Pleasing God with R. C. Sproul, “Beware of the Leaven,” 2

One of the questions that I hear frequently from people who are earnestly seeking to do the will of God is the question, what is the most important thing that God wants from me in the Christian life? It's like the businessman who's always asking the question, what's the bottom line?

Let's cut through all of the details and the myriad possibilities and the thousand and one commandments. What is it that God really cares about in terms of the chief focus, the chief goal, the chief end of the Christian life?

And what I'd like to do in this session is to focus on what I think the Bible says is the answer to that question. As I read the Scriptures, it seems to me that the bottom line, the chief goal of the Christian life is righteousness.

That what God wants from us more than anything else is righteousness, and I emphasize that for a reason. I hear Christians speaking all the time about piety, about spirituality, and even about morality, but you almost never hear anybody talk about righteousness.

In fact, I've never had a student in the seminary come up to me and say, Professor Sproul, how can I become a righteous person? Now, maybe that says more about me than it does about my students that they don't bother to ask me a question like that, thinking that they're wasting their time.

But you hear them concerned about, I want to be more spiritual, I want to be more moral, and so on, or more pious, but somehow they shrink from that term righteous, and perhaps it's because nobody wants to be guilty of being self-righteous, and in the currency of our language, the very word righteousness has become something of a liability.

But if Jesus were to walk in that room tonight and we said to Him, Lord, what is the chief priority that You have for Your church? If He answered that question this evening the way He answered it in the New Testament period, He would say this, Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and everything else will be added unto you.

Let's take a moment on that text that we've all heard of. When Jesus says, Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, the word for first there is the word protos, and in the Greek language, the term protos does not simply mean first in a sequence of events.

That is a serialized procedure where you have the first and the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth and so on. Jesus doesn't simply mean number one in terms of chronological order. But this word protos in the New Testament carries the implication of that which is first not only in order of sequence, but it is foremost in terms of importance.

That is to say when Jesus says, Seek first the kingdom of God, He's saying this is the top priority of the Christian life, seeking the kingdom of God and God's righteousness. And so what Christ wants from His people and from His disciples are people who actually manifest righteousness.

Now I've often said that one of the most frightening statements that ever came from the lips of Christ was the statement that He made when He said, Except your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will in no wise enter the kingdom of God.

Now you've all heard that passage, haven't you? And I think what puzzles me about it is that we don't seem to be too troubled by it. I mean here Jesus gives a ghastly warning. He gives an if-then necessary condition.

Unless A takes place, B can't possibly follow. Unless your righteousness exceeds, that is goes beyond the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you don't have a chance of getting into the kingdom of God.

Now there are a couple of ways that we can interpret what Jesus is saying. Some commentators look at that phrase by Jesus and they say, Well, we don't have anything to worry about because what Jesus is talking about here is the righteousness that is required for us for justification.

In order to be justified, we have to have perfect righteousness, and obviously the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees was imperfect, and the only way you can get into heaven is by perfect righteousness, and thanks be to God that's what we have by faith in Christ where we receive through God's decree the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, and obviously His righteousness exceeded that of the scribes and the Pharisees, and since we possess by faith the righteousness of Christ, we can breathe a sigh of relief and we don't have to worry about that dreadful warning that Jesus gave on that occasion.

Now I think it's very possible that that's exactly what Jesus had in mind, that when He said, Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you'll never enter the kingdom of God, that maybe what He had in mind there was the imputation of His own righteousness that is the only way that we can ever stand in the presence of God.

But you remember that at the time of the Reformation when Luther was running around teaching justification by faith alone, he used a Latin phrase that has since become so famous that every Christian can recite it, that that person who is justified is simul justus et peccator.

You all know that phrase, don't you? At the same time, just and sinner. Just by the application of the righteousness of Christ, yet we receive the righteousness of Christ while we are in fact in and of ourselves are still sinners.

But Luther said in our sanctification it doesn't stay like that, that the person who is declared to be just by faith, if that faith is in fact genuine and not just a claim to faith or a charade here, but that it's authentic faith, then Christ will truly begin to be formed in that person's life, and that person will begin to show forth the fruit of righteousness.

And so the other half of the commentators look at Jesus' warning and say that what Jesus means there is that unless our lives begin to manifest a quality of righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, then that's the surest sign that there is that the faith that we profess is not genuine.

So even though we don't teach justification by works, we still are very much concerned with the fact that the New Testament calls us to show our faith by our works, and justification is by faith, but sanctification is where we grow in authentic righteousness.

Now if that statement by Jesus does not curdle your blood, let me start the cauldron boiling, because what I'd like to do in the time that we have left in this session is to consider the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, to consider that level of righteousness that we are called to go beyond if we are to please God with our lives.

It's so easy for us to simply dismiss that statement of Jesus because we say, well, to exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, that's a piece of cake. That's duck soup, for heaven's sakes.

They were the ones that were the chief object of Jesus' wrath. Whenever we think of the bad guys in the New Testament, we think of the Pharisees. They were the worst of the worst. Well, why were the Pharisees called Pharisees?

You don't read about Pharisees in the Old Testament, do you? The reason why you don't read about Pharisees in the Old Testament is because there weren't any Pharisees in the Old Testament. The Pharisees as a party in Israel emerged after the exile and the return from exile, where what had happened was that the new generation of Israelite people began to adopt the pagan practices of those who were now in place, and they forgot their traditions.

They forgot the law of Moses and the covenant promises that God had made, and so a group of people who were especially devout arose in the nation. They were the ancient counterpart, ladies and gentlemen, to the Puritans.

They had this profound desire to reform the faith of Israel and to restore godliness to the nation. They were the conservatives of Israel who wanted to reach back into the past and recapture the pristine purity of the commonwealth of Israel, and so they set themselves apart out of this concentrated zeal to obey the law of God, and because of their single-minded desire towards righteousness, they were named the set-apart ones, the Pharisees.

In other words, what I'm saying is this, that the Pharisees as a group of people got their start in history as a group of men whose sole business in life was the pursuit of righteousness. They majored in the pursuit of righteousness.

There was nothing casual or cavalier about their zeal to accomplish righteousness. I doubt if you know anybody who had the same kind of determination to find righteousness as the Pharisees as a group did, but we think, oh, well, maybe that's the way they started, but by the time the first century rolled around, they had degenerated into such godlessness that they were a bunch of hypocrites and so on that Jesus called vipers and threatened them with hell and all of the rest.

Well, let's see if these people in the first century who incurred the wrath of Christ achieved any elements of righteousness, at least by the testimony of Jesus. We hear Jesus denouncing the Pharisees when He says unto them, Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites!

For you compass sea and land to make one convert, and when he is made, you make him twice the child of hell than you are yourselves. Now this is a pretty scathing indictment that Jesus makes of these people, but while He's making this criticism, He does acknowledge that they are evangelical, or at least evangelistic, not in the sense that they were running around preaching the gospel, but they had a zeal for missionary outreach, a zeal for evangelism and conversion that was unparalleled in the ancient world.

So in that sense, let's say that the first thing we learn about the Pharisees of the New Testament is that they were evangelistic, concerned about missions and evangelism were these conservative people.

Jesus said they would go over land and sea to make one convert to their religion, go over land and sea to make one convert to their religion. I spend nine months out of every year away from my home, traveling round and about, speaking and lecturing and teaching and all of that, and I do that because that's my job, and that's my calling, that's my vocation.

But I doubt if a speaking request came to our office in Orlando and said, R .C., I'm living up here in the state of Washington, and I haven't had an opportunity to hear much teaching on the book of Romans in my lifetime.

I wonder if you'd be willing to fly out here and spend a couple of days teaching me lectures for Romans. I doubt if we would accept that speaking invitation to go clear across the United States to speak to one person.

I don't think I'd do that because I don't have the zeal for outreach that these people had, that they would go over land and sea to talk to one person, to get one person persuaded to their way of thinking.

And so in that regard, at least, in terms of missionary fervor and evangelistic zeal, the Pharisees shame me, and I suspect they shame most of you as well. What else does it tell us about the Pharisees?

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith. These ought you to have done, and not to leave the other things undone.

Now, the second thing we learn about the Pharisees is that they were tithers. Not only were they tithers, ladies and gentlemen, they were scrupulous in obeying God's laws for tithing. In other words, they put their money where their mouths were.

The last poll that I saw about that was taken of, quote, evangelical Christians in the United States of America indicated that four percent of proclaimed evangelical Christians tithe their income, four percent.

Remember the book of Malachi, where the prophet Malachi is sent by God to the household of Israel virtually as a prosecuting attorney. That was one of the roles of the prophet in the Old Testament was to summon the people of Israel before the tribunal of God and times to bring charges against them for breaking the terms of their covenant.

And in this case, Malachi comes, and the charge that he brings to the people is the charge of committing robbery against God. And so he says, will a man rob God? He raises the question, and it's a rhetorical question, like what could be more unthinkable than that a human being would have the audacity to steal from God Almighty?

And then the answer is what, but how have you robbed me in your tithes and in your offerings? And the prophet speaks to the nation and says, by withholding your offerings and your tithes, you are actually stealing from God.

Put it in New Testament terms. How could someone seek first the kingdom of God and rob from the kingdom of God at the same time? I mean, is that conceivable to you? And now the Pharisees listened to that, and they understood the duty that every member of the covenant community had before God, and the duty was to pay that ten percent, to pay that tithe to the storehouse in Israel.

Now they were so, as I said, so scrupulous about it that they didn't just tithe in general. Now the tithe, for the most part, was paid in produce or livestock, and it worked out like this. If you raised cattle and in a given year you had ten new calves born, what would you do?

One out of those ten calves would be returned to God. If you raised wheat or barley or oats, ten percent of the yield went to God, and it went off the top, I might add, all right? Now what the Pharisees and the scribes did was this.

If they were growing vegetables or cows and they had fifty barrels of wheat, they would take five barrels of wheat. But if they found some ten little plants of mint growing by their doorstep, they'd take one and give it back to the church.

That's how scrupulous they were. It would be like this. If you, at the end of your month, you calculate how much income you have and you give ten percent to God, but you're walking down the street and you find a dime on the sidewalk, what the Pharisee would do is his conscience would bother him unless he took a penny and made sure he paid one cent out of that ten cents to keep those accounts absolutely square with God.

Now Jesus said, you're scrupulous about the tithe, but you omit the weightier matters of the law. It's good news to find out that Jesus didn't regard tithing as one of the weighty matters of the law. That was a small thing.

That was a lesser matter of the law. He said, these things you ought to have done. I'm glad that you pay your tithe, He said, but you've omitted the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith.

When I hear Jesus talk like that to them, I can just hear our defense as contemporary Christians saying, well, Lord, yes, we've been negligent with the tithe. We, ninety-six percent of us, have systematically robbed you and have not made the building of your kingdom such a priority that we would be willing to part from our own resources to give back to you what you've given to us and as a real measure of our obedience and faith and so on, and I hear people saying already, ah, well, that's the Old Testament.

We don't have to do that in the Old Testament. That's right. They got away easy in the Old Testament. Ours is a better covenant, a richer covenant with far more benefits than they've received in the Old Testament, and I might add far more obligations and responsibilities.

The starting place in the Christian life is the tithe. That's a simple, that's a little thing, but we can say to Jesus, Jesus, we want to please you with our lives, and so we're not going to worry about the lesser, lighter matters of the law like tithing.

We offer to you justice and mercy and faith. I wonder how that'll go down. I think unless we're faithful in little things, it's very unlikely that we're going to be faithful in the weightier matters of the law, and so even when the Pharisees are being rebuked by Jesus, He at least compliments them by acknowledging the fact at least they tithe.

They were tithers. What else? They were debating with Jesus constantly about what the Scripture says, and Jesus said, you search the Scriptures, and you do well, believing that in them you have eternal life.

But this group of people, again, who received the most vehement denunciation from Jesus during Jesus' earthly ministry were acknowledged by Jesus to be serious students of the Bible. I doubt if there was a Pharisee in all of Israel who didn't believe in the inspiration of the Bible, the infallibility of the Bible, and the inerrancy of the Bible.

Their doctrine of Scripture was impeccably orthodox, and they not only had a good view of Scripture, but they studied the Scripture. They memorized. They would always win the sword drills in the churches.

The problem was it never got into their bloodstream, did it? Do you see why this is so scary? I mean, there are all kinds of people in the church who don't care at all about evangelism, who wouldn't think about tithing, and have never cracked the Bible open.

That hasn't met the minimal requirements of the Pharisees, but what about if we have done all of these things? If we're evangelistic, paying our tithes, studying the Bible left and right, that doesn't prove anything.

One more point, as we consider the Pharisees, and there's more to be said, but time doesn't allow it, was that one of the things that Jesus complained about the Pharisees was their ostentatious display of piety through their long-winded prayers.

The Pharisees spent all kinds of time in discipline, spiritual exercises, and in prayer. In fact, they loved to be called upon at public meetings to pray because they were so eloquent, and the people applauded them.

They were the teachers, the preachers, the prayers, the evangelists, the professional religionists of their day. But the one problem that comes out over and over and over again as we look at the New Testament model of the Pharisee is that the Pharisees' religion was strictly external.

The word that Jesus uses for them again and again is the word hupokritos, hypocrite, which means one who is a play actor, one who on the surface manifests a religiosity, a kind of piety, but whose life in the deeper dimension never, ever reaches authentic righteousness.

Now again, the danger here of reducing the Christian life to externals is a danger that comes in every age. I don't mean that we're supposed to neglect the externals. Again, it's not an either-or here.

Jesus says, you know, these things you ought to have done and not neglect the other. I'm not suggesting that we can say, oh, well, we can dispense with prayer, and we can dispense with the spiritual disciplines, and we can dispense with Bible reading and all of that stuff as long as we really care about being kind to our fellow man and working for justice and all of that and forget all of this piety.

No, no, no. No, it's not the letter or the Spirit, but godliness is the letter and the Spirit. It's the external and the internal. It's the outside and the inside. It's not the inside without the outside, and it's not the outside without the inside, that authentic righteousness involves obedience to the commands of God.