Synoptics - Matthew 23:23-30

Matthew 23 and the Warning Against Religious Hypocrisy

No, leave on Tuesday, leave on Tuesday, mm-hmm. We're in Matthew chapter 23, to carry around that big blue book. You certainly won't have to worry about it till November. That's a base there. I can guarantee you whoever's driving that vehicle is deaf, completely so.

We'll be heading to Australia on Tuesday, so we've got one day home the rest of October and that's not a Sunday, so you all will be good while I'm gone. I'm not bringing you any koala bears or kangaroo stuff toys or anything like that.

I learned my lesson last time. You've got to remember when you go to Australia, they don't care about how much your carry-ons weigh on the way over, but they do on the way back, which was great when I got to the airport last time and I flew out of Brisbane that time.

All of a sudden, you have to weigh your carry-ons. I'm like, what? All that caused a major problem. I'm keeping that in mind this time and not bringing anything back, or if I do, I've got to get it packed into the luggage somehow.

The Weightier Matters of the Law

Anyways, that means this will be our last study in this for a little while. Brother Callahan will be taking my place for a while. If I recall correctly, we are somewhere around Matthew 2320-ish. We were talking about the divisions made in Jewish thinking between, for example, therefore, whoever swears by the altar, swears both by the altar and everything on it, and whoever swears by the temple, swears both by the temple and by him who dwells within it, and whoever swears by heaven, swears both by the throne of God and him who sits upon it.

What he's doing here is dealing with the punctilious nature of the Pharisees, and part of what they were doing, for example, next few verses, These are things you should have done without neglecting the others.

You blind guides, you strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. In other words, these are punctilious people in the sense that they had all these rules and regulations, and some of them at least had a biblical foundation.

Some were just massive expansions upon what had been found in the law, and they used it as a method basically of sort of controlling their own little group. There were only so many people that could do, could invest the kind of time and effort into the doing of all these little things.

Most of the people are on a subsistence diet. They have to get up in the morning and they have to do what they have to do to try to earn enough money or do enough farm work or whatever just to come up with a subsistence amount of money, of food.

When you're just trying to survive, you tie the mint and dill and cumin. Can you imagine taking your spices and you get out your cinnamon? You get, oh, I got to make sure you do this. You make sure everybody sees it, of course.

You're so focused on that, and then the weightier provisions of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness, those fly out the window. It was just a complete and total imbalance, and part of it was due to the fact that these kinds of groups and systems like the Pharisees had developed into, create a mechanism whereby, basically, the leaders have control over everybody else, and you can also sort of determine who's in and who's out.

And that is what the Lord is focusing upon here. Their oaths, where they would make a division between what's on the altar or the altar itself, that allowed them to be dishonest. And they could look at, well, look, as anyone else here, can you tell me exactly what one-tenth, it wouldn't have actually been one-tenth, it would have been about 19 when you put them all together because there are three tithes, all the rest of that stuff, but I'm sure they had it all figured out, and there's probably a book someplace.

See, here's my chart. Can you tell me what your tithe of dill is? I know what my tithe of dill is. And this is while a person is standing back and getting angry about Jesus healing somebody on the Sabbath day.

Or they are promoting injustice. They're not taking care of the widow and the orphan. They're not showing mercy. They're not being faithful to God. But they know what their tithe of dill is. And Jesus isn't saying there's anything wrong with their being very careful about what they possess, but the fact that you do one, you do the minor things and take pride in that, while the major things, which are repeated over and over and over again, and the prophets and things like that, those go undone, so that these become a source of pride for you?

That, of course, is the very essence of hypocrisy itself. And so the assertion, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you are hypocrites. You blind guides, you strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. Well, that one's easy enough.

We live in a day where, let's face it, our food preparation processes are a lot better than they used to be. Let's put it that way. I mean, it's big news when there has to be a recall because of E. coli or some type of bacteria and something.

And obviously, while that happens every once in a while in comparison to how often it used to happen, we do a whole lot better job than we used to. And most of the time, when you grab a beverage, you know, yesterday some friends of mine and I rode from Prescott Valley up over Mingus down to Jerome, down to Clarkdale and Cottonwood.

So we stopped in Cottonwood before riding back the other direction and it's a big mountain from Cottonwood up to Jerome and Mingus.

Wow.

I had never seen it from that side before. And I was sitting down there, looking at that thing, going, we're going to ride up that? Oh, this is exciting. This is going to be fun. But we need some water.

So I went in to a Maverick, you know, one of those Maverick gas station, quick mart thingies and bought a bottle of water. And I did not take that bottle of water and hold it up to the sun and do all this stuff, you know, just to see if there's anything floating around in there.

I didn't really have time to, but I just sort of assumed that what was in there was probably filtered and hopefully there wasn't anything floating around in there. I didn't look. And I'm here today, so evidently I was fairly safe on that assumption.

But, you know, we filter stuff out and we've all got those little Brita things and that kind of thing. And so what the Lord is saying here, you strain out a gnat. They had to back then, you know, if you had water and something like that, you sort of had to strain it.

You had to run it through a strainer to get rid of stuff because, you know, stuff would fall in and die and there'd be stuff floating around. And if it came out of a well, there might be, you know, parts of leaves or, you know, you had to strain it.

And so there would be, you know, the more effort you put into that than the pure, the resultant liquid would be. Well, these guys, you know, they strain out a gnat, you know, something really tiny and swallow a camel.

Now, if that's not hyperbole, I really don't know what is. I'm not really sure how you swallow a camel. But the point was there is a massive difference between the gnat and the camel. And these folks are so their balance is so gone.

They are so much into the that which is good is evil and evil is good. Black, white, white, black realm of things. We see back in the book of Isaiah that the Lord can use this kind of hyperbolic statement that they are so concerned on the little stuff.

And yet, you know, it's very it's pretty much parallel to the here. Help me. Let me help you with the speck in your eye. Well, I've got a log hanging out of my type of a situation. It is meant to indicate just the backwardness, the absurdity of the backwardness of the Pharisees and how they have completely lost their balance.

This is also true of their cleansing rituals. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish. But inside, they're full of robbery and self-indulgence.

You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish so the outside of it may become clean also. We know that, again, they had all these rules and regulations, not only about the washing of the hands.

It's interesting to see the modern ramifications and embodiment of this. There's a lot of close parallels between wadu in Islamic theology, the cleansing, how you have to wash your hands and how you have to start with one hand over the other hand.

Not this hand over this hand, but this hand over this hand. And because you do it the other way, then it's not right and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what you had going on with the Pharisees at that time as well, not only for the washing of themselves, their feet, so on and so forth, but also of the cooking utensils.

And again, you sort of had to, there's underlying some of this, there's sort of an economic aspect too. Because the fact of the matter is a really poor person, and remember, we're not talking the poor of today and the poor of then, different things.

Poor of today in most of the United States means you can't afford cable for your widescreen. But the poor of that day meant you go for a few days below a certain level and you starve to death. Okay, a little bit of a difference, absolute subsistence level versus I can't get my second cell phone type of a situation, not quite the same.

And of course, the reason was the economy of that time simply could not generate the kind of sustenance for the population that was attempting to live in a particular given area. Especially if there was any kind of weather event.

Now we call them la ninas or la ninos and so on and so forth. But you get a drought going for a period of time and you can't get out of a place fast enough and there would just be a lot of death. There were just people living right on that border.

And so the amount of time and effort, water, access to things that it would take to do a lot of the stuff the Pharisees said you needed to do, also sort of guaranteed that these were going to be upper middle class folks at the least.

Because poor folks just, I mean if you have to walk a long distance just to get the bucket of water to bring it and if you have to have certain cleaning stuff for the bucket itself just to bring the water to the house and that kind of thing, you don't have servants to do this for you, all the rest of that stuff, and you're just trying to get enough food to live, probably couldn't do a lot of this stuff.

And so I'm certain that the Lord had, we know the Lord ate at the home of certain Pharisees. We've had that recorded for us, Simon for example. And so I'm sure that he had observed the again punctilious nature of the processes of the cleansing of the cups and the dishes.

Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with cleaning cups and dishes. I've seen some folks that still have last February's breakfast on some of the stuff that they're eating with and I don't find that particularly appetizing myself, but I've got nothing against doing that.

But there was a religious aspect to where this was a mark of separation from others, that you put all this together and you can understand the Pharisee in Luke chapter 16 staying in the temple going, I'm not like that publican, thank you God, I'm not like that publican back there.

And he's not just thinking, he just didn't wake up that morning and go, man, am I good. This is a process, this was something that built up over time. And when you are so focused upon, you know what, my cups and dishes are clean and I do my washing the right way and I just, you know, me, me, me, me, me, how lucky the Lord is to have me type of an idea.

And if other people are encouraging you in that way, well, you can understand the attitude that develops. But Jesus pronounces a woe upon them. You clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they're full of robbery and self-indulgence.

You blind Pharisee first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish so that the outside may become clean also. He's talking about them specifically. He's making application from what they do externally to what good is it to have all this outward cleanliness when inwardly, well, the very next verse expresses it with even more force.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. And so you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

I mean, he provides his own interpretation. And first he uses something that everybody would be familiar with every day, the cleansing of the cups. But they're only doing the outside. The inside is all crusty with, you know, like I said, last February's breakfast.

So now he uses something that's even be more repulsive because of the Jewish laws against the touching of the dead body. And so you are like whitewashed tombs, which appear on the outside beautiful. And so you would have a tomb and it would glisten in the sun and it's just been scrubbed and it's whitewashed so that, you know, you know how it is around here after death storms like that.

Even though the building's white, you know, you get that, you know, that grime on it. And about the only way to get it off is you had to hose the thing down or rain, which it sort of forgot to do this monsoon season.

But it's just got that dinginess to it. Well, when it's all clean, it's all been whitewashed and it appears beautiful. But inside that tomb, well, there's dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Lord, he sinketh, you know, everything that you associate with what is inside a tomb.

You don't want to be inside a tomb, not just for the scary stuff around Halloween or something like that. But the smell of decayed flesh and maggots and all that kind of stuff, it's something that's repulsive.

And what he's saying is that's where you are. That's what you are. You may outwardly appear righteous to men. You've got the paint buckets out and you have done the whitewashing. But inwardly, you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

And so this whole section just keeps going directly to the internal and saying you have become so focused on the external and only certain elements of the external and certain elements that have become traditionally entrenched in the external.

But you've so focused upon the external, you have completely lost sight of the internal. And obviously the point is external activity is supposed to reflect internal reality, not the other way around.

And of course, one of the great failures of all forms of legalism is that while external behavior may act as a curb, it can never change the heart. It cannot change you internally. And so what normally happens is the doing of religious deeds outwardly without an internal renewal leads to this form of hypocrisy.

The Tombs of the Prophets and the Guilt of Their Fathers

That finally after the encounter we read in Matthew chapter 22 leads to this extensive and strongly worded denunciation of religious hypocrisy on the part of the Pharisees. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous and say, if we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in sharing the blood of the prophets.

And so clearly the Jewish leaders had to deal with the reality of the historical record of their own people. That is, they had to deal with the fact that if you start with the judges onward, and especially with the prophets, I mean we're in Jeremiah right now on Sunday evenings, we're seeing this, you know, Jeremiah's been down in the pit, and Jeremiah's been the object of false prophets, and the government likes the false prophets and doesn't like Jeremiah, and all of this stuff going on, and normally the ones speaking truth are in the minority, not in the majority and not in the leadership.

So if you are the sons of these people, then you have to deal with the reality that, well, now I'm in the religious majority. And so how are we different? Well, so we build monuments, we adorn the monuments of the righteous, and we build the tombs of the prophets, and oh, we honor Jeremiah, we honor Isaiah.

If we had been alive back then, we wouldn't have done what our fathers did. And Jesus' response is, so you testify against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. You recognize you stand in their line, and you are their offspring.

And, of course, I can't help but think that in the midst of this, there is some element of accusation, because he knows what's in their heart, and he knows that they have already sent people to arrest him more than once, and the only reason they didn't was because of the crowds.

And so there is, in essence, a self-identification of Jesus as a prophet here, and a not-so-subtle identification of these as individuals who are seeking to kill him. So you testify against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.

Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers. Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell? This is not Jesus in mediation mode.

This is not Jesus in non-escalation mode. There has been, literally, years of conflict, that again, in Matthew 22, when Jesus asks them, Who is this one in Psalm 110? How does David call him Lord? And they just stand there, not going to answer that.

That's the trigger that finally leads to this flowing discourse of denunciation, and I think we really missed Matthew's point. If we don't see the flow here from chapter 22 through 23, the enunciation of judgment on the Jewish leadership, Jerusalem, and then how does chapter 24 start?

Ah, look at this beautiful city. Not one stone can be left on the other. Connection. Judgment's coming. When you see it coming, get out of here. Historically, when Titus and the Roman legions showed up, there were very few Christians who died.

Because they saw it coming, they went, Ha ha, we've heard this somewhere before. It may not have been, oh, it's in the Gospel of Matthew. But Jesus' teachings were well known, and what did Jesus say? Get out.

And they did. And as a result, did save their lives. So there is a stream here that needs to be observed, which once again, I've decried it before, but we're thankful for the chapter and verse numbers in the Bible.

They're modern innovations. The final form that we have today, 1551, that's a year you can put down in your notes or something like that if you want. But they're a modern innovation, and they help us to find stuff and all that.

But unfortunately, I think, just especially as Western thinkers, it creates artificial divisions that were not there, and hence we don't see flow of argument and flow of thought the way we really should.

Well, that was chapter 22. We're in chapter 23 now. There's a relationship between 22 and 23? I mean, other than the fact they're bound together in the same book, right next to each other, there wasn't a chapter division when Matthew wrote these things.

So we need to follow these things along. As I've mentioned, it is phrases like what we have in verses 32 and 33 that cause in the modern theological world, especially the book of Matthew, to be looked at with great reluctance and embarrassment on the part of many New Testament scholars.

Ever since World War II and the Holocaust, there is a massive sensitivity toward anything that might be called anti-Semitism. And as much as we criticize the film, this was illustrated, I think, very clearly in what happened in the Passion of the Christ film.

Remember I told you about how they had the subtitles for everything, because remember it was in Aramaic, and so if they didn't subtitle it, most people listening or watching wouldn't follow the dialogue overly well.

Not too many people running around in the United States that speak or understand Aramaic. But when it got to the point of the quote from Matthew's Gospel, where the Jews say, His blood be upon us and upon our children forever,.

They just didn't subtitle it.

You can still hear it. You can sit here and babble at me in Aramaic all day long, but since I knew what the context was, it's close enough to Hebrew that I recognized where it was in the dialogue. You can hear it, but it's just not subtitled.

That was one of the main... It is just assumed, well, this is anti-Semitism.

This isn't anti-Semitism.

This is anti-Phariseeism. This is anti-hypocrisy. This is anti-abuse of God's Word, but it's not anti-Semitism. And it's so easy to take things, remove them from their context, and abuse them. I haven't taken the time to verify this, but I don't have any reason to question it.

But I've been told that during the Nazi era in Germany, that quotations from the New Testament would be used and posted as a basis for what was being done to the Jews. So there would be road signs quoting John 8, 44, You are of your father, the devil.

Now, any book can be abused in that way. There is no way that anyone could meaningfully defend the idea that what you're doing now to that person over there has some connection to what Jesus said to a particular group of Jews who were trying to kill him at that particular point in time in history, as if that's some carte blanche for all Christians, for all times, to kill Jews.

And anyone who would think that, Nazis weren't known for doing their theological debates with their enemies, except with the far end of a 9mm pistol or something like that. But that kind of thing took place.

It's easy to do that kind of thing. And fortunately, the Gospel of Matthew has experienced that as well. The context is ignored. And things like this are pulled out. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?

These are unforgiven men. These are unforgiven men. And yet they were the very ones that most of the people, if they were just observing the religious situation of the day, would say these are the ones who would have the most reason to hope for the grace of God.

I think the thing that really grabs the Lord's just indignation and righteous anger is that the Pharisees said, we are the only ones who have access to the grace of God because we keep God's law. They made God's grace something that was basically a substance that you obtained through your covenant faithfulness.

Now, there's been a big, big, big, big, huge explosion over the past 40 years now in New Testament studies by people saying the Lutherans.

Got it all wrong.

The Lutherans did have an imbalanced view of first century Judaism. The very idea that this is the only form of Judaism. Yes, it was the predominant form that was in control of the religious and political structures in Israel at the time.

But we saw Simeon, we saw Anna, we saw those people that were still sensitive to God's word. God always has his remnant. And you had the people that ran off into Qumran and did stuff like that too. So you had different groups.

But you look at those particular people there and these words are being addressed directly to them in their context for what they did at that time. To apply that carte blanche beyond that just doesn't make any sense.

And modern scholarship has jumped into this whole realm of saying, well, actually, Judaism was a very gracious religion. Well, I don't know how you can read some of the Psalms. His loving kindness lasts forever.

His loving kindness lasts...

Repeat it over and over again.

There have been imbalanced views of the Jews as if everything was just a credit. I get my brownie points for doing these things versus the merit system and that there was nothing about God's grace or anything else.

That would be a misrepresentation. But the pendulum has swung way over to the other side so that this type of stuff is pretty much dismissed. And even to the point of Paul being criticized for misrepresenting his own former co-religionists.

It's amazing what you can do in liberal seminaries and stuff like that today.

And get away with it.

That's become the foundation for those of you who track with these kinds of things and what's called the new perspective on Paul. Where once you determine that, well, Paul really wasn't talking about how you obtain righteousness with God because that's not really what the Jews were into anyways.

Then you can just completely reinterpret all of Romans and Galatians and you don't have to worry about Philippians and Colossians because Paul didn't write them anyways according to these folks. And you cut Paul up and now you've got a whole new understanding of Paul which means you can write all sorts of new books about Paul and stuff like that.

All going back to looking at something like Matthew and going, ah, that's just beyond the bounds. It's beyond the bounds. I don't remember if we did this because it's been a decade now. Did we ever show my debate with Barry Lynn on homosexuality?

Did we show that?

We did.

Okay, wow. It's in the notes somewhere?

It is.

Ah, good. Somewhere in the archives. You may recall, I know it's, again, a decade if you weren't here a decade ago, but if you've ever seen the debate that I did with Barry Lynn, Barry Lynn's the head of Americans United with Separation of Church and State and he's an ACLU attorney and he's the guy that they get on to blast Christianity every time he gets shot.

He's actually an ordained United Church of Christ minister. And if you know the UCC, United Church of Christ, is basically everything that opposes Christianity made into a Christian religion. And during our debate,.

He, ah,.

When I brought up some of the things that Paul said, because we were debating is homosexuality compatible with biblical Christianity?

Remember, this is the one.

He tried to sue us to hide the tapes of. Good old Barry Lynn, who has testified before Congress that child pornography is a guaranteed First Amendment. Right. But he'll sue you if he loses a debate against you to try to suppress the videos.

Of the debate,.

Which he agreed to do anyways. Gotta love the consistency of the radical left.

But anyway,.

Um,.

I brought up some of the things that Paul said.

And.

One of his responses, and I think I stopped, I seem to have this vague recollection of stopping the tape or something.

Did you catch that?

Because back then it would have been a tape, probably wouldn't have been a DVD.

Um,.

One of the things he said.

Was,.

And I think it was specifically about Galatians 5, if I recall correctly. But, ah, no, it was Galatians 1. It was Galatians 1. The Anathemas. It was Galatians 1. He said, well, Paul was over the top. Paul was over the top.

And he actually claimed in that debate to receive revelation on the same level as the Apostle Paul did. That's pretty frightening. I've never heard him claim that on Fox News for some odd reason. I'm not really sure.

I mean,.

It would be a killer comeback to somebody.

Well,.

How do you believe that, Barry?

Because God told me so.

Well,.

Okay,.

Well,.

That really wouldn't fit with his paradigm, though.

But anyway,.

Um,.

He dismissed entire sections of Scripture.

As if he had equal authority.

To go,.

Eh,.

He was,.

He was imbalanced there. He was over the top. He was over the top. And there is so much that is written today and so much that is said today in our seminaries.

Where,.

In essence,.

What they do.

Is they look at this text.

And they,.

You serpents,.

You brood of vipers,.

How will you escape the sentence of hell?

Well,.

The Jesus that I love would never say that to anyone. And so, I just,.

What,.

The,.

The view of Scripture that is developed at that point is one that allows you to set Matthew against Mark and Mark against Luke and Luke against John and all four of them against Paul and Paul against Peter.

And it,.

It assumes,.

Well,.

The nice way to put it is from the title of a book that I had to read back in seminary shortly after it first came out and it was just, oh, it was just the cat's meow at Fuller.

It was like,.

Oh, this is wonderful. This is what we've always been saying. Well, actually, we've only been saying it for 20 years. But this is wonderful and it's by James D .G. Dunn.

Called.

Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. The emphasis is on the diversity part. The unity part.

What you can do.

Is you can just chop the New Testament up into parts and if you really want to get creative, you don't have to just have Matthew versus Mark or Mark versus Luke or Peter versus Paul. It's really fun to make Paul versus Paul.

That's when it really gets interesting when you start chopping up individual books and have the individual authors.

Contradicting each other.

Then you can come up with just all sorts of wild theories.

And, you know,.

Get your Ph .D. in New Testament studies. It's really exciting and that's what lots of people are doing.

What you do.

Is you look at a text like this.

And you go,.

Well, you see,.

Matthew,.

Which wasn't written by Matthew, is written at the end of the first century. There's a tremendous amount of animosity between this developing Jewish sect called Christianity and the mainline forms of Judaism.

And they're fighting with one another and Matthew flows out of a community that felt persecuted by the Jews and so they put into the mouth of Jesus these particular words that represent their struggles at that time, you see.

And so these are people we need to understand that these are people who have been persecuted and maybe they've lost their families or their livelihood or they've had to leave their communities and so on and so forth because of these conflicts that existed.

And of course,.

They were just as guilty of doing it to other people but that's where the animosity comes from. And so really, all Matthew tells us is that there is animosity at the end of the first century between Jewish Christians and non-Christian Jews.

That's all, that's really the entire value of the book of Matthew.

I mean,.

It has some historical value to verify certain traditions that exist and stuff like that. But fundamentally, that's its primary value. And you wonder when you look at the extreme left of what calls itself Christianity in the United States today, whether it be United Church of Christ, whether it be ELCA, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, that's the left side versus the conservative side, Wisconsin and Missouri Synod.

And then of course,.

All your Presbyterian groups were on the conservative side. You've got your OPC and RPCA and RPCNA and then you've still got your conservative PCA folks but then you've got your left conservative PCA folks and then you've got, as my Presbyterian friends taught me to say it, PUCASA, which is PCUSA.

And they just, I just saw the announcement last night or this morning,.

One or two,.

That as a result of changes they made just a matter of weeks ago, they just had their first, celebrated their first ordination of their first openly gay clergyman. And I'm going to write an article about it because one of the things he said was, and even those of you who disagree with what we're doing here today, we are all one in Christ.