“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” Matthew 23:27-28
I recently came across this interesting photo of a tree that was hollow on the inside and looked relatively healthy on the outside. This tree was cut down because a professional arborist thought it looked stressed and said it was probably not healthy. Not healthy! If you could look at the stump closely, you will see that 80% of its insides are missing completely. Incredibly, to the untrained eye, the outside of the tree looked just fine, and it took an expert to spot the problem. Had it not been cut down, it would have inevitably blown down sometime in the future. The scary part was the tree was only 10’ from a house!
In today’s verse Jesus is speaking to the most outwardly righteous people in Israel. The Pharisees and Sadducees strode about striving to look righteous in all they did, but much of the sermon on the mount (found in Matthew and Luke) addressed the hypocrisy of these men. God is concerned with the health of our insides, not the looks of the outside. Time and time again His Word reveals stories of people who looked “wrong” on the outside, but were “strong” on the inside. Stories like the poor widow, the repentant tax-collector, and the kind Samaritan, were contrasted with the “righteous” men of the temple who looked good but weren’t good.
If we are not healthy on the inside, pressures from the outside will take us down. It isn’t always the weakest-looking trees that blow down during a storm but the weakest trees. Some look good on the outside, but like our tree in today’s photo, might be dead on the inside. Remember that I said the expert arborist saw the tree and then cut down the tree to protect others. God is the expert that knows our health on the inside. Throughout the Bible there are examples of God removing those that were dangerous to those around them. If we lose our usefulness to the Kingdom of God and have, in fact, become detrimental to the kingdom, we may be cut down.
Famous actor Robert Redford was walking one day through a hotel lobby.
A woman saw him and followed him to the elevator. “Are you the real Robert Redford?” she asked him with great excitement. As the doors of the elevator closed, he replied, “Only when I am alone!” Isn’t Redford’s answer often our own.
I think the Word is clear that we are eternally secure once we have received the Holy Spirit. I also think the Bible clearly teaches that sin in our lives can lead to physical death. When Ananias and Sapphira tried to deceive the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts, they lost their lives, but there is no indication that they lost their salvation. We are not “punished” for our sin in the sense of losing salvation or being eternally separated from God, yet we are disciplined, sometimes even unto death. “The Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son.” (Hebrews 12:6).
First John 5:16 says there comes a point when God can no longer allow a believer to continue in unrepentant sin, that there is sin that leads unto death. When that point is reached, God may allow the stubbornly sinful believer to taste that death. If we look like the tree above and we are spiritually dead on the inside, we should be prepared. If the strong winds of this world don’t take us down, the axe of the great Arborist just might. Regardless, how we look to others is inconsequential. It’s what’s inside that counts.
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