Jesus makes a serious charge

The Holy Trinity, is just what Jesus, did along Christ's way. It's just what we need. Jesus is our gracious King.

All of human nature, He is faithful to the end, He shall truly live. Mark chapter seven, commencing to read at verse one. The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered round Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with unclean, that is, ceremonially unwashed hands.

The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles and dining couches.

So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders, instead of eating their food with unclean hands? He replied, Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites, as it is written, these people honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain. Their teachings are but rules taught by men.

You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men. And he said to them, you have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions. For Moses said, honor your father and mother, and anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.

But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban, that is a gift devoted to God, then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down, and you do many things like that. May God bless his word to us.

Father, we offer to you the explanation of your word and pray for your help as we open our eyes, let them fall on Scripture, pray that we may be able to open our wills, that your word may have some corrective and some encouraging factor in our general Christian discipleship. May we be better and more equipped to serve you, because we've spent time here this morning praising, praying, worshipping, coming in front of your holy word as well as your holy person, for the Savior's sake, Amen. Let's look at the thirteenth verse, shall we, of this chapter.

In fact, we'll link together verse nine and verse thirteen, parts of. You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men. And you do many things like that.

A serious charge. The writer of my title says, could it be applied to the tabernacle? A serious charge. Could it be applied to the tabernacle? You have let go of the commands of God, holding on to the traditions of men, and you do many things like that.

Here's a task for you to engage in, a little bit of mental research. You've got to be quite quick, as I put it to you. What characteristic amongst the audience of our Lord Jesus pleased Him the most? Question two.

What characteristic put Him off more than any other? Alright, here's a question that really requires two opposite answers. Did you get the first? What characteristic do you think attracted Jesus about His contemporaries more than any other? What attitude put Jesus off more than any other? Now, here's my answer. As far as the first is concerned, He was attracted to integrity.

Integrity. He liked people to be true. There's a Christian organisation which has as its motto, through and through.

And I think that our Lord Jesus would have gone along with that. As for what put Him off, how about the word hypocrisy? It comes from a Greek word, actually, and it gives the idea of acting. It's plucked from the arena of the theatre.

Being what you are not. A cover that really cloaks what you are. Now, our Lord Jesus, whenever He's confronted with people, is looking for the first quality and not the second quality, but very often the second quality is more apparent than the first.

And it seems to me that that little mental exercise helps to set in relief this particular passage because our Lord is directing a very severe charge, is He not, towards those who are listening to His ministry as He's there in Galilee in the area of Palestine where He was brought up. Integrity is a word that sometimes we associate with an old man in the Bible whose name was Job. You remember how in the book of Job in the first chapter or the second chapter there's a particular comment made about the man's concern to be always true, to be always through and through.

Look at the third verse of Job chapter two. The Lord said to Satan, Have you considered My servant Job? There is no one on earth like him. He is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil, and he still maintains his integrity.

And right at the end of the book of Job, which really is an illustration of a man endeavouring to preserve his integrity, in the twenty-seventh chapter and the fifth verse you get Job saying to one of his so-called friends, I will never admit you are in the right till I die. I will not deny my integrity. Full marks to Job.

He always wanted to be in his lifestyle what he claimed to be by his profession. Now here is the difficulty for our Lord Jesus, you see he has a mixed audience, doesn't he? I mean we've seen him very often because I've been preaching quite frequently from Mark's gospel we've seen him often in the open air speaking to ordinary people and within the composition of the crowd references made as in the first verse of this seventh chapter of Mark's gospel to the Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law. Now they mingle in with the ordinary people and they have got something against Jesus.

They don't like him they don't like his disciples and when he commences what seems to be an increasingly popular movement of support in Galilee as he preaches and thousands of people flock to hear him so a group from Jerusalem, the headquarters of the Pharisees and the scribes come along and buzz, if you like, the audiences of Jesus. To use another colloquial expression, they come on a nit-picking ministry. You find them in the second chapter.

There their attitude to Jesus is this it's wrong for you, the rabbi that you claim to be, to have social intercourse with ordinary working class people, with the sinners who don't normally listen to us and frequent the synagogues and then later on in the same chapter and over spilt into following chapters you find them again engaged on picking fault in Jesus' disciples. You allow them to do on the Sabbath day what our law and tradition says shouldn't be done. And here in this seventh chapter the same technique is applied as these representatives of the Jewish religious establishment come to Jesus and say, your disciples when they eat they don't wash their hands properly and that for them was the criticizers of the Pharisees, of the disciples it was a very grave charge.

But Jesus sees through the charges, the nit-picking of this mixed audience. He spins round on them and he replies by quoting from the prophecy of Isaiah, speaking of his critics these people honour me with their lips, their hearts are far from me they worship me in vain, their teachings are but rules taught by men. And he goes on to say you have a fine way of setting aside the commandments of God in order to observe your own traditions.

In other words you're hypocrites. What you are concerned about is really on the periphery it's really on the edge. There's not a great deal of logic behind even the arguments that you bring.

What you however have utterly missed is that for true religious worship and conduct to be offered to my Father you've got to be through and through. You've got to be men of utter integrity. Now if you move on in this particular gospel to the twelfth chapter you get a mixture of both these qualities coming out in one incident.

Mark chapter 12 and verse 13 again the Pharisees and they're joined by another political group, the Herodians they come along to try to catch Jesus. You've got the passage chapter 12 verse 13. And they say to him, teacher now here's the punchline, teacher we know you are a man of integrity.

And they were dead right. Our Lord Jesus was completely upright. He was what he said, what he said he did.

He was a man of utter integrity. You aren't swayed, they go on and they're dead right here, you're not swayed by men because you pay no attention to who they are but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Now here's the hypocrisy.

Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not? It's a subtle ploy wasn't it? I mean you know the stories, the majority of you here in my congregation of the gospels, you've read them often and you know what was at the heart of these men as they put this question. They were trying to trap Jesus. They wanted some religious, some political charge to be able to bring against a high priest and Pontius Pilate, the representative of Rome so that Jesus could be impaled on a cross, done to death annihilated and then they would have no more problem with this troublesome teacher from Galilee.

You're a man of integrity. Hey Jesus should we pay taxes to Caesar or not? You see my point, integrity there with Jesus, hypocrisy on the part of his detractors, his critics. Now our Lord was constantly confronted with this.

This mixture of virtues. Some had integrity like his in degree but never as absolutely. But the majority of people who were against him were folk who he had to dismiss in terms of you have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions.

You know what God wants more than anything else from you and me? It's to submit our lives to the authority of Scripture. Did you hear that? It's to submit our lives to the authority of Scripture. And to do that in a deliberate, honest, 101 percent through and through manner.

My address as it's heading, remember, a severe charge. Could it be through the tab? Is it possible for us who claim to believe the Bible, at least the majority of us, from cover to cover could it be the case that yes we have lip service to the Bible and yet the way that we live our lives, our attitudes to certain things enables us to modify the teachings of Scripture so it could be said perhaps in a lesser way but nonetheless in a serious fashion you've let go of the commandments of God. You have a way, a fine way of setting aside the laws of God in order to observe your own preferences.

It's not that you're denying Scripture or the claims of God upon your life but you're neutralizing certain things. You're diluting them and you've got some sort of perverted logic in your personality, in your convictions that causes you in one sense to behave as the Pharisees and the scribes did. Now I don't want to be cruel.

I'm not taking this word from our Lord and applying it with the cutting edge that He applied it because probably there aren't that many people in my congregation who are in the category completely of scribes and Pharisees but it's that perversion in degree if not absolutely that is always a temptation for Christian people to fall into. What the Lord wants from you and me is a determined effort to do all in a deliberate fashion that His Word would have us to do. Let me lighten my address by introducing something that amused me a little while ago, a story I heard.

So the man who owned a swimming pool, a rich man and he threw a party, invited his friends and he said anyone who did one lap of the swimming pool successfully that night could either have one million pounds, the house of his choice or his daughter's hand in marriage. And just to make things a little more interesting he pointed out that there was a shark in the swimming pool. The party progressed and halfway through the night someone's in the pool, the people around telling him to go for it.

Eventually he gets out the other end, the shark's been a little bit sleepy and they congratulate him. And the man says to the fellow who's done the swimming, the millionaire, well what do you want? A million pounds? Do you want a house of your choice or my daughter's hand in marriage? He says no to all three. So the wealthy man says well what do you want? He says I want to know the identity of the silly fool who pushed me in.

As far as our commitment to the Lord Jesus is concerned, it's not being triggered off through circumstances sort of being pushed in. It's a deliberate act that you and I have taken that as for us we want to follow him in every area of our lives. Now here our Lord Jesus uses in verse nine cynicism.

He's not often cynical. You don't often find satire in the speech of Jesus because he's a gentle man and yet he's not so gentle that he won't be stern when necessity demands it. And when Jesus is satirical, when Jesus is cynical, when Jesus is ironic in the way that he puts his sentences together, it well behoves you and me to pay special attention to the irony of Jesus.

He says to this mixed audience, isolating particularly the scribes and the Pharisees, you have a fine way of setting aside the commandments of God. Now our Lord doesn't mean it's a fine way. It's anything but a fine way.

It's a terrible way. Our Lord from time to time will use this fashion of speech. He'll refer to the blind leaders of the blind.

He'll call Herod a fox. He'll describe the high priests and their retinue as whited sepulchres. Now I say that when our Lord Jesus, usually a very gentle person, when he uses that sort of language you need to pay double attention to the reason that prompts him to use what seems at first reading inelegant speech.

You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions. You reject what your anchorage should be and you cling onto something that will never support you, your own fancies. Here's another question for those of you who like to think things out before the preacher actually gets to his point.

What do you think is the most serious crime a preacher can commit? The most serious folly in which a preacher can indulge? It's necessary for me to put this question because these people who are critical of Jesus are on the bottom line preachers. Let me take you to the Apostle Paul, who is writing to the Corinthians in the second chapter. And he's defending his ministry.

Second Corinthians chapter four. He's defending his ministry over against those who are critical of some of the things that he's been doing. And he contrasts his attitude to being a preacher to the way that some in a very cavalier fashion come to that ministry and pervert it.

So he says in the first verse, Now here's the point. Nor do we distort the word of God. Nor do we distort the word of God.

The greatest crime of a preacher, and I don't lessen other sins, is not perhaps to have compromised himself, herself in some area of behavior, though that is lamentable. It's not in their personal lifestyle to have been a bad example to the flock, though that is lamentable. The greatest crime of any man or woman who claims to explain the word of God is to take that word of God and to distort it so that the sheep are led to the precipice.

So that when there is darkness, there is darkness when there should be light. That's why the Old Testament in the book of Ezekiel, speaking on behalf of Jehovah God, denounces the shepherds of Israel, because they took God's word and they manipulated it as they projected it to the people, and as they distorted it, the people were led astray. And the reason why Jesus spins rounds on the Pharisees and the scribes on this incident, on this occasion and says, you have a fine way of setting aside the commandments of God, the reason for the irony and the cynicism is because they were doing the same thing.

I've got an article somewhere here that I took from the Independent when I was on holiday, so it's about three weeks old. The article is entitled, The Incredible Aging Woman. Those of you who read the Independent, you may have seen that in their supplementary magazine that they did a very telling article on the problems of aged people in the United Kingdom.

You know, I thank God for those men and women, probably because I'm still old enough to have remembered not the outbreak of war but the aftermath of war. I'm so grateful to people who surrendered their lives, to some people who are still with us today whose limbs were severed, whose minds were shattered as a result of what they had to go through in repulsing the evil of Nazism. I'm proud of what our country did in those days by the help of God.

One of the things that fills me with a sense of despair is the way that sometimes we treat those who still survive, who pay tremendous prices, a tremendous price for our freedom. It seems to me wrong that soldiers and airmen and sailors, now old, who gave so much in the war are not properly recompensed, when pensions can be so miniscule compared with the ever-spiralling cost of living. The problems that elderly people have as a result of this it seems to me is most unfair and most unjust because it's unnecessary.

The cake could be more equally divided in our land. And one of the journalists from the independent newspaper, a 30-year-old, lived for some weeks as though she was 80. I've got a picture of this rather beautiful woman and also a larger picture of her acting out the part of an 80-year-old actually took place in New York City.

And she was contrasting the attitude on the part of shopkeepers when as a 30-year-old she went around the various departmental stores and the attitude of people when she's an old woman with a stick and trying to get across the road or going to the shops and so on and so forth. And she writes this most cutting article on the way that, and she's generalising of course, by and large it is difficult for older people who are handicapped to live their lives in the fast moving 20th century because when their tyre hits the road they wobble as they move along, they have great difficulties at times. You imagine being an 80-year-old in London trying to make your way through rush hour and getting down to one of the tubes.

It's almost impossible. I've now got to the point where my dear old mum, who looks like her son a little younger than she actually is, when she comes to London I now use a taxi because I don't like her to have to cope with the tubes. You say, well, preacher, what's all this got to do with what Jesus is saying about these men and their traditions and so on and so forth? You've taken leave of your senses, it's got nothing to do with this, you're just out on a tangent, not a bit.

Jesus is always very practical in his teaching, isn't he? And he cites as an example of these men perverting God's word the way that old people in his day were treated. The Jews had a custom which was part of their tradition but not part of the word of God, that if a man or a woman or a husband and wife wished to disassociate themselves from responsibilities to elderly parents, all they had to say is that the monies and the goods that they were going to direct towards those aged relatives were korban. Discover that in the, where are we, the eleventh verse.

I don't think it actually uses the word korban, it's translated from the Greek into the English. Oh, it is there, yes. Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is korban, last part of verse eleven.

That is a gift devoted to God. You see, there were corrupt priests in those days. When you hear of corrupt evangelists today, that's nothing new.

Within the church, within the church of the Old Testament and the New Testament, there are always those who distort, there are always those who corrupt, and there were some priests who were having a racket whereby folk who were so insensitive regarding the well-being of older people who wanted to cop out of their responsibilities could say, well, of this amount of money that I was going to direct towards my elderly relatives, I now say that they're korban. That means that they are dedicated to, devoted to the service of God or the temple of God. The priest got his ten percent, they kept the ninety percent, and the old people went without the necessaries in life to maintain a reasonable style.

And Jesus spun round with satire, with invective, with irony, and he said to these so-called preachers that this is unacceptable. You cannot dip into your tradition and nullify the word of God because the fifth commandment that came from the Holy God to Moses was, honor your father and your mother, that it may be well with you all the days of your life. You cannot take your traditional one part of Scripture and try to contradict another part of Scripture with your perverted reasoning.

You can't declare null and void the commandments of God as though you've got an air ticket and there as you're standing at Heathrow air counter, the agency, the agent that you're traveling with suddenly says that ticket is invalid, I cancel it, you can't do that with God's word. That's what Jesus is saying. And these people were receiving the butt end of his criticism because they had taken what was clearly from God and they had distorted it.

They had these obnoxious practices which meant that older people would be impoverished in their retirement years. Doesn't the character of Jesus doesn't it sometimes just move you? When you think of his sensitivity on the cross, pain like body, he thinks about his mother, commits her to the care of his beloved disciple. See these are the practicalities my dear friend of the Christian gospel.

It's not all a load of theology. I'd be on the first bus out of town if that's what Christianity meant to me. I'm not a philosopher, I'm not an academic.

Why this man Jesus mesmerizes me is because he speaks sense. It's his integrity. I look at him, I analyze him, I read of him in all the four gospels.

I read what the closest disciples said of him in the epistles that they write and I find this man true. And it's so utterly necessary that we who claim to be his have a lifestyle as best by the power of the spirit that it can be that is in accord with his lifestyle because sincerity was the hallmark of the character of our beloved Christ. I bought this 20 years ago.

Those who are hearing this tape, I've got a pottery vase in my hand actually. It's probably 25 years ago. Bought it in Jerusalem.

Paid one shilling for it. It didn't exactly break me. If we had the TV on, maybe you could switch it on so that these folks can see and put the camera in close.

There are cracks around this vase and the spout's actually been stuck on so it wouldn't really hold water very well. If you had gone to Corinth in the days of our Lord Jesus, you would have found more sophisticated, better made jars like this for sale. They would also have been painted.

But there was a bit of crookery sometimes amongst the merchants or amongst the potters. And instead of starting again when there was a flaw in the pottery, a flaw in the clay, what they would sometimes do is get some grease, some wax, and they would wax over the cracks. And then with their paint they would paint over the damaged area and they would present to the tourists their particular vase as being absolutely 100% perfect.

But it wasn't. And the racket ultimately was exposed. And a word was given for a perfect vessel.

A vessel without wax. The Greek is sincere. Without a flaw.

Without a crack. With no hypocritical attempts to paint over that which indicates that it's less than it really is. Now this is what I'm saying of our Lord Jesus, that he was utterly like that.

Sincere without wax. And when the Apostle Paul makes reference to his own preaching as he's writing to the Corinthians in the second letter, there are at least three occasions, he says my ministry was always a ministry of sincerity. These men that Jesus here castigates in terms of you've let go of the traditions of God and are holding on to the traditions of men, you have a fine way of setting aside the commandments of God, and you do many things like that.

They were as broken as pieces of pottery. Now look, there's nothing the matter with being broken. Because Jesus is the great parter that puts together broken vessels, but you have to admit the fact that you are in need.

The difficulty with these people was that they didn't admit that there was any need. They had distorted the word of God. They had developed their own religious beliefs to fit in with their own lifestyle.

They'd left the anchor of revealed Scripture and they were clinging on to the conclusions of their own fallible thinking. And Jesus says it's crazy. You have a fine way of taking the best and putting up a substandard and going for the latter, and ultimately that will lead you to disaster and also the people that you're influencing.

I want to bring my address to a conclusion. I was reading earlier today the book of Psalms, authorized version. What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits to me? And then I checked in my A.V. commentary about what we could render to the Lord.

The commentary says, well you can render worship to the Lord. It says you can render hospitality in the name of the Lord. It says you can render your finances in terms of your tithing to the Lord.

It says that you can render your love for one another as worship to the Lord. So many things that are basic to the worshipping community that are constants down the whole years of the story of men. Things that we are not to neglect.

Neglect not the forsaking, the assembling of yourselves together, says the Word of God. Neglect not coming around the Lord's table. Neglect not, hold it for the punchline.

You've had it a thousand times, but for some of you it makes very little difference. But you're unanswerable before God for this and not me. Neglect not coming together as a prayerful community, interceding for the advance of the gospel in the four far-flung areas of the world.

That's a paraphrase of the teaching of Scripture on prayer in the New Testament, but I can give you verse after verse after verse. Now you see my point, I tried to handle it gently earlier on. I'm not suggesting that people in the tab are in the same category as the scribes and the Pharisees.

But don't you see my beloved brother and sister, I measure my words and I use that word beloved in a very, very, very, very definite, a very meaningful sense. I deliberately employ it. If we look to God's Word and then accommodate our own inabilities, our own unwillingness as disciples to put into practice all that Jesus is asking of us then in some measure the problem of the Pharisees and the Sadducees is our problem.

Now isn't it? Is it or is it not? I asked you to do some mental working out of one or two questions earlier on. I finish at the point where I started. You're an intelligent group of people.

I haven't got, and I say this with love and with regret in my heart, I haven't got a conglomeration of people from a religious sect here. You haven't thrown your minds away. We're all one before Scripture.

You can take Scripture and my words, and when my words are not in line with Scripture then you forget what the preacher said. We're all equal before Scripture. So what I've tried to reason through this morning and I open my own heart as I bring it to you, is for you now to test before Scripture, am I right or am I wrong? And if there are areas where I'm right and where you're defective in your lifestyle, as I'll certainly admit there are areas where I'm defective in my lifestyle, then brothers and sisters let's get our act together.

Jesus is not a satirical man normally. He's not a man who doles out irony normally. Our Lord Jesus is a very gentle person and He wants to handle people in a gentle fashion because He loves people.

That's why He came into the world. But He does want from you integrity. Did you hear? If you never listened to another word from this pulpit He wants from you integrity.

He wants it from me because He's a man of integrity and it was the hypocrisy of His adversaries that put Him to the cross. He wasn't killed by atheists. He was killed by people with a perverted theology.

So there's the charge, a severe charge. Could it apply to the tab? Lord God, please not. Not to the pastor, not to my elders, not to my deacons, not to my leaders, not to the members of this flock.

But Lord if in some measure it does, from the pastor down or up, however you judge the scaling, you probably go from the pastor upwards. Get us right. I want Margaret to come and lead a couple of songs please.