Mark No.12 Where religion is useless

Well, good morning. Nice to have you all with us, boys and girls, men and women. Glad that you've been able to come on this lovely day.

Let's stand, shall we. Let's just commit our service to the Lord. Let's repeat that grand old Gospel verse, John 3 16.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. Father, we thank you for that verse, almost a creedal statement of a summary of what we believe. We ask that we might, in the light of that, be able to praise your name.

And as we come around your Word, will you speak to us? As we come around the table, will you make these emblems significant to each one who takes part? To be with our boys and girls and those who help to teach them. And we ask that today, on this family occasion, we might know your presence and gift you the praise and adoration that's due to your name. For Jesus' sake, Amen.

Now will you turn to 7 5 6, one of the grand old hymns. Some people, if you've read Notes and News, came into the tab last Sunday morning simply because they were impressed by hearing the singing as they walked past the church. Well, make your praise glorious and attractive to others.

7 5 6, when morning gills the skies, my heart awaking cries, may Jesus Christ be praised. We'll sing verse 4 unaccompanied. 7 5 6. If you haven't a Bible with you and the person alongside has, then you might like to check.

Yes, we're making our way through Mark's Gospel. We're coming to a very interesting, profound, difficult passage. Skipping a couple of narratives from last time and picking up on the seventh chapter and its contents.

Mark 7. 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 hands that were unclean, that is, unwashed. And then an explanatory comment. The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat until 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. They observe many other traditions such as the washing of cups, pitchers, and kettles. I'm sure all the men who did the washing up this morning would appreciate that little comment from the evangelist.

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 your 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 have otherwise have received from me is korban, 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.

Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him unclean by going into him, rather it is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean. After he'd left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable.

Are you so dull, he asked. Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean, for it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach and then out of his body. In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.

He went on, what comes out of a man is what makes him unclean, for from within out of men's hearts come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man unclean. So here are two different theologies of sin.

I mean basically this is what this passage is all about. Just to set the context, you've got Jesus being bugged, as he frequently was in his ministry, as you've discovered in Mark's Gospel. Not only by representatives of the religious establishment who lived in the area where he was preaching at this point, but occasionally as John the Baptist had suffered, so Jesus had the same insult.

From Jerusalem came the Mafia and they were checking up on what the Lord was doing, what the disciples were doing, because the religious establishment in the days of our Lord, who I refer to quite rudely and yet in one sense don't apologize because our Savior is even more cutting when he assesses them, they're checking up on Jesus because they believe that what he is teaching is so revolutionary it's gonna bring down the whole house of Judaic theology. In other words, if Jesus got it right, they're wrong and they don't want to concede that they're wrong. So Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law, verse 1, come from Jerusalem, they gather around Jesus and they take issue, not so much with Jesus, but with his disciples and the problem is, did they wash properly before they had their food? When you open up this chapter or the remaining verses that I've just read from, the first one of which I've just quoted, you discover that what Jesus is actually doing is defining true religion.

He does it negatively because he tells you what true religion is not. Our Savior will often leave with a negative and then come to a positive and as a result he'll make his lessons stand out that much more, that much more clearly. The religious establishment of those days, that they confused liturgy with life.

Instead of reality, they wanted ritual. They believed that sin was something that could be dealt with externally and Jesus said that sin is something that must be dealt with internally. Their treatment was cosmetic, his treatment was surgical.

He said you couldn't tinker around. You had, if you please, to go for a blood transplant, a blood injection, a blood transfusion I was trying to say. They didn't appreciate this whatsoever.

And so this squad from Jerusalem comes down and they check up on what the Lord Jesus is saying in order to try to find fault with him. And the whole issue seems to revolve around something which is very unimportant from our viewpoint and that is the disciples and their lack of preparation before they take a meal. They saw verse two, some of his disciples eating food with hands that were unclean and they say verse five, why don't your disciples live like us? Why don't they do what we do and why don't you, if you claim to be who you are, keep in line with the tradition of the elders which is sacrosanct in Judaic theology.

There was a bishop of Liverpool who lived last century, Bishop Ryle. He's my second favorite to Spurgeon for quoting. And he said what an astonishing thing is this.

Here is the Jewish nation, such a mess as they were politically and yet religiously so ungifted. I mean as far as the latter is concerned, they got the Psalms and they got the book of Deuteronomy, they got all the wonderful teaching of the Old Testament. When they come to talk to the Lord Jesus and to take issue with the Lord Jesus, it has to do with washing pots, washing your hands as though there wasn't something far more consequential to be dealt with, as though there wasn't something far more wonderful for them to remind the Lord Jesus they had as a common denominator.

But you see these folk had engaged in what I would call the trivialization of religion. To the extent that Jesus said, and it's rather a cutting comment, that their religious practices are really useless. Look at verse 13.

You nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. So I want to shift the emphasis of the title that was given to my address this morning and replace it with this. Where religion is useless.

Where religion is useless. And my first response from the context here to that question is when it is stuffed with trivia. When it is stuffed with trivia.

Because in the first five or six verses, this is basically what we are confronted with. Here are these religious Jews and they've come to the northern territory of Palestine and they're accosting the Lord Jesus and they're asking him about their tradition and the fact that he doesn't maintain what they call the teaching of the elders. Now in order to understand those first four or five verses, there's something I have to tell you.

And that is that when the Jews came back to Jerusalem on one significant time in their history, before they had two exiles, a party was born. The religious level like the political conservative party today in our country. And they wanted to preserve and to conserve all that was good about the Old Testament ritual and regulations as given by Moses.

And they had a field day. They wrote so many commandments and so many regulations. But that by the time they were done from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night, if you were an Orthodox Jew, your life was controlled by what was known as the tradition of the elders.

Now it was a step on their part to altering the Word of God. I mean by that they got the Old Testament and they believed in this, but they made a tradition. The tradition of the elders.

And then they lifted that speculation on their part to the level of the Old Testament and said you're not only to live by what Moses taught and what the prophets taught, you're also to have reference to the tradition of the elders, what we are teaching. And in the third century after the death of our Lord, all this tradition was compressed into one book called the Mishnah. And even today Orthodox Jews will look to the Mishnah as well as to the Old Testament scriptures.

They wanted to impose on the disciples of our Lord Jesus the tradition that had grown up down the centuries. And our Lord had little respect or seemingly so for this tradition. So here are these poor disciples and they're having a meal and unfortunately they're not washing their hands in the way that they should according to their tradition.

Now that doesn't mean to say that their hands were dirty, neither does it mean to say that they were ill-mannered. What it did mean was that if your hands were not washed in a certain way and your fist eventually moving away the water from this palm and that palm and dripping the water properly according to the tradition of the elders, you were ceremonially defiled. And that's the rub.

Because to be ceremonially defiled meant that you couldn't enter into the presence of God. You getting the point? You deal with your sin not at an internal level but an external level. These disciples of yours, they are according to our tradition leaving themselves wide open to demon attack because they've not kept the teaching of the elders.

What is at stake then is the theology of sin. Why don't you do it Jesus as we do it? Why don't you teach Jesus as we teach? Why don't you accept Jesus what we accept? And our Lord says, in effect, I don't accept it because your theology is trivial. It's dealing with the external.

It's dealing with the cosmetic. You don't really understand what sin is all about. Do you know the church is often engaged in trivia? It's often built up its own regulations.

That was the reason why they had to be a reformation. Because the church is always like the Jewish fathers in Old Testament times or intertestamental times wanted to advance on Scripture. So you have your liturgy, sometimes your robes, your bells and your smells, and all the paraphernalia that sometimes we associate with the various strands of Catholicism.

I'm not incidentally saying that there is no truth within Catholicism, but there is an addition to the truth that sometimes detracts from the simplicities of the gospel. You get that incidentally always with the sects. 1,200 regulations come out from the watchtower for a card carrying Jehovah's Witness to live by.

If you think the Mormons are any better, let me disabuse you of the notion. You're really into a very regimented religion if you were to adopt that propounded originally by Joseph Smith. Our Lord rejects fundamentally any religion that is stuffed with trivia, external regulations, as though you could adjust yourself by the way that you live in the sight of God to the extent that he will accept you as being holy.

Now our Lord is a bit incensed. Our Savior is not a dispassionate man. Occasionally he'll show very strong reactions to what is alleged against him and his disciples.

So verse 6, responding to the insinuation of verse 5, he says, you're hypocrites, as I was right when he prophesied about you. Another reason, another characteristic of religion being useless is not just when it is stuffed with trivia, but when it stops at talk. Isn't this what our Lord is saying in the hearing of his disciples and directing his comment to this religious group that come from Jerusalem? What did Isaiah say? Well he says, these people, verse 6, honor me with their lips, their hearts are far from me, they worship me in vain, their teachings and rulings are derived from men.

You are not asked to honor God with your lips. The Old Testament writer speaking on behalf of God says, son, give me your heart. How shall I come before the Lord, says David? I've got a problem.

I've engaged in multiple sinning. Now I do know about ceremonial regulations. I've read Moses, and I do know the beginnings of this tradition, and I know a thing or two about sacrifices, and I've got flocks and flocks of sheep.

I mean, if it's just a question of that, then Lord Adam, just mention a number, a couple of thousand, three thousand, will that do? Can I fob God off just by what I say, or even by my actions, or is there something else more fundamental than my talk and just my actions at the periphery that God is looking for? Do you remember that lovable character in Wind of the Willows, Toad of Toad Hall? I mean, if anyone was a buffoon, he was. I mean, here's their old Ratty and Mowly. You remember, don't you? Think back.

And they're held in, they hold Toad in awe. But actually, he was just a puffed-up balloon. I mean, really, there was no substance to what he was saying.

He was just a pompous, lovable person. When the Apostle Paul is talking about true religion, as he defines it in 1 Corinthians 13, he makes reference to charity and the way that the charitable characteristics, the loving characteristics of our Lord should be picked up by ordinary folk like you and me, and it will have certain experimental consequences, says the Apostle Paul that love is not puffed up. In other words, a Christian is not just a bag of air.

Earlier on, he said in that same epistle, and J.B. Phillips carries the translation well, speaking of the kingdom of God, he says the kingdom of God is not just talk. What is pure religion? Well, pure and undefiled religion, says James in the opening chapter and almost the final verse of that chapter, pure and undefiled religion is doing. Pure and undefiled religion is being.

It's not just the externals. It's not just the cosmetics. It's the heart surgery that causes a change in personality and a desire to do, a desire to be.

Now, you see, here is a theological problem. I mean, these fellows have come down to bug the disciples and to check up on Jesus. They have got the tradition of the elders over against the Word of God as revealed in the Old Testament, and Jesus, whose acute theologian, realizes that there are certain areas in which their tradition brings them into conflict with the obvious meaning of God's holy and inspired Word.

They say, you've let go of the commands of God. You're holding on to the traditions of men. What do you mean, Jesus? All right, talk about honoring your mom and dad.

Sorry, you can't use the words mom and dad on a gravestone. Your mother and father. Now, according to your tradition, in which you have made comment on and misconstrued Moses in the final chapters of Numbers, you have said in this whole business of making an oath, that if you use the word Corban in the declaration of your promise concerning a certain thing or a certain amount of money, then that oath is so binding.

That if, says our Lord Jesus, just on the basis of hypothesis, you've got a Jewish young man or a Jewish young woman, a Jewish married couple who want to renege on their responsibilities to look after their parents, all they have to do is say, that money is Corban. And according to your tradition, that money cannot be touched for the purpose that it had originally been earmarked for. Verse 9, 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 your mother, and anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.

You see the theological problems that these men are bringing to our Lord Jesus, and the theological problems are caused by them heightening tradition to the level of the Word of God to the extent that their tradition eventually is used to minimize the Word of God in terms of human responsibility. In true religion, that doesn't put one's heart right with God, and as a result enable you to recognize your responsibility to your next of kin as well as to your fellow members of the human race. Well any religion like that is useless.

True religion means surgery in the heart that causes a change in your personality, in your lifestyle. Jesus will categorically deny the use of one biblical scripture to negate another, and they have misinterpreted Numbers chapter 30 and verse 1, and the fault is not in Moses's teaching but in their failure to take scripture as a whole. To refuse help where help is needed is an abuse of religion, Jesus says, making null, nullifying verse 13, the Word of God.

So when is religion useless? I argue when it is stuffed with trivia. I argue when it stops at talk, and finally when it stymies, or if you like, blocks truth. Look at verse 14.

You see that there's a crowd that's gathered because, well, they're enjoying this. I mean a hassle between the Lord Jesus and the theological geniuses from Jerusalem, that's worth seeing, that's worth being in on. And so the crowd is listening to Jesus and probably has a bias towards the Lord Jesus because some of these Pharisees and scribes, they weren't the most lovable of men, they didn't naturally attract people to them, and they weren't particularly popular, not the Pharisees.

I'm not saying there weren't any spiritual Pharisees, but I'm saying as a whole, they were a bit of a pain in the neck to ordinary people. So a crowd has gathered, not just the disciples alongside, but the crowd, and Jesus with his dominical authority, that means his authority as a great teacher, brings the crowd closer to himself, and he says, listen, listen to me. I'm putting down a fundamental proposition, a fundamental statement, a statement that in their day was so revolutionary it would have caught the headlines of the Jewish Chronicle had that then been published.

Nothing outside a man can make him unclean by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean, he's reverting to the first part of the charge that has been leveled against the disciples, and he says, no, it's nothing to do with ceremonial cleansing, and he's putting a red line right through an awful amount of Jewish theology. You really do have it wrong.

You really have misunderstood the teachings of God in the Old Testament. Some of you may say, but it does say in the Old Testament that there are certain things that have got to be washed in a particular fashion, and there's certain dress that the priests are to wear when they come into the temple, and so on and so forth. Well, yes, that is so.

I come, as is increasingly obvious, from an older generation, and when I was a kid, on Sunday you had Sunday clothes. A suit, a tie, stuck with that for the time being. You made sure that you washed behind your ears, and you presented yourself in church looking good in your Sunday best.

Actually, it was a bit of a pain, but we agreed, my brother and I. Not that we had any option, actually, but we're going to clip around the ear from my mother. What was the reason for this? Well, you see, the idea, I think, was that putting on the Sunday best and going into the house of God was a sort of illustration, a parable that God deserved something from you that was the best, but not just your clothes. Your clothes were a sort of illustration of what your heart should be like.

I'm not suggesting we return to the tradition, but I'm not also denying that the tradition didn't have its own value. So in the Old Testament, these ceremonial, these external things, it's not that they were of unimportance, not a bit, but the main importance was to indicate that beyond and within the external, there was that which was much more important. Israel is called to be a holy nation, therefore it has a holy high priest with all the adornments that that man would wear year by year.

And unfortunately, these opponents of our Lord Jesus, they'd cottoned on to the wrong thing. They had gone for the external and forgotten the teaching in terms of the internal. So our Lord, having put a line through wrong Jewish theology, now takes his disciples into the house where so often, verse 17, we read in a similar setting, our Lord Jesus unpacks his teaching and makes it even more clear.

And in one sense, we're very glad that the disciples felt so dull, or seem so dull. After all, they hadn't got the gifting of the Holy Spirit, they hadn't had this mental illumination, so they ask him about this parable, this teaching of uncleanness and so forth. And Jesus reprimands them, verse 18, are you so dull? Don't you see that as far as a parable is concerned, the parable of the human body, what you eat, the way you dress, even the hygiene of your body, even though these things may have an importance, they are not the things of dire importance.

You can't make your heart clean by having a bath. You can't pollute your soul by what you eat. What makes a man unclean is not that which from the external goes into him in terms of physical food, because eventually that's evacuated from the body.

In any case, what makes a man unclean is that which lies within him, sometimes, thank God, dormant, but always there, even amongst the best of men and women. The possibility of manifesting itself, evil thoughts, sexual morality, murder, adultery, the rest. Says Bishop Ryle, it seems forgotten that every man carries within him the fountain of wickedness.

We need no bad company to teach, no devil to tempt us in order to run into sin. We have within us the beginning of every sin under heaven. The seeds of all the evils here mentioned lie hid within us all.

They may lie dormant in our lives. They may be kept down by the fear of consequences, the restraint of public opinion, the dread of discovery, the desire to be thought respectable and above all by the almighty grace of God, but every man has within him the root of every sin. Thus neighbors who've lived side-by-side in Bosnia for years have been guilty of cutting one another's throats.

Tribes in Rwanda which have lived in peace for some time have perpetrated the worst things on one another. Our Lord Jesus, if you stop with the external and the ceremonial, you don't really understand the teaching of the Old Testament or the New, nor do you understand your own nature, the capacity for sin that lies within you. You can't deal with inadequacies just at an external superficial level.

You need heart transplant. It's not what is outside that pollutes you, it is what is inside and finds manifestation that causes you difficulty. Now if you left it there, which we're not, you'd almost feel hopeless.

But you see, our Lord has been dealing negatively, deliberately. He's been showing you what useless religion is. Religion that's stuff with trivia, religion that's full of talk, religion that distorts truth.

But what our Lord will now show you as you stay with him in his life is that he has the remedies for all the wrongs that you have ever done. The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin. It's the shed blood of our Lord Jesus on the cross, and only that blood that makes it possible for you and me to be acceptable in the presence of a Holy God.

You say I'm feeling uncomfortable, we'll join the club. But the fact of the matter is that a useful religion is directed towards that which discomforts you. In Christ Jesus there is now no condemnation.

Why? Because our Lord Jesus has dealt. Has dealt with the problems that the Mosaic law could not deal with. The Mosaic law could expose sin, but it couldn't cure sin.

And this is the reason why you see our Lord Jesus was on the collision course with these men who were so criticizing him. Their diagnosis was wrong, therefore their prescription was wrong. Jesus's diagnosis is right, and his prescription is supremely efficacious.

What does Jesus say? That it's a heart that needs cleansing. It's the blood transfusion, so to speak, of his life coming into your life, and you as a result having your sins forgiven. Which doesn't then mean you can live as you want.

It means that because of the love that you have for the Lord Jesus, and having received his Spirit, you will endeavor to live that holy life about which we were singing just 20, 30 minutes or so ago. What is the useful religion? It's that which Jesus came to proclaim from his lip and through his life. It's that religion which says God's own Son came into the world to cleanse you from your sins, and to make it possible for you to be right with God, and destined to be with him eternally.

Jesus's adversaries rejected what he had to say. Don't you be so foolish. Let's turn to a song which will help us to indicate afresh our trust, our soul trust, in our Lord Jesus.

It's an old song from yesteryear, but it's worth singing. I'm trusting thee Lord and at thy feet I bow, for thy grace and tender mercy, trusting now. And we'll stand and sing the first four verses, be seated for the last two, and at that point we'll start to bring around the bread and wine which we offer you if you to take if you confess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.

Otherwise please let the tray go by. How shall I enter into the house of the Lord, into the hill of the Lord? I come with holy hands, pleading the forgiveness for my sins in the name of our Savior. So with our hearts purged from sin, let's sing to the Lord a constant request for inner sanctification.

Purify my heart, let me be as gold and silver. 1-3-1 the supplement. Some of you just follow that with your own prayer.