Matthew 23:37 and the Role of Tradition

In 2 .13, we have two parallel passages, and I want to spend a little time on these.

Because of the fact, even though the Matthew 23 one we will look at again because it is part of a context, and we may need to look at that context today as well.

But I do not know, in my experience, of a single text of scripture that is more often miscited by memory than Matthew 23 .37.

What do I mean by that? I cannot tell you how many times

I have heard people say, I have heard Dave Hunt say,

I have heard Norman Geisler say, I have heard Arminians by the boatload say, and yet sometimes

I've even heard Reformed men. In quoting this text off the top of their head, they don't quote it correctly.

They miss a key element, and it demonstrates, in my opinion, how very deeply our traditions, our theology, can impact our reading of the text.

So much so that we only see in the text what is consistent with our theology, and we don't see other things.

What do I mean by that? Well, let's see, section 285, where is 285 here, all right, we're close, right there, it's on page, oh great, 253, but it is, we need to look at the context, if you've just got your

Bibles, look at Matthew 23, if you want to look at the synopsis, it's page 250, section 284.

Let's get the context so that we can handle Matthew 23, 37 correctly, and I think, other than maybe 2

Peter 3, 9, this is probably the text that I have had to explain to non -Reformed believers more often than any other.

And again, in the vast majority of instances, they just simply have never studied the text in its context, they're always just quoting it as a proof text, and so it's vitally important to give the context, to be able to demonstrate you've looked at it and handled it correctly.

Matthew chapter 23 is probably one of the harshest texts in all the New Testament. This is not a politically correct text in today's theological world, it's an embarrassing text, because since, and again, you need to understand this, since World War II, and especially because of what happened in the

Holocaust, and the German -Lutheran and German -Catholic cooperation with that, it has been rightly said that a large portion of the guards at Buchenwald and Auschwitz were practicing

Catholics. Because of that, there's been a backlash over the past 60 years to where anything in the

New Testament, remember what happened with the Passion film, now again, we criticize the Passion film roundly here, even before it came out, some of you may recall that.

But remember, one thing that happened right toward the end was they took out the citation, actually all they did was they took out the, what do you call it on the screen?

Subtitling, thank you. Because remember, they had them speaking in Aramaic, and so they were translating what was being said, and when the

Jews say, according to Matthew, let his blood be upon us, upon our children forever, before the film came out, they had that translated.

And I don't know, did you see it, follow enough to be able to know what they were saying? You could, even

I knew enough to be able to tell what they were saying, you could understand it in Aramaic, but they took out the subtitling, because the

Jewish people who had viewed it in pre -release were just so horrendously offended.

And that text in Matthew has been blamed for, that's why the Holocaust took place, that's what created Hitler, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That's what created the Crusades, and the misuse of this text has, of course they don't call it the misuse of the text, they just blame it on the text.

So embarrassing, bad, wrong, can't believe that scripture, can't believe that that is in the

Bible, Matthew was a bad man, et cetera, et cetera. That's where much of scholarship is today.

So Matthew 23 falls into the exact same category, let's look at it. Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, the scribes and the

Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do, if they preach, but do not practice.

Just in passing, we'll spend more time on this, we're not going to skip this when we get to it, but just briefly, Moses' seat was the stone seat in the front of the synagogue, where the word was, where the scriptures were read, the person reading the scriptures would be sitting in Moses' seat, that's what it was called.

And so the point is, when they are doing what they're supposed to be doing and reading forth the scriptures, do what they do, but since they don't practice, they do not live in accordance with what they're reading, then don't follow their practices.

They bind heavy burdens hard to bear and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move with them with their finger.

They do all their deeds to be seen by men, for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, phylacteries, these big boxes that you wear on your forehead, they started small, but they got bigger, you know how things like that are, that had portions of scripture in them, the fringes go back to Deuteronomy, you're supposed to wear these as reminders of prayer to people of God, so you start exaggerating these things.

They make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honored feasts and the best seats in the synagogues, salutations in marketplaces, being called rabbi by men.

But you are not to be called rabbi if you have one teacher and you are all brethren, and call no man your father on earth, for you have one father who is in heaven.

You are not to be called masters if you have one master, the Christ. He who is greatest among you shall be your servant, whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees." Now remember, scribes and Pharisees are the leading religious people of the day.

This would be saying, woe to you pastors and evangelists, in essence, would be how it would be heard in our context.

Scribes are the ones who write the scriptures, read the scriptures, have access to the scriptures. The Pharisees, of course, we know who they are.

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men. Please note this one, because I think verse 13 is the clearest parallel to verse 37.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men, for you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.

There was something they were doing that was specifically intended to keep people away from entering into the kingdom of God.

Their own self -exaltation, their own exaltation of traditions, their disrespect of the word of God through the addition of their traditions, etc.,

etc., they, even though they claim to be the very essence of the kingdom of God, not only did they not enter into the kingdom of God, but they kept, they restrained others.

They kept others from entering into the kingdom of heaven. Keep verse 13 in mind, because I think it is extremely important.

Woe to you, scribes and, let's see, verse 14, hmm, is that in, ah, yes, there's a textual variant here.

Well, I'll read verse 14. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you devour widows' houses and for a pretense to make long prayers.

Therefore, you will receive the greater condemnation, which evidently is considered to be a parallel corruption from Luke 20, 47, and Mark 12, 40.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

Woe to you, blind guides, who say if anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath, you blind fools.

For which is greater, the gold of the temple that has made the gold sacred? And you say if anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath, you blind men.

For which is greater, the gift of the altar that makes the gift sacred? So he who swears by the altar swears by it and everything on it, and he who swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it, and he who swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith.

These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you cleanse the outside of the cup of the plate, but inside they are full of extortion and rapacity.

You blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup and of the plate that the outside also may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.

And you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, saying, If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.

Thus you witness against yourselves that you are the sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up then the measure of your fathers.

You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify.

Some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent

Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Therefore I truly say, truly

I say to you, all this will come upon this generation. There's your context.

And it's pretty obvious it is a judgment oracle. It is a lengthy denunciation of the

Jewish leadership of that day. The very people that the people of the, in the street, the people in the villages considered to be the most holy of all men.

A denunciation, a long series of woes, scribes,

Pharisees, hypocrites, you who pretend to be one thing but are something else.

And so that then is the context. Without transition directly into verses 37 through 39, the topic doesn't change.

It's still a judgment oracle. Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you.

How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you would not.

Behold your house is forsaken and 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. Now this continues the exact same thought.

He's talked, he's just been talking about the blood of Zechariah, the son of Barakai, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.

That's, we're going to have to spend a fair amount of time on that one because that's a really interesting discussion and that'll take up at least a full

Sunday School class once we get to it in, well, however amount of time it's going to take us to get that many sections.

What's that? February. February. Well. All right. Well, I am going to Australia in August, so maybe that will be

February. I don't know. Actually, February is probably when I'm going to the UK, so maybe March. But anyway, it's a fascinating discussion because the identity of who is this

Zechariah, the son of Barakai, and so on and so forth. But the point is that from Genesis to the end of the

Old Testament, that's stories in Second Chronicles, which was the last of the Old Testament books in the order of the can that they had, the

Jewish people had been murdering the prophets. And that's what everything from verse 29 onward was about, was the fact that they had been killing those that had been sent to them.

And so in saying this, oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those were sent to you, then who is being addressed?

Well, the same Jewish leaders who had always been there in Jerusalem, had always been around the temple claiming all their religious rights and their religious privileges.

How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you would not.

You see the parallel with verse 13. How often would I have gathered your children, not you, how often would

I have gathered your children, those who are under their care, those who are under their tutelage. But what are they doing?

No, no, no, no, no, no. They would not allow that. They are standing in the way of people entering into the kingdom of heaven, which is exactly what verse 13 was all about.

In fact, I think you could make the argument that verse 13, since it is the first woe, this is what's called book -ending.

Have you ever, if you don't, if you have books on a shelf and the shelf doesn't have things on the end, you have to use bookends to hold the books in place.

Well, this is terminology that's used of a kind of literary device where you state a thesis or something at the beginning and then you restate at the end and it ties everything between together.

You can see this in John 1 .1, John 1 .18, they're bookends. They say the same thing. They gather up the entire prologue of John.

Well, the first woe is, but woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men for you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who enter to go in, and then we have the final word of this whole series, and it is the exact same thing.

It's how often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not behold because of this, because you're constantly staying against God's purposes.

Your house is forsaken and 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. So what is the context? The context is judgment on the

Jewish leaders. That does not change. Now why do I say this is the most often misquoted verse that I've ever heard?

Honestly, when I start naming those names, I can give you in print or on audio or video where every one of those people has misquoted

Matthew 23, 37 and many more beyond that. Since about 2000,

I've sort of been collecting examples where especially those who oppose Reformed theology will quote this verse, but they don't quote it completely because they want it to fit their paradigm.

What they say is, oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets, destroying those who are sent to you. How often would

I have gathered you together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not.

You see, God tries to save men. He wanted to save these people, but they said no.

And God's a perfect gentleman. He will never violate your free will. So here you have a clear example of where God tries to gather people and they fail.

Now how did I misquote it? It doesn't say how often would I have gathered you. It says how often would

I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not.

Not how often would I have gathered you, how often would I have gathered your children. This is a condemnation of the

Jewish leaders in that they are standing in the way of God's purposes for others.

Verse 13, you don't enter into the kingdom of heaven and you, how does it put it, nor allow those who would enter to go in.

You are a stumbling block. You stand in the way. You misrepresent God. You say this is the way, but then you don't walk in it.

This has nothing to do with, well, we see here from Jesus' own words that God tries to save everyone equally and it's your cooperation that makes the difference, you know, it's your heart that was softer, it was your spirituality that was greater, whatever it might be, that's why you're saved.

No, that's not even what the text is about. It is a condemnation upon the

Jewish leaders, and it's the same condemnation found in verse 13, and yet so often,

I even, God bless them, even heard Sproul misquote it once. Now he wasn't misapplying it, but even he missed the your children.

Who is being gathered? Is it the people who would not? No. It is not. That's not what the text says, and that's absolutely necessary for this text to be used in the way that people use it.

It would have to say how often I wanted to gather you, but I failed to do so because you would not.

That's not what the text says. The condemnation of verse 37 is on the scribes and Pharisees because they stood against God's purposes in His gathering of others.

By the way, did that actually stop them? I mean, is God's purposes, was

God unable to save 7 ,000 in the day of Elisha? Was He unable to save the remnant that's talked about all through the

Old Testament prophets? No, of course not. But these people, the false prophets in Jeremiah, the false prophets in Ezekiel, the false prophets in Isaiah, the false prophets in all the minor prophets who are standing against the people, standing against the true prophets of God, these are the people who stoned and killed the prophets and they stood in the way of God's purposes.

And their primary reason for so doing was so that they might have religious authority and the religious followers who greet them in the marketplaces and call them rabbi and give them the good seats in the synagogue and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So that's what this text is about. That's what the text is about when it's repeated in both

Matthew 23 and in Luke chapter 13. And so why have I emphasized that? Well, there are three,

I call them the big three. When I wrote The Potter's Freedom, I went through Norman Geisler's book and there were three texts that were cited either sometimes two together or all three together or a mixture of those three cited over and over again.

Never was a word of exegesis ever given for any of the three. It was just assumed that the universalistic

Arminian interpretation of the text was a given, it's just plain, it's just, well, it's just clear. We don't have to engage in exegesis.

And they were 1 Timothy 2, 4, 2 Peter 3, 9, and Matthew 23, 37, the big three.

Now we've gone over them before over the past number of years. There's a series on the website, Common Objections to Reform Theology, where I went through the big three.

So many of you have heard this before and you're going, yes, yes, yes. And Brick's sitting over there going, man,

I could have done that in my sleep. I've heard this so many times, you know, and things like that. But actually,

I think you were asleep, I'm not sure. So I know that some of you have heard this before, but we always have new folks coming in and you just have to listen to what people are saying.

And when they have to change the text description. Now do I think that the vast majority of these men were purposely, they know what the text is about, they know it's a judgment text, they know that it's actually saying you would not in regards to somebody else, which means they were standing in the way of God's purposes and things like that, and they're purposefully altering the text.

No, there might be one or two of them to do. But the vast, vast majority of them have never given consideration to verse 37 in its context.

The vast majority of Armenians that I know of see the text, see the

Bible as a bunch of disjointed texts. They just see them as these numbered texts, and you can pull this one out, and if there's 10 verses in front of that, the connection just isn't the first thing that crosses their mind.

It's just a text here, a text there, a text there, that's how you deal with Scripture rather than seeing its interconnectedness, its themes, its purposes in that way.

And so when their minds filter that out so as to make their point more clear, then you see the impact of tradition upon someone's even hearing the text of Scripture itself, even memorizing the text of Scripture.

How often would I have gathered you, but you would not? That's not what it says. It doesn't say that.

It's a misrepresentation of text to say that. And yet, that is how it is used and will be used this day in Armenian churches all across this land.

It is one of the three most popular texts. I'd say in order of popularity,

I would say, in my experience, and my experience is fairly broad on this for some odd reason,

I would say that 2 Peter 3 and 9 is the most popular, Matthew 20 through 37 is the second most popular, and 1

Timothy 2 .4 is the third of those three. I would say that's the, in my experience and in talking with the folks, that's how that works.

Now, I've had a bunch of folks think that Paul said what Peter actually said, and my experience is that the vast majority of these folks, when you ask them, well, what was

Paul talking about in 1 Timothy 2? Well, let's look.

No, no, no. You just quoted it. So, do you know what comes before and after it? Do you know what the subject is? Do you know what he's talking about?

Prayers for all men, beginning of 1 Timothy 2, talking about the mediatorship of Christ.

Have you thought about what your position means when you're saying that Jesus is the mediator for every single individual who's ever lived?

Do you really think that Jesus is pleading his blood before the throne of God for the Canaanites that were destroyed by God before Christ came to earth, and yet failing in that office?

Do you really think that's what he's doing? They've never thought of that. They've never even been challenged to think about that. So they're just not aware of those things.

And so, you have the wonderful opportunity, it's been my experience, I mean,

I just found out this week that the pastor of the church that is hosting for the

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, the Sovereignty of God conference in New Jersey this week, or next week that I'm speaking at, used to be in an

Arminian, Messianic, Jewish, charismatic church as an elder.

And you know why he's now, years later, an elder in a reformed

Baptist church? Was the potter's freedom. I didn't know that. Rocked his world.

And I'm like, wow, that's really cool. I was just trying to help folks out with some confusing stuff.

But there are people who really have a strong sensitivity, they've just never been instructed.

And when they are, they're like, you know, it's the Lucy Linus effect. I can't do that very well anymore, but if you remember the

Lucy Linus effect, you know, it's when Lucy is yelling at Linus and his hair is going straight back, you know, sort of like in the jet stream of the jet engine, something like that.

There are people that just, you know, I'll never forget Susan V, who came into our chat channel years and years ago as a convinced member of the

Church of Christ. And the very first night she was in there, I hit her with John 6, which is sort of like hitting somebody with a boulder, you know.

And for months, she kept coming back in. Well, I talked to my elders and they said this, well, here's why that doesn't work.

And she'd come back, well, I looked it up in this commentary, it says this, well, here's where that's from. And then eventually it was,

I'm losing sleep at night over this. Do you have any idea how much I'll lose my family, things like that if I, but she would not abandon the authority of the word of God.

And she's now secretary to one of the best known reformed speakers in the

Midwest and has been involved in that work for a long time now. And it started in a chat channel conversation with John 6, you know, and just patiently just dealing with every objection as it came up.

And they're just people who really love the word of God. And when you let them hear everything it has to say, they go, oh, wow, man, it's all over the place, isn't it?