Why did Jesus say to cleanse the inside of the cup (Matthew 23:26)?

The Lord takes this accordingly as the ground of appeal. He "said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish; but your inward [parts] are full of plunder and wickedness." Their religion, all protest to the contrary notwithstanding,310 was essentially of the outside; and, far from being clean, they were full of plunder and wickedness, plundering others and wicked themselves. Although they had the highest reputation among the people, the Lord pronounces them fools; and what His Word censures now His judgment will act on by and by. The judgment of God is always according to the Word of God. What is condemned by the Word of God now will certainly be condemned by the Lord Jesus when He takes the judicial throne. But it was the same God Who made both the outside and the inside. "Fools, has not he who has made the outside made the inside also?" They had forgotten Him; they were anxious only for what was seen of men. The Lord looks upon the heart. They did not think of this. Unbelief is always blind, and fixes, if there be a difference, on things the least important. The reason is manifest: it seeks the praise of men and not that of God. The Lord Jesus, however, bids them "rather give alms of what ye have311: and, behold, all things are clean unto you." He knew well that a Pharisee would do nothing less than this — that intense selfishness characterised the whole party. They were faithless and covetous. Him Whom God gave they despised; what they had they kept for themselves. All things therefore were unclean to them.

But there is much more than this. The Lord pronounces successive woes upon them for their zeal about trifles, their love of religious distinction, and their hypocrisy.312 "Woe unto you, Pharisees! for [beginning with that which was seemingly the least evil] ye tithe the mint and the rue and every herb, and pass by the judgment and the love of God: these ye ought to have done, and not have left those aside." It was really the same root of self, fallen human nature under a religious veil. Why did they thus seek to be distinguished from others? Others gave tithes honestly due to God; the Pharisees laid hold of the most minute points which did not cost much and gave themselves credit in the eyes of men not wiser than themselves, but they slighted judgment and the love of God. Righteousness is a due sense of our relationship to God and man; of it they had no adequate measure whatever before them. The love of God was the last thing that came before or from their hearts.313 "These ye ought to have done, and not have left those aside." Let them value their infinitesimals if they would, but let them not neglect the greatest duties.

The fourth woe is a denunciation of their show of being meticulous in trivial matters while ignoring for more serious matters which the law required, judgment, mercy and faith. Fairness of judgment in discerning between good and evil was to them a matter of no Importance compared to tithing the smallest, most insignificant items of income. Mercy toward others in need was also ignored; and faith, the one principle of any true relationship with God, was forgotten. They ought to have put for more emphasis on these things, while of course not neglecting the small things, but not making them the matter of prime attention. It is evident that blind guides are worse than none at all. But the Pharisees had no excuse, for they were able to find the gnat and strain it out of their diet, but oblivious to the Camel, they swallowed it.

The fifth woe reproves the mere exterior purity the Pharisees assumed, with correct formal observance of religion, while they were inwardly full of extortion and excess, given to dishonest dealings with others and to lustful self indulgence. They are told therefore to cleanse first the inside of the cup and platter, which is by all means the most important; but He adds, "that the outside of them may be clean also." Clearly He does not mean that the mere literal cleansing of the inside of a cup will result in the outside being clean, but rather that this will be the result of one's cleansing of his inner motives. True spiritual cleansing inwardly will have a proper outward result.

The sixth woe is similar, but emphasizes their effort to make themselves attractive to men while inwardly there was only the corruption of death. White washed graves appeared beautiful, but this only concealed the bones of dead men similarly, their show of righteousness was a more cover-up of hypocrisy and wickedness.

The Pharisees made clean the outside of the cup and platter, but that did not cleanse the inside, for it is that which comes from within defiles the man. The stream was bitter because the fountain was bitter; and the fruit was bad because the tree was bad. The fountain of a man’s defilement lies in his own heart. No attendance upon a religious ritual could be of any value. The mere fact of this only made men hypocrites. An appearance of sanctity and goodness might be, and had been, adopted by the Pharisees as an outward garb, leaving the seat of the disease untouched; but of what avail was that in the presence of One whose eye was upon the heart. And “out of it are the issues of life” (Prov. 4:23). There is nothing to be gained by attention to that which is merely external. If the tree were good the fruit would be good, and if the fountain were sweet the stream would be sweet; and if the heart were pure the man would be pure also. Not that which entereth into a man defiles him, but that which comes out. “Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: these are the things which defile a man.”

And yet the thought of every man who is a stranger to the grace of God is that the ground of his acceptance with God must depend upon the good that God may find in him; and hence the great aim of everyone who has an exercised conscience is to present something of his own goodness to God on the ground of which he expects to find favour. He hopes by making clean the outside of the cup to make clean the inside, to make himself “not as other men are,” to distinguish himself by some superior religiousness and good works, and by these things render himself acceptable to God.

In the third woe, He had condemned their corrupt teaching. Here, in the fourth, He condemns their corrupt practice, and, in the next, we get, under a correct exterior, the corrupt affections of the natural heart. Again, they were more anxious to appear right before men, than to be right before God. It was outward paint to cover inward pollution. The grass grown green on the sides of the volcano snow lying white on a manure heap.

Next the Lord* launches out woe after woe against the Scribes and Pharisees. They were hypocrites. They shut out the new light of God, while zealous beyond measure for their own thoughts; they undermined conscience by their casuistry, while insisting on the minutest alliteration in ceremonializing; they laboured after external cleanness, while full of rapine and intemperance; and if they could only seem righteously fair without, feared not within to be full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Finally, their monuments in honour of slain prophets and past worthies were rather a testimony to their own relationship, not to the righteous, but to those who murdered them. Their fathers killed the witnesses of God who, while living, condemned them; they, the sons, only built to their memory when there was no longer a present testimony to their conscience, and their sepulchral honours would cast a halo around themselves.

The prophet thereon proceeds (as it seems to us) in a tone of irony, "And now, I pray you, beseech God that He will be gracious unto us: this hath been by your means" (or, from your hand): "will He regard your persons? saith the Lord of hosts." "If I regard iniquity in my heart," says the Psalmist, "the Lord will not hear me." But these priests, spite of their condition — utterly indifferent and insensible as they were — did not hesitate to appear before God as if all were well. Pray, then, says the prophet, intercede that God may be gracious to us, and see if He will regard your persons. It is often a characteristic of a backslidden state that the outward forms of piety are continued, and sometimes with increased zeal. In proportion as life decays the attention is directed to rites and ceremonies. The soul thus deceives itself, and slides, as in the case before us, into a state of ignorance of its real condition. Losing all sense of its relationship with God, it places its dependence upon the exact performance of the required ceremonial. The Pharisees, for example, were most scrupulous in cleansing the outside of the cup and the platter, while they were perfectly indifferent concerning their inward cleansing.

b. (1) The three following woes are plainly different from the preceding ones. They show us the double life of these Jewish leaders. In the first case, the profession of absolute integrity could hardly be more complete than in paying tithes of the very mint and anise and cummin, the least product of their fields; yet on another side there was an absolute deficiency in that which should have been rendered. The moral elements, the weightier matters of the law, were just with them the things that had no weight. They strained carefully out the gnat in such things, but they swallowed easily the camel!

(2) Then the cup and dish they cleansed on the outside; within they could keep them full of rapine and indulgence. With a correct outside the lusts within were retained and sanctioned.

Verse 23. It is well to remember with a scripture like this before us that grace went out to the very vilest, and it is remarkable the cases to which His grace went 0ut in these narratives. But where there is pretension and wrong underneath, all this is abomination in the sight of God, and so we get these "woes." These Scribes and Pharisees were very scrupulous about little matters, but quite indifferent to the weightier matters of the law. The Lord frequently pointed out in His discourses that they did not understand mercy. If ye had known what that means, "I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless." We know that the Lord has said, "He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much." And so we get "These ought ye to have done and not to leave the other undone." We must not be careless about little things. But the Lord was speaking of reality. It did not cost them much to tithe the little herbs in their gardens, and they got a good name by it. They had their reward. Blind guides! they thought themselves guides, but knew not that they were blind. When the two sons of Aaron were struck dead the Lord said in Lev. 10, "I will be sanctified in them that come near me"; and then in Lev. 11. He begins to instruct them in making a difference between clean and unclean, and there is wonderful teaching for us in that chapter. For instance, a mouse there is reckoned unclean. Everything described there as unclean represents some trait of our old nature. A mouse is a purloiner. Very unworthy of a believer! Then again the chameleon — it changes its colour, it represents unreality. A man professing to be a Christian meets another and he speaks to him about spiritual matters; he meets another and talks politics; with another he discusses the latest novel. That is the chameleon. So these scribes were very particular about the gnat because it would make them unclean, but would swallow the camel: no doubt a proverb. But it shows how they ignored the important things, and God will have reality, and the heart right, not simply the exterior.

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites for ye make clean the outside of the cup and the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess" (ver. 25). Is this going to satisfy God? He is not deceived. To indulge that which is evil in the heart, and have a fair exterior is extremely offensive to God. There is no real happiness apart from holiness. Because God was dwelling in their midst He required holiness. But we need to be holy inwardly, and we have the word of God as our standard to judge everything by "The word of God is quick and powerful," and if we have the word of Christ dwelling in us richly, we should be quick to judge an evil thought. It is because these things are unjudged that saints know so little of spiritual joy. A person may be very intelligent in the things of God and yet know very little of spiritual joy. If it is a question of truth, God has two tests of truth the person of Christ and the word of God, as we have remarked.

Verses 25-28, expose another pernicious characteristic; they only concerned themselves about external cleanliness, so as to appear well in the eyes of men. They had no concern for the inside which was open to the eye of God. They were most careful as to possible defilement acquired by contact from without; yet most careless as to defilement which they themselves generated from within. In result they became centres of defilement, and far from acquiring it from others they diffused it to others. This is a most subtle evil, from any suspicion of which we may well pray to be preserved.