Morbid Anatomy: The Root Of Sin - Mark 7:14-23 Series

Mark 7:14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15 Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean.’” 17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. 18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’? 19 For it doesn’t go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods “clean.”) 20 He went on: “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ 21 For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’ ”

Introduction: Uncleanness

If I asked you to think of a time in your life when you felt dirty on the inside—morally soiled… , you probably wouldn’t have to think too hard. Even people who claim they don’t believe in moral absolutes, or they don’t think there is such a thing as sin—even those people have times when they feel it. They might use different words—instead of dirty or unclean they feel inadequate, unacceptable, unfit—a sense that there is something wrong with me, I don’t measure up. Whatever words you use to describe it, the problem of uncleanness was not unique to the Pharisees of Jesus’ time. It’s a problem for every human being on the planet.

If you’re going to meet with someone who is important to you—a job interview, a first date—you clean up, brush your teeth, get a haircut. What are you doing? Getting rid of uncleanness. You don’t want to look bad or smell bad or be repulsive in any way.

And that’s especially true if the person you’re meeting with is God. All of religion is about how a person gets cleaned up before meeting with God.

Jesus’ Topic: The Source of Uncleanness

Now, in the first 23 verses of Mark 7 Jesus teaches all about uncleanness. And you would expect that his main point would be the solution to uncleanness—how to become clean before God. But that’s not his point. He doesn’t say anything in this passage directly about the solution to moral uncleanness. The whole thing is about the source of uncleanness.

Why? Because the solution won’t work if you don’t first understand the source. To deal with the problem of sin it has to be severed at the root. Most people try to deal with their sin at the level of actions. “From now on, I’m going to stop doing this.” Or maybe they will even say, “I’m going to stay away from the influences that push me into that sin.” And for most people, that’s about as far as it goes. Fighting your sin problem by stopping your bad behaviors is like trying to kill an apple tree by picking the apples. No matter how many you pick, new apples keep coming. If you want to stop the apples from coming, you’ve got to cut the thing down at the root.

Or to put it another way, you can’t fight a war if you don’t know who the enemy is. It won’t do any good for you to master warfare if you are fighting the wrong people in the wrong country. You’ve got to know your enemy.

And if you’re wondering how important this is, just look at how long Jesus’ response to this question about uncleanness is. It’s one of Jesus’ longest speeches in the whole book. Usually Mark spends the great majority of his time describing Jesus’ actions and only gives just little snippets of Jesus’ words. That’s Mark’s style, but here he makes a rare exception and records a long answer from Jesus. And that long answer comes in three phases addressed to three different groups. Phase one is to the Pharisees and Scribes—we studied that last time. Phase two, he speaks to the crowd. Phase three is in the house with his disciples. And all of it gets recorded in the Bible. So Jesus’ response here has “important” written all over it.

And here’s something interesting—this whole thing is a response to the Pharisees’ question about handwashing. And in this whole, long answer, Jesus never says one word about handwashing—never even mentions it.

Jesus often did that—someone asks something and he skips by the pretext and goes right to the heart of the real issue. They confront Jesus about a ritual; he gives them an answer about ritualism. They ask him about a point of religion and he responds by demolishing their entire religious system.