CLEAN - 20 Amazing Bible Words To Know: (katharos - Part A)

Long before Jesus walked among us and taught His disciples, the Greek philosophers and generals were changing the world. Aristotle, Socrates and Alexander the Great actually helped to set the stage for the arrival of the Messiah.

To them, the world was being cleansed. That meant it was being united by language, politics, ideas and government. The Greeks called this cleanliness katharos. It was the word they used to describe clean clothes and pure water. Y hey used it to refer to metals with no alloys and grain that had been winnowed. Dirt and impurities had been removed. It had been purified.

It was the same with people. Over time, katharos became a term also used at altars and in temples. The Greeks recognized that the mind and the soul had to be cleansed, too.

Then came Jesus. Jesus came teaching and preaching and He did something totally amazing and unexpected. He knew the Old Testament Levitical laws about ritual cleanliness and the Greek concepts of cleansing out impurities. Armed with that knowledge, He sat down on a mountainside and began to teach His disciples what we now know as the Sermon On The Mount.

In that sermon, Jesus changed the world. He did that, in part, by using a Greek word to describe a Hebrew idea. He changed the relationship between God and man forever. What did He say? It’s recorded in Matthew for us:

Matthew 5:8

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

That word, pure, is the Greek word katharos. That’s the same word Homer used to write about his clean robes. Jesus took the Greek and Hebrew concepts of being clean and brought them together with the promise of seeing God.

How? We’ll learn that tomorrow.