The Merciful Call of Christ

Once again, to the Gospel of
Luke. Luke’s Gospel. And we find ourselves one more
time. At least one more time in chapter 10. There is a word, a Greek word,
that has really been bandied about for several thousand years. It’s a compound of two Greek
words. But in the mid-1940s, 1946 to
be exact, this little Greek word took on a very technical meaning
in our world. And it continues to this day.
A word that is used almost every day by some of us in various
circles and for various purposes. The word is synthetic. Synthetic. And we have come in our day and
age to know that it basically came to take on, the Greek word
means sin, or sun, is with. Thetic is taken from tithemi,
to place. To place together with is what
it means. We came to know it in 1946 as
being man-made. where we took something, added
it to something else, and a new product was formed. And so from
out of that, now we have synthetic motor oil. We have synthetic
fabrics. We have synthetic chemicals.
We have synthetic rubber called neoprene. We even, ladies, I
have bad news. We even have synthetic diamonds.
You might want to check that later. The sad thing is, though, I believe that for a long time
before we began to use this word in that technical fashion, man
developed a synthetic religion, a synthetic spirituality, a man-made
religion that he picked and chose and took what he wanted and put
in other things that he desired. a way that he could devise a
way to get to heaven. And you know what? It isn’t dead
yet. We’ll read about the Pharisees and we’ll point to them and we’ll
look at how they did this in their man-made, synthetic spirituality. But in truth, it’s not over.
In truth, it still goes on to this day. In truth, there are
still people that practice this man-made religion. There are
still people that adhere to these things. And may I even go a step
further to say each one of us probably stumbles in one of these
areas from time to time. Each one of us is tempted in
these areas that I’ll lay before you this morning. See if you
can’t spot them. I picked out what I believe are
four destructive features of man-made religion, all of which
press us To Christ, to Christ alone, even as we’ve already
read and focused on this morning, to Christ alone for salvation.
Pick up with me, if you would, beginning in Luke 11, verse 37. Now, when he had spoken, a Pharisee
asked him to have lunch with him and he went in and reclined
at the table. When the Pharisees saw it, he
was surprised that he had not first ceremonially washed before
the meal. But the Lord said to him, Now
you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the platter,
but inside of you, you’re full of robbery and wickedness. You
foolish ones. Did he not who made the outside
make the inside also? But give that which is within
charity, then all things are clean for you. But woe to you,
Pharisees, for you pay tithe of mint and rue and every kind
of garden herb and yet disregard justice and the love of God.
But these are the things you should have done without neglecting
the others. Woe to you, Pharisees, For you
love the chief seats in the synagogues and the respectful greetings
in the marketplaces. Woe to you, for you are like
concealed tombs and the people who walk over them are unaware
of it. You may recognize those words,
you may even mistake those words for several other instances where
the Lord used almost identical words. If you’re a student of
Matthew’s Gospel, you’ll find them in chapter 23, where we
have that just overwhelming rebuke. Woe after woe after woe. Where Christ rebukes the religious
elite of His day. I don’t believe this is the same
setting. In fact, the words are substantially different. The
imagery is substantially different. Jesus uses them in different
ways there. We’ll see in a moment. This was
a different situation entirely. It’s not absurd to think that
Jesus might have used the same imagery, the same words, some
of the same illustrations, even the same message. Pastors have
been known to do that, right? Well, this is a unique situation,
unique to Luke’s gospel. There are other similar passages.
Jesus had been challenged before on his disciples and their unwillingness
to wash their hands before dinner. And Jesus dealt with that in
Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 15, and in Mark’s Gospel in chapter
7. But this isn’t the same as those
either. This is another situation entirely where Jesus Himself
is called on the carpet regarding His ceremonial inattention. I suggested here this morning
that there are four destructive features of this man-made religion,
this synthetic spirituality. And each one of these ultimately
presses us. There’s no hope here. And it
presses us back to Christ. Christ is the only hope. And
you will see nothing but emptiness. You get nothing. No encouragement. No confidence, no salvation in
any of the things that make up man-made religion. Let’s look
first at the first feature of man-made religion. First and
foremost, it is hypocritical. It’s hypocritical. Look back again at verse 37. Picking up that passage, Jesus
had spoken. And we know the context, what
he had just spoken. He had just rebuked them because
they had alleged that he was doing the works of the devil.
They were attributing his works to the devil himself. And Jesus
rebuked them for it soundly. And so this overage to have him
into lunch, Jesus saw it for what it was. He took it at face
value. It allegedly was a meal. It wasn’t a very fancy or formal
meal. It was impromptu. It was really
a snack. We might call it afternoon tea. But it was hypocritical and Jesus
knew His heart. So He went in. Verse 38 says
that when the Pharisees saw that he just immediately plopped down
at the table and didn’t go through all the big formal hand-washing
ceremony that was absolutely required in Pharisaical circles, the Pharisee reacts. Perhaps
this Pharisee had been with Jesus. Perhaps this Pharisee had, we
note, almost certainly that he was there for quite some time
and likely heard the discourses, the challenges that he was issuing.
So Jesus knows his heart. Jesus knows his motives. And
that explains the tone with which Jesus responds. to his evil challenge. And that’s exactly what the Proverbs
teach us, don’t they? When I read this passage, I thought
immediately of Proverbs 23. When you sit down to dine with
a ruler, be careful. Consider carefully what is before
you and put a knife to your throat. If you’re a man of great appetite,
do not desire his delicacies for it is deceptive food. That’s
exactly the situation that Christ found himself in. This is akin
to putting a knife to the throat is saying, you know what, you’re
a hypocrite. This is the man who allegedly
invited you into lunch and there were commentators that suggested
that Jesus was just playing rude here. Can you imagine? Verse 38, this challenge that
he issued, and he didn’t even verbally issue it. He just thought
it. It never says that he challenged
Jesus at all verbally. But in his mind, he challenged
Him. You see, this duty of cleanliness had been turned. It was purely
by oral tradition that they held to this. Moses had instituted
certain washings to be obeyed at certain times, usually in
the Levitical priesthood. The Pharisees had taken this
and gone way beyond. And they had made it incumbent
upon everybody at every situation Anytime you walk through a marketplace
where there might be a Gentile, there were washings scribed.
Any meal that you partook of because you didn’t want to defile
yourself having touched a Gentile or anything that a Gentile touched
for that matter. I told you a minute ago that
there was another situation, a different situation entirely
in Matthew’s gospel. Flip over. Keep your finger in
Luke. Flip over to Matthew chapter
15. In Matthew 15, I told you, it was his disciples that really
come under fire. It was his disciples there that
were challenged by the Pharisees as to their hygiene habits. But it had nothing really to
do with dirty, grimy hands. It had everything to do with
their man-made religion and this hypocritical, man-made standard
of eating with purified hands. Look at verse one. Some Pharisees
and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and they said, why
do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They couldn’t
go to chapter and verse. And so often this is exactly
how it takes place in our circles. I can’t give you chapter and
verse. I just know it isn’t the way that we do things here. Why
do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not
wash their hands when they eat bread. And Jesus issues that
exact challenge to them. Why do you yourselves transgress
the commandment of God? You’re adding to the Word of
God. This tradition which had been passed down from one to
the other for thousands of years, from generation to generation,
had become an immense, as one said, mass of traditions which
the Jews revered and they held them even on a higher plane than
God’s Word. They adhered to these more strictly
than even God’s law. Ultimately, they continued to
accumulate down even after the days of Christ. They were ultimately
written down in a book called the Mishnah. All of these traditions
and commentary upon them, they were highly esteemed. And as
I said, most viewed them as important or even more important than God’s
written law. One rabbi said, the words of
the scribes are more lovely than the words of the law. For the
words of the law are weighty and light. But the words of the
scribes are all weighty. They wanted harshness. They wanted
this heaviness. God’s standard wasn’t high enough,
and so they invented a higher one. Ultimately, the Talmud declared
that it was a greater crime to transgress the words of the school
of Hillel, a Jewish rabbi and his school, than it was the law. One rabbi found himself thrown
in prison. And due to something, either
the harshness of his captors or his behavior in prison, some
cause, they began to cut back on his water. And he basically
made the decision to use what little water they gave him for
the washing of hands. Ultimately, he said, I’d rather
die. I’d rather die of thirst than to eat with impure hands. Foolish. The problem with all this was
it was completely devoid of divine
sanction. God never said it. God never
these stipulations upon people. And that’s what makes it so hypocritical.
These Pharisees had found numerous areas where they could get really
good at things that standards that they could attain to, and
they would put them off on the people and the people couldn’t
attain to them. And they were hypocritical. It had become a superstitious
practice. They were tyrannical about enforcing
it. And all of it was futile. It
had nothing to do with God. Ultimately, what it really was
all about was just spiritual elitism. So the surprise of Jesus’
host, if you turn back to Luke 11 now, the surprise of the host,
even in his heart, Maybe he raised an eyebrow. Maybe he muttered
something. It isn’t recorded in any of Scripture.
But Jesus knew his heart. And Jesus takes opportunity to
respond to his heart and he doesn’t mince words. After what had just
taken place and the blasphemous accusations, Jesus’ words and
his tone are perfectly appropriate. Perfectly appropriate. God had appointed certain washings,
but not these. Look at verse 39. Jesus begins
to rebuke them. He says, the Lord said to them,
you Pharisees, this is how hypocritical you are. You clean the outside
of the cup and of the platter, but inside of you, you’re full
of robbery and wickedness. And they would spend elaborate
opportunities cleaning and polishing. If you’ve ever been to some high
church services, you’ll see them when they perform the Lord’s
table, elaborately cleaning up in the pestles, the cup and the
platter. Very similar situation. Jesus
says you go to great lengths to wash your dishes and then
you put foul putrid meat in it. and foul, rotten drink in it. I went to a friend’s house one
time. Don’t worry, it wasn’t anybody in this room. I was so thirsty, they got me
a glass of water, and I noticed as soon as they set the glass
down, I don’t even think it had been through the dishwasher.
I was pretty certain things floating, things stuck to the side. That’s
exactly the image that Jesus says He says, you know what? You make great show of washing
the dishes and then you fill it with foul things. Another
instance where the shoe was on the other foot, I had my buddy
Frank. It was my graduation day from
seminary. A friend of ours had given us blueberry muffins as
a present for graduation. They sat in our car most of the
day in the warm California sun. That evening, Frank and I finally,
after a long, long day, long night, sat down to blueberry
muffins, got out nice platters, carved them up, put butter on
them, put them in the microwave for 10, 15 seconds, and we each
took one bite, exactly one bite. They were putrid. They were rotted. No amount of beauty, no amount
of preparation, nothing would fix them. And that’s exactly
what Jesus says of the dish of these Pharisees. Everything that
they dished up was foul and putrid because their heart was wrong.
He says you’re full of robbery and wickedness. No way is He
going to sit down and dine with them and enjoy their delicacies,
because He knew that they were arrived at by fraud, the response
in verse 40. You foolish ones. Did He who
made the outside make the inside also? Shouldn’t you be as worried
about the inside of your bodies as the outside? And here they
were ceremonially and fastidiously washing their hands and going
through great gyrations to make sure that their hands were ceremonially
clean. And inside their hearts were
as wicked and evil as the day they were born. Jesus says the food that you
are dishing up is only through your own wicked devices. It’s through stealing from innocent
people, from putting these weighty burdens on them, demanding tithes
that God never required. That’s what Jesus lays before
them. God had made their body. But
God had made their soul also. cared for the one and neglected
the other. No wonder Jesus zeroes in on
the problem. Jesus had such a knack of going
right to the heart of the matter, and here was case in point, verse
41. He says, you know what the real problem is? Try this. This is exactly what He said
to the rich young ruler. Give that which is within to
charity. Go take this meal and give it
to the poor and then all things are clean to you. He said, if
you could possibly do that, then you would know that your heart
is changed. That’s the problem. That’s your wicked heart in play. God didn’t care for ceremonies,
not in and of themselves. God instituted very few ceremonies,
but even the ceremonies that he instituted, he didn’t care
for those ceremonies at all if they were if they weren’t accompanied
by sincere hearts, purified hearts. It’s the spirit of love. It’s
the spirit of generosity. It’s the spirit of compassion
that these Pharisees lacked. They were hypocritical. Here
they were having Jesus in in some kind of pretended show of
affection for Him. and having him in for the afternoon
meal, and Jesus says, your heart isn’t with Me, because your heart
isn’t with anybody. You’re hypocrites. It wasn’t
the first time that God had rebuked these people for the same thing.
Isaiah chapter 1 talks about this very practice of going through
the motions. And here’s where it begins to
hit home for us, because we too can be equally hypocritical.
We tell people all the time, I’ll pray for you. That’s a great
answer, isn’t it? Let me pray for you. I’ll pray
for you. This week, I’ll pray for you.
And we don’t. We come to church and for an
hour, we look like the saintliest saints that ever walked this
putrid earth. We dress up, we put on a fair
face, comb our hair, we look good, talk good for an hour. Isaiah challenged, God challenged the people in
Isaiah chapter one. Hear the word of the Lord, you
rulers of Sodom. Give ear to the instruction of the Lord,
you people of Gomorrah. What are your multiplied sacrifices
to me? What is all this church attendance
have to do with me? They thought that in all their
wickedness, if they just were more spiritual, that God would
overlook it. What are your multiplied sacrifices
to me, says the Lord? I have had enough of burnt offerings
of rams and the fat of fed cattle. I take no pleasure in the blood
of bulls or lambs or goats. When you come to appear before
me, who requires of you this trampling of my courts?” God
said to them, go home. I don’t need this. I don’t need
your church service. I don’t need your pretension,
your show, your phoniness. The minor prophets also recorded
such instances. Amos chapter 5. I hate. Here’s a word we try to get our
kids not to say, but God said, I hate you and I reject your
festivals. It wasn’t the festivals in and
of themselves that God hated. He hated the fact that their
heart wasn’t in it. They were just going through
the motion. Nor do I delight in your solemn
assemblies. I love the way Isaiah’s solemn
assembly. God hated it. Micah 6, he dealt
with it as well. With what shall I come to the
Lord and bow myself before the Lord God on high? Shall I come
with burnt offerings, with yearling calves? Does the Lord take delight
in thousands of rams and ten thousand rivers of oil? Is that
what God wants? Shall I present my firstborn
for my rebellious acts? The fruit of my body for the
sin of my soul? He’s told you, O man, what is
good and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and
love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. And some of us
get so good at looking like Christians instead of being concerned about
acting, serving like a Christian. It’s interesting that word hypocrite
You know, the original meaning of that word was actor. So in
a very real sense, the Hollywood crowd, they’re hypocrites. The question for us is how are
we playing the part of the hypocrite ourselves? How are we acting?
In what ways are we acting? And in what ways are we really,
if the truth be told, if we could really see ourselves as we are,
we wouldn’t have the accolades of our friends and family and those around us, they’d be disgusted. Hypocrisy is just one of those
destructive features of man-made religion, but it’s foremost. And it presses us to Christ,
because only Christ can remove that hypocrisy. Only Christ can
make us genuine. Only Christ can purify our hearts
and our souls. That’s exactly what he was telling
these Pharisees. Secondly, man-made religion is
not only hypocritical, it’s inconsistent. Inconsistent. Look at verse 42. Look at their foolishness. Woe
to you, Pharisees, for you pay tithe of mint and rue and every
kind of garden herb and yet disregard the justice and the love of God.”
Same point that he had just made. These are the things which you
should have done without neglecting the others. God, he says, just
as he had already intimated, would best be shown by love of
others. You’re going through all this, you know, real careful,
icky, picky little task for the sacrifice. God never asked you
to give. Some of you remember our old
house on Troutman, one of the things I did there, I haven’t
done for my wife yet, but over there, what we did and what we
had to leave behind was a little herb garden. We had some of the
same herbs mentioned here. In fact, we even had the biblical
plant hyssop. Beautiful smelling stuff. And
we had all these little herbs. And you know what? I can’t imagine.
I can’t imagine the strain and the difficulty of getting down
there and separating all these individual little seeds from
all these individual little herbs so that I could bring a tenth
of it to the Lord. That’s what they did. And it’s
not only what they did, it’s what they commanded. It’s what
they expected of everybody. They upped the ante. They raised
the standard on God’s standard. God had required a tenth of a
lot of things. He required a tenth of their
oil and a tenth of their flocks. A tenth of their grain. But they
took it to an extreme, as they often did. They had extended this command
to the smallest little plant in their garden. If it was good
smelling, if it bore seed, I think it was… I can’t remember. One guy said
one time that everything’s a weed unless we
found a use for it. And if they had found a use for
it, they tithed on it. If they found out a good use
for dandelion, I’m sure they would have had you bring in the
heads of the dandelions before they flowered and blew away.
That’s how hypocritical they were. Jesus says that essentially
here they had become so fastidious about these icky, picky little
things, and they were ignoring the greater things. And that
is so often what happens in our Christianity, isn’t it? We have
areas, if not consciously, subconsciously, where we can be tremendously
faithful. And in our faithfulness, we challenge
and rebuke everybody around us. All the while blind and deaf
to those areas where we have consciously chosen to neglect. We may become strong in our devotions
But our service to others is completely absent. We may become
the greatest workers in our Christian community, and yet we’re totally
inconsistent. We have a tendency to be just
exactly like these Pharisees, to pick and choose part of God’s
economy that we want to obey, and we want to be very good at
that. And then we want to put off on everybody else, why aren’t
you like us? He’s overdid it. They picked and they choosed and they neglected the great
things. Jesus said it’s interesting point. He doesn’t say that what
they were doing with all these garden herbs was a bad thing.
Imagine having the privilege if you don’t have to have the
seed for mint to have the seed to grow mint. Jesus says on the
face of it, it’s a good thing if you do everything else. There’s another feature of man-made
religion that is destructive, that presses us as well to Christ. Not only is man-made religion
hypocritical and inconsistent, it’s pretentious. It is made
to be seen. It is made for people to look
and ogle and admire our lives and our works and our walk. We
want areas wherein we can be faithful so that other people
can see us and notice. Verse 43, woe to you Pharisees,
you love the chief seats. You love the chief seats in the
synagogues and the respectful greetings in the marketplaces.
These are the places in the synagogue that were right up front, right
around the rostrum, right around where the prayer would pray.
But the interesting thing about these seats is they faced outward.
They had a full view of the congregation, if you will. They had ready access
to the one praying or speaking. But the most noteworthy thing
about these seats is they were in full view of everybody. And
that’s exactly what they wanted. They longed for these seats.
They wanted these seats. And we do the same thing. Jesus
said, don’t let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.
And we do it all the time. We want people to see our righteousness. We want people to see us practicing
our righteousness. We want people to see that we’ve
gotten successful in this particular area of Christianity. I think in many churches there
are these same kind of seats. I used to refer to them as church
thrones. Maybe you’ve been in churches
that have them where behind the pulpit sits these chairs. And
in some cases, you would imagine that a king should have a chair
so nice. Big, tall, padded, ornate chairs. But it isn’t just pastors that
fall into this. It isn’t just those who preach. We do the same thing in many
ways. William Law, a Puritan, wrote
a book called A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. And
in that book, he makes an interesting point. He says, hate and despise
all human glory. See, we don’t do that. We like
human glory. We like a little recognition.
We like people to see when we’re doing good. We like people to
see when we’re up front. We like people to notice us and
appreciate us. We like people to give us respectful
greetings, just like the Pharisees did. William Law said, hate that
stuff. Hate and despise all human glory,
for it is nothing else but human folly. It is the greatest snare
and the greatest betrayer that you can possibly admit into your
heart. Love, humility, in all its instances,
practice it in all its parts, for it is the noblest state of
the soul of man. It will set your heart and affections
right toward God and fill you with every temper that is tender
and affectionate towards men. That’s what they lacked. They
wanted to be seen. Man-made religion has an insatiable
appetite for the opinion of others. It’s exactly what we read in
the Gospel of John today, isn’t it? They were careful. They were
concerned about what others may think. Let’s be concerned about
what God thinks. Let’s be concerned about the
fact that He sees everything that we do. In what ways are
we pretentious? In what ways are we longing for
the eyes of others to be seen by them, to glory in what they
see? And finally, this morning, there’s one last feature that
presses us to Christ as the only hope. All of these other things
leave us completely empty. Hypocrisy, inconsistency, pretentiousness. Those things won’t save us. But fourth and finally, the fourth
destructive feature of this man-made religion is that man-made religion
is communicable. It’s communicable. In our day
and age, we’ve come to learn that as a dirty word. That means
it spreads. It’s infectious. And not in a
good way. Look at verse 44. where Jesus
says, woe to you, for you are like concealed tombs, and the
people who walk over them are unaware of it. What on earth
does He mean? The same figure, I told you a
minute ago, it’s used in Matthew’s rebuke in chapter 23, but it’s
used in a completely different fashion there. What He’s talking
about there in Matthew’s Gospel, when He uses the image of whitewashed
tombs, the reason they whitewash them, painted them over with
white paint so that no one would step on them. Why? Because they
would desecrate the dead? Desecrate their burial place?
Not at all. God’s Word had given them explicit
instructions that to touch a dead body, to touch a grave, you were
defiled, unclean for eight days. The Levitical law laid it down
quite clearly. And they would paint these graves
over so that you would not step on them unawares and thereby
become defiled. And Jesus says, you know what?
You’re like un-whitewashed graves. You’re like hidden graves. And
people come and they’re around you and they hang around you
and they learn your ways and they hear your speech. And they
become infected. They become infected with the
same disease that you have, and that’s exactly what 2 Peter and
Jude warn us of with regards to false teaching. Same exact
thing. The question for us this morning
in this term is, how are you affecting others? Are you affecting
them for good? Or are they imbibing some of
the same foolish ideas that you have? Same in the faith. Man-made
religion is worthless. And there is a tendency in every
one of our hearts to saddle up, to cuddle up next to one or all
of these features, these elements of man-made religion. We’re comfortable
in hypocrisy and inconsistency. Let’s examine our hearts. Let’s
have God examine our hearts. Our great gracious God. Only you, us who tend in many
ways to be just like these Pharisees, hypocritical and inconsistent. spreading our foolishness to
all around us. Father, our hearts are heavy
because of that. Lord, we know that only You can
save us. We thank You that only Christ,
only faith in Christ. We’re right back to that theme
again. Father, we thank You for Jesus Christ, our Savior. We
pray that You would examine every heart for areas of inconsistency
and phoniness. And right our hearts, correct
our hearts for Your glory. In Jesus’ name, Amen.