The Jesus Of The Word Of God Series

“You don’t get your own personal Jesus!”

In spite of what a recent “He gets us” television ad says, that’s the emphatic title of a little booklet written by popular east-coast Baptist Pastor J. D. Grear.

He confesses that he first said it, actually yelled it in the middle of a television interview he was watching in which someone kept arguing his point by saying, “Well, My Jesus would or wouldn’t say that.”

It came as a result of his repeated frustrations with people who didn’t like something about the true Biblical Jesus. In one witnessing encounter, a young lady told him that she didn’t want a Jesus who insisted that He was the one and only way to God.

His point is not that Jesus isn’t personal—Jesus is very personal and personally interested in us. But his point is that you don’t get to choose whatever version of Jesus you prefer—that if you’re going to have a personal relationship with Jesus, it has to be with the real Jesus—the Jesus presented to us in God’s revelation, the Bible—the real Jesus of the Word of God.

The problem with many of us, He notes, is that we want to make Jesus after our own image—we want a Jesus who agrees with us and is pleased and supports us in whatever we want to do or say. It’s the same problem we all have in our relationship with God. As one sage put it, “God made man in his own image, and we have been returning the favor ever since.”

And so, as we continue our series this morning on meeting the Real Jesus, we continue talking about people who encountered the real Jesus 2,000 years ago in the Gospels. And this morning, we’re going to talk about some people who encountered the Real Jesus and didn’t like Him and ultimately rejected Him because He would bow to their opinions, and refused the meet their expectations of what the Messiah would be like and what He would do.

And so, the question for each of us this morning as we examine this passage is this: Do I follow the real Jesus, or merely a caricature of Jesus, a Jesus of my own imagination who just so happens to agree with Me whenever I need Him to. Am I about living up to Jesus’ expectations of me, or do I serve a Jesus who serves my expectations and demands.

So, this morning, believe it or not, the people we’re going to be talking about who didn’t like the real Jesus because He didn’t live up to their expectations were the most respected religious authorities of the Day, the Pharisees and the Scribes who were respected by all the Jews.

Now the Pharisees were the strictest sect of the Jewish religion. As I’ve noted before, they were absolute nitpickers in attempting to follow the Law of Moses, and even went beyond its demands of Moses’ Law by adding to their list of do’s and don'ts the “Traditions of the Elders”—that is the commands of the revered Jewish rabbis of the past, the oral Law of the Jews. The scribes were the scholars, the experts in the Old Testament Law, which was not only the religious revelation, but it was literally the political and governmental Law of the nation of Israel. They were, in a sense, religious lawyers, who dictated what Jews should and could do in Israel—those who handed the theory of the Old Testament Law while the Pharisees tried to excel in the outward practice of the Law.

In Mark 1, we’re told representatives of these two groups gathered around Jesus, having come perhaps as a delegation from the seat of religious authority in Israel, the capital city and site of the temple, Jerusalem.

It is now toward the end of Jesus’ Great Galilean Ministry—when Jesus became a sensation in Israel by healing everyone and anyone who came to Him. He’s in Galilee, and these Pharisees and scribes, the religious authorities have travelled a considerable distance north from Jerusalem just to check him out. After all, He’s created quite a stir in the nation, He’s been critical of the religious establishment, and they’re probably looking for any accusation they can bring against Him because, from their perspective, he’s been involved in subversive activities. He's challenging their credibility as the ruling religious elite.

And it doesn’t take them long to find something to critique. They had observed as some of Jesus’ disciples are eating food with impure or unclean hands, and this is a taboo, not according to Old Testament Law, not according to the Word of God, but according to the “tradition of the elders.”

Now our Gospel writer Mark is very carful in verse 3 to describe for us exactly why this was a problem. “For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they carefully wash their hands, thus observing the traditions of the elders, and when they come from the market place, they do not eat unless they cleanse themselves; and there are many other things which they have received in order to observe, such as the washing of cups and pitchers and copper pots.)