Vain Worship

Presently, I have three young grandchildren, and the question is, how should they come to live—not just as they grow up at home, but also when they become adults. What is the wise way for them to live now and later on in life? How are my grandkids to learn wisdom and how are we to gain wisdom?

Whether you are young or old, whether you are a young child or an old man, whether we are flush with youth or in middle age, we need the same thing. We each need wisdom in order to live well. Our devotional scripture reading last Sunday was from Proverbs 4, and it tells us of the importance of wisdom. Verse 7 says, “Wisdom is supreme; therefore, get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.” Midweek we read in Proverbs 8:10–11, “Choose my instruction instead of silver, knowledge rather than choice gold, for wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her.”

Young people, is wisdom something you are pursuing? Old man, have you given up on pursuing wisdom as impossible? Let us look at the word of Proverbs 4 in light of Mark 7. We will consider, first, wisdom and its benefits; second, get wisdom; third, the heart problem; and, fourth, the solution. And I probably will not finish this morning, so we will finish another day.

Wisdom and Its Benefits

Why should we pursue wisdom? Why is it worth so much? Young person, as you hopefully want to live long, you should also want to be happy. You should want to be a success in life. If your answer is “Yes,” then you need godly wisdom.

Wisdom, you see, is the stuff that makes for happiness and fulfillment and a life lived successfully before God. It is divine wisdom that enables you to make right choices. Teenager, you have important decisions ahead of you. First and foremost is to sincerely entrust yourself to Jesus as Lord and to dedicate your life in serving him. All else flows from that.

It is wisdom, for instance, that leads you to choose a godly Christian spouse so that you can live together with that person in joy and happiness (Prov. 2:17). It is wisdom that makes you choose a useful career, a calling from God, that you find both fulfilling and prosperous. It is wisdom that gives you a good name and reputation so that you are favored by all and despised only by those who hate Christ. Wisdom challenges you to be like Daniel and his friends, not a prodigal and a fool. It is wisdom that keeps you walking down the right path, the path of righteousness and uprightness (Prov. 2:8–9). It is wisdom that enables you to live out faith each and every day in every way. Proverbs 9:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”

Listen to what Proverbs 8 says about the benefits of wisdom:

Counsel and sound judgment are mine; I have understanding and power. By me kings reign and rulers make laws that are just; by me princes govern, and all nobles who rule on earth. I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me. With me are riches and honor, enduring wealth and prosperity. My fruit is better than fine gold; what I yield surpasses choice silver. I walk in the way of righteousness, along the paths of justice, bestowing wealth on those who love me and making their treasuries full. (Prov. 8:14–21)

Wisdom has so many benefits for the person of God, and it is most worthy of following. So to each of you, I challenge you: Get wisdom!

Get Wisdom

Now, where do we get wisdom from? How do we become wise and end up enjoying the blessings and benefits the Bible promises? How do we become wise enough to faithfully live out the Christian faith?

Let me start off by saying that some of the smartest people you and I know are some of the dumbest. They have no wisdom. Godly wisdom has nothing to do with brains or money. It also has nothing to do with education or philosophy or science or computer programming or corporate success. The cultural elites of our day, the New York Times reporters, the CNN commentators, the women’s studies and social science professors, the NFL commissioner and Colin Kaepernick, Greta Thunberg and Al Gore, and the Jeff Bezos-types of the corporate world do not have wisdom. They are fools. Psalm 14 says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” Even if they do not express or deny God with their mouths, they deny him in their actions. Ephesians 2:12 says that such people are “separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.”

Real wisdom comes from God. It is gotten by living one’s life according to God’s revelation to us, according to the Bible. The Westminster Shorter Catechism answer 2 tells us, “The Word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy [God forever].” Real wisdom is gleaned from studying the Bible and seeking counsel from proven, Spirit-filled men of God. But that by itself ,though, is not sufficient. The wise man or woman is one who, according to Matthew 7:24, hears God’s word and puts it into practice. Such a person is a wise man who builds his house on the rock. It does not fall in the storms of life because it has its foundation on the rock. Everyone who hears God’s words and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who builds his house on the sand. The rain comes down, the streams rise, and the winds blow and beat against that house, and it will fall with a great crash (see Matt. 7:24–27).

Unfortunately, churches often drift from this truth over time. Unregenerate persons begin to fill the pews and the pulpits, and human traditions slowly take over. Now, worldly wisdom says if you only keep a certain set of rules and do given rituals, then you will be right with God. The problem is that that is simply not true. Such people become preoccupied in life with obeying human rules and regulations, and they conceive of Christianity as a series of do’s and don’t’s. But theirs is a cold and deadly set of shifting moralizing principles. They substitute obedience to man-made rules in the place of obedience to God’s word. The authority of all men is thus preferred to the command of God. They forget God is looking for perfect obedience to his laws, and none of us makes the cut. We are sinners by nature and sinners by action, and our own supposed good works are as filthy rags to God.

Nevertheless, many people in every generation throughout history insist on trying to obtain salvation through rule-keeping you keep, whether it is to their own rules or to some other guru’s. The scribes and Pharisees had tons of rules, as we shall see shortly. The small core of them was loosely fashioned on certain biblical mandates in the Old Testament, in the ceremonial law. The rest were simply made up by someone enamored with his own self-importance, someone who thought his own thoughts more perfect than the word of God, and who had the special standing in society to impose his will on others. This is always followed by the growth of tyranny. When men have once assumed to themselves the right to issue rules and regulations, they demand a rigid adherence to their laws and do not tolerate even the smallest iota of deviance to be left out. Deviate in any way, and they will heap contempt on you. Jesus calls these rules taught by men. All together they constitute vain worship—worship that God does not approve of.

These morality police use human policies to bind the conscience in an ultimate way to make their policies determinative of your salvation, and thus they venture into territory that is God’s alone.

In Mark 7, a face-off ensues between Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees. They try to intimidate Jesus with their posturing. These religious police noticed that Jesus’ disciples had begun to eat, and they are aghast at what they see. Part of the “great unwashed”, the contemptible working class, these disciples of Jesus, do not ceremonially wash their hands before they start to eat; nor, I might add, were they practicing social distancing. It was a violation of the Jewish CDC mandates and King Herod’s coronavirus guidelines. Like the COVID-19 Nazis of today, these Pharisaical hypocrites were quick to pick at legal nits with others over trifles in their laws while constantly looking for loopholes for themselves. They thus neglected the great duties of biblically defined godliness and righteousness, which are unchanging obligations to God. They recoiled in horror at ceremonially unwashed hands but were perfectly comfortable with their own impure murderous thoughts towards Jesus.

To them, Jesus is a troublemaker. He and his men are showing their ignorant disregard for the tenets of true, progressive religion. The Pharisees queried, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the traditions of the elders instead of eating their food with unclean hands? You call yourself a religious man, and yet you failed to even do the most elementary duties of our religion!” And so they substitute their rules for God’s.

Now, almost four centuries before this incident, the thirty-nine canonical books of the Old Testament Scriptures had been completed. And there was to be no more divine revelation or vision given by God to the nation of Israel until the Messiah came. It was during those three to four hundred years of silence that a new class of men arose, legal experts and casuists who became known as the scribes and teachers of the law. A casuist is a person who uses clever-sounding arguments and unsound reasoning that may be false to solve moral problems.

God’s word is not enough for them, so they create and entangle others in the snares of their own vain legalistic traditions. Thus, the authority of men is preferred to the command of God. (GJB) These men are not content with just keeping the Ten Commandments or simply embracing the unvarnished ceremonial laws found in the Old Testament. No, where these areas of law were silent, the scribes and Pharisees filled in the gaps with their own rules and regulations. Putting it another way, the scribes and Pharisees were binding people’s consciences to things which were not required of them in the Scriptures. As they saw matters, it was their sacred duty to enforce this oral tradition and sternly punish any attempt to undermine it.

Jesus condemns this in verse 8: “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.” The word “holding” in verse 8 refers to grasping firmly. They were obstinately adhering to the tradition of the elders. Now, it is not a bad thing to wash your hands before eating. We should do it. But here is what was really at stake: The Bible never says that everyone must wash his or her hands in a prescribed, given way. The only Old Testament reference you could find was for priests to wash their hands and feet before entering the Tent of Meeting (Exod. 30:19–21 and Exod. 40:30–32). But the Pharisees had religiously turned it and extended their interpretation of the practice to include everyone.

This Pharisaical handwashing was not done in the interests of hygienic cleanliness. Yes, you should obey your mother and wash your hands before eating if possible. But here it was ceremonial purity that was at stake. Before every meal and between each course, the hands had to be washed, they said, in a certain prescribed way. Failing to do this was not considered bad manners or poor health practices; it was to be ceremonially unclean in the sight of God.

Now, did God say to do this? Absolutely not! They just made it up. True biblical faith was buried under a mass of external human taboos and rules. Some Pharisees even determined that neglect of ceremonial washing was a greater sin than prostitution, and others declared it would be much better to die rather than not to do it.

And it was not just handwashing that was at stake. They had laws about everything. There were some immensely detailed and complicated laws and regulations about how to observe the Sabbath—how far you could walk and what things you could and couldn’t do, and so on. They had lots and lots of rules and regulations governing food preparation and eating. There were rules about what to do when you came in contact with Gentiles. It often mandated when you had to take a bath. Dishes and cooking utensils could also become unclean, so our text in verse 4 talks about the washing of cups and pitchers and kettles. All these rules were later codified into the Mishnah, which came to have more importance than the Scriptures.

In the Mishnah, there were 186 pages just on the subject of ritual washing. This, then, was the religion confronting Jesus. Its essence was ritual purity based on man-made rules and ceremonies. The Pharisees wrongly saw them as the heart of Jewish piety and the way to please God.

Jesus, however, is having nothing of it. He calls it the rules of men. He tells the Pharisees in verse 9, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!” This problem is clearly seen in the issue of what is Corban (vv. 10–13). Corban means things dedicated to God. The underlying issue was God’s command to honor your father and mother, especially to do so when it may cost you something financially, when you really just did not want to it, or when it was a huge inconvenience for you. The Pharisees, however, established an ingenious way to dodge this duty and not feel guilty. At the time, there was no social welfare system, no Social Security, no Medicare, no long-term insurance care, or anything like that. So children were biblically obligated to look financially after their parents. And they still are, I might add. Look at 1 Timothy 5:8.

So the scribes came up with this formula. You could sign a note in which you devote all your money to God. The nifty thing is that you can hold on to your money. You do not have to actually put the money in the offering plate. It still is in your possession for you to use for your own purposes, though technically it belongs to God. Thus, when your parents ask for help, you would just say, ‘Sorry. Corban. All my money is devoted to the Lord, so I just cannot help you out.”

Now, that may sound terrible to us, especially those of us who are over 65. But Jesus’ point is even larger than that. This is the way we often treat God. We give him the dregs. We give him the leftovers. We give him the bits and pieces that are not inconvenient to us. That was the prophet Malachi’s complaint to the Jews of his day, and Jesus now points out the hypocrisy of those in his day. And, my friends, Jesus still hates such hypocrisy when we play false with true faith, when we sing God’s praises with our lips, but our hearts are far from him.

Additionally, Jesus is showing how the scribes and Pharisees have no biblical leg to stand on when they accuse Jesus of violating their oral traditions. Not only are their traditions nothing but the rules of men, and therefore not binding, but in their efforts to defend the ceremonial law, they completely misunderstood and distorted the purpose of God’s moral law in the first place. It was not only to guide their lives, but to drive them to repentance and faith in God’s substitutionary atonement for lawbreakers—the sacrifices in the Old Testament and the ultimate sacrifice in Christ.

These self-righteous scribes and Pharisees are not the true guardians of God’s law. Rather, they end up negating it. They negate the very word of God they are claiming to defend. And, in fact, Jesus says they do many things like this. Such legalistic rulemaking in every age of history makes slaves of people. The rules are always enforced by the “woke” Taliban of any particular time and place in history. These are zipper watchers who try to cow people into keeping whatever is the current set of politically correct rules. They seek to bind people’s consciences to things not required of them in the Scriptures. Violate their rules, and the Pharisees of old would kick you out of the local synagogue and alienate you from society. Violate their rules, and the Pharisaical progressives of today will demand that you be removed from the editorial board of your newspaper or fired from the university. And woe to you today if you say, “I bow only to King Jesus.” Woe to you if you try to live out Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Those, you see, are statements of “Gentile privilege,” and the Pharisees then and those of today will hound you out of society. And it can get worse, Jesus said in John 16:2, “They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God.”

Now, the Pharisaical rules of the first century may seem crazy to us today. But back in my youth, many churches had strict rules of how they would enforce morality. There were dress codes—how long a skirt could be or should not be, whether you should wear make-up or not, or jewelry or not. In my parents’ generation, you were not supposed to see The Wizard of Oz. In my youth, some churches were opposed to seeing The Sound of Music. And now woke people are banning books and movies.

There were rules against smoking and drinking. Smoking is not a sin stated in the Bible, yet not smoking became the mark of spirituality. So our society today should be more spiritual than previous societies. Drinking to excess is condemned in the Bible, yet legalistic people ban alcohol altogether. Some people simply cannot live without making up moral rules and imposing them on others and demonizing them as they do not knuckle under. Then again, there are other serious problems with being a Pharisee. One problem is your own personal inconsistency. No human being can keep all the societal norms perfectly all the time.

Worse, people always cheat and are hypocrites, publicly appearing to keep the rules and privately doing otherwise, like the governor of Michigan who insisted that others could not go boating but her husband could. Such Pharisees insist that the average woman cannot go to the hairdresser because she is deemed non-essential, but they can if they are the mayor of Chicago or the Speaker of the House of Representatives and deem themselves essential. Many governmental jurisdictions across our land are imposing strict caps on religious gatherings even as they allow huge gatherings of people in the streets to protest against law enforcement. In this way, they are saying that leftist political speech is more important than the gospel.

Was not Jesus right in condemning all such legalists? In Matthew 23, starting in verse 25 he said, “Woe to you, teachers of the law, and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish. But inside you are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness” (Matt. 23:25–28).

So the most serious problem is not that we are inconsistent in keeping the rules. It is that our hearts are all wrong. No amount of rule-keeping will make them right. We each need a fundamental, divine heart transplant. The only solution for Pharisaical legalism is not to run to the other ditch and become an antinomian, which is the prevailing spirit in evangelical churches today. That heresy says, “You do not need to obey anyone. Live as autonomously from God as you want. All the rules, even the Ten Commandments, are passé. We are saved only by accepting Jesus as our Savior. Submitting to Jesus as our Lord and living a holy life are optional and certainly not required. All authority is oppressive and passé. God places no expectations upon you. You can sin freely and still go to heaven.” And if you do try and live a holy life before God, the woke evangelicals will try and shame you in the public square and on the Internet.

This is all a gross misrepresentation of the Bible and what it says about obedience and Christian discipleship. Jesus is both Savior and Lord and cannot be divided. God directs us in Proverbs 7:2–3, “Keep my commands and you will live; guard my teachings as the apple of your eye. Bind them on your fingers; write them on the tablet of your heart.” He also said in John 14:15, “If you love me, you will obey what I command.”

So we are not saved by legalistic law-keeping. We are saved from a transformed heart that loves God and his ways, that seeks to please God because we are thankful and grateful to him for what he has done for us in saving us. If that is not your heart, you need a heart transplant, and the problem with the heart transplant is that only God can do that. Only regeneration by the Holy Spirit and submission to Jesus Christ can set things right in you in this life. And then one day Christ will come and set things right permanently. All other solutions proffered by people are illusory and hoaxes. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”

So it is regeneration that transforms your heart, and faith which cements this new relationship to Jesus and results in love for him. God pours his love into the hearts of his people and we in turn love others as well. But it begins with the heart. This is wisdom.