Upsetting The Religious Applecart

"Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them.  Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them"   ( Mark 7:15, NIV). 
"You can identify them by their fruit, that is, by the way they act..." (Matt. 7:16, NLT).

Jesus was clearly antiestablishment and countercultural and was determined to overturn the tables on the Pharisees' religious turf.  He managed a revolution of topsy-turvy spirituality.  They had no notion of true spirituality, but only of externalism:  circumcision, tithing, offerings, sacrifices, festivals, Sabbath observance, fasting, handwashing, ceremonial duties, and whatever agreed with the outward show of religious piety but having no inward vitality or reality.  Jesus succeeded in internalizing religion and making it a matter of the heart and sin was on the inside that God could see.  The Pharisees were highly jealous of Jesus and protecting their turf was Job One.  Everyone wants job security, but this was too much for Jesus.  They sensed a threat to their authority and teachings, which Jesus referred to as the leaven of the Pharisees.

The people were burdened by 613 additional (248) commands and (365) prohibitions or laws of their legal system that made the Law of Moses a burden too heavy a yoke to carry.  Even the Sabbath with 39 additional activities regarded as "work" was nothing to look forward to anymore nor enjoy as a day of rest and spiritual renewal.  What really got them uptight and ill at ease was His popularity among the common people who heard him gladly and the miracles He was doing were both undeniable, and they had to come up with some explanation.  Jesus repeatedly made them out to be as fools and an embarrassment to their own cause.  Jesus seemed like a hero and authority the way He threw the moneylenders out of the temple.  They had every reason to fear His authority because He spoke like no man, not by authority, as one of the teachers of the law, (cf. Matt. 7:29), but with authority and they could not resist the Spirit by which He spoke nor answered His questions.

Jesus was against religion as they knew it.  The Pharisees were frauds at worship--just going through the motions with lip service and their hearts being far removed.  He saw the Jewish faith as one of knowing God, not of performance or a list of dos and don'ts.  The Pharisees were white on the outside but inside were as sepulchers.  They would strain a gnat and swallow a camel because they were so worried about the minor details of the Law but missed the main points of justice, mercy, and faithfulness.  Religion for them was mere show and Jesus despised it.

One thing that He wouldn't tolerate was duplicity and He saw this in the Pharisees they way they didn't practice what they preached. The religious authorities were never the same after Jesus was through with them and He changed the culture by changing people.  He was the light that shown on every man to see.  No one was unchanged nor the same after an encounter with the Lord.  The religious applecart had become an organization, not an organism, or living community of believers.

The major realignment in religion came as Jesus saw through legalism and hypocrisy and instituted undefiled and pure religion as coming from a sincere heart and motive.  Jesus saw through the veneer and facade!  The people needed to be set free from the burden and yoke of the Pharisees and their take on religion, in fact, most people didn't want to emulate them nor were they jealous, though the Pharisees were respected, Jesus saw their veneer and masquerade that they hid behind.

One sad commentary on the Pharisees was their tendency to exalt themselves and of having an air of superiority.  Jesus countered that the way up is down in God's economy and one must humble oneself first to be exalted in God's eyes.  He warned them that one must become as a child to enter the kingdom of God (cf. Mark 10:15; Matt. 18:3).

The normal Christian life was in contradistinction to the one of the Pharisees.  The Pharisees flaunted their faith and Jesus taught that people should not practice their righteousness before people (cf. Matt. 6:1) but keep their religious duties between them and God and to pray in their closet, inner sanctum, comfort zone, or private space.  The Pharisees were the ultimate goody-goodies who were working for God and kept up all appearance of propriety, but they knew not the Lord in reality.  Christ will say unto them that He never knew them at the Judgment.  But we all have feet of clay (flaws not readily apparent) and must repent of the Pharisee in us.  All our works are worth zilch if we don't love the Lord and do His will--"if I have not love, I am nothing."   Soli Deo Gloria!

Going By The Rules

"And Samuel said, 'Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD?  Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams"  (1 Sam. 15:22, ESV).

"I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will guide you with My eye" (Psalm 32:8, ESV).

"The law of his God is in his heart; his steps do not slip"  (Psalm 37:31, ESV).

"... [T]o bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all nations"  (Rom. 1:5, ESV).

"... [A]nd a great number of priests were becoming obedient to the faith"  (Acts 6:7, NASB).

"And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him"  (Acts 5:32, ESV).

"But he said, 'Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!'" (Luke 11:28, ESV).

"But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves" (James 1:22, ESV).

"You are my friends if you do what I command you" (John 15:14, ESV).

"Make me to know your ways, O LORD, teach me your paths" (Psalm 25:4, ESV).

God is angry at the people of Judah because of their ignorance ("Therefore, my people go into exile for lack of knowledge" per Is. 5:13, ESV and "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge ...," Hos. 4:6a, ESV).  Jeremiah 8:7 (ESV) says in a similar vein:  "... [B]ut my people know not the rules of the LORD."  The people of God do not know the way:  "Then I said, 'These are only the poor; they have no sense; for they do not know the way of the LORD, the justice of their God'" (Jeremiah 5:4, ESV).  Micah echoes a similar controversy of the LORD:  "But they do not know the thoughts of the LORD; they do not understand his plan...."   Hosea says "a people without understanding shall come to ruin" in verse 4:14 (ESV).

The very essence of knowing Jesus is applying that knowledge in doing what Jesus would do; however, one must first know Him and learn of Him to do that (What would Jesus do?).  But we don't imitate Jesus, we let Him live through us.  "I have been crucified with Christ.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20, ESV).  This defines a life of inhabitation, not imitation.  According to the aforementioned passage, the Christian life is about relinquished life, the exchanged life, substituted, inhabited, and the surrendered life.

Remember what is says about the Israelites in Judges 21:25, where each man did what was right in his own eyes, for they had no king. Obedience is the true test of faith according to Dietrich Bonhoeffer:  "Only he who believes is obedient, and only he is obedient who believes."  See how they are correlated and can be distinguished, but not separated, as seen in Heb. 3:18 (ESV):  "And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient?  So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief." "Obey your leaders and submit to them ..." (Heb. 13:17, ESV).  We have an easier yoke than the Jews in obeying the will of God and not the yoke of the Law.

There are some legalistic Christians who can't have enough rules and measure their spirituality or piety by how well they keep them--basically inclined to refrain from doing pleasurable things, and not following the Lord in the positive things.  The problem arises when they make up their own rules that "go beyond that which is written" (cf. 1 Cor. 4:6, ESV).  Baptists have always been known as being rule-obsessed and for what they don't do, rather than what they do do.  The Pharisees of Jesus' day were also ruleS-obsessed and had over 600 additional prohibitions and commands to the 613 laws of Moses. You practically had to be a scribe or lawyer to be able to know your way around the law and its loopholes.

On the other hand, Jesus' yoke is easy and His burden is light.  Their rules were simply traditions of men and nullified the grace of God and made their worship in vain    ("[I]n vain do they worship me teaching as doctrines the commandments of men," says Mark 7:7 in the ESV). For instance, they had made the Sabbath a burden when Jesus said in Mark 2:27 that man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man!  There were not supposed to be any hard and fast rules as to what was forbidden and God never defined what "work" was.  Salvation is not Jesus plus obeying church rules such as tithing, nor Jesus plus Sabbath keeping, nor Jesus plus asceticism, fasting, or self-denial, nor Jesus plus secret knowledge, nor even Jesus plus church, nor Jesus plus anything--we must realize that it is by Jesus alone since our faith must be in Christ alone.

In Martin Luther's time, the Antinomians arose who said, "Freed from the Law, O blessed condition, now I can sin all I want and still have remission."  The point of salvation is that we are freed from the power of the law and sin and are no longer under the law--the law cannot condemn us, claim us, nor control us (see Romans 8:1-4)!  As Christians, we are not under the law (see Romans 6:14), but we are not lawless.  We are not free to do as we want, but as we ought!  We have been given the power to obey God and to overcome sin, instead of being its slave.  The problem arises when we go beyond that which is written according to 1 Cor. 4:6 and make up our own laws as we go along, instead of obeying the Word.  The only test of faith is obedience and the Christian has a supernatural yearning to obey the Lord through the Word in love as a motive ("... The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love," says Gal. 5:6, ESV).

To cite an example, let's say that you don't believe in drinking.  It may be a no-no for you! Fine, but you cannot make an ironclad biblical case for being a teetotaler.  Paul clearly says in 1 Cor. 6:12 that all things are lawful, but we are not to be enslaved by anything.  The point is that we don't want to be brought under the power of any sin (Psalm 119:133 says not to let any sin have dominion over us). Some sects are known for being highly "religious" or legalistic and forget that Christianity is about knowing the Lord, not following rules that are unbiblical. True, Christianity is not about a list of do's and don'ts or some catalog of rules or being moral and ethical.  It can be said:  Evil is being good without God, and that is where some people err in believing the essence of Christianity is about obeying the Golden Rule.

There are many commands in the Bible and God's moral code has not been rescinded--we are not free to covet our neighbor's wife, just because we are not under the law.  But true believers don't do it because they have to, or even want to, but because they feel they get to--we get to go to church, we get to pray, we get to witness for Christ.  If you haven't reached that point in spirituality where you want to please your Maker and Lord you may just see the Christian life as a list of rules.  If Christianity were just about rules you could compare your "performance" with another's and measure thereby your spirituality, but Paul says:  "Not that we dare to classify or compare ourselves with some of those who are commending themselves.  But when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they are without understanding" (2 Cor. 10:12, ESV).

The Bible never gives us the right to do what is wrong, nor sanctions us the right to do what is right in our own eyes as spiritual lone rangers. The problem arises when we obey the letter of the law without respect to the spirit of the law.  Antinomians have a distaste for the law and are anti-law. They think that freedom meant license to sin or disobedience to the moral code.  "Do we then overflow [make void] the law by this faith?  By no means!  On the contrary, we uphold the law" (Rom. 3:31, ESV)  Romans 6:1 (ESV) says, "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?  By no means!  How can we who died to sin still live in it?"

Even though the essence of Christianity is a relationship with the living God, the New Testament does list rules to live by and guides to our spirituality (i.e., praying without ceasing, in everything giving thanks, abstaining from all appearance of evil, etc., per 1 Thess. 5:17ff).  We are not to become morally lax simply because we are free in Christ.  People who are rule-obsessed tend to major on the minors and miss the point of a relationship with Christ.  We have to beware of elevating tradition to the level of law and binding people where they ought to be free.  Christianity is not about making bad people good, but dead people alive (in a vital relationship with Christ).

Christians are regenerate but also have two natures: The old nature knows no law; the new nature needs no law.  The question is which one will they let rule their life?  To be carnally minded is death, and to be spiritually minded is life, says Paul.  The Christian lives by a higher law: The law of love and knows that love is the fulfillment of the law!  "Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law" (Romans 13:8, ESV).  Soli Deo Gloria!