answer of the elders was a couple of hundred detailed rules and regulations.
The problem was that the rules and regulations were not in the Bible, but they grew up around the Bible and they became equal in authority with Scripture. And because they were considerably more detailed and concrete than the principles of the Bible - they tended to distract people and sometimes even contradict the original principle of the Bible.
Jesus gives two examples in this passage. The first was ritual washing. This is something far more complicated than just, “Ewww, your disciples didn’t wash their hands!” The idea was ritual purity (Ex 30:19; 40:13). According to the law of Moses that the priests had to wash their hands and feet prior to entering the Tabernacle. This made sense and served as a very important part of the liturgy.
The only people who are told to wash their hands are the priests. But, by the time of Jesus, everybody was required to wash constantly. Why? You may have accidentally touched something, or someone, unclean. You might have touched a Gentile. So the Pharisees surpassed the priests in their zeal to safeguard themselves and created this obsession with ritual purity.
Now think about this. One of the foundational principles of the Hebrew scriptures was that Israel was to be a light to the Gentiles, a light to the nations. And yet that basic principle is totally lost in all of the legalism and separatism that comes with this obsession with ritual purity. These extra rules such as ritual washing before meals completely separated the Israelites from the people that they were called to reach.
The Other example Jesus gives is this thing about CORBAN. Essentially the Pharisees had found this little loophole in God’s law. You could take a piece of your property and declare it CORBAN - or dedicated to God. So that if one of your parents got into economic trouble and came to you - you could say, no I can’t use any of this.
So, Jesus is saying, by complying with the tradition of the elders you have actually contradicted the whole spirit of the law to honor your father and mother. And the closing line of the whole passage Jesus says, “I could give you a hundered other examples but I won’t!”
In v. 6 Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah and says, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.”
This is a remarkable statement! What he says here is, if you fail to honor the unique authority of the Bible, you fail to worship God. If you let your human traditions, what the experts say, what your heart says - if you let anything else have equal authority with the Bible - you fail to worship God.
You create your own God.
You are your own God.
Christians do this all of the time. Afraid of accidentally stumbling into sin we place ‘safegaurds’ around ourselves. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is when we turn those ‘safeguards’ into mandatory regulations for all Christians everywhere and thereby put them on equal playing field with scripture.
Life is complicated. There are often no easy answers. So rather than rely on the discernment of the Holy Spirit, we want a new law. We want someone to give us the answers. This is why people are driven to cults.
The greatest deception is this: you think you are giving the Bible more authority, but instead you are robbing it. You are placing your own interpretation, your own tradition, your own agenda ahead of God’s.
And what Jesus is saying is that a failure to recognize and honor the unique authority of the Bible is a failure to honor the authority of God. You can’t have one without the other. This is an astonishingly high view of the Bible. Jesus is looking at the Bible as not a human product but as something much more. Something divine.
2. We have to grasp its purpose
What the scripture is for? What is the purpose? What we are trying to accomplish when we obey the Bible?
Notice Jesus says, “These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.” God says the purpose of the Bible is not formal compliance, but ‘I want your heart. You are far from me and I want to be close to you.’
If you add all kinds of other the regulations, that shows that you think the purpose of the Bible is so you can feel like you are a righteous person. You do all the right things so that God has to bless you. You are trying to manipulate God so that he has to bless you and answer all of your prayers.
That was never the purpose of the Bible!
The purpose of the Bible is an intimate love relationship with God. God says, “I want you to obey the Bible because I want relationship with you.”
In Exodus 20 God gives the Israelites the Ten Commandments, but notice in the previous chapter the context in which he gives these commandments.
You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession (Exodus 19v4).
This is one of the most important points in the Bible. God did not come to the children of Israel in Egypt and say; “if you obey me then I will set you free.” He says, “I saved you! I released you from the bondage of the most powerful nation in the world and you didn’t even lift a finger. I didn’t do it because you obeyed the law, you didn’t even have the law! I didn’t do it because I owed you, I did it because I love you!”
Sheer, unmerited grace.
So why should we obey? Because this is how you can become my treasure. This is how you can treasure me and how I can treasure you. This how we can have an intimate relationship. You have to obey my will in order to have an intimate personal relationship.
Now for us in the 21st century western world, this seems antithetical. But think about it, if you are really falling in love with someone and you really want it to go well, what do you do? You start to do research. You want to find the things that offend and outrage the person and avoid doing those things. You also want to know even the little things that will delight them and make them happy.
You are discovering the will of your beloved.
And once you’ve done the research, without being asked, you begin to conform to the will of your beloved. You begin to obey the will of your beloved. It doesn’t it feel like obedience? We don’t even think about it like that! Because when you fall in love you put your own happiness into their happiness. You are only happy if they are happy. That’s how love works.
You can’t have a personal relationship with God unless you are willing to submit and adjust your life to God’s will and the authority of the Bible.
But if you adjust your life to the authority of the Bible, out of love, out of the desire to love and know God, then you begin to understand the true purpose of the Bible.
3. We must fall in love with the person at its center
There is a secret to reading the Bible.
There is a center to it.
There are commands and poems and songs and stories, but there is a plotline running through all of them. And, Jesus says, it is all leading to me.
Notice what Jesus says in one of his first messages: “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it” (Matt 5v17). He was essentially saying, “I didn’t come to do away with the words of God; I came to show people what it looks like when the Torah is lived out perfectly, right down to the smallest punctuation mark.”
“I’m here to put flesh and blood on the words.”
Jesus Christ is the ultimate expression of God and his love and intention for humanity. He lived the life we should have lived and died the death we should have died. He has rescued us from Egypt. Not on the basis of our works. But on the basis of sheer grace.
When I fall in love with Jesus Christ I have all the fuel I need to obey him in return.
Religion teaches external compliance to the rules. But the gospel is an inner heart, filled with love and joy, that wants to passionately love God and love your neighbor, that goes beyond just what offends God to what delights Him. And the purpose of the Bible is to show you the way to do that.
