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Nov 19, 2023 06:00am

Looks Aren’t Anything

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Today I was preparing the ground for a Fall Garden. My husband had made it easier for me by tilling the ground with the tiller behind the tractor, but I still had to clean out all the old roots and grass and weeds to avoid fighting them again throughout the season. My husband suggested that raking the weeds and roots out would be easiest, so I got out the rake and began raking up and down each row.

The end of summer was very hot and dry where we live, and our ground is what is called “sandy loam.” As I began raking, I noticed that the fluffy, dry sand was going to rake over the top of all the dense root systems of old plants and grasses. In all honesty, it looked great! But it only took a casual perusal with my fingers through the sand to know that my garden spot was infested with grass roots and weeds that were lurking beneath the surface, waiting for the perfect opportunity to rob my plants of any water or nutrients I would give them. As I continued working my way across the soil, I found more and more grass clumps. Some of them were as much as 5 inches in diameter even though they were invisible from the top of the raked soil. It was frustrating to know I had worked so hard, but there was still so much potentially destructive organic matter in my garden soil under the pristine surface.

As I began to work my way through the soil again, but this time by hand, my frustrating experience brought to mind a passage of Scripture in Matthew 23. The entire chapter is Jesus expressing His own frustration and indictments against the religious leaders of the day, and then in verses 26-28, He uses two analogies to describe them. One is a dish that is washed only on the outside and called clean, and the other is a whitewashed tomb which is beautiful on the outside but full of dead men’s bones. With these analogies, Jesus is making two strong points for both the religious leaders of that day and for us as well.

His first point is that changing our actions, thoughts, or behaviors, is not what makes us righteous before God, because we can never do it perfectly. In Romans 5:8-9 we learn that while we were still sinners Christ demonstrated His love toward us through His death and righteousness comes only through faith in His finished work. After we are reconciled to God through Jesus’ sacrifice, the Holy Spirit then begins the work of sanctification which changes us from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Romans 8:13 says, “For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” In our own strength we will never be able to put sin to death or keep behaviors in check. How we look or what behaviors we do or don’t do cannot make us clean from our sin. Like the unclean dish, anything that goes in the dish or comes out of the dish is unclean or contaminated because the dish was never completely clean in the first place.

Jesus’ second point to the religious leaders is that their outward appearances and adherence to the laws do not make them (nor us) spiritually alive to God.
Because our righteousness is cited as “filthy rags” in God’s sight, they don’t make us holy or righteous or acceptable in the face of God’s holiness.

Because our righteous acts will always miss the mark of God’s holiness, they cannot earn our entrance into heaven. Jesus’ analogy is appropriate for the situation because as religious leaders they have the knowledge of Scripture that would lead them and the people to faith in God and to know Jesus as the Messiah, but instead they became focused on how they look to others and holding others to unreasonable standards as a means to earn their way to heaven. But Jesus teaches that the way we look on the outside isn’t important when it isn’t a result of a clean and holy inside. He wanted them to know that their works still earn them death, because Jesus is the only way to enter. He is the only option if we want to be made alive to God and gain entrance to heaven. Romans 10:9 says, “if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”