IN VAIN

by Ivan Maddox

West End Bible Fellowship

Atlanta, Georgia

In Matthew 15, Jesus made a statement to the scribes and Pharisees that should send chills down our spine if we look at it seriously, and examine ourselves in its light.

Matthew 15:7-9.

7 [Ye] hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying,

8 This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with [their] lips; but their heart is far from me.

9 But in vain they do worship me, teaching [for] doctrines the commandments of men.

But we read this, and we pass over it lightly. It doesn't bother us one bit.

Part of the problem is that we see that he's talking to Pharisees, and we feel safe. We say, "Go get 'em, Jesus," because we can't stand Pharisees!

But the Pharisees of Jesus' day were the equivalent of the fundamentalist Christians of our day, while the Sadducees were the equivalent of "liberal" Christians in our day. The Pharisees took the Law literally, and tried to keep it. They were just going about it the wrong way.

Jesus seems to have spent much more of his time jumping on the Pharisees than he did jumping on the Sadducees. And it eventually paid off. You read in Acts, after Jesus’ resurrection, that many of the Pharisees believed. You never hear that about the Sadducees.

But just because Jesus was talking about Pharisees in this passage doesn't mean that he's not talking to us, too. We miss the whole point of what he's saying if we rush off to apply it to someone else while making sure it passes us safely by. We can ignore it. We'd never be guilty of what he's accusing them of, would we?

Jesus says four things about them that we would never want him to say about us:

1. He calls them "hypocrites." Today that's a nice, safe religious word -- no threat to us at all! A "hypocrite" is the other guy -- someone doing something we don't like, or someone who thinks he's better than us! Nobody likes hypocrites any better than they like Pharisees.
   
   So let's use another word here, one that means more to us today. Jesus was calling them "fakes," "phonies." He said they were "acting a part," "putting on a front." They were "talking the talk, but not walking the walk." They were "living a lie." Does that communicate a little bit better?

2. He accused them of not loving God. He didn't use the word "love" in this passage, so that might slip right by us. But when you look at what he said, that's what it boiled down to. He said that:

• They were drawing near to God with their mouths;
• They were honoring God with their lips; but
• Their hearts were far from God.

Now when your heart is "far from" someone, I think it's safe to say you don't love them. If you listened to these people talk, you'd be very much impressed by their closeness to God, by their honor and respect for God. But their words were just a front. They were "faking it" in their walk with God.

3. He accused them of teaching the commandments of men in place of God's Word. This was the heart of the problem.

One very real danger that confronts God's people is that we don't see much of a problem with our words and our ideas. In our thinking, our words and our ideas are a close second to, and a viable substitute for, God's Word.

Jesus kills that idea right here. He draws a line in the sand for us. On one side is the Word of God, which lives and abides forever. On the other side is our word, or the word of our neighbors, or the word of our religious leaders, or whoever's word we want to consider other than God's Word. The two are separate. There is no connection between the two of them. They are opposites. They are at war with each other.

Isaiah 55:7-9.

7 Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon

8 For my thoughts [are] not your thoughts, neither [are] your ways my ways, saith the LORD.

9 For [as] the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

The only hope of reconciliation between God's Word and our words is that we change our words to agree with God's Word; that we forsake our thoughts and our words and our ways, and replace them with God's thoughts, God's words, God's ways. When that happens, we have agreement between God and ourselves. But without that, there is no hope of reconciliation. God's Word will not change. And His Word is as far removed from our word as night is from day, or as the heavens are from the earth.

4. Because they had substituted their word for God's Word, Jesus said that they were worshipping God "in vain." In other words, they were wasting their time in their worship of God.

This is the part of this passage that should stop us in our tracks, and make us look deep inside ourselves, asking, "Lord, is it I?" Jesus said that their is something that has the power to make your worship of God worthless. That makes whatever it is extremely dangerous to us.

Imagine standing before God after a lifetime of worshipping God, working for God, and serving God, and have Him say, "You wasted your time." Can anything be more tragic than that?

What is it that takes your worship of God and turns it into a mockery, a show, a fake, a waste of time? Jesus gives us the answer right here: teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. Substituting the words of man for the Word of the True God. Teaching and living by your own thoughts and convictions -- or somebody else's -- in place of the living Word of God.

If God's Word is truth, then anything that disagrees with God's Word, anything that stands in opposition to God's Word, anything that substitutes itself for God's Word while differing from it, is a lie. And there's a world of difference between the truth and a lie.

During World War II, the Germans besieged the Russian city of Leningrad. Food became so scarce there that people became desperate for something to eat. In the middle of the famine, someone came up with the idea of making bread out of a combination of grain and sawdust: ninety percent sawdust and ten percent grain.

This plan was put into effect. The people were given this "new bread," which looked like the answer to their prayers. They were able to chew it and eat it, and it felt to their stomachs like they had eaten something solid. Yet, their bodies could not digest sawdust. As a result, ninety percent of their eating was a waste of time. Ninety percent of what they ate did them no good at all -- because someone had substituted something "almost as good" in place of food.

There is no substitute for God's Word. Anything we accept in its place is a waste of time as far as walking with God or pleasing God is concerned. We can eat, digest, and feed others on the "bread of life," or we can substitute "spiritual sawdust" from the dead wood of our own minds, or from someone else's mind.

In light of these things, what should we do? Everything we believe, live, and teach that pertains to life and godliness is either God's Word or someone else's word. It is critical to our spiritual health and to our walk with God that we root out from our thinking and teaching everything that substitutes itself for God's Word.