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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.”1 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?”2 (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.”
[1] 7:15
[2] 7:19
(ESV)
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
Today, we're gonna be continuing our sermon series in the book of Mark. So if you want to go ahead and turn to chapter 7, we'll be looking beginning in verse 14 today. It's also in your worship guide. Now this is going to serve as a bit of a part 2 to Jeff's sermon from last week. And there Jeff talked with us about how Jesus was confronted by the Pharisees, by the religious leaders of the time.
Dwight Castle:And they were challenging Jesus because of his followers, his disciples. They weren't washing their hands before they ate according to the tradition of the elders. And they gave Jesus and his disciples a hard time about this, but Jesus responds very clearly to them, and he points out the important difference between God's law, which was intended to be internalized and lived by by God's people, and the traditions of men. And Jesus says that what they have actually done is rejected the law of God and followed the traditions of men. Jesus says, don't judge your holiness in the eyes of God by how you conform externally to the religious things of life.
Dwight Castle:And today in this passage that we will look at, Jesus will build on this idea again. He will talk about what defiles a person. So look with me, if you will, Mark chapter 7 verse 14. And he, Jesus, called the people to him again, and he said to them, hear me, all of you, and understand there's 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. And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable.
Dwight Castle: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, since it enters not his heart, but his stomach, and is expelled. Thus, he declared all foods clean. And he said, what comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.
Dwight Castle:All these evil things come from within and they defile a person. This is the word of the lord. Thanks be to God. Will you pray with me? Lord Jesus, we come to you today needy.
Dwight Castle:We are all needy. We need to hear from you. We need a word from you today. I need a word from you. All of us here need a word from you.
Dwight Castle:And so we ask that you will speak to us, and that you will give us hearts that are receptive to hear your word. And so, Lord, pray that the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart will be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, oh, Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. This week, I, I voted. I went to Girls Incorporated, which is there anyone here who attended Redeemer when it met at Girls Incorporated?
Dwight Castle:A very small number of hands. But for those of you who don't know, Girls Inc. Is a girls' after school club, and it is in Crestwood. It's where Redeemer actually started meeting. And it was a flashback for me when I went in that gymnasium where we used to meet as a church body, And I was reminded of what it used to be like to worship, not in an old historic sanctuary building like this with beautiful stained glass.
Dwight Castle:But instead, when you looked around, we saw girls empowerment slogans all over the wall. So if you ever got bored with what Joel was saying, you could just look and see think like a queen, or if you can dream it, you can be it, or follow your heart. And I was thinking about this in as it pertains to today's sermon, particularly that last one. Now this wasn't unique. It's not something that we would only see in Girls Inc, that last slogan, follow your heart.
Dwight Castle:I actually googled that phrase, and it's everywhere. It's amazing how many songs, how many movies, how many famous people have said some variation of that phrase? Follow your heart. Walt Disney said this, let your heart be your guide. It whispers.
Dwight Castle:So listen closely. And I think every Disney movie ever since has said some version of essentially this. We have a whole generation of young girls who have heard Elsa singing at the top of her lungs, some version of no wrong, no right, no rules for me. Everywhere you look in culture, you hear this theme. Follow your heart.
Dwight Castle:Trust your heart. I actually found this random article in the Huffington Post that is by some no name counselor, a life coach, but I thought it perfectly captured what our culture says about the heart. Here's what it says. Your heart speaks the truth. It's as simple and sacred as this.
Dwight Castle:No one knows your heart better than you do. Your heart speaks to you every day in the language of love. It speaks to you with kindness and hope. It never speaks of fear and doubt, and it will never betray you. Your heart honors you.
Dwight Castle:And when you listen to the guidance of your heart, your peace and your happiness is restored. Doesn't that sound amazing? If only that were true. Follow your heart. This passage today says something a bit different.
Dwight Castle:Right? And it asks us, it begs us an important question that I want us to think about today. How do you primarily think about the condition of your heart? Have you thought about it? Do you think that you have a mostly good heart?
Dwight Castle:If so, why? What does that even mean? What does it mean to have a good heart? Do you think that you mostly have a bad heart? Why?
Dwight Castle:What does that mean? Or maybe like many of us, it's like, well, kinda in the middle. Right? Some days are good. Some days are bad.
Dwight Castle:I'd say mostly good. I do have my moments of passion. Sometimes I act against my better judgment. I'm certainly not as bad as that person, so I would say, you know, somewhere in the middle. Right?
Dwight Castle:But this is an important question for us to ask ourselves, to consider how do we primarily think about the condition of our heart. Now, Jesus focuses in on the heart today in our passage, and he has a very clear answer for us about the natural condition of man's heart. We just heard it. Let's look here at verse 14 again and see how Jesus begins. It says, and he called the people to him again, and he said to them, hear me, all of you, and understand.
Dwight Castle:Alright. Let's pause there. There's an important shift, especially from where we began last week, where Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees at first, but he has already dealt with them now. He has told them how they have wrongly seen the law of man and equated it on the same level as the law of God. Now Jesus turns, and instead of addressing the Pharisees, he addresses the crowd.
Dwight Castle:He actually gathers them to them, and he says something important. He says, hear me and understand. Now, in scripture, especially at this time, this is an important way to speak to a crowd. It is intended to grab their attention and ours. This sounds like something I might say to my kids when I'm really trying to tell them something important, but they're getting that glazed look in their eyes, that they're kind of looking around distractedly, not all that different from sometimes in here too.
Dwight Castle:So hear me and understand is what Jesus says. He says, you don't wanna miss this. What I'm about to say is important, and there's a difference between hearing and actually listening and understanding. He's contrasting what they could do, what he wants them to do with what the Pharisees have just done. The Pharisees did not listen and understand.
Dwight Castle:The Pharisees came attempting to justify themselves, to argue with Jesus, and they missed everything he had to say to them. It was all lost on them. And Jesus says to the people, don't make the same mistake. Hear my words and understand. So it must be good.
Dwight Castle:Right? He's gonna have this really long, in-depth sermon. He has a one liner, and then he drops the mic. Here's what Jesus says, verse 15. There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him.
Dwight Castle:But the things that come out of a person are what defile him. I don't know how that would work in today's setting if you said one line, and then you just walked away, but it says then Jesus just walks away. And everyone's probably left scratching their heads a little bit. We know this because then Jesus goes inside inside a house with his disciples, and he debriefs on what he just said. The disciples, they do not get it at this point.
Dwight Castle:And Jesus is a little disappointed. He says, you also don't understand. Now, it would be easy at this point for us to be critical of the disciples. Mark makes it clear to us time and time again that the disciples are just really not getting it. They don't see who Jesus is and what he is doing.
Dwight Castle:I mean, Jesus' teachings are different. They have never heard anything like this. It goes against all the norms they've ever known. They're unsure what to think about Jesus and his teachings. I mean, at the end of Mark chapter 6, we are told that they have hard hearts.
Dwight Castle:We see that time and again, they have questions. They are missing the point. They are told that we're told that they have a lack of faith. Now, all these things are true, but I want us to zoom out for a moment and be a little more gracious. What is actually happening here with the disciples?
Dwight Castle:They're in a process, much like a process that many of us find ourselves in. They are spending time with Jesus. And yes, they don't understand who he is. And really, spoiler alert, they're not going to get it until after the resurrection. And then the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost, and they really start understanding where the light bulb turns on.
Dwight Castle:So they don't understand, but they are still spending time with Jesus, and they're drawing closer to him. And every day they're looking more and more like Jesus. That's actually the scene here that we find ourselves in. The Pharisees are upset at Jesus because his disciples are doing things like him. They have heard Jesus cast off the religious facades of the day, and they do the same thing.
Dwight Castle:So they are being changed by him. When they don't understand what he has to say, like in this passage, what do they do? Well, they come to Jesus and they ask him. This is a common phrase here in Mark that we see they actually go in the house and then Jesus explains more of his teachings to them. This is actually a good pattern for us, For us to see how Jesus changes us, we spend time with him.
Dwight Castle:The more time that we spend with him and with his people, we begin to look like him. Do we understand everything that Jesus says? No. But what should that cause us to do? We should do what the disciples do.
Dwight Castle:We should press in. Come to him. Ask him for help, for clarity. Ask questions. Do you have doubts?
Dwight Castle:Does anyone here ever have doubts? You don't even have to raise your hand. We all do. You don't understand some of Jesus' teachings. Maybe some of the things in scripture rub you wrong, or it goes against what you're hearing in culture around you.
Dwight Castle:Instead of walking away, I encourage you to press in. Come to Jesus. Go in a house even with other believers and ask questions. Ask Jesus to clarify his word for you. So this is what we see happening here, and Jesus unpacks this brief sermon for his disciples.
Dwight Castle:Now, this might seem rather straightforward to us, but for the original audience, Jesus is turning their world upside down. Jesus is expanding the original conversation about washing hands, and he's making it about ceremonial cleanliness, and particularly how food plays into that as well. And for us to really understand this, it's important to understand some about ceremonial cleanliness and the role that it played for Jews, because it was everything to them. It defined their entire way of life. Now, in the Jewish system of ceremonial cleanliness, they followed God's law.
Dwight Castle:God's law that was given to them in Leviticus. Now God gave it originally to help his people to live in a way that was set apart from everyone else around. His laws, if you've ever read through Leviticus or attempted to read through Leviticus, it they're very thorough. They're very specific. God is a God of order.
Dwight Castle:And he cares for his people to know exactly the way that he wants them to live. And his intent with these laws is to turn their hearts towards him, that they will want to obey from a heart of obedience. But as Jeff talked about last week, what we found actually happened is the Israelites would take the law of God, and then they would add to it. They would add their own traditions, the traditions of men. And then they would hold these traditions on the same level as God's law.
Dwight Castle:Over time, they even began to confuse obedience to God's law from a heart of worship as God intended, they confuse that with mere external conformity to the law. In other words, they would And in doing so, they missed the heart of the law. God's people actually began to miss God's heart. It was all about self righteous good works. If you kept the letter of the law like the religious leaders, you were considered close to God.
Dwight Castle:You are holy. You are obedient. You are clean. If you did not, you were unclean. You couldn't go into the temple.
Dwight Castle:And then you had to do a whole series of things to become clean. It was a very outward focused evaluation. You do this, you're clean. You don't do this, and you're not clean. You're dirty.
Dwight Castle:You're sinful. To add to this, the rabbinic traditions, the rabbis who led the people, they actually had this view that humans started out from a base position of purity. Your starting point was purity. And then all of the defilement was out in the world. And when you came into contact with defilement, it would make you unclean.
Dwight Castle:So then, you had to do something to remove that external defilement, and you're restored to your original state, purity. So, if you have dirty hands, wash them. You were clean at first. You wash the dirt off. You're clean again.
Dwight Castle:Right? This is why some foods were considered unclean. Because if they came into you from the outside, as Jesus is talking about and addressing here, then you were made unclean. There's a lot of confusion for the Jews over the differences between internal cleanliness, external cleanliness, holiness, the way that God viewed you in light of all of this. And so we can see the danger here and why Jesus is taking issue with it.
Dwight Castle:He's going to take this manipulated structure that the Jews have. He's gonna turn it upside down. He's going to reorient them to the heart of God, the God who gave them his law before they distorted it. Now Jesus' punchline to his sermon here, he says very simply, nothing can go in you, food included, and make you really, truly, unclean. Now this was earth shattering for them, because everything that they knew up this up to this time said the opposite.
Dwight Castle:Unclean food goes in you, you become unclean. Jesus says, no. That's a physical process. He says, look, it's actually really clear. Your food goes in your mouth, goes into your stomach, and it comes out.
Dwight Castle:He gets kind of graphic here for a mixed audience. In this time, there were actually public bathrooms everywhere. If you've ever been on one of our mission trips to Cyprus, we go to an ancient Roman, settlement in Salamis, where Paul and Barnabas landed on their first missionary journey, and there is a public restroom. And it is a circle with a bunch of stones, and everyone just sits there and looks at each other in a circle while you go to the bathroom. And I imagine that Jesus is probably standing somewhere close to one of these, and he kinda motions.
Dwight Castle:The actual original text says, hey, it goes in you guys, and it comes out as sewage. It goes into the latrine. He's being very graphic. It's physical. It doesn't actually do anything to your spiritual state before God.
Dwight Castle:It's not about the food, it's not about the stomach, things that go in you don't make you unclean. Rather, he says it's the things that come out of you from your heart that make you unclean in God's eyes. So before we shift to look at Jesus's discussion of the heart, it's important to note here that Jesus adds this little side note here in verse 19. Thus, he declared all foods clean. So Mark wants us to know something that is going to take a long time for the church to unpack later, that Jesus has taken the ceremonial food cleanly laws, and he's flipped them.
Dwight Castle:Now there's a lot going on here that we could talk about, but the important thing I want us to see here is that Jesus is signaling something more important than a food law here. He is addressing his authority to speak to the law. Matthew 517 shows us that Jesus says he doesn't come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. So that means that everything in the law up to this point that God gave is now fulfilled in Jesus. It all pointed towards him before he came, and now that he is here, he is saying, I have the authority to interpret this law and fulfill it.
Dwight Castle:In other words, you don't have to worry about unclean food anymore, because I am going to make you actually clean on a deeper, more important spiritual level in your heart. So none of those things will make you defiled anymore. Now you need to focus on the heart. At this time, the heart was an important part of how Jews understood who they were. It was the center of who you were.
Dwight Castle:It's not your anatomical heart pumping blood. It wouldn't be used in the same way that we might use a phrase about your heart, kind of referring to our emotions or saying, bless your heart. The heart was the seat of your desires, your emotions, your intellect, and your will. It was the symbol for who you were in the essence of your being. This is why a passage like Proverbs 423 says, keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life.
Dwight Castle:Another version of that says, above all else, guard your heart, for everything that you do flows from it. So Jesus is gonna build on this. If your heart is the core of who you are, everything flows from it. And he points in and says, we're gonna focus not on the fruit, the external actions, we're gonna focus on the seed. He is course correcting the Israelites' evaluation of what mattered the most.
Dwight Castle:They missed the heart of God, because they were looking at the fruit, and not at the seeds. Now, it's not that the fruit or the actions that you do don't matter. It's that your actions reveal your heart. I'm gonna say that again. Our actions reveal what is actually in our hearts.
Dwight Castle:The Jews at their time, and I will note our culture as well, says, what you do defines who you are. Are. Your fruit reveals the kind of tree that you actually are. The seed of who you are grows first inside and then it comes out and it bears fruit. Now Israel's heard this before.
Dwight Castle:This isn't brand new to them. When God appointed David as king, he said, hey, man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. Now our world, it leans into what we do. This is why works based righteousness is such a problem. What I do justifies me before God.
Dwight Castle:I've gotta act the right way. I've gotta put on a good face because I wanna impress others but I also wanna impress God. I wanna earn my way before him. If I act right, if I keep the law, if I'm a good person, then I could be clean in the eyes of God. And Jesus says, no.
Dwight Castle:Your heart is what matters. Now, I have a son. My oldest son is almost 10, and he's learning a lot about life right now. And so I'm having a lot of discussions with him about external appearances of things versus interior really factual, actual things that go on. You know, you don't judge a book by its cover kind of things.
Dwight Castle:But he's looking around, and he's he asks me questions that people won't ask. Hey, dad, are we rich? Are we poor? Is that a homeless person? Are they better than we are?
Dwight Castle:Is their house bigger than ours? Why do they do these things, and I don't? This past week he was convinced that every kid in his class has eaten sushi and loved it, except for him. Every kid has a Kindle, and he doesn't. And every kid has read all the Harry Potter books without any age restrictions, and he has age restrictions.
Dwight Castle:He's comparing himself, and he's looking, and he's taking every little cue that he can get in the external world, and he's evaluating. But I'm trying to say to him, hey, listen, Mac. That's not actually how the world is. That stranger over there, he looks like a nice guy. He might be a bad guy.
Dwight Castle:And sometimes in your eyes, when I discipline you, I look like a bad guy, but I'm the good guy. Yeah. You like that? He he doesn't quite fully appreciate it. But I'm trying to explain to him this idea.
Dwight Castle:Things aren't always what they seem. The internal is really the true nature of what somebody is. So Jesus is gonna tell us about the true nature of our internal state apart from God. What does he say? And I'm gonna warn you, if Jesus was alive in this culture, he wouldn't fare so well.
Dwight Castle:People wouldn't like what he has to say. He says the natural heart is evil. It's defiled. He uses this umbrella term first for the internal heart. It's full of evil thoughts.
Dwight Castle:And then he goes on to list 12 different sins. 6 of them are action based. 6 of them are attitude or character based. But there's no distinction between them. Sins of thought and sins of deed are the same in god's eyes.
Dwight Castle:Now this is a varied list. If you look at it, there are a lot of different things here. Sexual sin, pride, envy, lying, murder, stealing. It's not intended to be a comprehensive list, mind you. We are way more creative than these 12 things.
Dwight Castle:But it represents that all sin comes from our hearts. One commentator says, in every heart lie the seeds of every possible sin. Think about that. In your heart, lie the seeds of every possible sin. It doesn't matter whether it's overt, or a little sin, or a big sin.
Dwight Castle:Your jealousy, it's just as bad as murder. Your lust is just as bad as adultery. Your pride is just as bad as stealing from someone. Jesus condemns it all. He says it's all evil.
Dwight Castle:It's all sin. It all comes from our hearts. Again, scripture is clear on this before Jesus. Jeremiah 179 says, the heart is deceitful above all and beyond cure. Isaiah 2913 says, the people honor him with their lips, but their hearts are far from him.
Dwight Castle:These aren't encouraging themes. I can't imagine these in Disney movies. But scripture's clear. Jesus is leaving no wiggle room here. He says, make no mistake, every heart at the very center of who you are, from it flows all forms of wickedness.
Dwight Castle:And I've got to ask you, do you believe this? Do you believe this about your own heart? Just pause and think about that. I'm sure there's a spectrum in this room. I'm sure there are some people over here.
Dwight Castle:You do not need to be convinced that you have an evil heart. You know it. You see it day in day out. You know what comes into your mind and in your heart. You know your tendencies, your weaknesses, your sins.
Dwight Castle:An evil person, a sinful person at your core. How could I be sinful? I do good things. I do more good things than I do evil things. I do more good things than I do evil things.
Dwight Castle:There are probably a lot of people in the middle who say, well, I know I'm a sinner, but we try to get through our sin with behavioral modification. You know, if I could just change some of these factors, I probably wouldn't sin so much. Right? If I could just get more filters on my phone or my computer, I probably wouldn't look at porn anymore. If I would just be able to stay away from those people or those things, I wouldn't deal with that addiction.
Dwight Castle:If I could just have better self control with social media or cut it out altogether, I wouldn't even deal with envy or jealousy. Like the Pharisees, if you could just do x, y, or z, you could regulate sin out of your life. Yeah. Sin's real, but it's mostly just the external factors that are coming in assaulting me. It's the evil world.
Dwight Castle:Everyone else is causing me to be sinful by what's coming in, and that's what's making me The problem is that the law, doing the right things, putting up good barriers, behavioral modification, it cannot remove the evil impulses from our heart. It's not designed to do that. Even if you're perfect, if you kept all the law perfectly, it would never remove sin from your heart. Actually, the law's design is to reveal sin. It's to show us our need for Jesus because we can't do it on our own.
Dwight Castle:Now we might be influenced by our context, but sin is not the result of our environment. It's from our heart. At worst, our environment can trigger sin, but the seed is already there. Now, I will say, as a side note here, some of you are wondering, aren't aren't we able to do some good? Aren't there I've I've done good things.
Dwight Castle:Right? I see other people. I even see non Christians doing good. Yes. We are capable of doing good.
Dwight Castle:Let me tell you how it started. God created the world, and He created everything perfect and good. He created man in His image to reflect Him. But then sin enters the picture. And even though we can continue to live in a way that reflects the good that God created us to do, everything we do, our very best is still marred.
Dwight Castle:It's broken. It's a lesser version of what it was supposed to be. Every human heart from that time on is born with sin. We can't escape it. Now, culture doesn't want us to say this.
Dwight Castle:Culture says you are good. Find your truth, discover your true self. Just be honest about who you are. Find your authentic self. If you don't live according to your authentic self, you are actually doing yourself a disfavor, and don't you dare ask anyone else to live in a way that goes against their impulses that they have.
Dwight Castle:But Jesus warns, don't embrace your natural self. Instead, we see that he confronts it. Now Jesus doesn't tie up this passage with a nice bow. It ends right here. Before we can be offered a good word, we have to understand the desperate situation that we're in.
Dwight Castle:We have to feel the weightiness, the brokenness of our sin. Do you struggle to see that in yourself? If you're here and you don't see that brokenness, that evil in your own heart, I encourage you to ask God to reveal it to you, because He will. We can't appreciate the light coming in until we understand the darkness. But there is good news.
Dwight Castle:We don't stay in the dark. Our hearts don't have to stay this way. God actually promised his people that one day, he would bring healing to our broken sinful hearts. In a famous passage to the Israelites in Jeremiah chapter 31, God is speaking to the exiled Jews. They broke God's law.
Dwight Castle:They worshiped idols. They disobeyed his commandments, and now they are reaping the due consequences of their sin. But God sends them a message. He says, don't lose heart. He says this in verse 33 of chapter 31.
Dwight Castle:This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the lord. I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts. In the next chapter, he says, they shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them. So God is promising to his people.
Dwight Castle:He says, don't lose heart. Someday coming, I'm going to give you a new heart. He repeats this in Ezekiel chapter 11, another letters to the letter to the exiles. He says, I will give them one heart and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they might walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey me.
Dwight Castle:And they shall be my people, and I will be their god. In 1979, there was an Old Testament professor from Westminster Seminary. His name was Ray Dillard, and he preached a famous sermon on another old testament prophecy from Zechariah chapter 3, and I wanna end here today. He I'm thankful for men like this who helped connect the dots for us because this is kind of an obscure passage, and he brings into great clarity what good news it is for us today as we talk about this. In this scene in Zechariah chapter 3, God is giving Zechariah a prophetic vision.
Dwight Castle:He's giving him a vision of the innermost part of the temple, the holy of holies, And Zechariah sees the high priest. His name is Joshua. He sees him standing before God interceding for the sins of the people. Now this only happened on one day in the year for Israel. It was the day of atonement, Yom Kippur, and in his sermon, Ray Dillard goes into great detail.
Dwight Castle:I would really encourage you to go listen to it because it's amazing to see all that the high priest had to do to prepare for this day, Because he was the one person who would come before God on behalf of all of Israel and he would go to every effort he could for the whole week leading up to this day of atonement and then that whole day he would cleanse himself He would put on clean clothes. He would make a sacrifice. He would repeat, cleanse himself, make a sacrifice, put on new clothes. He would do this 12 times over and over and over again, trying to wash away every single physical germ, every single spiritual sin that could cloud him communing with God on behalf of the people. And it is this vision that Zechariah sees, and Joshua is standing before God as the high priest.
Dwight Castle:He is coming to God, having made every single possible measure that a human could make to be pure and clean before God. And then we see the most staggering, surprising, shocking thing that could happen. Zechariah sees that Joshua is completely covered in excrement, like from the latrine that we were talking about before. Zechariah cannot believe it. How could this be possible?
Dwight Castle:The high priest who is to intercede for God's people, the cleanest, purest person, the representative is literally covered in filth from head to foot. What is going on here? God is showing Zechariah how he views the people and even the high priest from his perspective, how he sees our hearts. The very best that the Israelites could bring to God, with all of their efforts for purity, It was literal filth in the eyes of God. But what happens next is actually the real shocking part here.
Dwight Castle:The holy, pure, sinless God removes Joshua's filthy, excrement covered clothes, and he says this, behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you in pure vestments. God then goes on to promise that He will send someone in the future, His servant called the Branch. One day, the servant will come, and he will remove all of the inequity from all of Israel in one day. Friends, fast forward. There's another high priest, the high priest.
Dwight Castle:His name in Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic is the same as Joshua. It's Yeshua, Jesus, and Joshua, same name. He comes before God the father, except he is truly, actually pure and clean, not just externally. He's not just bathed and in white robes. He has lived a pure, perfect, sinless life, and he comes before God the father, and there is an exchange, but He takes His purity off, and He takes our filth on.
Dwight Castle:He takes the sin of the entire land in one single day. Jesus, the promised branch from the root of Jesse, takes on the sin of the world, and He exchanges our sinful heart for His pure heart. He fulfills the prophecies that we just read, and He gives His people a new heart. What a picture. Now, Jesus' words from Mark 7 today, it's a hard word for us.
Dwight Castle:It's hard to hear, but Jesus doesn't leave us there. Friends, we can peek ahead beyond Mark 7. We can see Mark 15 and 16 when Jesus goes to the cross and He rises again from the grave. Our hearts are no problem for Jesus. He alone can wash away our filth.
Dwight Castle:He alone can deal with the evil in our hearts, and He gives us a new heart. We can be made pure. We have been made pure in the sight of God. If you don't know if this is you, if God has not made you clean in His sight because you have not called on Him and asked Him to cleanse you, today is the day, my friends. Jesus cleanses us from all sin.
Dwight Castle:Our obedience to Jesus, then, after that doesn't come from trying to earn holiness, to earn purity. It's the good fruit that comes from the good seeds that are now coming from a transformed heart. Praise God. Pray with me. Lord, we thank you for this word.
Dwight Castle:It is a hard word. We don't like hearing that we are sinful, that at our very core, we are helpless and hopeless and apart from You, but You don't leave us there. You provide a way. Thank You for this word. Thank You for giving us truth, for reminding us how You alone can make us clean.
Dwight Castle:No amount of right living or acting in a certain external way can do it, but you have done it. Jesus, I pray that you will help us to embrace that, to accept that, to live in light of that, that we aren't trying to earn anything, but we receive what you've done. Thank you, Jesus. In your name. Amen.