Inside out
It is quite common for an unbeliever to believe that mankind, although not perfect, is fundamentally good. Even many believers hold to a watered-down form of this belief where they technically admit that every one of us is a sinner, but practically think that we aren’t that bad. You know, maybe we were bad enough to doom us to Hell, but most of us are still basically nice people. Given this common belief, it is surprising to realize how often people—even religious people—are exactly wrong.
The Pharisees were, if nothing else, religious men. They devoted massive amounts of time, study, and energy to doing what they believed would please God. If religion could help any man, then these men would have been safe when they died and met the Judge of all the earth. But, one day, they did meet Him. He surprised them, though. He didn’t wait for them to die. Instead, He came to visit them. It was, if you will, a test run to see if religion would help men when they met their Maker.
It turned out that religion wasn’t the help they thought it would be. For all of their study and effort, the Pharisees didn’t know how to please Him at all. Worse—they found that He didn’t please them. Of all the men and women the Lord Jesus met as He walked the earth, nobody hated Him like those men did. The Pharisees weren’t just wrong, they were utterly wrong.
The problem was that they had things completely reversed. The Lord Jesus told them, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also.” (Mt. 23:25f)
This is, in fact, the problem with all of mankind’s religion: it focuses on the externals, but the inner man—the real person—is untouched. In the most important question of life, we are not slightly, but completely, wrong. Our natural approach to God (and you can find it the world over in a variety of forms) is to clean up the outside—make rules and laws and rituals to get people to do right. But what we really need is to cleanse the inside.
You can see why the Pharisees didn’t like Him. In telling them to first make men clean internally, He was telling them to do something that no man can do. Well, no man save One.
Our God is the God of new things: the new covenant, a new song, a new commandment, a new and living way, a new man, and, one day, a new heaven and a new earth, just to name a few. So He has a simple but wonderful method for cleaning the inside of man: He gives us new hearts.
“Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.” (Ezek. 36:25-27)
This world is full of men and women who are disheartened by the problems they see when they honestly look inside. We have the privilege of introducing them to the One who can make them a new creation, grant them a new life, and give them a new heart.