In the last post I pointed out how much Jesus despised the brand of spirituality found in the Pharisees called legalism.  Christ criticized this approach because it missed the point of obedience.  According to Jesus in Matthew 12:7, the point of obedience is to worship the God of mercy and compassion.  Any attempt at obedience that loses sight of the God that is its object will result in a prideful and uncaring spirit in the life of the practitioner.  For proof, look no further than Matthew 12:8-14.

Matthew tells us that Jesus, after having challenged the Pharisees understanding of obedience, went to the synagogue and encountered a man whose hand was withered.  In other words, he came upon a man whose hand musculature had atrophied from an injury, stroke, congenital defect, or other cause.  We’ve all known folks who have had similar conditions.  Followers of a God of compassion view such victims compassionately. 

So we spot right away that legalists follow no such God.  They looked right through the crying human need in front of them and instead saw an opportunity to expose Christ as “soft” when it came to adherence to the law.  Jesus the “softee’ would “break” God’s law and “work” on the Sabbath by healing this guy.  They just knew it.  He could never pass up such an opportunity.  And sure enough, Jesus healed the man.  Note their response:  “But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.” (Matt 12:14 ESV) How on earth could the Pharisees find no joy in the merciful healing of a human in pain and actually believe that God was displeased with what Christ had done?  It’s simple.

We are what we worship.

When I was a boy I was told by health and science teachers in school, “You are what you eat.”  The goal was to impress upon me the truth that what I put in my body is what I would become.  That’s right, I am the product of a steady diet of Ding Dong’s and peanut butter as a child.

The truth of Matthew 12 is that we become what we put into our spirit.  The Pharisees had poured what I would call a worship of the Law into their spirit’s.  And what does scripture say of the Law?  It says that it takes us captive and serves as a guardian (Gal 3:23-24).  While this was actually a positive thing until the coming of Christ (again, see Gal 3:23-24), it still was a difficult burden.  I like how John McArthur put it:

“…the law is an unrelenting taskmaster--it never eases up and it never lightens the load.  The law doesn't say, "Well look, just work hard at this thing, keep it perfectly for the first five years and I'll give you a few sins for the second five."  The law never lightens the burden.  The law never eases up.  Sinners never have any rest.  They never have anything to look forward to in terms of the easing of the standard of the law--it never eases up.  It has stringent, unbending, and unrelenting demands and no days off and no exceptions.”

When such a taskmaster becomes an object of worship, we become like it.  We become stringent, unbending, and unrelenting in our demands with no days off and no exceptions.  That’s why the legalists around you are the most unloving and difficult people you know.  They are what they worship.

Christ has shown us a better way.  Nothing in the New Testament would lead us to believe that he came to lessen the standards of the Old Testament.  To the contrary, it seems pretty clear in the Sermon on the Mount that he came to show us that God expects adherence to the Old Testament law in both thought AND action.  That’s pretty tough.

But he also came to meet that standard on our behalf.  That’s a little thing we call grace.  And because of God’s grace, we are free to worship him by committing to follow the law as an act of devotion to Him, not as a means of currying His favor with the law as a taskmaster pressing relentlessly on.  And because our worship is fixed on the person of God…because we love the Lord with all of our heart, mind and strength (Mark 12:30)…we become like the God we worship and love our fellow man as we love ourselves (Mark 12:31).

That’s what Jesus was trying to show us in Matthew 12.  He was showing his superiority over the law.  He was encouraging people to worship God, not the law, and showing us that when we do we will demonstrate the compassion and mercy of the God we worship.  Why?

Because we are what we worship.