Mark 7:6
He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.
Jesus spoke the words to a deputation of Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem who confronted Him before the multitude to criticize His disciples for eating without ceremonial handwashing, after He had stayed away from the Passover where a trap had been laid for Him. They had been sent expressly to watch Him and find ground for accusation, hoping to provoke controversy by asking why His disciples did not walk according to the tradition of the elders about washing hands, cups, pots, brazen vessels and tables, but ate bread with unwashed hands. In answer He called them hypocrites and declared Isaiah's prophecy fulfilled in them.
To honor God with the lips while the heart is far from Him is hypocrisy, with outward sanctity serving only as a cloak for iniquity and outward religious form being empty without true devotion of heart. Their hypocrisy was proved by treating numberless rabbinical rules about purification, professedly made to guard the law, as more sacred and essential than the law itself. They supplemented God's commandments with a mass of wholly human oral traditions conceived by narrow minds. The Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes in Christ's day held controlling influence over Jewish religious belief and represent those not converted and sanctified through truth, with perverse ideas, self interwoven in all they did, not one with Christ, without active Christian fellowship, and cherishing jealousy toward any supposed not to keep the letter of the law.
When human precepts collided with the commandments given from Sinai they laid aside God's commandment to hold the traditions of men, preferring their own inventions. They wove human maxims into God's laws, taught human commandments as religious doctrine, occupied the people with trifling distinctions God had not required, confused them about the laws of His government, turned attention away from its great principles, and made His law and word of no effect. A specific proof was their setting aside of the fifth commandment to honor father and mother through the Corban rule that freed a man from helping his parents.
Their self-centered, unconverted religion led them to oppose and kill the world's Redeemer over difference of opinion about senseless, unreasonable forms and minute particulars of handwashing ceremonies before eating for which they had no command from God. His untainted purity in life, words and works was a bitter reproof to their self-righteous uncleanness. He charged them with ignorance of the Scriptures and the power of God, condemned their pride, ambition, injustice, fraud and robbery of the poor, and exposed their evil motives to open shame. They rejected Him because He would not use divine power to free them from Rome and give temporal triumph as Israel had been delivered from Egypt but instead condemned their evil works.
The same lip-honor with a far heart is seen in those who set aside the seventh-day Sabbath of the fourth commandment and uphold the man-made first-day sabbath. They place men's commandments on a level with divine requirements and exalt a spurious sabbath above the Sabbath God blessed, sanctified, and commanded to be remembered and kept holy. Obedience to such man-made requirements makes their worship null and void, though God bears with their ignorance until light comes to them.