GOD IS NOT PETTY.

A “GROW AND GO” STUDY.

More churches and works of God are crippled by fussiness over trivialities than by any of the more obvious false doctrines. It was the same in the early church. Pettiness is one of the greatest obstacles to the fulfilment of The Great Commission.

The word “Petty” or “petty-minded” means:-

Fussy over trivialities.
Caring more for technical rules than for real values.
Applying regulations without understanding the reason behind them.

GOD IS NOT PETTY

BY THE CORNFIELD. Matthew 12.
One sabbath day Christ was walking beside a field of ripe corn. Some of His disciples picked a few ears, rubbed out the grain between the palms of their hands and ate it.

The law stated that passers-by could eat from standing crops provided they picked by hand and ate on the spot, but the watching Pharisees had a different quibble. They objected, not to the action but to the day. It was the Sabbath and work was prohibited. Picking corn, they said, was reaping. Rubbing out the grain was threshing.

Christ answered them, and the really significant point of His answer is that He did not attempt to correct their interpretation of the law. He could easily have done so. Reaping another’s field was forbidden as theft; so if plucking corn was not considered to be the same as reaping for that purpose, it could hardly be called reaping for the purpose of the sabbath law either.

If He had argued like that, the whole discussion would have been about the exact meaning of the words of the law; the kind of argument the Pharisees loved. They might have disagreed with Him but would not have showed the bitter anger which His actual answer provoked.

He said, “Haven’t you heard what David did when he was hungry? He ate the shewbread which only priests are allowed to eat.”

All quibbling was swept aside by the over-riding declaration that God is not petty. For that they plotted to kill Him.

PHARISEES FURY Matthew 12.
Why? There is nothing petty about murder by anyone’s standards. Why did the Pharisees respond with such unreasoned anger when Christ opposed their pettiness?

The fact was He had torn down their defences and left them exposed. Pettiness forms a protective wall with which people surround themselves.

It protects self-righteousness. It is easy to set up trivial standards and boost self-esteem by keeping them. It is equally easy to condemn others for not keeping them. Pettiness protects a self-image of being holier than others.

It protects a false sense of community, of being united with others who share our little rules, of being a privileged people, different from and better than the rest.

It protects from the reality of God’s standards. A god who fusses over trifles does not concern himself with such matters as justice and love. Truth and honour are outside his province. His jurisdiction does not cover purity and holiness.

The Pharisees rage at having their defences removed led them to plot murder.

ALL FOOD KOSHER (CEREMONIALLY CLEAN) Mark 7.
The Pharisees found another complaint. Some of the disciples were skimping the ceremonial washing before meals. Once again the Lord’s answer went far beyond the point in question.

“What goes into a man does not defile him,” Jesus said, “only what comes out of him can do that.”

It took everyone a little while to grasp the full meaning. Even the disciples thought it was a parable at first. It was no parable, just a simple statement of fact. When evil thoughts, words or actions come out from a person, that person is defiled. Food merely passes through and out the other end.

By this statement, the astonished disciples reported, He declared all foods kosher. Every major religion has its food regulations and dress regulations, and the little cults revel in them. The Lord from Heaven dismissed them in a single sentence.

It must not be imagined that the food regulations of Judaism were the invention of the Pharisees or Rabbis. Moses himself received them from God. Incidentally if seen as a matter of health and hygiene they make good sense. Modern dietary science has just about caught up with them. But as necessary rules for conduct, Christ simply wiped them out.

IN THE EARLY CHURCH
The clash continued. In Acts and the Epistles, pettiness is seen, not as the enemy from outside but the enemy from within. It divided the early church. It sent Paul and Barnabas journeying between Antioch and Jerusalem. It caused the only disagreement between Peter and Paul.

The church in Jerusalem began magnificently, yet it was Antioch, not Jerusalem, which formed the springboard from which the Gospel went into the world. Antioch was the church that stood for freedom. Its elders, not its upstarts, resisted every petty regulation that tried to find its way in. They kept it clean while Jerusalem was gradually slipping back into rule-keeping and Pharisaism.

When Peter visited Antioch he shared its life and worship together with Gentile Christians who had never been taught to keep the law of Moses. But when some visitors came from Jerusalem, the normally-courageous apostle kept out of the way to avoid a confrontation. For the second time he played safe, and it was as much a denial of His Lord as the first time. Only the temptation was more subtle.

St Paul’s letter to the Galatians is the angriest book in the New Testament. Writing to a church he had planted and loved, he uses words like these:

Why are you deserting Christ so soon?

You are turning to another Gospel which is not a Gospel.

False brothers have infiltrated to spy out your liberty and make you slaves.

Foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you.

You did run well - who has stopped you obeying the truth.

You are turning back to weak and miserable principles.

Do you think that what the Spirit started can be completed by human effort?

What had gone wrong? Why such intensity of feeling? The Galatians had not begun to worship idols. They still believed that Jesus Christ is God and that He died to save them. They were not denying the resurrection.

(In fact when some people at Corinth did deny the resurrection, Paul wrote to them with a reasoned argument - 1 Corinthians 15 - but with nothing like the white-hot fury of Galatians.)

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What had happened was that some visitors had come to Galatia and, finding a new church full of enthusiasm but comparatively untaught, had begun to teach the scriptures. They had expounded the law of Moses (an excellent subject for study). They had declared that God’s law had to be obeyed - true.

They had not, as is sometimes said, taught that observance of the law is necessary to salvation. The doctrines of the atonement and salvation by faith were as much part of their teaching as of Paul’s. Most modern churches would have accepted them as orthodox Evangelical Christians and learned Bible scholars.

They were simply telling the Galatians that they must obey the law in order to be acceptable followers of Christ. What they taught came from scripture just as the Pharisees’ teaching had, but they forgot to mention that God is not petty. They led their hearers straight from the words of the Bible to the action of obedience to it, bypassing the need to hear from God Himself, neglecting the Holy Spirit’s role as interpreter of God’s Word.

They did not teach the difference between the “letter” of God’s Word and the “spirit” of it.

LETTER AND SPIRIT.
The “letter” is what was actually said to the original hearers, in context. The “spirit” is what the Holy spirit is saying now to the present reader through it.

Christ declared every dot and comma (jot and tittle) of the law to be valid until Heaven and Earth pass away. “Do not think’” He said, “that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets.” Yet it must have seemed to His bewildered orthodox Jewish disciples that He had come to do just that.

Similarly, St Paul wrote that all scripture is, “God-breathed and profitable” but also warned Galatians that by obeying certain detailed commands they were turning aside to another Gospel which is no Gospel.

To bring the dilemma up to date; we eat pork, some of us (not I) eat shellfish or black puddings (an English food containing blood). If we observe a sabbath we do so on Sunday not Saturday. We do not wear blue tassels on the corners of our coats or build parapets round sloping roofs. If we circumcise our baby boys we do it on medical advice or not at all. We keep no year of jubilee or Passover. We rarely wash each other’s feet.

In all these things we appear to be disobeying commands given clearly in the Bible - but we declare emphatically that the whole Bible is God’s Word, inspired and having authority.

Unless we understand what the Bible itself teaches about the “letter” and the “spirit” of what it says, we shall either give up trying to follow it at all, or tie ourselves in knots with unending and conflicting regulations.

THE BIBLE - THREE STEPS TO TRUTH.
The three steps to Truth when seeking God in His Word are simply stated, READ, HEAR AND OBEY; but applying them is a lifelong commitment.

Read the Bible itself and find out what it actually says. Hear what The Holy Spirit is saying to us through it as we read it in fellowship with Him. Obey what we have thus heard.

Great sections of the church and whole movements have gone wrong in three different directions, by missing out one or another of these steps.
Read - or become shallow.
Hear - or fall into legalism.
Obey - or stagnate.

Reading means getting to know the “letter” - what God’s Word actually does say instead of what we have been told it says. It includes thinking ourselves back into the lives of its characters and feeling the heat of the desert with Abraham or the dampness of the dungeon with Joseph. It includes revelling in the poetry of Job, dreaming the dreams of Ezekiel, Daniel or Zechariah. It includes struggling to make sense of the measurements of the Tabernacle or piecing together the events of Holy Week from the four Gospels. It includes knowing the law - the very law that can lead us to legalism if wrongly used is part of God’s Word, God-breathed and profitable, not to pass away while Heaven and Earth endure, full of Truth to be received from its Author.

But none of this study by itself will lead us to Truth. Only the Holy Spirit can do that and whatever study is not done in living relationship with Him will be dead.

Whole churches have been ruined and whole movements led astray by applying some scriptural passage in what seems to be its obvious sense and obeying it rigidly.

Pettiness is one of the Devil’s most effective weapons against the spread of the Gospel as well as against the understanding of God’s Truth. If our interpretation of the words of scripture produces a petty-minded action, stop and go back to the Holy Spirit and ask where did we get that wrong?