¹⁵To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled. ¹⁶They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed.

Sounds like a horror movie, “The Defiled,” starring the most depraved characters. The word defiled indicates that which is “conceived of as being or becoming marked or discolored with foreign matter.” Those who are spiritually defiled are stained with sin, contaminated. In the Jewish sense, they are “unclean,” utterly unfit for worship in the ceremonial sense. Some translators use the word “corrupted.” Sounds bad? It is bad! Paul describes those who are defiled as unbelieving, detestable, and worthless.

God loves all sinners. But it is not that sinners are deserving of God’s love, or that unbelievers are simply ignorant of God and deserve a chance for redemption. Nothing could be farther from the truth! God loves those who are without Christ while they are defiled, and He gave His Son for them. Because of Adam’s sin and because our deeds ratified our inherited sin nature, we were rendered completely depraved. Yet God loved us—not with an emotional response of affection or a sentimental sense of suffering for us, but with the sacrifice of His Son for us: an act of substitution, a satisfaction of divine wrath by Jesus’ dying for our sins.

This is core to Paul’s instruction about false teachers, for they epitomize what is wrong with their teaching.  Professing to know God is insufficient without the pure heart of faith. That is why Paul began by saying, “To the pure, all things are pure.”  If one has not been purified through faith in God alone, then nothing in his life is pure in God’s eyes. Well-meaning thoughts, pseudo-spiritual sound bites, warm religious feelings, even outwardly benevolent actions—are all stained.

This is seen in the propagators of false doctrine as they turn the focus from Christ (“by their deeds they deny Him”). It becomes all about them and their teaching, rather than all about Jesus Christ. As a result, they render themselves entirely worthless for any real “good deed” that God counts as good. They are unable to fulfill that for which God has created them, as Paul wrote elsewhere, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). False teaching undermines our created purpose. We must protect the pure instruction of the apostolic gospel message.

Lord, I want to live an authentic life centered on You, the perfectly Pure One.