Part Two, of Eight Qualities of the Heart That Resists Error
If lights are out in the heart, then lights are out in the mind.
If we want to know the truth about the big questions of life, we must pay attention to the state of our soul, not just our worldview. Last week we began an examination of eight soul qualities that make us immune to false teaching. The first quality is Devotion to the True God. The second quality is purity of heart.
2. Purity of heart
Discerning truth and error can seem like the domain of rational thinking alone, but the mind usually follows the heart. Desire steers belief. Evil desires and feelings lead into darkness, and darkness makes reason unreliable. Therefore to recognize error, guard the purity of your heart.
A pure heart depends especially on the illumination of love. John wrote, “Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes” (1 John 2:9–11).
John wrote these important words about love in a letter (1 John) devoted to the subject of distinguishing truth from error. This confirms again the connection between mind and heart. If lights are out in the heart, then lights are out in the mind. If our hearts are full of lingering bitterness, hatred, anger, and unforgiveness, we will have a hard time knowing the truth. We will be in darkness.
“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4:23).
Guard your mind by regularly examining your heart, confessing sin, forgiving others, loving even your enemies, and sincerely repenting.
Next week, we come to the third quality of your soul that makes you immune to error.
God’s purity and your health are linked. Because God is absolutely pure, he loves what is clean, and what is clean brings health to every aspect of your life.
With all the knowledge and technology available today, you would think clean, healthful water would not be hard to get in America.
Several decades ago the idea that tap water was contaminated and unhealthy took hold among the masses, and a wave of marketing persuaded us that if you wanted pure water you needed to buy bottled water. I did not want to spend a major part of my budget on bottled water, but when I did drink it I felt as though I was doing something healthy. I felt I was putting purity in my body, water that cleansed my body of toxins.
Then we began to learn that bottled water was contaminated. Chemicals could leach from the plastic. Lots of bottled water did not come from clean sources. Just because water was in a bottle did not mean it was pure, as many people had assumed. Bummer.
Foul in Flint
Then you have a case of major negligence from a municipality like Flint, Michigan. In 2014 a crisis began over the presence of lead in the city’s water supply. For months numerous governmental leaders and agencies who were responsible for the situation denied or minimized the problem. But eventually they could no longer deny the facts. The number of children showing up in local hospitals with lead poisoning was increasing. They were being poisoned by drinking tap water and suffering neurological harm.
One outside expert on municipal water quality, who was brought in to study and report on the situation, said about the governmental leaders handling the crisis: “It was the injustice of it all and that the very agencies that are paid to protect these residents from lead in water, knew or should’ve known after June at the very, very latest of this year, that federal law was not being followed in Flint, and that these children and residents were not being protected. And the extent to which they went to cover this up exposes a new level of arrogance and uncaring that I have never encountered.”1
Stories like that do not make for trust in government.
Don’t drink from the water fountains
Here in Chicago we have not had a problem as bad as Flint, Michigan, or the same level of official negligence as far as I know, but we have had tainted tap water. When the Flint story came out, people here started testing the water and found that the water flowing from the fountains in public parks and in public schools had excessive levels of lead in many places, due to old lead pipes. News sources listed locations where the water was bad. Now the city is systematically digging up old water pipes and replacing them with new ones.
Meanwhile, don’t drink the water unless it is filtered.
Everything tainted?
All that is unsettling. What do you do? At my home we drink tap water run through a Brita filter. Is it pure? I don’t know. Is it tainted? Certainly. My son works for the EPA, and he says there is no such thing as food or water that is absolutely pure; the best you can hope for is toxin levels below what has proven harmful. Acceptable contamination. Relative purity. Minimal pollution.
Nontoxic God
The point of all this is not water, but God. The Bible says he is what our water cannot be: absolutely, 100 percent pure, without a trace of toxins.
1 John 1:5 says, “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”
Revelation 22:1 describes the New Creation: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.”
The water of life that God supplies is as bright as crystal, sparkling with purity like a crystal vase under a lamp in a jewelry store.
The Bible highlights God’s absolute purity not only by comparing him to bright light and sparkling, clean water but also to pure gold. Again and again God’s directions for the construction of the tabernacle specified that Moses was to use pure gold on various articles such as the Ark of the Covenant. “You shall make a mercy seat of pure gold” (Exodus 25:17). The pure gold symbolized God’s absolute purity.
God’s Purity and Your Health
Therefore he loves what is morally clean. Through Moses he gave Israel detailed laws to follow for what is clean and unclean. God knows clean and pure.
Therefore he knows what is perfectly healthful for us in every aspect of life. He is not like a negligent government official who fails to tell people what can poison them. Rather, God has been faithful to warn us about impurity of every kind.
He knows what is pure and healthful for you sexually and in your thought life. He knows what is pure and healthful in your attitude toward possessions and money, and toward other people. And he knows about pure emotions and desires, and pure speech. He knows about pure books, movies, and music. He knows about pure doctrine.
What is pure is clean, and what is clean is healthy. God is absolutely pure, absolutely clean, and therefore he brings health to your spirit, soul, and body.
Jeremiah 9:23–24: “Thus says the LORD: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.’” (ESV)
Because God is absolutely pure, he is perfectly good, and we can trust him.
We live in a world where impurity can ruin anything.
Last year, for example, after one of the most respected Christian apologists in the world died, he received waves of public admiration and eulogy. A few months later, however, investigators revealed he had maintained for many years a double life of sexual sin and abuse toward many. YouTube channels reverberated for months with disillusioned people trying to make sense of it. By destroying people’s ability to trust leaders in general and by bringing discredit to the gospel, this man’s sins outweighed the good he had done for a lifetime.
Ruined by impurity
Ecclesiastes 10:1 says, “Dead flies make the perfumer’s ointment give off a stench; so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor.”
In computer apps, one wrong character or command, one corrupted line of code, can render the entire program useless.
And in hospitals, one disease-causing microbe on the glove of a surgeon can lead to an infection that ends in death.
In restaurants, one cockroach in your food is enough to spoil the entire meal and prevent you from ever going to that restaurant again.
Who wants food with a long list of artificial ingredients? Who wants corrupt politicians? Or who wants polluted air and water?
Pure is good.
Absolutely pure
To say that God is holy is to say he is absolutely pure, meaning he is uncontaminated by any trace of evil, but in fact hates evil and loves only good.
False gods and worldviews are impure. The pantheon of gods in Roman and Greek mythology were powerful, but flawed. The idolatrous gods of the nations around Israel required cultic prostitution, child sacrifice, and self-mutilation, and their rituals involved worshipers with demons. Pantheistic religions and worldviews maintain that everything is God and part of God, including all the corruptions inherent in our world. In the worldview of yinyang, everything contains both light and dark.
But 1 John 1:5 says, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” 1 John 3:3 says, “He is pure.”
Like sunlight
The definition of pure is: not mixed or adulterated with any other substance or material. Unalloyed. Free of contamination. Spotless. Stainless. Unmitigated. Free from what vitiates, weakens, or pollutes. Containing nothing that does not properly belong. Free from moral fault or guilt.
God is pure love, pure goodness, pure truth, and pure light.
He is as pure as sunlight, as clean as fire. God is not 99.9999 percent pure, but rather 100 percent pure, perfectly free from contamination and corruption, perfectly delighting in what is morally clean and abhorring what is defiled. He cannot be tempted by evil.
Psalm 5:4–6 says, “You are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you. The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies; the LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.”
The benefits of having a God who is absolutely pure
Because God is pure, he is perfect.
Because God is pure, he alone is good, perfectly good in himself, and perfectly good to his children. In all things—not some things or merely most things—he works for the good of those who love him (Romans 8:28).
Because God is pure, he will not lie to us.
Because God is pure, we can trust him.
And because God is pure, he is unchanging.
Because God is pure, he is infinitely superior to us.
Because God is pure in relation to us, he cannot act in malevolence toward us or betray us.
And because God is pure, he is love, pure love. We do not have to fear some pocket of darkness in God, but rather can trust him entirely.
Because God is pure, he is eternal life. Revelation 22:1 says, “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.”
This is what God is like
God is like organic, all-natural food perfectly free of artificial ingredients, preservatives, pollution, and disease-causing microbes and chemicals.
God is like a grocery store absolutely free from food, employees, or customers with coronavirus, colds, flus, or any other disease. You could walk in their without a mask and breathe freely and observe no social distancing and not have any chance whatever of getting sick.
God is like a surgery room with no germs, viruses, or bacteria on anything or anyone. It would be literally impossible to get an infection during surgery because there is not a single disease-causing microbe in the room.
God is like perfect computer code.
God is like a governmental leader who cannot lie, take a bribe, associate with corrupt business or political leaders, believe false information, or make a bad decision.
And God is like pure water that does not merely meet minimum standards for purity, but rather is perfectly free of toxins. In the real world, such perfection is impossible, but if it were, that is what God is like, with not even a trace of toxins.
We, too, can be pure
And because God is pure, and purity is good, he calls us to be pure.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).
First John 3:3 says, “Everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.”
Second Corinthians 6:14–7:1 says, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.’ Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.”
Jeremiah 9:23–24: “Thus says the LORD: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.’” (ESV)
In our defiled world, how refreshing and attractive is God’s purity and moral excellence.
When the Bible says God is holy it means he is morally pure. Not 95 percent pure, nor 99 percent pure, nor 99.99 percent pure, but 100 percent, absolutely, perfectly pure in every way, every action, every thought, every intention, every emotion. He is moral excellence.
Ethically, God is as clean as sunlight, as pure as fire.
“Far be it from God that he should do wickedness, and from the Almighty that he should do wrong” (Job 34:10).
Daniel had this vision of God: “As I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire” (Daniel 7:9).
Mark writes, “Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them” (9:2–3).
John writes, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).
God’s purity in what he loves and hates
In holiness God loves, enjoys, and finds infinite delight in what is pure. He loves his own righteous ways and delights in doing good. His pleasure is in justice.
Likewise, he rejoices to see goodness in us. God promotes what is morally clean, teaching people his ways. He honors and rewards people for being clean, pure, and good.
The flip side of that is, in holy purity, he has absolutely no pleasure in moral evil. He has no evil desires. God has never had an evil thought. He cannot be tempted by evil, and he tempts no one (James 1:13).
Not only does he have no pleasure in evil, he hates, abhors, and abominates it. For example,
There are six things that the LORD hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers. (Proverbs 6:16–19)
God reacts to evil the way we react to the worst smells. He recoils from evil the way we recoil from the smell of dead animals, dung, or rotten food in a dumpster.
God testified concerning Jesus, “You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness” (Hebrews 1:9).
Not only does he hate evil, he condemns and burns it. He is never complacent about evil, but sooner or later takes action to purge it from existence. He is absolutely pure, and this is his universe, so despite his great patience, mercy, and love, eventually what is evil and defiled must perish in flames (Revelation 21:8). Because God is the pure, clean housekeeper of the earth, what is corrupt and defiled is doomed.
God’s purity washes the unclean
God taught Israel over and over again in his law and in the procedures of worship in the tabernacle that his holiness meant being clean.
The Tabernacle provided a crucial object lesson:
You shall also make a basin of bronze, with its stand of bronze, for washing. You shall put it between the tent of meeting and the altar, and you shall put water in it, with which Aaron and his sons shall wash their hands and their feet. When they go into the tent of meeting, or when they come near the altar to minister, to burn a food offering to the LORD, they shall wash with water, so that they may not die. They shall wash their hands and their feet, so that they may not die. It shall be a statute forever to them, even to him and to his offspring throughout their generations. (Exodus 30:18–21)
Because God is holy, as pure as sunlight, he told the priests that one of their most important jobs was “They shall teach my people the difference between the holy and the common, and show them how to distinguish between the unclean and the clean” (Ezekiel 44:23).
The law divided food into the categories of clean and unclean, and therefore into what could and could not be eaten.
Even Israel’s soldiers had to pay attention to cleanliness:
You shall have a place outside the camp, and you shall go out to it. And you shall have a trowel with your tools, and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it and turn back and cover up your excrement. Because the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp, to deliver you and to give up your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you. (Deuteronomy 23:12–14)
Knowing God’s nature firsthand, Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
Finally, knowing all this, the apostle Paul wrote, “Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God” (2 Corinthians 7:1).
Our ways versus God’s ways
Our ways: Fallen humans can be tempted by and find pleasure in evil, in thinking about it, doing it, and experiencing it vicariously through books, movies, gossip, music, and the real actions of others.
God’s ways: God delights in purity and recoils from corruption. There is no shadow in him, nor moral indifference, only holiness as intense as fire.
That being the case, here is good news:
Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf (Hebrews 9:24).
We have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Hebrews 10:10).
You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Corinthians 6:11).
Today we look at one of God’s ways that is most not our way, but it is perfectly good and desirable once we come to our senses.
Recall again that the theme Scripture of this current series is Isaiah 55:8–9: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
What that tells us is that we cannot trust our intuitions when it comes to God and his ways. Nor can we trust what popular opinion and media culture say about God and his ways. We can only trust what God has revealed to us about himself and his ways.
What Jesus says
I believe that God has revealed the truth through Jesus and the Bible. And here is what Jesus teaches about God’s countercultural, counterintuitive ways: “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” (Matthew 7:13–14)
What American culture says
Turn on the television and watch for a few hours, or buy some magazines at the grocery store checkout lane and read, or check out the trailers of the top ten movies, and then answer this question: In general, is American culture and the people who drink deeply of it walking on the easy path through the wide gate, or walking on the hard path through the narrow gate?
If we were to shut ourselves off from our culture for one month and devote ourselves to reading the Bible over and over again, we would come to one conclusion: the way of life that American culture generally approves of is not God’s way.
Your big decision
This brings us to a fork in the road. Will we choose to walk in God’s way even though Jesus says it is hard and it is the way chosen by few? Or will we choose to go with the easy flow of the majority even though it is a way God rejects?
Big decision. Because the way of our world appeals to our appetites and desires, and it is smiled upon by people around us. It feels good. It is truly the easy way.
But there is one big problem. God does not approve.
And there is another big problem. In the end the way of the world leads to pain and loss. Its pleasures are temporary.
Choose the way that’s good for you!
All pleasures that God forbids resemble what meth does to an addict.
The Bible says, “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.” (Galatians 6:7–9)
This verse presents a contrast. The ways of the flesh lead to corruption, but the ways of the Holy Spirit lead to eternal life.
God’s ways may not at first feel like the way we want to go—just as a person accustomed to eating a high-sugar, high-salt, processed-food diet recoils from eating healthful, natural food—but eventually we find that God’s pure ways bring true, lasting life. They bring peace, joy, and love. His ways bring hope, righteousness, and strength. They bring health and true happiness to soul and body.
God’s ways versus our ways
God’s ways: “You shall be holy for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16).
Our ways: You only get one life, so enjoy yourself while you can. There is no such thing as evil. Make your own rules. The dark side is entertaining. Purity is for prudes. If it feels good, do it. Explore. Decide for yourself. No one tells me what to do. Don’t judge me. Express yourself. I do it my way. Have fun. Get it on.
Based on this stark contrast, I leave you with wisdom from the apostle Peter: “Save yourselves from this crooked generation,” (Acts 2:40).
Spiritual purity is not the world’s way, but it is most definitely God’s way. If you want to know him truly, it must also become your way. Be pure!
