Mark 7:1-23
Date: January 15th 2023
Speaker: Samuel M. Crites
Scripture: Mark 7:1-23
Exegetical Outline
Main Idea of the Text: Jesus defends his disciples by rejecting the tradition of Pharisees and teaching that sin is a matter of the heart, making all foods clean.
1-5: The Pharisees challenge Christ by criticizing the disciples for not observing the traditions of the elders.
6-8: According to Jesus, the Pharisees are hypocrites, because they leave the commandments of God and follow the traditions of men.
9-13: Jesus gives an example of how the Pharisees nullify the commands of God with the traditions of men.
14-15: Jesus publicly teaches against the Pharisees publicly with a parable.
17-23: Jesus privately teaches the disciples that defilement is a matter of the heart, not a matter of tradition.
Homiletical Outline
Main Idea of the Sermon: The ultimate root of evil is the state of one’s heart out of which come all sinful actions, like preferring man’s traditions to God’s law.
The ultimate root of evil is the state of one’s heart.
The ultimate root of evil is the fountain of sinful actions.
Preferring man’s traditions to God’s law is an example of evil.
Introduction
What is evil? In the moral relativism of contemporary society, we have almost completely lost this category. Out there, in the public sphere, individualism has so totally reshaped morality that good, and evil are functionally meaningless. Everyone is governed by a private sense of good and evil that is relative to the individual. What is evil for you is not evil for me. Your truth is your truth, and my truth is my truth.
But in here, in the Church, we must not allow such moral relativism to take hold in our lives. Evil truly exists. It is an objective reality that can be known and must be avoided if the Christian is going to grow, and the Church is going to thrive. So, I ask again: what is evil?
In 2017, John Piper stood before 55,000 college students and young adults in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia, and he asked this very question. He said:
John Piper, “The Ultimate Essence of Evil: The Majesty of God, the Triumph of Christ, and the Glory of the Human Life,” Passion 2017: Atlanta, GA, January 3, 2017.
I would like to speak to you about the ultimate essence of evil. And lest you think this is going to be abstract or theoretical, I mean your evil. The evil you do every day. And the evil you hate when others do it. I mean my evil, my daily sin. I want to speak to you about the ultimate essence of evil — real, tangible, globally pervasive evil.
By essence I mean to distinguish between the root of evil and the fruit of evil. What is the inner spring of evil that causes attitudes and actions to flow out of it — out of us — which we call wrong, or bad, or sinful, or wicked, or evil?
And more specifically, my question is: What’s the ultimate essence of evil? And by ultimate I mean that there’s nothing deeper or more original that makes this evil essence evil. We are looking at the ultimate essence of evil when we see the deepest force that makes all evil evil.
This is the subject of our sermon text today: the ultimate essence or root of all evil. As John Piper describes it: the word ultimate means the end, the bottom, the last thing that can be said that shows evil as truly evil. What is its root? As we read Mark 7:1-23, keep this question in your mind.
Mark 7:1-23
1 Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, 2 they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 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 him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6 And he 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 he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ 11 But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban” ’ (that is, given to God)— 12 then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”
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.” 17 And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, 19 since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20 And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles 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.”
I mean to get at the question, “what is evil?”, by asking the question: what is the ultimate root of evil? If we can identify the causal root of something, then we can better understand its essence. We can understand its character. The main idea of our sermon today is this: the ultimate root of evil is the state of one’s heart out of which come all sinful actions, like preferring man’s traditions to God’s law. This week, we are going to work backwards through the text. We are going to begin at the end, and then see how the Pharisees demonstrate Christ’s teaching on the root of evil.
Our sermon will have three points. First, the ultimate root of evil is the state of one’s heart. We see this in verse 23. Our problem is not that we sin, but that we are sinners. True evil is a heart that is oriented away from loving God toward loving anything and everything else. This is true of the most contemptable and repulsive villain you can imagine, and your dear, sweet grandmother. The state of one’s heart is the root of evil. Our second point is that ultimate root of evil, that is the unregenerate human heart, is the fountain of sinful action. The evil actions that we call sin are the overflow of the evil heart, they are not the cause. Your problem is not that you sin. Your problem is that you are a sinner. The sins you commit are simply the overflow of your sin nature. Finally, as we work backward through our sermon text, we will see that preferring man’s traditions to God’s law is an example of evil. Fallen man will always seek anything but God. The Pharisees have taken God’s revelation in the Law and corrupted it to point away from God to themselves. It is a perfect example for how the ultimate root of evil is the state of one’s heart out of which come all sinful actions.
The ultimate root of evil is the state of one’s heart.
So, let’s begin at the end. The ultimate root of evil is the state of one’s heart. Read with me Mark 7:17-23:
Mark 7:17-23
17 And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, 19 since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20 And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles 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.”
We are beginning with the climax of the story. Everything that has taken place in Mark Chapter 7 has been leading to this lesson. The confrontation with the Pharisees and Christ’s public teaching about defilement are preamble to allow Christ to teach his disciples this crucial lesson: The ultimate root of evil is the state of one’s heart.
Over the last several weeks, we have been observing the manner in which Christ has been educating his disciples. Christ has been teaching them about the kingdom of God and his own personal identity as the Son of God. We have seen him teach them with their ears through parables, we have seen him teach them with their eyes by demonstrating his power through miracles, and we have seen him teach them with their hands by delegating his own authority to them so they could go out and cast out demons, heal the sick, and preach the Gospel.
Last week, the disciples were put to the test. They failed. Their hard heartedness prevented them from seeing the true, spiritual reality around them. They saw the crowd following Jesus as a problem, not as sheep to be cared for. When the crowd was in need, they preferred sending them away instead of trusting in the power of Christ that had been delegated to them to meet their needs. When Christ met them on the water, they did not see their Teacher and Leader, they saw a ghost. Mark explicitly says that the disciples did not understand all that was happening and what they were being taught, because they had hard hearts.
So, we can think of Christ lesson this week as remediation. Just because the disciples have been tested does not mean that their education is over. In fact, it is because they failed and why they failed, namely that they had hard hearts, that this week’s lesson is so timely and important.
But Christ’s teaching is not a new teaching. It is actually a very old teaching. Scripture has consistently taught that sin is a being problem, not a doing problem. Let’s quickly survey the Old and the New Testament in order to see that the consistent witness of Scripture is that the heart is the ultimate root of evil. I have 4 passages of Scripture to walk us through.
First, why did God send the food? Let’s read Genesis 6:5-8:
Genesis 6:5-8
5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
When we read verse 5, we can see that there is a connection between the wickedness of man being great on the earth, and the thoughts of man’s heart. They are both wicked, but the wickedness of the heart is a greater wickedness. The actions of man come and go, but the wickedness of the heart is continual. It is interesting to see that the heart of God responds to the wicked heart of men with sorrow and regret. But this is not the fool story. Flip over to Genesis 8:20-22:
Genesis 8:20-22
20 Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21 And when the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. 22 While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
God goes on in Chapter 9 to re-commission man with the cultural mandate: be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth, but here we see the end the flood narrative. The flood was a judgment against God for the wickedness of man. God literally washed the earth of man’s wicked actions, but the flood could not resolve the real issue. So, God cuts a new covenant with all of creation known as the Noahic Covenant. We see this in verse 21. Part of this Covenant is that God will never again curse the ground because of the wickedness of men but notice his reasoning. It seems that God finds it unreasonable to punish the rest of creation for the wickedness of men. It made sense when Adam had dominion over creation, but Noah does not inherit that dominion in the same way that Adam had it. The relationship between man and creation has changed, because man is no longer fit to represent God to creation. So what is God’s reasoning? Why did God promise to never again hold creation responsible for man’s wickedness? Verse 21 says, For the intentions of man’s heart is evil from his youth. The evil actions of men that filled the whole earth in Chapter 6 have been washed away. There is a new start, but the essential problem with man persists: his heart is wicked from the time he is born.
The problem of the heart persists and continues to plague man. So God gave man another Covenant to teach them how to love the Lord their God. This new Covenant was called the Mosaic Covenant, because God gave it to Moses to give to the people. Listen to Moses explain the Mosaic Covenant to the people in Deuteronomy 6:1-6:
Deuteronomy 6:1-6
6 “Now this is the commandment—the statutes and the rules—that the LORD your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, 2 that you may fear the LORD your God, you and your son and your son’s son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be long. 3 Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey.
4 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.
This is the purpose of the Law. It was meant to train the hearts of the Israelites to love God with all that they are. The rules and the statutes were never the point. The rules and the statutes were only ever meant to be a brace on the hearts of the people to point their loves back to God. To fix the real problem that the flood could not fix, the problem of the heart. But the problem with the law is that the law was external. It was merely a brace on an otherwise dead limb. It was never meant to be a permanent solution. It was actually meant to demonstrate that a greater solution was needed.
The author of Hebrews makes this clear in Hebrews 8:6-7, when he says:
Hebrews 8:6-7
But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises. 7 For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second.
The New Covenant is better because it has a better Mediator and it is enacted on better promises. One of those promises is that the Law is no longer external, it becomes internal by the power of the Spirit. Look a little bit further down at verse 10:
Hebrews 8:10
10 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, declares the Lord:
I will put my laws into their minds,
and write them on their hearts,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
Man’s problem since the moment that Adam and Eve disobeyed God is that they have wicked, evil hearts. These hearts do not know God, they do not want God, they are utterly deprave and spiritually dead. The New Covenant is such good news because the promise is that God will finally fix the real problem that has been plaguing men since the Garden. He will give men new hearts and on those new hearts he will write his law. They will love his Word and finally desire to follow God.
So this is what Jesus means when he tells his disciples that what goes into man is not the problem, but what comes out of man. The actions of man are the problem, because our evil actions point to the true nature of our hearts. Man’s problem is not that he sins, but that he is a sinner.
Now, let me try to explain to you why this is such a big deal. It might seem like I am splitting hairs between the sinfulness of the heart and the sinful actions of individuals. Isn’t is all just sin? Isn’t it all the same? No, it is not all the same, but let me explain.
I read a lot of fiction. My favorite genre is high fantasy. I love epic stories that have a large cast of characters, where the bad guys are really bad and the good guys are really good. In these kinds of stories, they typically have a similar beginning. Some unsuspecting hero is minding his own business and, through no fault of his own, he is swept up into a conflict between good and evil. Through a long journey of self-discovery, he conquers his inner demons to be reborn with the internal fortitude necessary to conquer the external forces of evil and save the day.
I have read this story or watched that movie more times than I can count. The amazing thing is that it doesn’t get old. There is something about the hero’s journey trope that resonates with people. Some might say that the hero’s journey mirrors Christ’s own story of redemption, but I do not think so. I think that we love this story for a more nefarious reason. I think we want to be the hero. We want to think of ourselves in life as struggling against forces greater than ourselves and coming our victorious. But we are not the heroes of this story. God’s enemy is not some devil sneaking around tricking men. His enemy is not some ambiguous, nameless evil force called sin out there somewhere in the cosmos. Romans 1:18-23:
Romans 1:18-23
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Understanding that the ultimate root of sin is the state of one’s heart is so important because God’s wrath does not burn against the abstract concept of sin. There is not some ethereal concept of evil out there brooding in the darkness. The object of God’s wrath is not sin, but sinners. Romans 1 tells us that his wrath is revealed against men. Those that have purposefully traded his glory for anything and everything else. Men, in their fallen state, are in grave peril as the objects of God’s wrath, because they have wicked hearts. If God is going to put an end to sin, he must put an end to sinners.
This morning, in our Sunday morning prayer service, we discussed Genesis 5:1-3. At the beginning of Genesis 5, we see that Adam was made in the image of God, but his son Seth was made in the image of Adam. In a chapter that most people skip because it is mostly a long list of names, we see a fundamentally important point about humanity. Natural man was made in the image of God. He was both physically and spiritually alive. When Adam and Eve fell, they died spiritually. Every single man that is descended from Adam and Eve has inherited their problem. All of their children have been born in the image of Adam, meaning, they are physically alive and spiritually dead. After the fall, every man is subhuman. They are not what God originally intended them to be.
This means that there are no good people. There is no one that is morally good. We are all born evil. We are ungodly and unrighteous, and the only thing we deserve from God is his wrath. It is right and good of God to deal out punishment to all men because they are rebels against him. There is not a single person that will spend eternity separated from God that does not deserve it.
We have seen that the ultimate root of evil is the state of one’s heart. It is either spiritually alive or spiritually dead. This is the real conflict between God and sub-natural men. As such, God is right and good to send every rebel to eternal punishment, separated from him. There is not a single person that deserves God’s grace and kindness, because we all are rebels against him. The things that we call sin are the fruit of a heart that is evil. Christ gives examples of the things that come out of the heart: evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. These are the outward signs of the brokenness of the heart. This brings us to our second point: The ultimate root of evil, or the heart, is the fountain of sinful actions.
The ultimate root of evil is the fountain of sinful actions.
Sinners sin. As we have just seen, all men are born sinful. They are sinners. Their hearts are fundamentally oriented away from God toward anything and everything else. Since they are sinners, then what they do is sin, and this sin makes them unclean. This is what Jesus is teaching in Mark 7. As we work backward through the text, let’s read Mark 7:14-19:
Mark 7:14-19
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.” 17 And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, 19 since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)
The disciples and the crowd are confused by what Jesus is teaching. All their lives they have been taught that if they keep the law, they are righteous and if they do not keep the law, they are unrighteous. As far as they understand, righteousness is about keeping the law.
One of the most poignant examples of law keeping that were easy to see and verify are the dietary restrictions. The Jews had many things that they were not allowed to eat: land animals that did not have cloven hooves or that did not chew their cud, birds of prey, fish without scales, and invertebrates. Not only these types of food, but the food they were allowed to eat had to be prepared in the right way. I don’t really want to go into great detail on all of Israel’s dietary restrictions, because the point is this: the dietary restrictions got out of hand because they were outwardly visible. It was obvious if someone was eating something they were not supposed to eat or preparing food in a way that it was not supposed to be prepared. It was easy to call balls and strikes on the dietary laws.
Christ’s is teaching them that restricting food was not because the food itself was clean or unclean. There is no spiritual distinction between beef and pork or sea bass and catfish. At the end of the day, it was all protein. Keeping the law was always a matter of the heart, not a matter of actions. The right actions would flow from a heart that was rightly oriented. A couple weeks ago, we saw this in Deuteronomy 30:11-20, when Moses stands before the nation of Israel right as they are about to enter the promise land and tells Israel they have a choice to make. He said they can choose life or death. They can choose life by loving God and keeping his commandments or they can choose death by turning away from God and worshipping other gods.
Law keeping was always about the heart, but instead of going back and looking at that passage again, I thought we would look at a New Testament example. Turn with me to Luke 1:5-7.
Luke 1:5-7
5 In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. 6 And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. 7 But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.
Isn’t that interesting. Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist, “were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord.” Now how could that be? Is Luke saying that Zechariah and Elizabeth were sinless? That can’t be. In another 10 verses, Zechariah is going to make some pretty boneheaded mistakes before Gabriel and be struck dumb for Elizabeth’s entire pregnancy. It can be that they are without sin.
It also can’t be that they are under the New Covenant. They are clearly still under the Old Covenant, because Jesus has not arrived yet and has not inaugurated the New Covenant with his sacrifice on the cross.
Their righteousness must be based on something else. I would argue that their righteousness is based on their right heartedness before God. They are keeping the law and all of its statutes because the essence of law keeping is not about rule love, but God loving. They loved God and genuinely sought to keep the Shema, the great commandment to love the Lord you God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
This is exactly Christ’s point in Mark 7. Right doing flows out of right being. If the well is clean, then water drawn from the well will be clean. So food entering the body could never defile the body, because it passes through the digestive tract, not through the heart. Defilement cannot come from outside; it can only come from inside.
This is an important point for the Church, especially as we start the New Year. Many of us struggle with sinful actions that are perpetual: apathy, lying, pornography, despondency, doubt, and the list goes on. We have tried to deal with these sins by changing our behaviors. We are attacking our sinful actions and not looking at the deeper reasons that cause our sinful actions. We have a constant headache, so we try to medicate with Tylenol when really we have a brain tumor. We need surgery, not Tylenol.
The cause of sin is the heart, so we need to fight sin at the level of the heart. I am not saying that having protections against behavioral sin are not important. We need all the defenses that we can get. However, just as important as defense, we need some offense in fighting sin. We need habits that reorient our hearts toward the right loves and give us a great appetite to love God. As we talked about last week, one of the ways our church is attempting to do this is by doing a daily Bible reading plan together. The habit of purposefully reading your Bible on a daily basis will begin to reorient your heart toward the right kind of affection.
But we don’t just read our Bibles, this daily reading plan is meant to be a personal time of worship every day. Our staff is very intentional about crafting our corporate time of worship every Sunday. Your personal time of worship should not be any different. Every day, when you open your Bible to do your daily reading, think about crafting that time as a time of personal worship, not just a time of learning or checking a box. Have a time for a prayer of praise, a prayer of confession, and a prayer of thanksgiving. Add one or two hymns to your personal time of worship that fit the themes you are reading in Scripture.
The danger of a personal reading plan for the whole Church is that it becomes a status symbol of the faithful and the unfaithful. It is not a box that we need to check every day. It needs to be something that we love doing because we love spending time worshipping God. If you focus on your time being a sweet time of worship, you will begin to desire that time. You will begin to look forward to it as something that can’t be missed.
We have already seen that the root of evil is the state of one’s heart. God is not revealed against sin, it is revealed against sinners. Dealing with our evil hearts is ultimately a matter of life and death for the individual, because the root of evil is the human heart. Now we have seen that our sinful actions do not come from outside of us, like the dietary restrictions of Israel. They come from inside of us. We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners. To truly win the battle over sin, we must reorient our hearts to love the right things. One of the ways that we can accomplish this is by transforming our daily time of reading into a daily time of worship.
Preferring man’s traditions to God’s law is an example of evil.
This finally brings us to the beginning of our story for this week. What does all of this talk about evil and the state of one’s heart have to do with the Pharisees? Let’s read Mark 7:1-13 and find out.
Mark 7:1-13
7 Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, 2 they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 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 him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6 And he 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 he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ 11 But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban” ’ (that is, given to God)— 12 then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”
The Pharisees are bringing charges against Jesus’s disciples. The charge is that the disciples are not holding to the traditions of the elders. They are not washing their hands properly before they eat. Now, before we just dismiss the Pharisees as religious zealots that are simply trying to trick Jesus, let’s attempt to understand what is going on here.
Defilement under the law is a real problem. Defilement could spread from things to people back to things and on to other people. The Law had many rules to help keep Israel set apart, but it didn’t cover everything. The traditions that the Pharisees started as an attempt to make explicit what Scripture left implied. The problem is not that the traditions existed, the problem was that the traditions had become as authoritative as Scripture.
You can see this in the way Christ responds to the accusation in verses 6-8.
Mark 7:6-8
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.”
The Pharisees were teaching that the commandments of men had the same authority as the doctrines of God. In fact, he goes one step further and says that they have left the commandments of God and are actually only holding to the traditions of men.
So, how does all of this talk about the root of evil and the state of one’s heart have to do with the Pharisees? Our third and final point is this: Preferring man’s traditions to God’s law is an example of evil. The Pharisees are the case study. If the root of evil is the orientation of the heart away from God towards the love of anything and everything else besides God, then choosing to follow man’s traditions rather than God’s law is evil. As Christ says, it shows that their hearts are far from God. They worship him with their mouths, but in reality, their heart is oriented toward the love of everything but God.
I want to emphasize this point. It would be wrong to say, “See, here Jesus is saying that all tradition is evil. We need to get rid of all traditions.” That is not what Christ is saying. Christ is saying that when the Pharisees elevate the tradition of man over the law of God, they show that the true orientation of their hearts. Someone that truly loves God would never us tradition in that way.
This has become so bad for the Pharisees that they purposefully counsel people to disobey the Law of God. The example he gives is one where a young person is told not to take care of their father or mother in their old age and instead give those resources to the temple. Because the gift financially benefits the Pharisees, they are counseling Jews to directly disobey Scripture and follow the traditions of man.
The system that the Pharisees have established could be characterized as a legalistic system. Let’s define legalism. Legalism is when someone attempts to achieve righteousness by their own actions and encourages other people to do the same. Legalism is not rightly following the commands of God. There are things that God has said we must do. To obey those commands is not legalism. Legalism is when we obey those commands in order to become righteous, not because we are already righteous.
So the Pharisees are legalists. They are attempting to earn their righteousness by doing all of the right things, and they expect Jesus and his disciples do to the same thing. But Jesus sees through their outward actions and knows that their hearts are far from God.
This is the big application point for the Church: we obey God because we love him, and he loves us. We can never do enough good things to earn his favor. He loves us in spite of our brokenness. He loved us while we were still sinners and his enemies. When our hearts is rightly oriented toward God, when we love him as he ought to be loved, obedience is easy. We want to follow his commands because he has already demonstrated his goodness and kindness to us in Christ.
We cannot be like the Pharisees. It is impossible to earn God’s love. His love is a free act of grace that we cannot earn. It is impossible to earn righteousness. Our righteousness is foreign to us and freely given to us by Christ himself. He did what we could not do and gave us a gift we do not deserve. It is impossible to keep God’s favor. We didn’t earn his love or our righteousness, so it is impossible for us to keep it once we have it. The Holy Spirit is the one that keeps us walking in every statute of the law. He is the one that is the seal of our future hope of redemption. If we stay in the Lord’s favor until the end of our days, it is not going to be because we held onto the Holy Spirit, it is going to be because the Holy Spirit held onto us.
Conclusion
The ultimate root of evil is the state of one’s heart out of which come all sinful actions, like preferring man’s traditions to God’s law. Evil is not out there. Evil is in here. Every single man that has even been born, except for Christ himself, has been born with an evil heart that does not love God. We are, everyone of us, a rebel against our Creator and our hearts are factories of evil actions. They are constantly churning out sinful thoughts and deeds.
These kinds of sermons are hard. It is hard to preach them and it is hard to hear them. My heart has felt heavy all week knowing that we were going to stare long and hard at the corruption of the human heart, and I knew that what we were going to see was only ugly. There is nothing good inside of the hearts of men.
But I also know that these kinds of sermons are so important to the ultimate health of the Church. Unless we have stared deep into the ugliness of our own evil hearts, we will not be ready to see the beauty in the ugliness of the cross. Why did our savior have to die such a brutal and shameful death? Where is the beauty in the bloody sacrifice of our innocent king? If you believe that you are a good person, you can’t answer that question. It is not until you have look long in hard at the mirror of God’s word that you start to see yourself for who you truly are. You cannot understand the beauty of grace without understanding the evil of the human heart.
The good news is that there is grace. God provided a way of escape. Knowing that we could never save ourselves, he crossed the chasm of sin by taking on human flesh and standing in our place to take the wrath of God that we deserved so that we could have a righteousness that we do not deserve. My hope is that the bitterness of today’s sermon makes the Gospel that much sweeter.
Let’s pray.