Doctrine, Dogma, and Defilement (Part 2)

Introduction

My Old Testament Professor in seminary had a saying that became so widely used in the school that they eventually made a t-shirt with this quote on it. The quote was this, “when was the last time you delighted in the book of Leviticus.”

I know you’ve probably been there. Early in your Christian life you decided to read the Bible from one end to the other. Genesis was interesting, Exodus started off interesting and than got a little difficult. Than you got to Leviticus and you probably gave up. You’ve probably wondered to yourself, “why did God put this book in the Bible?” Laws about skin diseases, ritual cleaning, mildew, all kinds of things that seem to have nothing to do with your Christian faith. Why do I need to read this? What is the point of all of these laws about what is and is not clean?

What if I told you that Leviticus is full to the brim with the Gospel? What if I told you that studying this book in detail, although frustratingly difficult, would make the Gospel and the way it is expressed in the NT shine on your heart like never before?

In that book of the Bible, God deals with the concept of ritual cleaning, something completely foreign to most of us. Why does God care so much about what these people eat, whether they have mold in their house, and how a skin disease should be treated by the priest in a religious, not medical, context? Today, we will see how the cleansing laws given in Leviticus and other parts of the OT were a picture of the ultimate problem with humanity. The fact it displays is that we, as sinful human beings, cannot approach God as we are because we ourselves are inherently unclean.

DA Carson:

“what ultimately defiles a man is what he really is.”

Through this, we will see how God must be the one to cleanse his people in order to dwell with them and bless them. I hope after this morning, you will learn to delight in Leviticus a little more as you see the Gospel expressed in the concept of the clean and the unclean.

Understanding the Laws of Defilement

In order for us to understand the significance of Jesus’ statement in verses 10-11, it is necessary for us to have a basic understanding of how the OT Law treated the subject of clean/unclean. So put your thinking caps on as we dive into it.

In the books of Leviticus and Numbers, the subject of clean and unclean is described in great detail. While this is a difficult part of the Bible for us to read today, it plays a significant role in God’s revelation of what it means to be in communion with him.

The first thing that must be understood about being clean or unclean is that it is given with a significance to the relationship between God and his people. This was not God’s attempt to have the people live sanitary lives, but rather it highlighted the holy nature of God and subsequently the need for personal holiness in order to have God dwell with his people. To be in God’s presence and to please God in worship, you must be holy as God is holy. The purity laws concerning things clean and unclean were a metaphor or a picture of this reality. If mankind is to return to the Garden of Eden, to a state where God and man dwell together, man must become clean and holy as God is holy.

The purity laws show three levels of impurity: There were times where one could not escape becoming unclean, other times making yourself unclean was allowed as long as you participated in a cleansing ritual, and some uncleanness was prohibited altogether and would result in expulsion from the Promised Land and the covenant people of Israel. The distinction between impurity that was allowed and impurity that was not allowed was different for priests, who had to serve in the Temple and so had to be clean by all means possible. Being in the Temple meant being in God’s presence, which meant you had to be clean as often as possible.

There were generally four ways someone could become unclean:

Interaction with a dead body (this included animal carcasses, especially of unclean animals, as well as human bodies). Some contact with dead bodies, like the need to bury the dead, was permitted but still made someone unclean. Others, like touching the body of an unclean animal, were strictly forbidden.

Sexual impurity (this included any sexual relationship outside of biblical norms, as well as sex during menstruation). Usually prohibited with violation meaning expulsion from the land.

Health-related impurity. This was usually inevitable and required a ritual cleansing.

Cultic impurity, or impurity in religious practice. This was allowable impurity. For example, a priest became unclean during the ritual of making someone who had touched a dead body clean, and had to wait a day and wash before they could be clean again.

To become clean always involved a ritual that often included a burnt offering or sacrifice of some kind. The animal would often take the uncleanness away from a person and sometimes become unclean in the process.

To be clean represented holiness before God. It is impossible to be in God’s presence without being purified first. Even the tabernacle had to be cleansed because it was in the midst of unclean people. This gets to the heart of what this ritual is communicating.

Among the other nations in the middle east at that time, purification rituals were common but in every case the impurity came from outside the person or people, usually through an unclean spirit. For example, touching a dead body would make someone unclean because of the contact made with unclean spirits that were thought to be drawn to the corpse. However, the Biblical Law never makes this connection. Instead, uncleanness only comes from the person themselves. If an unclean animal touched you, it wouldn’t make you unclean. Only touching it’s corpse would defile you. Becoming unclean was always the result of human nature or human action, which was unique in the ancient world. This means that if you were unclean, its either because you produced the uncleanness (even unintentionally, as through disease or menstruation), or you did something that made you unclean, like touching an unclean thing. In other words, impurity always came from the person themselves, not from external sources such as evil spirits.

This is important to understand because it leads us to what Jesus is teaching here. Jesus is showing how the Law was never saying that these objects are unclean in themselves, whether they are unclean food or an unclean object. Paul echoes this in Romans 14:14

Romans 14:14 ESV

I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean.

Instead, the actions and nature, even the beliefs, of a person makes them unclean. It was to show that human beings are unclean by default and live in a sinful world in which they become unclean constantly. It is the nature of being a human being with a sinful heart to be unclean. Therefore, if someone is going to approach and dwell with the Holy God of Heaven, they must be made clean.

As we keep reading the OT, we see uncleanness and impurity more and more related to the sinful heart of man. Ps 24:3-4

Psalm 24:3–4 ESV

Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully.

Psalm 51:7–10 ESV

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

Isaiah 1:16 ESV

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil,

And during Isaiah’s vision of God’s Heavenly Throne, we read:

Isaiah 6:5–7 NIV 2011

‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.’ Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, ‘See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.’

In this last example, we see Isaiah recognizing his sinful nature makes him unclean before the Lord. But it also shows that only God can purify, which was also true in the Law through the rituals God had instituted. More and more, the emphasis is on the heart of man as the source of impurity.

To be impure means the inability to live with God, which reflects the rejection of mankind from the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life. As long as we are unclean, we cannot live with God and enjoy his blessing of eternal life with him. The story of salvation is God’s plan to reunite himself with humanity in love, and so this issue of being unholy and sinful is a very important part of that story. This is why Leviticus is so important.

In short, the OT teaches us through the illustration of purification laws that man has a problem: we must be with God or we will die, for in God alone there is life. But to be with God requires purity which we cannot obtain except through his grace. Those who approach God in impurity will also die. How than shall we see life? Impurity stems from a heart bent on sin, and the only way to become pure is to have God purify the heart. This brings us into Christ’s teaching in our passage today.

The Nature of True Defilement

After the statement in verses 10-11, the disciples inform Jesus of the offense the Pharisees took to it. Why were they offended?

While the text doesn’t tell us exactly, we can probably figure it out. After scolding the religious leaders about how their traditions nullify what is laid out in the Law of God, it now seems that Jesus is nullifying the Law by saying that no one can be unclean by what they eat. This seems to contradict what the Law said about foods that were unclean.

So we must ask ourselves the question: is Jesus using a double standard? (A double standard is when we hold one person to a standard, in this case the Law of God as it is clearly written, and ourselves to another. A double standard is a common tool used by hypocrites and Jesus has actually just accused the Pharisees of exactly this. While they blamed the disciples for not taking the law seriously in observing their traditions, their traditions in some cases allowed someone to break the Law of God. So is Jesus using a double standard in his interpretation of the Law? No.

First, remember that Jesus’ claim is to be the one who came to “fulfill” the OT Scriptures. Jesus’ ministry hangs on the claim that his coming is not only equal to but even more significant than the giving of the Law. Heb 3:3

Hebrews 3:3 ESV

For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself.

John 5:46 ESV

For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.

In other words, the essential claim of Jesus’ ministry is that he has a right to interpret the true meaning of the Law since he is greater than Moses, through whom God gave the Law, and that Moses’ writing were in expectation of his coming. Parents may seem to have a double standard with their children when they tell their kids to go to bed at 8:00 while the parents don’t go to bed until 10:00. Kids are kids, and the parents, as adults, have an inherent right to go to bed whenever they think it wise to do so, whereas the kids don’t have that right because they are not yet mature and responsible. So Jesus has a right to use a different standard to interpret the Law if indeed we believe He is the Son of God.

But beyond this, Jesus is appealing to the original purpose of the law, its deeper purpose, and its fulfillment which is displayed at his coming. In this way, he is actually doing the opposite of what the Pharisees are doing. They, in a vain search for a righteousness by works of the law, inventing external laws and rules thinking that these will create a greater holiness in themselves. Jesus, on the other hand, goes beyond the external signs of clean and unclean to the very heart of what these ceremonial commandments were teaching. They taught that God is holy and that his people must be holy if they are to dwell with their God. External cleanness was pointing to something spiritually significant: the need for a clean heart. Already we saw that the Prophets were catching on to this as the OT period progressed, emphasizing more and more God’s displeasure with the outward display of holiness while the heart remained corrupt. This is why Jesus teaches elsewhere that the Pharisees are like whitewashed tombs: clean on the outside, but inside full of death and decay.

This can be said for so many religious expressions. In Roman Catholicism, what is thought to make the Eucharist holy is not the faith of the participant, but an external ceremony involving the priest. The bread and wine, they imagine, then literally and physically become the body and blood of our Lord and taking these external elements makes the communicant holy. Our view of the Lord’s Table, however, focuses on the heart of the person taking it. If the heart is of faith, the bread and wine express a spiritual communion happening in that persons heart. If the heart has no faith, it is nothing more than a sub-par snack after a lengthy sermon. Islam is a religion that focuses almost exclusively on external rituals and practices without addressing the purity of the heart. The same can be said for almost any religion and unfortunately many who practice Christianity hypocritically.

So this is not a double-standard at all. While Jesus shows the Pharisees the way their external display of holiness actually undercuts the heart of the law, Jesus’ teaching here clarifies the heart of the law. Pigs don’t defile you, menstruation doesn’t defile you, dead bodies don’t defile you. Instead, we see what these images were telling God’s people the whole time, something the Prophets understood: everyone is defiled because everyone is born in sin, and the thing that stops us from being near God is our inherent uncleanness before God. To become clean, we must be washed by God himself.

In verse 15, Peter asks Jesus to explain this saying, which he calls a parable. Jesus answers, “are you still without understanding?” or, “are you still so dull?” A very blunt translation would be, “why are you still so stupid?” It is not meant as an insult, but rather as a wake-up call to all Peter has heard and seen in his following Christ. Jesus is saying that what he is teaching is common sense if one thinks through it carefully. What one eats passes through the stomach and is expelled, in Greek literally “goes out into the toilet.” Common sense tells us that whatever we eat turns to unclean waste anyway, and is soon taken away from our bodies leaving no trace of the unclean substance. Mark’s version of this story includes a note that in this way Jesus declared all foods clean, something that Matthew doesn’t mention probably because of his Jewish readers, who perhaps were not ready to deal with that reality. As Christians, we are allowed to eat anything from a religious perspective because these things do not defile our holiness. If you are a morgue worker, you can still go to church the next day. If you are a pig farmer, there is no problem. These things do not make you unclean. What those ceremonies were pointing to was this deeper spiritual reality which Christ makes plain in verses 18-19.

When what goes into the mouth defiles someone, the assumption is that the person was clean before they ate. Jesus turns this around and says it is what comes out of their mouth, and in verse 19 out of their lives, that shows defilement was already there in the first place. The words, actions, and thoughts of a person are what show their holiness or unholiness. Their blasphemy, their slander, their sexual immorality, their theft, their lying, their unloving speech, all examples of things that display defilement that was there to begin with. The reason we cannot approach God in our natural state is not because we were infected with impurity from something else, rather it is because we have unclean, unholy hearts that are incompatible with the presence of God.

This relates to a doctrine in Christian theology we call original sin. Sin is something we are all born with, passed down from our ancestors all the way from Adam and Eve. Sin, at it’s heart, is faithlessness towards God. It is someone’s inability to believe God, and thus inability to live in a relationship of trust, faith, and obedience towards him. This is why all hypocrites begin to show their stripes sooner or later. Jesus tells us to judge a tree by its fruit because the fruit shows the heart. The fruit of the Pharisees looks good on the outside, but Jesus has just exposed the rotten core of it in their neglect of the fifth commandment in prioritizing their traditions. Satan has planted many hypocrites in churches over the years in order to destabilize God’s people, but Jesus gives us the key to discovering them: the fruit of their lives. Yes, they may have many excuses. Yes, they may put on a mask of repentance, but never change. Yes, they will hide it for a time, but hypocrites always, always, slip up at some point. The mask falls, even slightly, and you see not a person genuinely struggling and fighting the sin in their heart, but someone who indulges it and hides it.

Conclusion: Christ Took On Impurity for Our Purity

But the problem remains, how can anyone come to know God and be in his presence if, in our sin, we are all unclean? We will die without God, but in our unholiness we will die in his presence too. How can we resolve this? Remember Isaiah’s experience in Is 6:5-7

Isaiah 6:5–7 ESV

And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

There is nothing we can do to clean ourselves, to make ourselves holy, in order to be with God. The first step to knowing God is a recognition of the sins the defiles you. A hopelessness in yourself to become clean enough for the presence of God. Only than, in that moment of grief and anguish, does the Gospel start to make sense.

It is not a seraphim, an angel, that comes to clean you. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, God in human flesh, the Emmanuel which sweetly means God with us, came to earth. He was born of a woman who, in her natal and post-natal discharge, was ceremonially unclean. As a baby, he fed at the breasts of an unclean woman. Jesus embraced our uncleanness. He touched the leper, the defiled, and cleansed them just as touching the holy water would cleanse the unclean in the Law. Whereas in the Law, touching something made you unclean, everything that Jesus touched became clean.

But blood was needed. A sacrifice was often required for cleansing, and Jesus came forward to provide this as well. As he bore the cross to the hill outside the city, he bore all our filthiness and uncleanness. We who were unclean and unholy could never approach the holy God, so God came down and became unclean for us. Just as the priest would become unclean during the ritual of cleansing someone who had touched a dead body, Christ took on the uncleanness of those who were defiled by the disease of sin whose wages is death. He died on the cross, along with all our filthiness and unholiness. Three days later he rose from the dead, clean and holy and ready to offer his own holiness and cleanness to us for whom he died.

Hebrews 9:13–14 NLT

Under the old system, the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer could cleanse people’s bodies from ceremonial impurity. Just think how much more the blood of Christ will purify our consciences from sinful deeds so that we can worship the living God. For by the power of the eternal Spirit, Christ offered himself to God as a perfect sacrifice for our sins.

Is it any wonder that we, with such joy, sing,

There is a fountain filled with blood,

Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,

And sinners plunged beneath that flood,

Lose all their guilty stains?

Not until I prepared this sermon did I realize how full the NT is of this cleansing language. One of my favourite passages is found in

Revelation 7:13–17 ESV

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?” I said to him, “Sir, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. “Therefore they are before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

So much more can be found: Acts 10:13-15; John 15:3; Eph 5:26; 1 Peter 1:22. If only we had the time to dive into these great passages, but for now I hope the substance of this will rest with you. You are unholy in yourself, you are unclean, and all the religious duties and righteous acts in the world cannot make you clean enough to stand before God. But you can be cleansed, you can find washing, you can be clean and holy through the blood of Christ. Oh, that our hearts would turn to him more and more for daily cleansing and renewal that we may draw closer to the Father. In Christ, you are already clean, so live as the holy child of God that you are. Outside of Christ, you are unclean, but the offer of cleansing is here for you to accept by faith today. Will you not come and have your guilt, your shame, and the evil of your heart washed away, for his love is set on those who trust him.