The difference between spiritual purity and moral cleanliness

Leviticus 10:10 says, “You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean.” Matthew 5:8 says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” These two verses describe two different frameworks for understanding holiness, which I would term moral cleanliness and spiritual purity. Moral cleanliness understands holiness as faithfully following God’s rules and boundaries because it pleases God for us to follow His rules. Spiritual purity understands holiness as purging the competing passions and loyalties from our heart so that we can be purely devoted to God. I believe that Christian holiness is about spiritual purity, but many of my fellow evangelical Christians believe it’s about moral cleanliness. Let me explain.

The primary question that moral cleanliness asks is: Am I obeying what God has said to do? This of course presumes that God has told me everything that I’m supposed to do in the Bible. Moral cleanliness runs into trouble when we encounter situations in life that the Bible did not explicitly anticipate (which of course can never be admitted to without the moral system collapsing). For moral cleanliness, holiness is a matter of conforming my behavior to a set of commands. How I am transformed internally by my behavior is not relevant to moral cleanliness. The opposite is what matters: any internal spiritual transformation I undergo is valued by the degree that it results in correct behavior. The sole concern of moral cleanliness is obedience to a set of commands. So if I’m doing something that impacts someone else, it’s irrelevant to consider whether they appear to be harmed or helped by what I have done. What matters is whether I have obeyed whatever command from God is presumed to apply.

Spiritual purity values moral cleanliness, but only as a means to an end. The presumption is that whatever commands God has laid out have one of two purposes: to do justice to the people around us (loving neighbor) or to purify our hearts in relation to God (loving God). The goal is to maximize the love inside us and outside us; it goes deeper than correct behavior and obedience to commands. An example of this logic can be found in Jesus’ statement “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Jesus is saying that God gives us commands like honoring the Sabbath for our benefit, not so that He can take pleasure in watching us follow the rules He gave us.

It is because Jesus sees the Sabbath in terms of spiritual purity rather than moral cleanliness that He feels perfectly comfortable breaking the rules of the Sabbath for the sake of allowing the sick and lame to experience the spiritual benefit of Sabbath for the first time in their lives. Because of His acute sympathy with their pain, there was no point in His trying to celebrate the Sabbath without healing them first. It would have morally clean of Jesus to refrain from healing on the Sabbath in obedience to the command, but He would have been spiritually impure as a result. To Jesus’ religious rivals who were operating under the moral cleanliness ethic, Jesus’ actions were completely incomprehensible. He disobeyed what God said to do. End of story. It doesn’t matter that it spiritually purified the paralytic to have his sins forgiven and gain the ability to walk. Jesus could have healed him on a different day, because the Sabbath is a holy day to focus on God alone. Always. No exceptions.

All of us who grew up evangelical have had drilled into us the Romans Road polemic from the apostle Paul that says we cannot be saved by following the rules but only by God’s grace alone. We have been taught to believe that moral cleanliness is an insufficient basis for holiness because it does nothing to protect us from becoming spiritual “whitewashed tombs” (Matthew 23:27) like the Pharisee who prayed, “I thank you God that I’m not like other people” (Luke 18:11). And yet, instead of moving past an understanding of holiness as rule-following into a deeper understanding of holiness as inward spiritual transformation, so many evangelicals have simply built a new Torah out of Paul’s pastoral instructions to specific churches in specific contexts to replace the old Torah that he said we could not be saved by.

Instead of the paradigm shift that Paul so emphatically exhorted the Galatians and the Romans to make, we simply apply the old paradigm of rule-following to a new set of data. We have created new marks of “circumcision” out of the teachings of the man who polemicized against the concept of circumcision (and circumcised or didn’t circumcise his own disciples Titus and Timothy for purely strategic, pragmatic reasons). So many evangelicals today are Paul’s perverse neo-Galatian exegetes. How can he not be shaking his fist at us from heaven!

Now, by no means am I saying that we should not diligently dig through the inspired teachings of this amazing apostle for the purpose of decluttering our hearts of all their idols so that only love can reign there. But to turn the teachings of the man who said that “all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse” (Galatians 3:10) into the new law to be obeyed for the sake of obedience is to miss the most important point he had to make.

One of the most ignored statements that Paul makes and perhaps the key to understanding how to interpret everything else he says is Romans 14:14: “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean.” In other words, our behavior is clean or unclean according to how it impacts the purity of our hearts, not according to its conformity with a set of commands, even if they’re Paul’s commands, which Paul gives us for the purpose of helping us purify our hearts. (Now it’s fair to say that we would be utterly lost in trying to purify our own hearts without God’s Biblical teachings and we should not insist on understanding how everything God teaches contributes to that purpose before doing it.)

God doesn’t want us to follow His rules in order to show Him that we’re being obedient. God wants us to use His means of grace in order to become temples where we share in His ecstasy. God doesn’t want a bunch of sanctimonious sycophants who never stop saying, “Do you see me? Do you see me? Look at how much I’ve sacrificed for You. Look at how devoted I am to You.” God just wants to share His joy with us. We can’t taste the joy if we’re spiritually cluttered with idols, so God gives us the inspired teachings of scripture to help us get rid of those idols and delight in the only One who can fulfill our desires.

But it just so happens that one of the biggest idols that can clutter our hearts is our moral cleanliness even if we’re just putting on our show for an “audience of One.” And people who need God to see how correct and clean they are often step all over other people God wants to share His joy with. They throw other sinners under the bus as part of their flamboyant exhibition of righteous zeal. That’s why the only thing acceptable to God is for us to accept His mercy unconditionally and utterly without a trace of entitlement. If we become obstacles to other people receiving God’s mercy, no matter how morally clean we supposedly are, what do you think God will have to say to us when we go to face Him?