The Inside Out - Wild Heart: Mark’s Portraits of a Radical Messiah
Last week we looked at how Jesus brought healing within reach of everyone. By simply touching the hem of His garment, something that possible for even the most broken could do, they could be healed. What Jesus started all of those years ago is still possible today. Healing is within our reach through faith in Him.
This week we have the first direct confrontation with the religious leaders for their emphasis of their man made traditions over the law of God.
The scribes and the Pharisees had created a comfortable relationship with Romans that allowed them to maintain their power over the religious life of the Jewish people. The Romans didn’t want anything to do with sorting out disputes and arguments over what they saw as a strange religion. So they gave the religious leaders freedom to do what they wanted as long as there wasn’t any trouble.
What they did with this power was create rules that looked good on the surface but were corrupt to the core. Of course we can only reproduce what we really are and when we have a corrupt heart our rules will be corrupt too. Before this point Jesus was willing to defend Himself and His disciples from their accusations of wrongdoing, but in this passage Jesus goes a step further and turns the tables and points out their rotten core.
Let’s read Mark 7:1-23….
On this trip they tried a new tactic, instead of attacking Jesus directly they went after His disciples. Their thinking went something like this: if Jesus is such a great teacher why can’t His disciples follow the simplest rules about holy living. If they could get the people to question the disciple’s actions it would give them a way to accuse Jesus.
But they started in the wrong place when they accused the disciples of not following ‘the tradition of the elders.” The ‘traditions of the elders’ were man made rules for following the commandments of God. For example God said to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Simple enough, but because people are hardwired to break the law the religious leaders made up rules that would help them decide if someone was breaking the law. Not a big deal there, except over time the rules to keep the law became more important than the law itself.
Not only that but the ‘elders’ created traditions that would give them loopholes allowing them and their friends to ‘legally’ break the law. Sounds kind of like congress doesn’t it? That should tell us something about the real problem. Jesus goes right after that issue.
The corruption that resides in our heart is our real problem.
He starts off by calling them hypocrites, two faced phonies, and uses scripture to back up the charge. Then He points out an example that sums up the entire issue perfectly. They allowed people to give Corban, and pledge to the temple, even if it meant allowing someone to neglect His duty to their parents. They would allow their rich friends to give them money so they didn’t have to give it to their parents in need. If their parents were in need its obvious they had been neglecting them for some reason anyway, so this Corban simply gave them cover to make their sin look good. It was a conspiracy to undermine the law of God and create a new one that they liked better.
Doesn’t that sound terrible? But let’s be honest we’re prone to do the same thing, maybe not quite so blatantly, be we do it all the time. When we accuse someone of being a gossip by telling someone else aren’t we trying to whitewash our own sin? When we get all condemn someone because they have trouble breaking a bad habit that’s not even mentioned in the Bible and we go through the buffet line 4 or 5 times every time aren’t bending the rules to suit our sin?
Having helpful guidelines is good. We need those things to help us get along, but when we start to make the rules to give us an out and allow us to condemn and control other people then we stepped over the line.
Jesus is clearly tells us that the most evil place on this earth is the human heart and no amount of rules and laws will change that. Changing the rules was useless, the only hope was for the heart to change but no one can do that for themselves. That’s why we’re so tempted to make the rules suit our sin we know we can’t change our heart.
You’ll notice something in this passage. Jesus points out the problem but He doesn’t offer a solution.
Jesus creates a ‘holy’ tension that causes people to look deeper than the rules and traditions they had come to rely on.
We seem to be drawn to create religious rules to help us but the problem is that instead of making things easier it makes them more complicated and burdensome. That’s why Jesus said that the entire law could be summed up in two: Love God with our whole being and love our neighbor as our self. But since we’re really powerless to do even that we keep running on this treadmill going nowhere.
So what are we supposed to do about this dilemma? There is help and it’s described by the apostle Paul in….
Romans 8:3-4 For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, 4 that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Someone said to me the other day that they were struggling with something in the Bible and my response was ‘good.’ While it’s true that the scriptures provide comfort and peace when we’re troubled…..
The truth creates a ‘holy’ tension in our heart that causes us to seek the help we really need. The epistle of James tells us that the Bible is like a mirror that allows us to see ourselves clearly enough to know how we’re really doing. We don’t need man made rules and regulations to know how we’re doing.
We need to join with the Psalmist and sing “Create in me a clean heart Oh God and renew a right spirit with in me.”
What’s your heart telling you today?
You are thy light unto my path and the footsteps to my path and cross that u died for me to save my life from sins.
Labels: eat, heart, inside, Jesus, Mark 7:1-23
posted by Jerry Stitzel @ 10:14 AM
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