"The King knows our hearts" by Sam Reeves, 2 December 2007, Matt 15:1-20 OT: Is 29:13-16

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Intro: When I came back from LS leave and came into the church, I
discovered that the piano had been shifted from this side to that
side. It’s now back over here (I don’t know who did that. It wasn’t
me!). But I was surprised at my reaction inside. I was a bit startled
that it had been changed. I was comfortable with where it had been. I
was used to it being over here, along with the musos. I asked someone
why it had been moved. There didn’t seem to be any answer. Someone
said that maybe it was because it would make access to the office here
easier. Then I started thinking about it. Why is this uncomfortable
for me? Why shouldn’t the piano be over there? Where in the Bible does
it say that the piano has to be on the right side of the church? Or
the left side? Where does it say we have to have a piano at all? Where
does it say even that we have to have a building to put a piano in?
When it gets down to it, it’s just the way things have been.
When I was about 12, my father was excommunicated from the church we
were going to at the time. It was over an issue like that. He was the
organist, and the organ had been moved without consulting him, there
was a clash, and as they say, the rest is history.

Most of the things that churches split over are things like this.
Keith was telling me a few years ago about 4 churches he’d heard of in
a short space of time that had had significant splits over music
style, something the Bible says virtually nothing about. How do we
deal with stuff like this? It’s crucial what we do, because if we
don’t, the fallout is pretty bad.

In today’s passage, Jesus is confronted head-on by the custodians of
religious tradition. (People like me, who get upset about a piano
being moved!)

1. What rules our hearts v1-6
The scene is this: Some Pharisees and teachers of the law come down
from Jerusalem to check Jesus out. The Pharisees have already been
mentioned in 5:20, where Jesus says to his followers, “unless your
righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law,
you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The Pharisees
were a group of super-keen Jews, lay-people (not priests) who were
totally committed to keeping the rules in the OT. The problem with
being rule-focused is that you never know when enough is enough. Eg
God said “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy”. There was to
be no work – the Lord rested on the 7th day, so should we. It raises
lots of questions: What is work? Is getting out of bed work? If it’s
not, how far could you walk before it was? What about milking the cow
to get some milk for the morning cuppa (and give a bit of relief to
the cow!)? It’s not hard to see that once you start saying that your
eternal future depends on how you keep the rules, it’s an endless task
defining what does and doesn’t fulfil the rules. They had hundreds and
hundreds of rules trying to tie down obedience to just the one command
about the Sabbath. Once you have a committee that defines things like
that (as the Scribes and Pharisees were), it’s not long before they
get asked about other stuff that’s not in the rule book. Is it OK to
eat without washing your hands? The OT rule book says that the priests
should wash their hands before they approach the alter to make an
offering (Ex 30:18). Whether the Pharisees and scribes had started
from there or not, they had ended up with a list of rules about
washing before you eat. Maybe it had come from Lev 11-15, where there
are a whole lot of commands about clean and unclean foods. Maybe it
was about avoiding contamination from any unclean food. Whatever its
origin, by the time of Jesus it was pretty well established that there
was a strict ritual way of washing your hands (pouring water over both
hands, fingertips up, etc) before eating. It was part of a whole body
of legislation that went under the heading of “tradition of the
elders” (v2), some of which seemed fairly new in historical terms at
the time of Christ. It was very definitely a code-book on “How we Jews
do things around here”, more than that, it was a “how to please God
manual”. Such things are dangerous. When I was a youth, that oral
manual had stuff in it like “Don’t chew gum”, “Don’t go to the
pictures”, “Don’t play games on Sunday”, “Don’t dance”, “Don’t wear
jeans, at least not to church” and for the girls “Don’t wear make up”.
Shaving the legs also got a mention in some of the manuals, depending
on how strict your brand was. Good Christians just didn’t do things
like that.

• Traditions or God’s Word?
Jesus’ answer to their accusation is intriguing. He doesn’t trash
tradition. He simply points out that that is what it is. He asks a
question that makes them face the fact that they had lost the plot.
They had so elevated the tradition that they were ending up breaking
God’s commands. In the tradition they had developed a sort of legal
construct whereby they could declare that something was “korban” -
dedicated to God, and therefore not available for other purposes.
Resources that might be claimed by others could be kept for your own
use on the pretext that they had been set aside for God (and
presumably He hadn’t turned up to claim them yet!). So people were
getting out of caring for their parents on the pretext that the
resources that they could use to help mum and dad were dedicated to
God. A modern day equivalent might be something like “I can’t clear up
the mess I’ve made in the kitchen mum – got to get off to church/BS/
etc”. Or “I can’t visit you in the nursing home dad – got too much on
at church.”
Jesus confronts them with the fact that what they had done was not set
aside something for God, but had set aside the command of God himself
and replaced it with their own. They had nullified the word of God for
the sake of their tradition. This is serious stuff. It’s not just
about rule-making, it’s about how you think of yourself in relation to
God. “I know better than God what needs to be done.”
Whenever we have a clash between our traditions of what a good
Christian/Baptist/etc looks like, and what the word of God says, then
Jesus tells us in no uncertain terms what we need to do. Sometimes
this is not immediately obvious. We need to start from the core – love
God and love His people, and work outwards from there. The centrality
of Christ and his work on the cross – how does it impact that?

2. How far they are from him v7-9
What is at the core of this stuff? Jesus quotes from Isaiah 29 to
reinforce his charge that they are hypocrites. V8,9. Now He is coming
to the essence of the problem. It’s not that they do or don’t keep the
rules. It’s that they say they are following God, when in reality they
aren’t. God is not into deception. It is a huge slight on God’s
character to think that we can deceive him. He’s not a fool.

• Lip-service, heart-service, or both?
The primary thing is the state of our hearts. You see, wanting to
please God can turn into making a list of rules about how that can
happen, which can easily be interpreted as a list of what I can get
away with, and before you know it the focus has shifted from pleasing
God to pleasing me. Our hearts are bent that way anyway and will
naturally drift in that direction if we don’t focus on the greatest
commandment “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul
and strength.” The king knows our hearts – how far they are from him.
He wants heart-service first of all, then lip-service.
The judgment of Isaiah that Jesus applies is very serious. “They
worship me in vain”. The whole charade is useless. All the rule-
keeping, and hounding other people about the rule-keeping is totally
useless. Worse than useless, as they go on thinking that they are
pleasing God, but all the time they are storing up wrath for the day
when God comes.

3. How pure they are v10-20

• Inside-out, not outside-in 10,11, 15-20
The problem is not obeying or disobeying the rules. The problem is to
do with the state of the human heart. Conformity to rules doesn’t deal
with the human problem. It is much more serious than that. Our problem
is not that we need a bit of sprucing up, we need a radical re-build.
When a house is a bit run-down, a coat of paint is not going to deal
with it being white-ant eaten. When we were teaching about this stuff
in the villages in Pakistan, we used the illustration of the village
water pump. When people start getting sick from the water, the village
heavies get together and decide that the pump needs fixing. They
decide that it looks a bit tatty, so they give it a nice coat of
paint. It doesn’t work, of course. Then they decide to get a good
teacher in to convince the pump to give good water. That doesn’t work.
Then they decide to give it a beating. Still no good. Then finally
someone opens up the pump and they find all sorts of junk in the well.
Dead rats, rotting plants, etc, etc. They clean it out, and the
problem is solved. Human beings are the same, Jesus says. The human
problem is much worse than we imagine. He is the one who came to deal
with that problem – to clean us up from the inside out. Because the
Pharisees had their theology of the human problem wrong, their
solution to it was wrong. Jesus called them whitewashed tombs.

• Planted by God v12-13
The thing about this whole rule system that the Pharisees have created
is that it is not a plant planted by God. It’s not that God is opposed
to rules. He gave us heaps of them. But they were given in a context
and for a purpose. The context was a relationship with him. That was
the primary thing. A people with their hearts inclined in love and
devotion towards the God who had saved them (Deut 5:6. Before the
giving of the 10 commandments, God says “I am the Lord your God who
brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery”).
The rules that He gave were to show them what it meant to be in a
relationship with such a holy, loving, rescuing God. They are
consequences of the relationship, not the basis for it. They were not
to show them how they could get in God’s good books. That’s
impossible. As Paul points out in the letter to the Galatians, it’s
all about faith in God. The system that they had planted was not
God’s. The system God had planted was based on faith. “Abraham
believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness” (Gen 15:6)
is quoted over and over again in the NT. The plant that says you can
save yourself by keeping a set of rules is a weed and will be pulled
out eventually, Jesus says. That plant doesn’t bear fruit, it only
shows us that we are failures. It is Christ who deals with our
failure, and we go on to do His will as a result of being rescued, not
in order to be rescued.

• Eyes wide open v14
He uses another illustration to describe people who say that: They are
blind guides of the blind. They themselves don’t know where they are
going, and they are setting themselves up as leaders of others. It’s a
pitiful picture – of a blind person leading a blind person and they
both keep bumping into things. Jesus warns that the end result,
inevitably, will be that they both fall into a pit. It is inevitable,
because they themselves will not even be able to keep the rules that
they have made. And precisely because their hearts are not right.
Conclusion: What is this whole passage about? Firstly and most
importantly, it’s about our hearts being right with God. Christianity
is not a form of behaviour modification. It’s primarily about being
put right with our Creator. That comes about through the death of
Jesus on the cross in our place, and us putting our trust in Him.
There are many things that do, and must, flow from that into our
thinking and our behaviour, but those things are not the starting
point. It’s first and foremost about being in a right relationship
with God – having our hearts cleansed and right with him.

After that, it’s about us getting the things right that flow from
that. Holiness of life. One of the dangers of focusing on the grace of
God is that we can neglect the holiness that must flow from knowing
Him. There will be differences about the way we do things. We may even
be able to justify long or short hair, shaving the legs or not, nose
rings or not, from an obscure verse somewhere in the Bible, even if
you have to remove it from its context to do it. But that is not the
point. The point is that if our insistence on some traditional
practice nullifies what is the express command of God (Eg Love God and
love your neighbour, your fellow believer), then we have joined the
blind guides of the blind. If my insisting that you wear shoes when
you come in here sends a message that I don’t love you, and drives you
away from the Lord, then I have become a blind leader of the blind.
Neither wearing shoes nor not wearing shoes is going to lead you to
God. It is Christ alone who can save, and whatever we do must bring
honour and glory to Him and point people to Him.