DAILY DEVOTIONAL – January 11, 2021
“Laws, Ladles, & Labels”
Prayer: Lord Jesus, You alone are the sinless Son of God. You alone are the Righteous One. Lord, daily renew us in the faith and Word You have so graciously given us, that our lives may bring You all the glory. Amen.
Scripture: Mark 7:3-23 (selected verses)
3 (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, 4 and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.) 5 And the Pharisees and the scribes asked Jesus, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6 And Jesus said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
“‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
7 in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
8 You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”
9 And Jesus said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!”
14 And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: 15 There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him…21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
Devotional – “Laws, Ladles, & Labels”
The other day I was in the store looking for something refreshing and different to drink. One of the drinks looked quite good. On that label it had the following 3 short phrases in nice big and colorful letters. “Real Blueberry & Pomegranate. 100 percent juice. All natural.” The label featured a picture of a ripe pomegranate and mounds of fat, perfect blueberries.
Then, I turned the bottle over and read the ingredients list. “Filtered water, pear juice concentrate, apple juice concentrate, grape juice concentrate.” At this point I thought to myself, “I thought this was real blueberry and pomegranate juice. Where are the blueberries and pomegranates!?” I kept reading and found them in sixth and seventh place on a list of nine ingredients. Just before the blueberries and pomegranates, in fifth place, was listed the mysterious and unspecified “other natural flavors.”
By law here in the United States, food ingredients are listed in descending order of weight. That means a product contains the greatest proportion of the first ingredient on the list and successively less of those ingredients you find farther down the list. So according to this list, the juice in my hand held mostly water and other juices, with just enough blueberry and pomegranate for flavor and color. I turned the bottle back over to look at the front again, looking again at what the bottle claimed to be on the outside. In the bottom corner of the front label, in small, easy-to-miss type, were the tell-tale words: ‘Flavored juice blend with other natural ingredients.’ The enticing pictures and clever labeling were decoys to sell a diluted, blueberry-pomegranate flavored product, convincingly disguised to look like something it wasn’t.
The Pharisees were the leaders of a very influential sect of Judaism in Jesus’ day, who were over zealous, even fanatical, about trying to live perfectly according to the laws of God found in the Old Testament. The Pharisees were very often enraged by Jesus, not because they could ever prove Him wrong or guilty of a single sin (and believe me, they did try real hard), but because Jesus, who is the Truth and the Light, had a way of exposing false labels, false religiosity, and the façade of piety that many of the Pharisees prided themselves on. In Mark 7 we see a primary example of this.
The Pharisees were certainly educated in the Laws of God, and for the most part, they did their very best to keep those laws. The problem was, their obedience served a purpose much like the front label of that pomegranate and blueberry juice. What the Pharisees showed the rest of the world and what was actually on the inside were two very different things. The Pharisees lived to convince other people that they were real, holy men of God. However, as Jesus reveals to them and everyone else, their faith and obedience to God was not in service to Him and for His glory, but their own.
As we have experienced even in our own time this past year, it’s not difficult for any of us sinful humans to take traditions or man-made laws and twist them and contort them into being on par with God’s Word or somehow a reflection of someone else’s faithfulness or compassion. Whether it’s pride or fear that tempts us to do so, we need to be ever vigilant and ever careful about abusing the Word of God in order to impose our will on others. That’s the very things that Jesus our Lord came crashing down on the Pharisees for, saying, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
7 in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
8 You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”
9 And Jesus said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!”
Notice that Jesus didn’t take issue with washing hands. Jesus didn’t say that washing your hands before you eat is a bad thing. As He so often does, because Jesus sees the true heart inside of men, Jesus addresses the real problem the Pharisees had in their hearts. It’s the same problem we all have in our hearts. We are all sinful and wicked at heart, and when we forget that or try and make our religion about being better than others, even those we think are behaving improperly, we only prove Jesus’ words about the Pharisees to be true of ourselves.
William Barclay summarizes well the real issue the Pharisees had with Jesus. He says, “Here we come upon a truth that re-emerges in every age. Time and again it is not the intellectual difficulty of accepting Christ, which keeps men from becoming Christians; it is the height of Christ’s moral demand. Many a man’s refusal of Christ comes, not because Christ puzzles and baffles his intellect, but because Christ challenges and condemns his life.”
What if like the blueberry pomegranate juice, we all had permanent labels on our backs that told people what was really behind our words, behind our silence, behind our smile or our frown, behind our actions or inactions?
Jesus said, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him. What comes out of a person is what defiles him…evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” Jesus leaves no room for misunderstanding. There is nothing we do or don’t do that makes us more or less of a sinner. The problem is not in what we do or don’t do, the problem is our own hearts and minds that have already been defiled by sin, in our very nature, from birth.
Throwing a convincing label on a bottle of pear juice and apple juice doesn’t make it pomegranate-blueberry juice. Using pomegranates and blueberries makes pomegranate-blueberry juice. If you and I have any hope of being saved and being able to live the righteous lives before God we know we should but can’t, our only hope of doing so is to pour ourselves out so there is nothing left of who we are, and instead receive through faith alone the fullness of new life Christ died to give us through His death and resurrection. This is exactly what God calls us to do in His Word, when He said through the Apostle Paul, who was a Pharisee before He met the Risen Christ, said in Galatians 2, “For when I tried to keep the law, it condemned me. So I died to the law—I stopped trying to meet all its requirements—so that I might live for God. My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Thanks for joining me for another daily devotional, and remember, that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today, and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
