God’s Constitution, Pt 7: Purity
Matthew 5:8 8Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
2Tim. 2:22 22Flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.
James 1:27 27Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
1Pet. 1:22 22Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart. 23For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.
When we read the word pure in these verses we are tempted to understand it in terms of moral cleanness or purity. The Greek word is katharos. It is used 28 times in the New Testament and of those is used 27 times to mean pure or clean. When used ethically the word means to be free from every corrupt desire, free from anything false, to be genuine, blameless, and innocent. It is the parent word for catharsis which refers to the almost violent release of strong emotion. It seems the understanding we are to take from this is that impurity, guilt, or sin are not to be seen as the normal human state but should be removed in whatever means is necessary.
The trouble is that we humans can’t do this in our own flesh. But thankfully God can! As an example, look at the blessing so far seen in these verses. A believer who seeks God out of a realization of his own spiritual bankruptcy seeks the righteousness of God who grants the mercy necessary to cleanse the heart of impurity. More than that though is that we who have accepted Jesus as Savior have been washed clean of sin through His sacrifice. We have been made clean and will have access to God for all eternity. Is this cleansing through salvation a ‘one-off’, or a ‘one and done’? Can we now, after salvation, do whatever we want and still get into heaven?
Not at all! Remember salvation is the granting of forgiveness and the absolution from guilt. Having received such wondrous grace are we now to re-crucify Jesus? Certainly not! But we are burdened with a sin nature and it occasionally raises its ugly head. So purity of heart has to do with integrity; having entered into covenant with our Savior we must make every effort to do our part. That is, we endeavor not to sin, but when we do we seek His forgiveness, hit delete and move on. Doing our part means focusing on the big picture, not the petty details. God wants us to love him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. This means loving in such a way that his precepts and commandments are constantly in front of us; loving with full integrity. It is missing the point to behave with an eye towards meeting certain external behavior standards. Our internal spiritual, emotional, and intellectual lives must be the root of our external behavior. The Pharisees didn’t love like this. Concerning their devotion he said,
7You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: 8“ ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. 9They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’” 10Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. 11What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.” (Matthew 15:7-11)
But how is it that even in this state of purity we shall see God? In Exodus 33:20 we find
19And the LORD said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. 20But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”
Even in our purity we are sinful so we cannot be in the presence of the divine majesty of God’s righteousness. But there are verses which speak of certain persons having greater reward in Heaven. It is my opinion that the greater the holiness, righteousness, and purity held by persons here on earth the greater will be their reward in Heaven. They will have greater access to the presence of God. And the fact that we have the promise of eternity with Jesus as Savior itself means that we have the purity of heart granted by the washing away of our sin by the sacrificial blood of Jesus. But what about the here and now? No person on earth can fully understand God, for his ways are so far beyond our understanding, but still our striving towards personal purity changes us from the inside out. This was the problem with the Pharisees: Their piety was all for show; not for real. Our internal struggle for purity changes us. We have a greater desire to be like Jesus and in that condition we change our behavior to line up with Him. We don’t go to places that promote impurity like we once did. We disassociate with friends or acquaintances who have the desire to go to those places or do those things. We avoid suggestive movies; we eradicate foul language; we avoid morally dangerous situations.
One thing to remember is that we tend to think of Heaven as an otherworldly place, located somewhere far away, accessible only by the exceptionally holy and righteous. We think of us as here and Heaven as there. But what if Heaven and earth coexist, but where sight is only one way? Heaven is God’s space after all and if God is omnipresent so must be Heaven. In this case Heaven is a place of full reality, interlocking with earth, but not observable from earth. As we become more and more holy, righteous, and pure it seems to me that our senses become better and better able to penetrate to that other place. We feel God’s presence more acutely; we hear His voice more easily; we are better able to see Him working in our lives and the lives of our friends. What a glorious place to be!