Inside the Box

by Bill Denton

"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." (Matt 23:27-28, NASV)

When Howard Carter and his associates found the tomb of King Tutankhamen, they opened up his casket and found another within it. They opened up the second, which was covered with gold leaf, and found a third. Inside the third casket was a fourth made of pure gold. The pharaoh's body was in the fourth, wrapped in gold cloth with a gold face mask. But when the body was unwrapped, it was leathery and shriveled. Whether we are trying to cloak a dead spiritual life, or something else, in caskets of gold to impress others, the beauty of the exterior does not change the absence of life on the interior. Michael P. Green, Illustrations For Biblical Preaching

    Religious people struggle with a problem that is just as difficult today as it was a couple thousand years ago during the ministry of Jesus. We struggle to have the spirituality on the inside match what is more easily displayed on the outside. Interestingly, religious people often seem unaware that this problem even exists. I don't think the Pharisees of Jesus' day thought of themselves as hypocrites. As long as their religion dressed them up on the outside and gave the appearance that things were right, then they felt they were doing well.

    Jesus had an entirely different take on such things. With stinging words, he confronted them with the inconsistencies in their lives. He wanted them to deal with the differences between how they looked to others and what was true on in their hearts. The picture he used to describe the reality of their lives is a good one: whitewashed tombs!

    Tombs are often monuments. You can visit any number of cemeteries and see this for yourself. Marble mausoleums, artistic statuary, beautified gardens all adorn the dead, but inside the casket death still creates havoc with human life. Dead bodies still decay, return to dust, and leave us empty and sorrowing over our loss. We may try to comfort ourselves by dressing it up, but within, the grave is still a place of horror.

    There is nothing wrong with outward righteousness. Please don't think that there is. What I'm talking about is the problem of outward righteousness unaccompanied by the same kind of things on the inside. It's not that God is uninterested in outward righteousness. However, God wants us to know that real, solid, life-changing righteousness is rooted in the heart. If he can get each of us to develop our heart, then the outward things will automatically fall in line. He reminds us that we can look good on the outside and be pathetically awful on the inside or we can be transformed on the inside and that will transform how we look on the outside.

    Without wishing you any pain at all, if we could peel away the outer layers of your body and reveal your heart, what would we find?

    Would it be like lifting the golden death mask off the young Pharaoh? Would it be leathery and shriveled?

    God can help you become as righteous on the inside as anything you've tried to appear to be on the outside. That is real righteousness and that's what Jesus is after.

Posted: 02/06/2001
URL: http://www.heartlight.org/articles/200102/20010206_insidethebox.html

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