Broken Cisterns. Matthew 15:7-9

We have the challenge here that Jesus runs into with the Pharisees, and that is, the grace of God versus human religion. We have often heard it said that Christianity is not a religion but a relationship. Christianity stands over against every world religion and philosophy in that we understand that any kind of relationship with God has to be based not upon human effort, human morality or human ritual, but upon the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. In the New Testament period and the church age following we look back to the cross. In the Old Testament they looked forward to the cross, so that salvation throughout the ages is always based ultimately faith and His provision of salvation or redemption through a perfect sacrifice. In the Old Testament that was not as clear as in the New Testament but there was a lot of clarity to the promises and the prophecies than a lot of people today are willing to recognize. In the New Testament we have clarity because Jesus died on the cross; He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Salvation is based on faith alone in Christ alone. It is not based on the righteousness that we have done (Titus 3:5), on works (Ephesians 2:8, 9); it is a free gift of God. That is so hard for some people to understand. But ultimately the failure isn't just a failure of not understanding grace; it is the refusal to submit to the authority of God, the refusal to accept God to be who the Bible says that He is and to substitute for God some other authority. That is what is at the root of all religion and religious systems, and that is what we saw as we began the study of this confrontation in chapter fifteen. We need to probe a little bit more into the Old Testament background to see this type of mentality.

What we have seen is that the disciples had crossed over to Gennesaret which is on the north western shore of the Sea of Galilee, and it is there that Jesus heals a large number of people who were brought to Him, and He is conducting His ministry there. This continues to really irritate the Pharisees, especially those who were up in Galilee, and at this time it is near Passover. As they have rejected Jesus and claimed that He is empowered by Satan the people are still flocking to Him, not because they are necessarily accepting Him as the Messiah but because, like many people who flock to the government, they get free medical care, free food and free healing. That was their reason for going to Jesus and it didn't have anything to do with any sort of spiritual integrity on their part.

We saw that there was a group of scribes and Pharisees who came down from Jerusalem. The local Pharisees have apparently appealed since they seem to be incapable of influencing the masses to stay away from Jesus and now they want to call in the leadership from Jerusalem. This brings a confrontation around the issue of the transgression of what they believe is God's Word. Matthew 15:2 ^NASB “Why do Your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.” Their ultimate authority is the oral law. In Judaism there is the view that God gave Moses the written Law, the Torah, but that He also gave a second set of commands that were not written down called the oral law. In actuality, that oral law is really a collection of various commands that were established after the return of the Jews from Babylon, and set up as a secondary set of mandates that functioned like a fence around the 613 commandments of the original Mosaic Law. It had been elevated during this period from about 250 BC to the time of Christ to a level that superseded the authority of the written Word. This oral law was used to interpret the Bible.

This is no different from what happens in any religious system, whether it is Judaism or what happened in Christianity after the beginnings of what has come to be known as the Roman Catholic Church. Depending on what you are using as your criterion the Roman Catholic Church began somewhere around 600 AD. What happened in the Roman Catholic Church as well as Eastern Orthodoxy was that the traditions of the teachings of the church fathers was set up as the authoritative interpretation of the Bible. What happened is that people from those traditions quit reading the Bible just as the Jews quit reading the Torah, and they spent their time studying about what is written about the Torah and what is written about the New Testament rather than reading the original documents. Any time you set up another authority alongside the Bible it is not just the Bible plus tradition; the tradition dominates the Bible. It replaces the Bible. Man's heart is always inclined towards idolatry and not towards the exclusive authority of God. That is why we so often emphasize the sufficiency of Scripture. The very phrase "the sufficiency of Scripture" emphasizes that the Word of God alone is sufficient, enough, is adequate to solve any problem that we face in life. We need to go to the Word of God in order to understand the framework for addressing the problems and the challenges of life.

What happened with the Pharisees was that they set up the oral law as a second authority and there was so much that consumed the thinking of the Pharisees related to washings and cleansings and all of these various rituals. So when they see the disciples eating without washing their hands it is not a matter of hygiene, it is a matter of their ritual cleansing. They accuse Jesus of apostasy basically by claiming that His disciples don't wash their hands, so therefore He was guilty of this heinous sin and they are spiritually unclean. Jesus in a very sophisticated way responded to that, pointing out that they were the ones who truly transgressed the Law by making the tradition of the elders superior in authority to the tradition of the Law. Jesus is exposing them for having rationalized away from the Law to some other system of authority. This is what has happened not only within Roman Catholic theology in setting up tradition over the Bible but when we got into the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period that came after the Protestant Reformation people set science, psychology and sociology over the Bible so that the Bible was no longer sufficient. In the last fifty or sixty years this has become a major issue within evangelicalism, those who claim to believe in Sola Scriptura (the Latin for "Scripture Alone").

There was some of this before World War II, but coming out of World War II there were people who were assimilating a view of creation to some form of evolution. Even today there are more and more evangelicals who reject a literal six consecutive twenty-four-hour-day creation. They replace it with something that accommodates to any form of old age dating of the earth. Yet, if we stick with the Bible on the basis of strict exegesis the earth is relatively young. The creation of the earth does not need to be billions and billions of years ago, it is a relatively young earth and we have to stick with what the Bible says. It is the Bible alone.

Psychology is another area of great inroads into the church. Up until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and really up until the Word War II period, it was the pastor who was the doctor of the soul, who through the teaching of God's Word enabled people to understand God's solution to man's problems. You do not need to have a degree in counseling or in psychology in order to help people deal with the problems in their life. Problems are ultimately grounded in sin and we have to learn to think in terms of what the Bible says about man's problems: that it is sin-based and not environment-based, not genetically-based. Those may be other factors but the real issue is our volition; the real issue is, are we willing to trust God alone to handle the circumstances and situations of our life?

In psychology we reject the sufficiency of Scripture and the sufficiency of grace. Think about this logically. If God isn't powerful enough to create the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, then God isn't powerful enough to solve your problems because you don't have a creator-God who is truly omnipotent. But if we have a biblical God who is truly omnipotent then we have a God who can clearly handle every problem that we face in life.

In sociology in the last forty years we have seen a huge development in the role in sociology in understanding the role of missions in the church and understanding the dynamics and leadership of the local church. Sociology has dominated literature and philosophy known as the church growth movement that really came out of the late 1960s. If we trace the thinking of what has come to be known as the church growth movement it can be traced back to a couple of professors at Fuller Theological Seminary and their world missions department in the 1960s. What is important to understand in terms of what gave birth to that at Fuller was that Fuller Seminary was founded originally with an extremely orthodox doctrinal statement. But by the late fifties and early sixties they took inerrancy, the view that the Bible was without error in the original autographs, out of their doctrinal statement so that is read: "We believe the Bible is authoritative in all areas of faith and practice …" That sounds good as far as it goes but it doesn't go far enough. It claims that the Bible is only the Word of God and authoritative in areas related to faith and practice, not in terms of science, not in terms of the history and origin of the earth, the origin of mankind. It is not sufficient in the area of ancient history and not inerrant in many other areas that it addresses, it is only inerrant and authoritative in areas related faith and practice. So it is limited. Recently a view has been generated called "limited inerrancy", which is another way today of getting away from biblical authority and the sufficiency of Scripture.

This is the problem that Jesus is addressing with the Pharisees. This always gives root to religion. And so when Fuller shifted in its definition and understanding of inerrancy and infallibility it opened up the door to where the Bible is no longer enough. We are not going to be able to solve our problems on the mission field in terms of planting and developing churches by the Word of God alone; we have to look to all of these other sociological inputs to be able to really establish churches. Of course, the apostle Paul knew nothing of any of this! Neither did Peter! So obviously they were short-changed by God because they needed Feud, Spencer, and all of these demographic studies to be really successful!

This strikes to the issue of the heart of man, which is what Jesus gets to in this section. The real problem is a heart problem. We are corrupt, defiled, and we must learn to live on the basis of trusting in God alone for everything. We can't rely on our own efforts and our own works. But this is what religion always does; it always tries to input our own efforts. We always try to help God out. (Isaiah 64:6)

Jesus addresses the Pharisees in an extremely politically incorrect manner. He is not concerned about offending anybody. We have to be careful with this. I've known some people who said, well Jesus didn't worry about offending anybody, neither am I, and they are just downright offensive to everybody. Jesus was not offending people because He wanted to offend people, He was proclaiming the truth and that offended people. It was not how He said it, it was what He said that offended people. We have to be careful that we deal with people on the basis of grace and kindness. If they are going to get mad at us and become offended it needs to be clearly on the basis of what the Word of God says and not because we have inappropriately handled the situation by the way we have done things.

Matthew 15:7 ^NASB “You hypocrites …" This indictment of them as a hypocrite, that is, someone who is saying one thing—that they are devoted to God but they are actually doing something else—means they are putting on a mask to disguise what they are actually doing. Then He cites and indictment that comes from Isaiah. Isaiah wrote about 700 BC, but the point is that this is not unique to that particular generation; it was a trend that we see repeated over and over again in the life of Israel in the Old Testament. What this demonstrates is that they did not learn from their history either personally or nationally. They continued to make the same errors. They continued to disobey God and choose paths of idolatry. Any time we disobey, that is a path of idolatry. We choose another authority. Whether it experience, reason or tradition, any time we focus on another authority other than God that is idolatry. "… rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: [8] ‘THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS, BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME. [9] ‘BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE PRECEPTS OF MEN.’”

He is saying that Israel did this in 700 BC. We see in Jeremiah that they were doing this around 600 BC. Jesus is saying that they are doing it at the time of Christ. This is the same thing we do both personally and nationally today. We reject the authority of God and replace it with our own authority. We need to start with the examination of our own heart to begin with and then we look at the nation.

In Isaiah's day they were just giving lip service. One of the problems we have in evangelicalism today as a whole and among many Christians, many of us individually, is that we know the right things to say, we know what the right answers are, we know what the Bible verses are, but internally we are not walking closely by means of the Holy Spirit. We are not walking in close fellowship with God and we always have a tendency, whether we are looking at Old Testament Israel or believers in any generation, to be selective hearers when it comes to the Word of God. We have a tendency to choose that which we want to apply and we carefully and skillfully ignore that which is not as easy for us to apply.

Jesus indicted Israel—they were just giving Him lip service—and He says they have removed their hearts far from Him. This is what Jesus is going to point out with the Pharisees: their hearts are not obedient to the Lord. The heart focuses on the center of their being, their soul. Even in the generation of Isaiah that had elevated the tradition of man over the Word of God. Therefore God said: Isaiah 29:14 ^NASB "Therefore behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people, wondrously marvelous; And the wisdom of their wise men will perish, And the discernment of their discerning men will be concealed.” The wisdom of the wise men is human viewpoint wisdom, the wisdom that the culture thought was right, the politically correct viewpoint that dominated their culture, not the wisdom of Solomon.

Human wisdom is ultimately self-destructive to the individual, and in the collective it is self-destructive to a religious group and to a nation. When we live our lives apart from the exclusive dependence on the authority of God and His Word it is a recipe for disaster. We may not experience that disaster in a week, two weeks, a year or two years; it may take a decade or two for things to come together and then we wake up one day and wonder how in the world we got where we are today. It is the accumulation of numerous bad decisions based on the idea that somehow our understanding is superior to God's understanding and we don't really have to depend upon God exclusively.

This is the same indictment that Isaiah brought against Israel. About one hundred years later it was the indictment that Jeremiah brought against Israel. There are two statements in Jeremiah chapter two. The first two verses are addressed to Jerusalem, but it is not just Jerusalem, it is focusing on the people of Jerusalem as the heart of Israel at that time. In the second stage of the indictment it expands the address to the house of Jacob and all the families of the house of Israel. He wants to make it sure that nobody has any wiggle room and say, See, that doesn't apply to me. It all applies.

Jeremiah 2:1 ^NASB "Now the word of the LORD came to me saying, [2] 'Go and proclaim in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus says the LORD, “I remember concerning you the devotion of your youth, The love of your betrothals, Your following after Me in the wilderness, Through a land not sown." What He is doing here is saying He wants them to remember the way they were He brought them out of Egypt. Even though they were disobedient at times and at critical times they failed to trust Him, generally they followed the Lord.

Jeremiah 2:3 ^NASB “Israel was holy to the LORD, The first of His harvest. All who ate of it [him, Israel] became guilty; Evil came upon them,” declares the LORD.’” Holy to the Lord means they were set apart to God, they were God's chosen people, and God was distinctively protecting them and providing for them in the wilderness. God sustained them for that period of time, demonstrating that He was sufficient to take care of whatever their problems were. God can take care of us. We have problems with health; God can take care of that. We have problems with finances: God can take care of that. God takes care of and sustains us.

In vv. 4-8 God is reminding them that during this time He dealt justly with Israel. Jeremiah 2:4 ^NASB "Hear the word of the LORD, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel [inclusive of all the twelve tribes]. [5] Thus says the LORD, 'What injustice did your fathers find in Me, That they went far from Me And walked after emptiness and became empty?'" We need to pay attention to the strategy that God is using. He doesn't come out and just list a series of indictments against Israel and then tell them what their faults and flaws are. He asks them thought questions. He wants them to not just hear what they have done but to reflect on what they have done and come to conclusions on their own as to have they have departed away from God.

I think it is important that we master that, especially when we are talking to unbelievers. I find that some believers are so much in a hurry to tell unbelievers what the problem is that they short-circuit the thought process on the part of the unbeliever. Often they engage in more of a confrontational evangelism than truly coming to a point where it helps the person come to an understanding of the truth and to think through the issues on their own.

I recently became aware through an article that was published in Christianity Today about an individual who has a most remarkable testimony that, to me, demonstrates the sufficiency of God's Word. Her testimony is one that demonstrates that God really does change people and that if people are willing to completely submit to God's authority in their life He can handle any sort of situation that they bring to Him. This is the story of a woman whose name is Rosario Butterfield. In her late twenties she was a Marxist, lesbian activist who was elevated to the position of English professor at university. She was one of the most radical feminists in academia at that time. She hated Christianity, according to her testimony, and thought that Christians were the dumbest, most thoughtless, anti-intellectual people there could be, and she was writing a book attacking evangelicals because of some things that Pat Robertson had said. In the middle of this she realizes that to really understand these evangelicals she ought to read the Bible.

While debating with herself as to when she is going to read the Bible she wrote an article that was a full-bore assault on Christianity that was published in the local paper. She said that she had two boxes by her desk—one for all the hate mail and one for the letters that praised her. One day she got a letter from a pastor—and this is such an example of how we should do things. Too often people get mad and just go off on somebody that they disagree with. The pastor didn't focus on the Bible or the gospel, he didn't blast her with some sort of drive-by evangelism; he wrote her a very nice, calm, respectful letter: "I'm really interested in what you said in your article and I would just like to come to understand your thinking on these various points, and would like you to answer some of these questions for me. How did you come to these interpretations of Christianity? Have you ever believed in God?" He just listed a series of questions, which she listed in the article in Christianity Today, as well as in her book called The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.

She took that letter and thought well, it is not hate mail and it is not positive, and she put it on her desk not sure what to do with it and it just sat there. A couple of time a day she would come back and try to decide what to do with it. She threw it in the trash and then dug it out again by the end of the day, but those questions were getting her to think through the presuppositional foundation for what she was saying in that article. As a result of that she ended up calling the pastor. He was an older pastor in his seventies and he and his wife invited her over for dinner so that they could talk about these things. They didn't talk about the Bible that night and they didn't give the gospel, didn't take out their gospel gun and shoot her five or six times, they just go to know her. This took a couple of years. They got to be friends and she would invite them over to meet her radical friends. It was that methodology of not just rushing in to indict someone: how can you believe what you believe? That is the attitude that too many people have.

God is asking these kinds of questions and it is important to develop that methodology to get people to think about what it is that they believe and what it is that they are doing.

Jeremiah 2:6 ^NASB “They did not say, ‘Where is the LORD Who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, Who led us through the wilderness, Through a land of deserts and of pits, Through a land of drought and of deep darkness, Through a land that no one crossed And where no man dwelt?’" What is the focal point of these questions? It is their history; it is their background, their origin—not of the people of Israel but of the nation of Israel. They are ignorant of their history. They are either denying it, ignoring it, or they are suppressing their own origins. Origins are important, and God is saying they did not ask these questions; they did not go back to their own identity, learning who they are and discovering that they came into existence through the miraculous power of God. He lists the things that He had done for them.

Jeremiah 2:7 ^NASB “I brought you into the fruitful land To eat its fruit and its good things. But you came and defiled My land, And My inheritance you made an abomination." That is the sufficiency of God. He provides for us. They had to take the land; it wasn't given to them in the sense that they didn't have any responsibility to do any kind of work. They had to conquer the inhabitants and work the land, but it was a land that was productive and if they were obedient to God then God gave them the increase. But when they entered they "defiled my land". That is the issue in Matthew chapter fifteen, the issue of being spiritually defiled and spiritually corrupt. Religion says that the way to handle that is through our own efforts and works. For the Pharisees it was their ritual. For a lot of people it is to construct their own morality and then they think they are moral.

Then He indicts the priests. Jeremiah 2:8 ^NASB “The priests did not say, ‘Where is the LORD?’ And those who handle the law did not know Me; The rulers also transgressed against Me, And the prophets prophesied by Baal And walked after things that did not profit." Their spiritual leaders were not confronting them with their spiritual failures; they went along with them. "And those who handle the law did not know Me…" Bring that forward a few hundred years and that is the scribes and the Pharisees confronting Jesus. They handled the Law but they didn't know God. In fact, they were mishandling the Law and coming up with a higher authority. "And walked after things that do not profit". This is what happens in our lives. We substitute that which gives no sustenance for that which can only sustain us. We substitute that which gives personal pleasure for a moment for that which will sustain us and give us a true happiness that lasts forever.

Jeremiah 2:9 ^NASB “Therefore I will yet contend with you,” declares the LORD, “And with your sons’ sons I will contend." The Hebrew verb that is used here we would translate as indictment. Prophets functioned like a prosecutor for God and He is indicting them for failing to obey the Law. He is going to bring judgment, which will not only affect them but also their children. Then He gives them some evidence.

Jeremiah 2:10 ^NASB “For cross to the coastlands of Kittim and see, And send to Kedar and observe closely And see if there has been such {a thing} as this! [11] “Has a nation changed gods When they were not gods? But My people have changed their glory For that which does not profit." This is what has happened to us as individuals. We pursue things that have no eternal value and build them into a level of importance and significance in our lives, and we think that life exists in terms of how we succeed in school, in business; life is determined by our social standing or our material possessions and having the things that we enjoy—not that those things are wrong in themselves, but that is not the source of life.

Jeremiah 2:12 ^NASB “Be appalled, O heavens, at this, And shudder, be very desolate,” declares the LORD." Judgment is coming. [13] “For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, The fountain of living waters, To hew for themselves cisterns, Broken cisterns That can hold no water."

How many times in Scripture do we see that God provides life? He is the source of life. Our sustenance is from God; He is the source of genuine life. Here they have rejected God as the source of water [life] and have hewn out their own cisterns. They have developed their own systems of happiness, of meaning in life, their own values, and now they have these broken cisterns that can hold no water. Their life is now going to be meaningless.

We see an application here both personally and nationally. Personally this often happens as they seek life from something other than a relationship with God. They have God as part of their life on Sunday morning, or maybe at different times during the week, but God is not the sole sufficient source of real life and real happiness and so they look elsewhere.

We see an interesting comment by Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter eleven as he is addressing the issue of failure of the Corinthians to examine themselves at the Lord's Table. This is also a recognition of confession of sin. The word that he uses here for "examine yourselves" goes far beyond just confession of sin. It is the Greek word DOKIMAZO, which is "let a man look to see what in his life has God's approval". In looking at our life to see what has God's approval we are going to see whether there is sin that needs to be confessed, but the ultimate focal point is on something positive, not something negative: to see what is of value to God in terms of what He has produced in our life. There has to be this self-evaluation that goes on day in and day out in terms of our spiritual life. Are we truly seeking to find life from God? Are we drinking of that fountain of living waters, the sufficient Scripture, or are we seeking life from some other source.

In the first chapter of Isaiah, Isaiah is indicting his generation and he is focusing on the fact that it is not external observance, not sacrifices and offerings; it is having your heart toward God. Isaiah 1:13 ^NASB “Bring your worthless offerings no longer, Incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies—I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly." They were doing the right things for the wrong reasons and God is saying they need to do the right things for the right reasons. It is a heart issue. [14] “I hate your new moon {festivals} and your appointed feasts, They have become a burden to Me; I am weary of bearing {them.} [15] So when you spread out your hands {in prayer,} I will hide My eyes from you; Yes, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered with blood." Just because we are going through the motions it doesn't mean we are in right relationship with God; there has to be more. [16]  “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean [cleansing]; Remove the evil of your deeds from My sight. Cease to do evil." Confession is the beginning. We can't confess and then go back like a dog to its vomit. We have to abide in Christ, walk by the Spirit, and continue in obedience. There needs to be a thoughtful evaluation of our own lives when we are going through confession. We have to confess our sins to God to be forgiven but it doesn't stop there. It goes beyond that to an evaluation and to move to this radical dependence on the sufficiency of God's grace.

Isaiah 1:18 ^NASB “Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the LORD, “Though your sins are as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool." This is often used as a salvation verse but this is used to call Israel back to fellowship with God. We have to recover spiritually when we fail (1 John 1:9) but recovery through confession of sin, restoration of fellowship, is not the same as ongoing fellowship, not the same as walking by the Spirit, not the same as abiding in Christ; that is what we do after we confess sin. We have to go forward. We are not to pursue these broken cisterns, which is what too many people are doing. They are looking to something other than Christ as the source of their happiness, their stability, and the source of the meaning for everything in their life. That is what Jesus is confronting the Pharisees over.

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