Proper 17
Deuteronomy 4:1-9; Mark 7:1-23
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I.
How do you know if you are a Christian?
The same question might have been put to a first-century Jew. In fact, that is basically the gist of Jesus’ question to the disciples in Mark 8:27, “Who do men say that I am?”
Get that answer right, and you can rightfully call yourself a Christian. Or, better, a Christ-ian, or a Messiah-ian.
Why do I say it like that?
Well, to emphasize something that the Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem are clearly missing in today’s gospel reading.
You see, even in the first century A.D., Christians were not a new people.
Yes, I know, “the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch” (Acts 11:26) but the point I want you to understand is that by the time Christ came, the Christians were already a very old people.
So old, in fact, that they were not bound by the “traditions of the elders.” They were older than the elders. They were from the original stock of believers. They held to the faith before the tradition.
Now, what am I saying? You may think I’ve got my history all confused. Guest preacher doesn’t know his Bible. Everyone knows Jesus was a Jew and that Christianity is a relatively young religion as these things go.
Well, let me give you a few verses to help you understand what I mean.
Speaking to His disciples in Matthew 13:17, Jesus says:
“Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.”
Speaking to hostile Jews in John 8:56, Jesus says:
“Your father Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad.”
Shortly after saying it, those same Jews take up stones to kill Jesus.
Describing the faith of the Old Testament saints from Abel to Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Moses, and many others including unnamed widows who received back their sons raised from the dead, the eleventh chapter of the letter to the Hebrews says:
“All died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar.”
And what was it — I should say, who was it — that they saw and greeted?
Jesus Christ.
Jesus the Christ.
Jesus the Messiah.
Which made them Messiah-ians. It made them Christ-ians — Christians — long, long before Jesus was born in the flesh, born of a woman, born of Mary.
They were Christians by faith. They were Christians because they believed in Christ, even before He came.
But how do you know if you are a Christian?
That is the question we turn to now.
II.
My text for today is Mark 7:15.
“There is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him.”
This verse occurs in the middle of another episode in Jesus’ ongoing dispute with the Pharisees and scribes of Jerusalem. This time, the Pharisees do not accuse Jesus of any wrongdoing, but they accuse His disciples.
Specifically, they accuse them of eating with “hands defiled, that is, unwashed.”
This does not mean that Jesus’ disciples were so coarse as to eat with dirt on their hands, but rather that they had not performed a traditional ritual of purification.
Jesus condemns their traditional observances, what the Pharisees called “the tradition of the elders,” calling them hypocrites in Mark 7:6, and in Mark 7:9 saying:
“You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God, in order to keep your tradition!”
Here’s a popular misconception. It was popular in Jesus’ time, and it is popular in our own.
It goes like this.
The Jews are the keepers of the law, but the followers of Jesus are law breakers. Or maybe, to put it a little more charitably, we Christians tend to think the Old Testament law doesn’t apply to us.
That’s why we don’t worry about things like kosher food and mixing fabrics, right?
Because the law has been fulfilled. It no longer applies in the New Testament.
At the same time, we tend to think that the Jews, well they are the real deal. Want to see what it was like in Old Testament times? Look at today’s Jews, especially the orthodox.
Now, here’s where the misconception lies. Today’s Jews are the spiritual heirs of the same Pharisees and scribes with which Jesus got in trouble.
And He gets in trouble with them for the same reason you’ll get into trouble with a practicing Jew — or even a Roman Catholic for that matter — if you point out that you really don’t need to pile on all these “extras” just to have a relationship with God.
(Now, if some of you are pre-mils and dispensationalist and a good deal of your theology of the end times rests on there being a specific role for ethnic Israel, I am just going to ask you to hear me out.)
One thing to know about the Pharisees is that they were influenced by a group of relatively recent converts to Judaism.1
Roman Palestine was a cauldron of identity politics that would make the Democratic National Convention look like a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
About a hundred years before Christ, a group called the Idumeans was more or less forcibly converted to Judaism by the Hasmoneans.
The Hasmoneans were the ruling class in Judea.
You’ll recognize the name Herod, as in King Herod, who was king when Jesus was born, and who, after meeting with the Wise Men, ordered all the baby boys in Bethlehem under the age of two to be killed because he was afraid that Jesus would usurp him and his dynasty. (See: Matthew 2:16-18.)
All that is interesting, but the more interesting thing is who the Idumeans were. Ask yourself if Idumean sounds familiar in the least bit? Does it sound a bit like Edom or Edomite?
If it does, you have a good ear and know your Old Testament.
That means you will also know that the Edomites were descended from Esau, Jacob’s brother, and Israel’s ancient ethnic enemy.
Numbers 20:18 tells us that long ago the Edomites did not let Israel pass through their land during the Exodus from Israel.
Closer to the events of my text today, and certainly top of mind when it came to Jewish nationalist identity, the prophet Obadiah devotes his entire short prophecy to recounting Edom’s crimes against Israel and Israel’s eventual revenge.
Specifically, the prophet said that Edom was guilty of rejoicing over the destruction of the Jerusalem temple (Obadiah 1:12), of plundering and looting Jerusalem (Obadiah 1:13), and finally of abusing the refugees who managed to escape Jerusalem after it fell to the Babylonians in 587 B.C. (Obadiah 1:14).
For the Edomites to convert to Judaism — especially by force — would be seen as a fulfillment of the prophecy of Israel’s triumph over its old enemy.
If you’ve ever wondered why the battle between Jesus and the Pharisees was so fierce, perhaps this is one reason why. Hatreds and rivalries don’t go away, even after one side concedes defeat.
What is one thing you know about recent converts?
They tend to know everything. They tend to be very zealous. And since they really don’t know everything, since their habits are just being formed, they tend to need guides and rules. They haven’t quite got their balance, so they need training wheels.
I’m arguing that those “training wheels” are the “traditions of the elders,” going back about 100 or so years before Jesus, to the time of the forced conversion of the Idumeans.
I’m also arguing that maybe those Idumean training wheels weren’t something God was prepared to bless.
Jesus was descended on Joseph’s side from King David, and on His mother’s side from a priestly family. (Her cousin, Elizabeth, was married to a priest, which, incidentally, made John the Baptist a priest by birth. See Luke 1:5, 39.)
In other words, Jesus was from an old family, an old family of believers, an old family of Christians. You don’t think of it that way, but it makes sense, right?
Compare the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 with the list of the faithful in Hebrews 11.
So, Jesus is from a family of old believers, and the Pharisees, well, many of them were too — Paul himself was “a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee” (Philippians 3:5; Acts 23:6).
But they were not keeping to the old faith.
In fact, they were guilty of breaking the law of Moses. Deuteronomy 4:2, which we read this morning says:
“You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from it; that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.”
The Gospel of Mark is the shortest of the four gospels and Mark is known for his economy of words. So, his (for him) lengthy digression on the customs of the Pharisees in Mark 7:3-4 is important.
The second half of 7:4 is crucial to understanding why Jesus thinks the Pharisees are law breakers. Mark writes:
“…and there are many other traditions which they observe, the washing of cups and pots and vessels of bronze.”
Recent archeological evidence suggests that this ritual purification of cups was a feature of Idumean religion that was adopted by the Pharisees.2
In Deuteronomy 4:6, Moses says:
“Keep them and do [these statutes and ordinances]; for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’”
Do you see what’s wrong here?
Psalm 19:7 says, “the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul” but it seems that the Pharisees have let themselves be converted by others and their traditions.
“The traditions of the elders.”
Key elements of the religion of Israel’s old enemy had been added to the law given to Israel by Moses — which goes directly against the injunction of Deuteronomy 4:2 not to add or take away — but that is not the reason Jesus calls the Pharisees hypocrites.
He calls them hypocrites because their hearts are far from God, and, therefore, all of their religion, all of their worship, is vanity (Mark 7:6-7).
In Mark 7:8, Jesus says:
“You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men.”
Where does Jeremiah 31:33 tell us the law of God is to be written?
On the human heart:
“This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
The man who has left the commandment of God is the man who has given his heart to someone else. He is unfaithful. He is an adulterer.
That is how Jesus describes the Pharisees and scribes a chapter later in Mark 8:38.
Jesus condemns the entire Jerusalem religious establishment as an “adulterous and sinful generation.”
Or, as J.C. Ryle described this sad incident:
“From the religion of the books of Deuteronomy and Psalms, to the religion of washing hands, and pots, and cups, how great was the fall!”3
III.
The Pharisees could be described as environmentalists. Not the green kind of today, although they both share a focus on external concerns.
No, the Pharisees were environmentalists because they believed that the environment in which a Jew found himself could defile him. Hence, they became managers. Managers of the world around them.
But Jesus tells them (and us) to be more concerned with internal concerns. Stop defilement where it happens: in the heart.
But Jesus isn’t asking us to become psychologists, or managers of the inner life.
On the Temple of Apollo in Delphi was the inscription, “Know thyself.”
But what is there to know?
According to Mark 7:21-23, our inner lives are a world of wickedness. Jesus says:
“For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man.”
No wonder the pagan rites were deeply sensual.
They included image worship (which is a false representation of God), drunken or drug-induced ecstasies, and ritualized sex.
In other words, all pagan rituals can ever do is to externalize the wickedness and sin that is within the human heart.
The externalization of indwelling sin through ritual fits hand in glove with our need for external validation.
Or, put another way, our need for justification. Self-justification.
Perhaps there was some deep racial guilt on the part of the converted Idumeans, wanting to atone for their fratricidal hatred of their Israelite brothers over the centuries, so that, when they finally became Jews, they had to do it better than they did.
After all, their father Esau was the firstborn. He was manly. He was a hunter. He was not the mama’s boy that Jacob was. But, in a moment of weakness, he had been tricked.
That ancient hatred would not soon be forgotten, and it wouldn’t be washed away no matter how many times you washed your hands, or your pots, or even took yourself out to the Jordan River at the behest of some new prophet to be baptized.
In Matthew 3:7, John the Baptist, when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, said to them:
“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”
Even showing up to be baptized, even a public declaration of repentance, even joining the church, can be an act of self-justification if your heart is not in it.
One way to tell if your heart is not in it is if you are adding or subtracting to God’s word written.
One obvious example that is on everyone’s mind these days is abortion. It’s clearly murder. It breaks the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not murder.”
To justify abortion, you have to subtract from God’s word by somehow twisting the truth that the unborn child is not a human being. (What else would a mother be giving birth to? A toaster oven?)
But here is an example of adding to God’s word: the death penalty. In Genesis 9:6 God says:
“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.”
Yet you have many churches today, including the Roman Church, oppose both abortion and the death penalty in the name of being pro-life.
Others, in a further inscrutable twist, promote “a woman’s right to choose” while denying the state its right to punish capital offenders.
You can’t be more pro-life than God, and when God requires the shedding of blood as a punishment for the sin of murder, then we are no better than Pharisees if we put our word against His.
In this encounter with the Pharisees and scribes sent from Jerusalem, Jesus emphasizes the primacy of God’s word written, what came to be called the written Torah.
He reminds His hearers that adhering to tradition — what came to be called the oral Torah — amounts to a “forgetting” and a “making void [of] the word of God” (Deuteronomy 4:9, Mark 7:13).
That “word of God” was the divine revelation that Moses gave to their Israelite ancestors.
Incidentally, it was this divine revelation that prepared the hearts and minds of men, teaching them how to recognize and receive the Christ when He came.
This is why many of the Pharisees could not recognize Jesus.
Instead of preparing to meet the Christ when He came with broken and contrite hearts, they were busy whitewashing their own tombs.
In John 5:46, Jesus says to the Jews:
“If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me.”
The same is true today.
People do not believe Jesus is who the Bible says He is because they do not believe the Scriptures are what Moses said they were. Deuteronomy 4:5:
“Behold, I have taught you statutes and ordinances, as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do them.”
Instead, the unbelieving man is content to wash pots and dunk himself in rivers. He is content with endless rituals of self-justification.
When Jesus tells the Pharisees that they have made void the word of God He is also invoking the covenant curse of Deuteronomy 4:3 upon those who forget His word.
Moses reminds the Israelites that:
“Your eyes have seen what the Lord did at Ba′al-pe′or; for the Lord your God destroyed from among you all the men who followed the Ba′al of Pe′or.”
In other words, the curse for forgetting God’s word is death.
People forget that God’s curse is just as important as His blessing.
The self-justifying world around us only wants a god who blesses, but the way they behave shows they are living under God’s curse.
Paul describes such people in Philippians 3:19, writing:
“Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.”
They glory in their shame.
This is a reference to the massive cover-up, the great big lie that turns evil thoughts into “you do you,” fornication into free love, theft into reparations, murder into a reproductive right, adultery into polyamory, envy into systemic racism, slander into cancel culture, pride into a month of perversion, and foolishness into our foreign policy.
The man who covers up his sin in any of these ways is a man with an unchanged heart. He has left the commandment of God.
He is not yet a Christian, or, as Jesus testified in Revelation 2:4 against the church at Ephesus:
“I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.
Are you that man? Are you that woman? Have you abandoned your first love? Or, perhaps, you’ve never known that first love, that original love that comes from God alone.
What are you covering up? What sinful thing within needs external validation from your wife, your husband, your friends, your children, your church, and even your dog?
Think about it and then we’ll apply the cure, shall we?
IV.
We want to be Christians, or, at least, we want to know whether we truly merit the name Christian or not.
First, let us remember that there is only one who in His own right bears that name well and truly: Jesus the Christ.
Paul writes in Romans 13:14 that we are to:
“…put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
But when we “put on Christ” it cannot be that we are just trying on one more hypocritical cover up.
“I’ve tried everything else. Let me try Jesus. Let’s see if He’ll make me look better.”
He will make you look better, but He will start with your heart first, by writing His law on it.
You will feel it take effect as you make less and less provision to gratify the flesh. Less porn. Less drinking. Less fornication. Less reviling. Anyone have a problem with road rage?
But, ironically, more hatred.
More hatred? Why do I say that?
You will come to hate your sins — and not just to apologize for them while all the while wishing you could forget them — but hate them.
You will disown your former self.
You will also start to hate the things of this world that aid and abet sin and give comfort to God’s enemies.
Yes, God has enemies, which means the faithful Christian has enemies.
Too many Christians do not realize this, but the moment they put on Christ, they make themselves a target.
If you don’t have a target on you, maybe you should ask yourself, “How faithful am I being to the commandments of God?”
This is part of the process of mortification, the killing of desire and the destruction of the flesh that is part of sanctification.
“That wasn’t me!” you will say as you look back with regret on your past life. And as this process goes on, it will almost be true.
The difference between a new man in Christ and the old one is the difference between a healthy athlete just run a marathon and a corpse.
But it was you.
And atonement for your sins needs to be made.
The good news is that atonement for your sins has been made.
The destruction of the men of Ba′al Pe′or points to the cross, where the body of sin and death is condemned and destroyed once and for all.
This is the covenant penalty for sin that Christ bore for us. He took on that body of sin and death.
In other words, your body of sin and death.
Since Christ bore the punishment you deserved, exposed naked and alone on the cross for your sins, you need to let go of the rags, the cover-ups, the pretenses, and the hypocrisies that you fool yourself into thinking hide your shame.
No one is fooled by your cover ups.
There’s an old saying, “A little lipstick, a little paint, makes a woman what she ain’t.”
No one is fooled by your outward appearance, least of all, God.
You need to confess your sins, repent of them, and become a Christian.
Then, for each of your sins, Christ will declare you, “Absolved! Absolved! Absolved!”
For all eternity you will stand justified before God, not self-justified, but justified by Christ’s blood as satisfaction for (and fulfillment of) the penalty required by the commandment of God.
There is no wishing this away. It must be done. It has been done by God’s grace in the sacrifice of Christ Jesus on the cross.
“When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.”
The wrath of God which should have come crashing down on your head has crushed His instead.
The law is satisfied.
Justice is done.
Your sins are covered by His righteousness, and their effects are being cancelled left and right in our daily lives as we grow in holiness.
V.
How do we apply this to our own lives? How do we take the make-up remover and get the cover-up off?
First, we have to have faith. Faith is the objective through-line from Genesis, to Revelation, to today.
Faith is the reason I can say with certainty that there were Christians before Christ. Christ-ians. Messiah-ians.
All those who believe the promise made to Eve in Genesis 3:15 are counted in Christ:
“I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
Faith in the promised seed makes one a Christian. I like to believe it made Adam and Eve Christians.
But we are better off than they were.
We have a better covenant (Hebrews 8:6-7) and we have learned to call the promised seed by His proper Name, Jesus.
The Old Testament saints had faith in this Christ before He came, and that faith was accounted to them as righteousness. Genesis 15:6 and Romans 4:22 both say:
“And [Abraham] believed the Lord; and [God] reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
Second, we have to guard against the second or third ordering of the word of God. There can be no “triaging” the word of God and His commandments.
To be fair, this is also what Al Mohler said in 2005 when he introduced the idea of triage.
Using grape juice or wine is certainly a second, likely even a third order distinctive.
Episcopal polity versus presbyterian versus congregationalist polities (ways of governing the churches) are certainly not primary order matters.
The problem is that this concept has slipped and first order concepts are being pushed down to the second order.
Take, for instance, trying to reconcile two opposed and mutually exclusive definitions and teachings on marriage.
The word of God is clear what marriage is and to say otherwise is to depart from His commandments.
It invokes the covenant curse that befell the men of Ba′al-pe′or.
It invokes your own death and the destruction of your children, your spouse, your church, your nation, and your entire civilization. It’s happened before in history, and it is happening to us right now.
So, I close with the same question with which I began: how do you know if you are a Christian?
In 1 John 2:4 the apostle writes:
“He who says ‘I know [Christ] but disobeys his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.’”
So, according to John, you know you are a Christian if you keep the law of God.
Jesus says:
“…there is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him.”
You are a Christian only after God writes (Col. 3:10) His truth on your heart and then draws forth law-abiding faithfulness from within.
Let us pray.
Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of thy Name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Preached on September 1, 2024 at North Country Bible Fellowship, Speculator, New York.
Questions for reflection and discussion:
1. Even in the first century A.D., Christians were not a ____________ people.
2. Jesus teaches that His people were never bound by the “____________ of the elders.”
3. Whom did the Old Testament saints see and greet?
4. Jesus’ ongoing dispute is with the Pharisees and scribes of ____________.
5. The Pharisees were influenced by a group of relatively recent ____________ to Judaism.
6. The ritual purification of cups was a feature of ____________ religion that was adopted by the Pharisees.
7. The Pharisees believed that the environment in which a Jew found himself could ____________ him.
8. Pagan rituals externalize the wickedness and sin that is within the human ____________.
9. One way to tell if your heart is not right with God is if you ____________ or ____________ from God’s word written.
10. What can you expect to experience more of when you “put on Christ”?
11. To call things marriage ____________ order is to make void the word of God.
12. You are a Christian only after God ____________ His truth on your heart and then ____________ law-abiding faithfulness from within.
Parents and Grandparents, you are responsible to apply God’s Word to your children’s lives. Here is some help. Young Children – draw a picture about something you hear during the sermon. Explain your picture(s) to your parents or the minister after church. Older Children – Discuss with your parents one or both of the following: 1) Have you ever done more (or less) than you were asked to do? Why? 2) What is your favorite tradition? What would happen if you stopped keeping it?
(1) new; (2) traditions; (3) Jesus Christ; (4) Jerusalem; (5) converts; (6) Idumean; (7) defile; (8) heart; (9) add/subtract; (10) hatred for sin; (11) second; (12) (re-)writes/draws forth
See: Yigal Levin, “The Religion of Idumea and Its Relationship to Early Judaism,” MDPI, September 24, 2020, accessed August 24, 2024, https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/11/10/487.
Ibid., “In any case, while we have no idea of the demographics involved, the integration of the Idumeans into Judaism undoubtedly had an influence on the latter as well, and Stern has suggested that at least some of the ‘Idumean’ customs noted above, such as ritual immersion in baths, burial in caves with kokhim, and perforation of pottery vessels possibly as a way of purifying them may have eventually been adapted into Pharisaic Judaism.”
J. C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on Mark (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2012), 107
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