Matthew 23:25-39 - Religious but Wrong Part II

Go to Matthew chapter 23.

Matthew 23 · chapter mention

Matthew chapter 23.

Matthew 23 · chapter mention

We've been away from Matthew for a little while.

We've had our Easter service a couple weeks ago, and last week we had our missions conference.

And we've been going through the Gospel of Matthew, and we're back in Matthew chapter 23.

Matthew 23 · chapter mention

And if you have a pew Bible in front of you and would like to find that, you can find it on page 878, 878.

Just a note, if you don't have a Bible and would like to have a Bible, please feel free to take one of the Bibles in the pew and just claim it as your own.

You can put your name in it.

It's yours as a gift from us.

As I stated three weeks ago, the last time we were in this passage, we're in a section of the life of Jesus that we call the Passion Week, the last week of Christ's earthly ministry that starts with his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and ends with his resurrection from the dead.

We center in on Matthew chapter 23, which is wholly taken by Jesus talking about the failures of the religious establishment in Jerusalem during his day.

Matthew 23 · chapter mention

It can be broken down into two sections.

The first section, verses 1 to 12, talk to us about Jesus speaking to the crowds about the religious establishment.

And then in verses 13 through the end of the chapter, Jesus speaks to that religious establishment through a series of woes.

It'd be easy for us to listen to this chapter and feel removed from it.

These are people that we will never have met in a time that we never can go back to, in a place that many of us will never visit, and to speak of forms of religious activity that most of us are probably unfamiliar with, a religious system that's outside of our knowledge.

We may feel a world away from this chapter, but it has much to say to us.

When Jesus speaks to the crowds about the Pharisees, and when Jesus speaks to the Pharisees, he is calling us to a period of self-examination, of religious hypocrisy.

These things that he warns about and casts woes upon are issues of the human heart that all of us can be tempted with, that every single one of us might drift this direction and find our lives caught up in the things that Jesus denounces.

And so when Jesus speaks to the crowd about the Pharisees and their hypocrisy of the inconsistency of their life and their lips, as he speaks about them heaping religious burdens upon people without so much as lifting a finger to help, when he talks about their hungering for recognition as they love, honor, and applause, the Lord is teaching us that those temptations are not to be found among his people, that those kind of activities are meant to be completely cast aside and replaced with sincerity of worship and helpfulness of hand and heart, devoted to God's praise and not our own.

Place where God's people prioritize humility and service rather than position and power.

Last time we were here, we started in on the seven woes that Jesus gives.

There's seven throughout the rest of the chapter, once we get from verse 13 onward.

And we said the last time that a woe was a mix of a compassion and condemnation.

And it's hard for us to understand that because our world today is either filled with compassion or condemnation.

And we don't easily mix the two.

But Jesus is able and does very much so pull the two of these together.

You can feel the compassion in these woes, and you can feel the condemnation in these woes.

He bewails this miserable condition of the religious establishment, and yet at the same time pronounces their fate if they continue down that pathway.

These woes are meant to be invitations to repentance, to seeking out a new way of life, to realize the dangers of continuing down a road to destruction.

As we listen to these indictments, as we hear the compassion of our Savior, may it also be for us a halting warning sign if we continue to progress down the same road that these religious leaders were going down.

May it be for us a time for self-examination, an exhortation against the sins that might gravitate in our hearts to overwhelm our life.

And may we also find in this positive encouragement to walk with our Savior and to realize that his kingdom is not like the powers of this world.

We looked at the first four woes three weeks ago, and I just want to sort of highlight those and move deeper into the passage, and we'll get ourselves to the end of the chapter before we close off.

The first woe that Jesus offers is found in verse 13, where he declares the woe to the scribes and Pharisees of shutting the door to God's rule.

The religious leaders there assert their right to speak authoritatively about God, but Jesus says instead of welcoming in the Messiah themselves and directing people toward him, they are not only not entering in, they are also shutting the door so that others can't enter in as well.

They're known for their religious zeal for God.

But while they were working in full-time ministry, they were working in full-time opposition to God's kingdom.

What a horrendous waste of life.

And this teaches us of the importance of knowing God rightly, of knowing and aligning ourselves with Him and His purposes, and being an instrument by which we point people His direction, not our own.

This is exactly what the Pharisees were doing.

They were calling attention to themselves and not wanting to point people to the Savior.

Temptation is there in all of our hearts to want to be at the place and the center of all of the attention and of all the power and all the things that come with it.

But Jesus here is calling out a woe against those who would do this.

John the Baptist called out prior to Christ's coming, and he told people to repent, because the kingdom of heaven was at hand.

But when Jesus came into the scene, his first words cried out, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

He moved the attention off of himself toward Jesus Christ.

And some of his own disciples were concerned about this.

And John said those famous words, He must increase, and I must decrease.

Paul said this.

For no one can lay any foundation other than what has been laid down.

That foundation is Jesus Christ.

We have to ask ourselves: what kind of signpost are we?

Are we a signpost of direction to the Savior?

Or is it somehow just kind of trying to get people to focus in on ourselves?

Woe number two is akin to this.

These people were zealous in their efforts.

They were definitely focused on making converts.

In verse 15, it tells us that they traveled over land and sea to make one convert.

However, when they made one, Jesus said, You make them twice the child of hell as you are.

Not only were they putting a do not enter sign in front of heaven, they were also putting a you turn only sign in front of heaven.

And so people that might want to enter in, seeing the do not enter, are being told by the Pharisees to turn around and head directly to hell.

They were enthusiastic about trying to get people to conform to their strict sectarian understanding of Judaism, contending that their way was the only way.

But they were actually influencing people even further away from God as those people listened to their voices and began to conform themselves to this self-righteous religious devotion that the Pharisees said they had to do.

And then to find behind him 50 followers who are all going, I can wear camel hair too.

I'm going to eat locust too, and try to conform themselves to the physical characteristics of John the Baptist.

When John is saying he's the one you should be following, you don't need to look like me, you don't need to eat like me.

You need to be yourself and a follower of Jesus.

This is what John the Baptist would do.

We are to ensure that we encourage people to be followers of him.

We need to understand the importance of our words and the eternal impact that they have.

This isn't just they're defaulting from better things in this life.

Jesus is saying by their influence and their words, they're actually condemning people to a greater degree of judgment than when they were going toward when they had before they had met these people.

Imagine standing before the throne of God and being called to account for turning people away from God Himself.

Woe is the only word that we can say.

Woe to you, blind guides, who say, Whoever takes an oath by the temple, it means nothing, but whoever takes an oath by the gold of the temple is bound by his oath.

These religious leaders were doing religious gameplaying with their words.

So desirous to be the center of attention, so desirous to be the source of wisdom, people would come to them for counsel and ask, I've got an obligation.

Am I obliged to keep my promise here or not?

And they would go, well, let's talk about this.

Um when you made that promise, did you call an oath upon that?

Well, yes, I did.

And when you made that oath of sort of substantiate your promise, did you call upon the temple as a justification and as it would rain down as a witness upon you?

Yeah, I did.

Well, I've got some good news to share with you.

If you'd given that promise by the gold of the temple, well, you'd still have to do this, but I've got some good news.

You're you're really not obliged.

You're not obliged at all to keep this promise.

You only gave an oath against the temple, not the gold of the temple.

And they'd be like, Oh, thank you, teacher.

Thank you for that counsel.

Oh, my heart is so much lighter.

I can walk away without having to take care of my parents, or to pay my bill, or to go on a workday next Thursday, or whatever it was.

And the next time, teacher, I made an oath, and they would make themselves the arbitrator of what people ought to do, whether or not they were bound by their word, and whatever foolish little scheme they dreamt up became the means by which people's lives were changed, whether they kept their word or not.

And Jesus cuts through all of this and just shows it for it to be the silliness that it actually is.

And what Jesus is telling us here, we don't we're not to sell out our character or sell out our integrity with this sort of slippery slope formulas to release ourselves or people from promises that they've made.

And we're also to be very careful about the wisdom we share with others, because it will affect people's lives.

It will matter what you say, and they will go one way or the other, depending on what kind of advice you give.

Rather, as believers, we should listen to what James did when he heard the words of the Savior here and in the Sermon on the Mount.

And he said, Let your yes be yes, and your no me no.

Be a person of integrity.

Don't play the game, just do what you say.

My son came to me one day with a big concern.

He had said that he was going to work at the junior high uh work day.

It was gonna mean a whole day of work.

It was gonna be hot, sweaty work.

And a few friends of his, a little later in the week, had asked him to come with them on a fun outing.

I can't even remember what it was at the time.

And he's like, Dad, what do I do?

I said, Well, I'm not gonna tell you what to do.

But why don't you go read Psalm 15 and tell me what it says?

He comes back and he says, Okay, I've made my decision.

Because in Psalm chapter 15, it says that a person who loves the Lord keeps his word no matter the cost.

Psalms 15 · chapter mention

And my son said, That's what I need to do.

It was a little episode in the life of me and my son.

But you know what?

My son, 20 years later, is still talking about that little moment.

And I thank God.

Well, for one, he had a heart to listen, but I thank God I I had the wisdom to give him God's word instead of my, like, hey, well, you know, there'll be another work day.

It could have been easy just as a dad to pass off that that obligation and look at the the joy that my son would have in meeting his friends and going out and doing stuff.

It wasn't easy for me to say, you really need to keep your word.

But it was that important.

20 years later, he's still talking about it.

These woes call these religious leaders to account for the way that they're blocking people from God as they're making them actually deeper liable to judgment, and as they're releasing them from obligations by the whimsical fascination of their minds.

In verse the next woe, he again brings up this idea, and he tells them in verse 23 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, you pay a tenth of mint and dill and cumin, and yet you've neglected the more important matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faithfulness.

These things should have been done without neglecting the others.

Blind guides.

You strain out a gnat but gulp down a camel.

The picture here of Jesus gives these unbalanced religious leaders straining out their wine by pouring it through a thin cloth so that a little gnat might be caught up in the cloth and wouldn't be contaminating their wine, and yet turn around the second time and just open their gullet to a whole camel and throw it down without a thought.

In their scrupulous attention to ceremonial detail, they're so consumed in their time and their attention on these little things that they've forgotten, neglected, ignored.

Their obligations as leaders to talk about justice and mercy and faithfulness.

They had missed the obvious by fixating on the minutiae.

These religious leaders sought to be precise in their actions, but lost the meaning and the real purpose of their responsibilities to God.

It tells us just how easy it is for us to get caught up in little details, to lose sight of the real purposes for what we're here for, to even interact with each other as the body of Christ, and to get entrenched in things that really don't matter at all.

How many times has a church business meeting been captured by an endless conversation of things that don't mean anything on an eternal perspective?

Church splitting over whether or not they're going to have green or orange carpeting.

A church broken by whether or not they were going to have a glass or a plexiglass or a wood pulpit.

Like it would matter.

Love God, love your neighbor.

That's the focus.

That is the weightier matters of the word of God.

Now, if you want to have orange carpeting and you want to do retro 70s paneling on the walls, we'll talk about it.

I mean, it just makes my skin crawl.

I grew up in that stuff.

However, we'll do so cordially, lovingly, kindly.

We'll interact on a way that love matters, right?

Where caring for each other is important.

And if you guys win the vote on the paneling, that's okay too.

I don't care.

The fifth woe is found in verse 25.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.

You clean the outside of the Cup and dish, but inside are you there full of greed and self-indulgence.

Blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup so that the outside of it might also become clean.

Imagine taking a half an hour to clean a cup, and then you pour into it a cup of soup that's been sitting in your fridge for four hours and has mold forming on the top of it.

What good did that do?

None.

All your cleaning of that made no effect.

And here Jesus in the first four woes is speaking predominantly about what the religious leaders are doing.

And these last three woes, he now moves to the inside of these men.

He moves into who they are within their souls, with the penetrating light of what only God could see.

He looks at them and he says, You're clean on the outside, but the inside is broken.

Your inside is unclean.

And they had committed themselves to a whole form of actions, of purity laws, and external ceremonies and requirements of purification.

They looked and they sounded pious.

They were all correct in their forms, strict in their principles.

They were careful about their associations, scrupulous about their dietary laws and their associations with people.

Time and again they would criticize Jesus for eating with those who were not ceremonially clean, or his disciples eating things that they thought they shouldn't do, or doing things on a day they felt ought to be dealt with differently.

But Jesus is saying, your heart the whole time is dirty.

What good is it to be outwardly pure, to have this barrier separation from unclean people, while your heart all the while is full of greed and self-indulgence and lusting for religious pride.

In order for them to be truly pure, they needed heart change, not just a change of clothes, not just a washing of hands.

And the only way that they can have a changed heart is through the power of the kingdom of heaven that comes through Jesus Christ.

Because Jesus said in Matthew 5, your righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees.

Where does that come from?

Only from God's transforming work by his spirit and word.

But by rejecting the operation of Christ in his kingdom, they decided to leave the inside of themselves undone.

They spent all their times examining the actions and associations of others, but gave no thought to letting the light of God's word come into their own.

We have to ask the question, where are our eyes pointed?

Are they pointed on what other people are doing?

Or are they turned inward and examining our heart?

The psalmist said, Search me, O God! Search me, find if there be any wicked way within me.

Tells us about the damaging effects of legalism.

When I was converted at the age of 21 in the military, one of the guys who was discipling me, along with teaching me how to read the Bible and how to pray and to love the church and to love the gospel and to share my resources with others by word and faithfulness and other ways, also taught me different things that I just took on board.

This is what it means to be a Christian.

And so I took on those things and even became a proponent of them for a while.

And after a couple years, God began to crack the fissures of legalism in my heart.

But it left me wondering and adrift, what does it truly mean to be spiritual?

And God gave me a lesson.

I was in England, and the daughter of my senior pastor and her husband were stationed in England, and we went to visit them and went to their church service one day, and they had a guest preacher there.

And this his passage was this clap your hands, stamp your feet, and cry aloud over the evil and detestable practices of the house of Israel.

So this guy took that passage very literally.

He clapped his hands and he stomped his feet and he cried out aloud the sins of everybody but the people in that room.

And I began to realize just how starkly wrong legalism was.

Here was a military base.

Everybody has a military haircut, and this guy's crying out about men having long hair.

And all the people are like, amen, amen.

They're waving their ham handkerchiefs and they're just like whooping it up.

And I'm looking around, there's there's like white walls over every guy's ears, right?

Everybody's got a short haircut.

Women shouldn't be wearing pants.

Amen for sure.

Screaming, hollering, yelling.

There's no lady there wearing pants, so there was nobody in the middle of all of this.

And it just went on with all of these external regulations and rules of what it meant, he thought, to be faithful to God.

And the crowd was brought to this frothing fervor.

I'm sh, and the next day I was outside um the home of our friends, and a guy came to me afterward, came up to them to visit, and he said, What did you think of that preaching last night?

And this is what I said, and this is when it dawned on me.

I said, I wonder if he had spent time talking about pride or greed or envy or gossip or inappropriate lust.

I wonder how many amens he would have gotten.

And I realized then, in a very stark, strong way, that this guy was just playing the crowd for emotional fervor.

He wasn't giving them anything that would speak to their hearts about giving themselves to God and the influence of the power of the Spirit.

Because anybody can cut their hair, anybody can change their wardrobe.

Anybody could grab a King James Version and pick it up.

Anybody could join a Baptist church rather than another one.

But we can't get rid of covetousness apart from the Spirit of God.

These men had clean cups but dirty souls.

Woe number six, another one very much like this in verse 27.

Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, you're like whitewashed tombs which appear beautiful on the outside, but are inside full of dead, full of the bones of the dead and every kind of impurity.

In the same way, on the outside, you seem righteous to people, but inside you're full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

It's easy to play the game, Jesus is saying.

It's easy to look the look, talk the talk.

It's easy to make people think you're something you're not.

He said, You're just like those whitewashed tombs.

During the times of festivals, people would come into Jerusalem, and in order to, they would mark the tombs by whitewashing them so that visitors coming into Jerusalem would see them and move around them so they wouldn't become ritually impure themselves.

And of course, it made it all look better, but it didn't change what was on the inside at all.

And external standards of righteousness, external practices are not heart-affecting.

There's nothing inside but impure death, he's telling them.

We have to watch out that we don't get caught up by images, but rather substance, the Spirit of God working within our hearts.

Watch out that we are neglecting internal holiness and replacing it with the simplicity and the air of outward appearances of righteousness.

Woe number seven, verse 29.

Woe, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous.

And you say, if we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we wouldn't have taken part with them in shedding the prophets' blood.

And they did just that.

But Jesus is speaking to people who at this very moment are conspirat in order to bring Jesus to death.

They want him executed.

And so Jesus lifts up the lid on the hearts of these men, cries out against their practices, but drives home deep into their soul the realities of who they really were.

What a horrible thing this is.

That we can be so duplicitous as people that we can present ourselves as one thing and be exactly the opposite on the inside.

Now tell me that's not a universal problem.

It certainly is.

So may we never, never come into this passage and go, oh, look at those people, look what they did.

How bad of them, without letting the searchlight of God's word come upon our hearts in order to seek out those things that still need remedied by God's gracious activity of sanctification, of leading us to renewal of life and transformation of our behavior from the inside out.

Jesus finishes this off with a statement of invective and a and a crying, crying lament.

He talks to these people and speaks to them of the judgment that's coming upon them.

Judgment because of their rejection of the messengers.

He said, I'm sending to you prophets and wise men and teachers, and some of them you'll kill and crucify, and others of them you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town.

It's remarkable the earnestness of God's calling these men to repentance.

These men who had were conspiring to kill Jesus at that very moment, those men who would be successful in their counsel together, who would literally put Jesus on the cross in a matter of days.

And yet Jesus says, I'm going to continue to send you more messengers.

I'm going to continue to send you more prophets.

I'm going to continue to send you more people who are going to call out to your soul, believe, repent.

We take it as a judgment, but hear the mercy in this.

Beyond the grave.

What we call 2 Chronicles.

And Zechariah, the last one murdered, made this proclamation in 2 Chronicles 24.

He stood above the people and said, This is what God says.

Why are you transgressing the Lord's commands so that you do not prosper?

Because you've abandoned the Lord, he's abandoned you.

But they conspired against him and stoned him at the king's command in the courtyard of the Lord's temple.

King Joash did not remember the kindness that Zechariah's father Jehoiada had extended to him, but killed his son.

And while he was dying, he said, May the Lord see and demand an account.

When Jesus said that the blood of Zechariah was coming upon them, these men who knew their Old Testament would have heard ringing in their ear the condemnation of you have rejected the Lord, and so he's rejecting you.

Even though he had kindly sent his son, and you killed his son.

This is why in verse 37 Jesus says, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who killed the prophets and stones those who are sent to her.

How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.

See, your house has left you desolate.

For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

He who is Emmanuel, who is God with us, is speaking to the violent reactions and rejections of Jerusalem, to God's agents of change, the people who spoke the word of God.

And he's lamenting over them and showing them all that they had lost, just as Zechariah said, You had rejected the Lord so that you would not prosper.

And they were rejecting the Lord who was among them, and they would not prosper.

He would be for them a protector, a sustainer, a guard, and a guide, and a nourisher, just like a mother would her children, just like a mother hen would do her chicks, even, but they would not.

And he's willing, he says, to shelter under his wings these children of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, the torturer of God's servants.

Jerusalem, the city that would cry out, crucify him, crucify him.

And he says, I would, I would take you under my wing.

And what we have here is the heart of Christ's compassion, showing his longing for these people.

Calvin said, This is an amazing and unparalleled instance of love.

And though he addresses Jerusalem with such tender images, he knows that Jerusalem will not allow that intimacy.

Your house is left desolate.

In the next two chapters, he's going to talk about the desolation of that temple, that house.

Jesus exhorts us to be people of humility and service, teaching us to focus our attention on the Lord's glory and not our own.

When we're given places of responsibility, not to do it with selfish arrogance, but rather to avoid a quest for status and to leave off public approval.

To point people to the kingdom and open up the door so that they can enter in.

To be careful not to be so zealous for converts that we turn them into our converts and not the Lord's.

Instead of helping people avoid the responsibilities to encourage them to see God is there in all things and that integrity and character and promise-keeping are important.

Instead of being so focused on the minutiae of details of even Christian doctrine in some areas, are denominational distinctives, majoring on the minors, that we lose off the most important matters of justice and mercy and love and faithfulness.

This passage teaches us that the heart of the matter is the main matter.

That cleaning up our outward act only ministers us toward more pride and arrogance rather than inward godliness.

That we must guard our attitude to the word of God and those who speak it to us.

But there's something else here.

To listen, to listen to the longings and the pleadings of God, as He is here in flesh, pleading for hard-hearted souls to let go of their sin, as He's sending in the face of a crucifixion more servants, more prophets, more messengers, to the very people that had put him to death.

And ask ourselves, am I responding to the voice of God and his invitations?

Am I willing to say yes to God's call to my heart to believe the gospel and repent?

Or will it be said of me on the judgment day, your house has been left desolate, because you would not?

This passage also teaches us the importance of caring for others, being a signpost, directing them to heaven, helping them to be promised keepers, not breakers, of showing them what purity is like on the inside, not just the outside, of being a messenger of the Word of God, even when it's difficult to say, to be willing to suffer the hardships of truth in a generation that's full of lies.

This passage has a lot for us.

It's not just a historical document of a day in the life of Jesus right before he died.

It's not just a call to a people long gone with practices long spent.

It's a message of the living God to us.

May we hear it well.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you for your word.

Lord, we know that not all things that are necessary and important for us are pleasant.

And it's so easy in our generation to try to skirt around those things that are uncomfortable.

We're so full of convenience and comfort.

We get upset if the parking space is ten spaces away from where we'd like to park.

Father, thank you for your word.

As challenging and as difficult as it is, we recognize its importance.

And Father, we want to receive all that it has for us.

We want to submit ourselves to your word.

We ask, Lord, that you might work within us.

Those things that will glorify you most, that we would give attention to those matters that reflect you, that we as your people would be centered on the things that matter the most to you, and that, Father, we would be there with Christ, urging, pleading, and calling, even at the cost of our comfort, and perhaps as much as our very lives, as we speak the word of Christ.

Lord, we pray this so that you might be glorified in us.

I pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.