Human rules are not the same as God’s commandments.
START WITH SCRIPTURE:
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
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OBSERVE:
The controversy between Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees has already ripened into open hostility. By the time we have arrived at this passage, the Pharisees and scribes are critically examining and ‘picking’ at virtually everything that Jesus does.
Here, they notice a hygienic/ritualistic defect in the disciples:
they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.
This was shocking to the scribes and Pharisees, for they had developed very detailed rules about the washing of hands, food, dishes, etc. It should be noted that these rules were not from the Torah, the revealed Law that God had given to Moses; instead they were dictated by the Oral Law, passed on by rabbinic traditions over the years. It was common for rabbis to meet with students and to answer questions about the Torah, and offer interpretations about how the Law was to be applied. So, it is the Oral Law that the scribes and Pharisees believe that the disciples are violating.
So they pose the question to Jesus:
“Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”
Jesus is very clear that there is a sharp distinction between the Revealed Law of God and the Oral Law. He quotes from Isaiah that the scribes and Pharisees are “teaching human precepts as doctrines,” and declares to them:
“You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
Though they pretend to be deeply religious, he accuses them of honoring the Lord with their lips, while their hearts are in fact far from God.
We must be clear that Jesus never criticizes or diminishes the Revealed Law of God. Just the opposite. In fact, in Matthew 5:17-20, Jesus declares:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
The key difference between Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees is that he sees that true righteousness is not a matter of external ritual, or superficial piety. True righteousness is holiness of the heart.
Jesus says to the crowd that had gathered and witnessed this interaction:
“Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
And Jesus reiterates that what truly matters is not external, ceremonial law, but God’s unchangeable moral law:
For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
True righteousness is a matter of the heart, not the superficialities of ritual practice.
APPLY:
Jesus makes it very clear that he distinguishes between the rules that have been created by human beings and the commandments of God.
As we apply the Scriptures to our lives, we must do the same. The rules and traditions that are developed over time in our churches may have a good purpose, and they may even have some validity for a time; but they are not ever to supersede the law of God.
We tend to get tied up in knots over things that are human traditions — music, clothing, ritual, etc. And we can even begin to think of externals as being more important than the internal meaning of the law.
Jesus never loses sight of the fact that internal holiness is what matters. The mistake that many of us make is to treat holiness as a kind of medicine that we apply externally. The only way it will work is by being taken internally.
RESPOND:
I think many Christians have misunderstood the New Testament attitude toward the law. I think of a pastor I knew years ago who parked his car in a no-parking zone when he went to the hospital, because he said “the children of God are under grace, not under law.” Although he was flouting a civil law, I suspect his attitude toward the laws of the Scripture were similar.
Jesus says quite the contrary about the laws of God. He declares:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Paul in Romans 7:12 says that the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.
We have been led to believe that the law is a bad thing, and that Christians are free from any law. That is not Biblical teaching. The law has different dimensions.
There was the ceremonial purpose of the law, reflected in the temple sacrifices, feasts, and the dietary laws. These had the purpose of reminding people that they were dependent on God for forgiveness and that they were to be set apart for God’s purposes. Jesus is the final and perfect sacrifice, and therefore fulfills the sacrificial law. The dietary laws were an external sign of the distinct nature of Israel; but as Christians our distinctiveness is found by being filled with the Holy Spirit.
And then there is the moral law. We may argue that the law of love fulfills the moral law completely. When Jesus sums up the law, he answers in two parts:
“The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31).
But it is also very clear that if we are fulfilling the law of love, then we will fulfill the moral law! If we love God, we will have no other god before him, we will honor the Sabbath day by worshiping him, and so on. And if we love our neighbor, we won’t steal or lie. In fact, all the things Jesus mentions in our current passage would be completely contrary to the moral law of love:
fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.
Our Lord, I have a tendency to turn my religion into a kind of medicine taken externally. My religious customs become a substitute for the real thing. Your grace is a medicine that must be taken internally. You change me from the inside out! Amen.
PHOTOS:
“Pool Rules” by Peter Dutton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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