Bulletin Articles
Restoring New Testament Christianity: Part 4
Note: this is part 4 of a series of articles on “Restoring New Testament Christianity”
In Matthew 9:10-13 as Jesus is dining with many tax collectors and sinners, the Pharisees are questioning His judgment in eating with these people. Jesus responds by telling the Pharisees that there’s a really important part of the Scriptures they don’t understand. He tells them, “go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” This is an alarming statement. The Pharisees spent much of their lives studying the Law and were experts in the Scriptures. And we all know what an important component sacrifices were of the Old Law. In fact, much of the Torah was devoted to instructions around how to offer these sacrifices as this was a critical part of their worship of God. So what is Jesus saying?
Jesus is emphasizing that some things are more important than sacrifices, and if you don’t understand, and more importantly practice these bigger principles, then your sacrifices are worthless to God. That He tells the Pharisees to go and learn what this means emphasizes the importance of this teaching, one that these highly religious people had missed, and as a result, their judgement and way of living was distorted. Jesus quotes this exact same passage, originally from Hosea 6:6, in Matthew 12:1-8 in the context of the Sabbath law. In Matthew 23, He teaches the same principle again as He highlights all the relatively minor priorities of the Pharisees in contrast to the weightier matters of the Law such as justice and righteousness. And in Matthew 22:34-40 Jesus emphasizes once again to the religious leaders what matters most: loving God and loving people.
It’s clear that Jesus came teaching, much like Isaiah (1:10-17), Amos (5:22-25), and Micah (6:6-8) before Him, a need to restore the inside- the heart. It was not the nuances of worship that Jesus (or the prophets) were most concerned with, but one’s character and way of living. God wasn’t taking issue with the Israelites in Isaiah, Amos, or Micah because they missed a detail of how to offer the sacrifice, rather that they weren’t doing good, being just, and taking care of the vulnerable and weak.
Similarly, Jesus wasn’t condemning the religious leaders of His day because they weren’t praying or worshipping enough, rather that amid all the rules they were trying to bind, they had lost track of what it was all really about. This is by no means to suggest that God didn’t care about worship. He went into great detail in the Old Law on how to worship for a reason- it mattered, and He expected obedience. But if we don’t get matters like righteous living, mercy, justice, doing good, loving God and loving people right, the logistics of worship aren’t going to matter. Rather than just focusing on their worship, God wanted them to focus on their hearts- Godly living. We will further examine some practical applications of this next week.
