Matthew 15:10-20 What Soap Can Never Wash Away

To the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsek takes us through his series on the book of Matthew called Not Your Average Savior. Let's listen in.

Building Update and a Vision for the New Facility

I'm the lead pastor here, and I just want to welcome you this morning. Glad that you're here. I hope you're eager to hear from God's word as we've gathered together. That's kind of the main focus of what we do together is hear from what he has to say to us, and I hope that you're ready for that.

Just an announcement to catch you up to speed on where we're at regarding the building. How many of you have been out there to see the building in the last couple of weeks? You've driven back in there, you've seen it.

I would encourage you, if you get a chance to go back and check it out during the week, just try your best to not get in the way of any of the workers. It is usually locked up now from this point forward, so you might not be able to get inside, but just to even drive back in there and check it out is cool.

We're guessing at dates, and again, it is guesswork. But we're guessing that we're gonna be in there before Thanksgiving, so that's our goal. That's what we're hoping for. The builder seems to indicate that that seems to be a reasonable target, and so I would just ask that you please continue to pray for the progress, the timing for all of those that are working out there, and then also just continue to pray for the financial needs that are involved and associated with that as well as we continue, and we are just very grateful for the way that God has blessed us with the means to be able to begin this process and carry it forward with building this facility.

But further beyond that, I would just ask that you please also, I don't think that's hitting, are you guys getting something out there from, and that's gonna be distracting throughout the service if it continues, but I don't think it's coming from this.

Back up a little. I'm getting the push back here, so, okay.

Maybe, see if that helps. Can you still hear me?

All right, maybe a little editing for the podcast on that a little bit later, we'll see. But where I was at is just talking about the facility and get back to that for just a second. I would ask that although we pray for the finances and we pray for this, and how many of you are pretty excited about getting a new building?

Some of you are pretty excited about that. I just want to point out that I would really ask for you to continue to pray that the building would be a good tool to bless our community. It would be something that we could use to bless the area of Matawan and that they would be grateful and that we would be able to be gracious in giving towards this community.

The elders here at Recast have a vision for this building to be a blessing to the Matawan area and I believe that in order to really truly do that, it requires us to think a little bit outside of the box.

It requires us to actually intentionally offer this building up to our community in ways that is not extremely common for a church. Now most churches are open to people in the community using it, but the reality is I've been in churches and I think many of you would recognize that your church experience would reflect this if you've been in a church growing up or whatever, is that it becomes a tendency to all the investment that we've put into this building to really make it ours with a capital O.

It's our building and we cling to it. And then further what we do is we tend to protect it, right? Like it's an investment that we've invested in and so now we need to protect it and I think in its worst case, what that slides into is serving it, making the building something that we serve, that we've got to protect it, we've got to maintain it, we've got to make sure that it's all great and doesn't get any nicks or dents or any problems with it and so then it becomes something that we can idolize, we can serve it and it becomes our hope is wrapped up in it and so my hope for this new building is that we see it as a tool that God has loaned us to bless others in ministry and just like you wouldn't worry, I mean, how many of you have a hammer at home?

Do you worry if that hammer gets a nick in it? Does that really bother you? Does that really hurt your heart every time you get a nick in your hammer? No, no, it doesn't. Did somebody say yes? You got a relationship with your hammer.

That's an idol right there. You got to work on that. No, you don't really necessarily worry if your hammer gets a nick in it, right? It's a tool that you use to beat on metal with, right? You expect it to have some nicks and some cuts in it so I would just encourage you to think in terms of this building.

It's an expensive tool but it is a tool that God is giving us for the purpose of outreach and to further his kingdom and so even if that means working through some issues that are gonna be part and parcel of sharing that with our community, I hope that that's the case.

So be praying for that. As we dive into the text, the heart of all that we do at Recast Church stems from a proper understanding of what Jesus is gonna be teaching us this morning in the text we're looking at here in Matthew 15.

The message of our text is so fundamental that your eternal destiny hinges on your understanding of this very truth. It's an ugly truth that we're looking at this morning, a very ugly truth. It's a devastating truth.

It's a truth that the Pharisees in the days of Jesus couldn't grasp or refuse to grasp because it maligned them. It said something bad about them. It was a truth that even the disciples had a hard time understanding and it's a truth that each and every generation needs to be reminded of and needs to remember for themselves.

Each person in every generation needs to be reminded of this truth and hear it again with fresh ears and that's one of the reasons that it's recorded for us here in the pages of Scripture because we need this constant reminder and the truth is simply this.

Hear me carefully, Recast. You need not worry about being corrupted by the world around you. You need not worry about being defiled or being made impure by the world around you. You're already impure.

You're already corrupt. That's the truth. More simply stated, the problem of sin is not something outside of you that you need to be protected from. But the problem of sin is inside each and every one of us.

Defilement or impurity before God is not an externally contracted, it's not externally contracted by interaction with the outside world. Now, granted it's also not something that's easily remedied or easily washed away.

I've entitled this sermon What Soap Can Never Wash Away. No amount of cleaning, no amount of hand washing, no amount of scrubbing up the outside, no amount of pious behavior or self-righteousness can wash your problem away.

We encounter in our text this morning religious people who are concerned about external, physical washing to avoid being spiritually impure. They came to Jesus last week and asked why his disciples didn't wash their hands before they ate.

In our text this morning, he identifies that they have a problem that no amount of soap is going to take care of. The defilement is within them. They ought not fear getting dirty is what Jesus is saying.

They already are dirty. And the one who can see inside knows the dirt that resides in each and every one of us. And he is faithful to bring us to the truth of our own plight. So that we might run to him for rescue.

So if you're not already there, I'd encourage you to open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 15 verses 10 through 20. And if you don't have a Bible or a means to navigate to the Bible, then please raise your hand.

Mike's got some Bibles back here and he'd just like to bring you a copy of the Bible. He's already got them open to this passage. And so if you don't have a Bible or a device that you can use to get to the Bible, we want everybody to have a copy of God's word this morning.

To be able to follow along as I read Matthew 15, 10 through 20. And again, I say this often recast, this is a privilege that we have to hear from God's word. If nothing else comes to your mind, if nothing else comes to your heart this morning of value, I'm gonna be explaining this text later and trying to make it clear.

But believe me, the very power rests in the word of God. If it is believed, it's not magical. What I'm about to do in reading God's word isn't a magical experience. Oh, we took in God's word. We're holy today or something like that.

But it's believing it, trusting it and going out and basing your life on the truths that are found here. That is the value and the power of God for us. And so Matthew 15, 10 through 20, follow along. And he called the people to him and said to them, hear and understand.

You hear what Jesus is saying there? Hear and understand. It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a person. Then the disciples came and said to him, do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?

He answered, every plant that my heavenly father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone, they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit. But Peter said to him, explain the parable to us.

And he said, are you all so still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart.

And this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands, that doesn't defile anyone.

Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for the truth of your word that cuts right down to the core. That Jesus, while he walked here and taught and performed miracles and demonstrated to us what you in flesh look like.

Father, that he was faithful to teach us about our own human condition. He was faithful to teach us what is so hard for us to grasp and so hard for us to understand and really live out in our own. And that is that we need saving from outside of ourselves because we are broken inside.

And so, Father, I pray that you would be transforming each and every one here from the inside out, Father. That even as we get a chance to sing that song and think about that, Father, that we would think carefully about our own hearts and our own lives and reflect not just merely on our sin, not just woe is me or not just how terrible we are, but on the unequally the glorious and beautiful salvation that has been offered to us through Jesus Christ.

And that we have new hearts and we can sing to you out of new hearts because many of us in this room have received that. Many of us have been given a new heart. Many of us are not left in that corruption.

But, Father, I pray that you would help us in humility to recognize what we're made out of and what sin has really done in us. And, Father, that we would give that over to you and praise you and rejoice because we recognize how terrible plight we've been under and how great and glorious and beautiful and awesome the salvation that's been provided for us through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for us.

So may it be from that place, Father, that we lift up our voices together in unison praising you because you are worthy. You are the only one who is truly worthy and you are the one who gives new hearts.

Amen. Well, thanks a lot to Dave for leading us. I appreciate the time and effort that he puts in every week and just even the way that he's willing to use his skills and gifts to serve the body of Christ here and serve Christ.

I'd encourage you to get comfortable like normal. If you need more coffee or juice or donuts, don't hesitate to get up and help yourself. If the seat you're sitting in gets uncomfortable and you need to get up and stretch out in the back, please, please do that.

Don't sit there in misery if you got lower back issues or whatever. That chair is not going to help you. And so, just I don't want anybody sitting there uncomfortable. But our goal over the next half an hour or so is to keep our focus on God's word and so whatever it takes to keep you from being distracted and focused.

And I would ask you, please, I love it when pages turn and, you know, you've got the Bible open in front of you, so keep open to Matthew chapter 15 verses 10 to 20. I recognize in the shuffle you might have lost your place there, but open up because that's going to be the text that we walk through and that's going to be our outline really is that, those verses there.

The Pharisees' Wrong Question About Hand Washing

To set up the context, the rebellious leaders of Israel, I mean the religious leaders of Israel, rebellious religious leaders, really, of Israel made a road trip from Jerusalem to Galilee and we saw that last week in our text as we're marching through the book of Matthew.

They made that trip from Jerusalem up to Galilee searching for Jesus to ask him a very simple and basic question. Why don't your disciples wash their hands before they eat? Now last week, I kind of made a little joke out of that.

It's kind of a petty and insignificant question, right? How many of you think that's a little bit insignificant? Of all the scope of things that you could ask Jesus, that probably doesn't rate up there in your top 10 questions, right?

Like a question about hand washing is not, it just seems very, very petty and very insignificant to us where we live today and that's partly because we don't understand the Old Testament law. We haven't lived under it.

How many of you are grateful that you haven't lived under the Old Testament law? Had to do all those rituals and routines and all of that stuff that were centered on the temple worship and the sacrifices that happened of real lambs and bulls and goats and all of that that happened in that very bloody sacrificial service to God.

So I'm glad that we don't have that, but I mean that's part of what their hangup is here. They had all of those religious things, but we saw Jesus challenge them on the way last week that they take their own traditions.

They've added laws on top of those laws, laws on top of the Old Testament, laws to help them keep the laws, rules to help them keep the rules that help them keep the rules. And because of all of that adding, they have begun to take their own traditions over the law of God.

And so that's the conversation that we're going to continue this week. Same context, same group of people gathered there. As a matter of fact, what you may have missed last week is that there's a whole bunch of people that Jesus had been healing.

This happens on the west coast of the Sea of Galilee, the western shoreline in an area called Gennesaret. Jesus had healed a bunch of people when these Pharisees and scribes showed up from Jerusalem and caught him there on the shoreline and began to question him like this.

And so you have to picture in your mind what might have last week been a conversation between a handful of religious leaders and Jesus in your mind is surrounded by a crowd of people watching and his disciples are standing by.

And this is a big crowd that's observing and watching Jesus interact with these religious leaders. And so he challenged them and Jesus is going to identify for them that their problem is not a problem of external defilement.

They need not worry much about getting stained and soiled by the world around them because they are the ones who bring the dirt. And in one sense at the very core, he is saying you're struggling with this whole idea of hand washing.

You're asking me questions about all of that. But at the very core, he's saying don't worry about getting dirty on the outside because you are dirt in your very core. You have a problem in your very heart of hearts in the center of you is what you need to be concerned about the most.

In the area of your heart where you make the decisions, the true self is corrupted and is broken in you, he says. And he's going to give us two points this morning. This text isn't a nice three-point outline.

It's really just two main points to the text, verses 10 through 14 if you're taking notes. He denies the false premise of the Pharisees. The first point is simply this, the wrong perspective. He, in the first half of this passage, gives us what is the wrong perspective and clarifies that.

And this is the wrong perspective. Oh no, I might get dirty. That's the wrong perspective. And Jesus is going to walk us through that and talk about that wrong perspective. And then in verses 15 through 20, he tells us what our real problem is.

What's the real problem in our hearts? What's the real problem of humanity? And we all know that we're a people and a race that are in rebellion against our maker. You see that all around us. You see it in your own heart.

And so the right perspective is, oh no, I'm already dirty. Oh no, I already have a problem. But before we jump into our first point, Jesus broadens the conversation to those who are standing by and listening into this conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees.

He breaks it out and talks to everybody. And I'm convinced that he is most concerned for those who are listening in and might be led astray by the poisonous false teachings of these religious leaders.

He's concerned for people. He is concerned for what we know and what we believe to be true. And he recognizes that the people, the masses are very prone to follow and to ascribe to the things that they're taught.

Now, how many of you have ever had somebody speak to you with authority and it's kind of like you just kind of lean towards, yeah, I'm gonna take that. Now, some of us are more skeptical than others. And we'd like to believe that we're not easily influenced.

But the fact of the matter is, I think all of us have been kind of duped by somebody at some point in history. How many of you would just raise your hand and admit to that? Like you've just kind of been like, oh yeah, that wasn't the real deal.

And I thought that was the real deal. And so we all recognize that that's a reality that we have to work through and figure out. And so he knows that those gathered around. He knows that those who are listening and those that he's just healed, those that he's been interacting with can be easily influenced by false teachers.

And he wants to bring them into an understanding about this fundamental aspect of their relationship with God to help them to see what is true and real. So he calls everybody. And there's really an exclamation point in the text here that hear and understand, says Jesus.

And from the very beginning, we must see that Christianity is a religion where our leader, Christ himself, is calling us to understanding. He wants your mind engaged. Christianity is not a religion of check your brain at the door.

He's not calling us to a blind faith. He's not calling us to some mysterious and mystical experience with the divine that involves emptying your mind and just feeling all the good feels. That's not the Christian faith.

It is an engagement of your mind with the truth of his word, with the truth that he is conveying to us. So Jesus is calling you, Recast. Jesus is calling you, Rob. He's calling you, Eric. He's calling you, Mark.

He's calling you, Sam. He's calling you to understand. He says, come, everyone, listen, hear and understand what I'm about to say. Jesus doesn't always start out his teaching that way. Now, how many of you know everything that Jesus said was valuable and important and we should follow it?

But for whatever reason, the importance of what Jesus is about to communicate to you, he wants you to be sure to get this. I want you to be sure to pay attention to this, Recast. Hear this and understand this.

Come and hear. This is vital. This is foundational. This is life-giving truth. You must understand what Jesus is saying here in order to even want to be born again, even to understand the phrase of what it means to be born again.

Without this understanding, you will never get past the religion of the Pharisees. Without what Jesus wants to tell you today, you will never get past religious behavior, religious actions, the following of rules and regulations and trying to make yourself look nicer to everybody around you or trying to compete with the person sitting next to you.

That's what religion ultimately is, is as long as I'm ahead of the person next to me, it makes me feel good, right? It makes me feel like maybe God, well, God's certainly gonna grade on a curve, so I want to be ahead of that curve, right?

I'm gonna be better than average as long as I'm better than average. And how many of you are better than average? Come on, you guys. You know you're better than average. A couple of people are willing to admit it, but everybody thinks it from time to time.

You're a better than average driver. You're more moral than the average person. You cheat less on your taxes than the average person. Less, right? So I think that there's a reality to religion that we won't get past that.

We won't get past that competitive nature with the people around us. We won't even understand what the true standard is if we follow this first half of this text. Without understanding, you will, without understanding this, you will basically turn into a Pharisee.

And here in this text, he indicates that these are false teachers, these Pharisees, who are not from God. They are blind teachers leading blind people because they do not understand their own internal problem with sin.

They have not accurately assessed their own relationship before God and who they really are. And hear me carefully recast, you are not on God's side if you are not living a life based on the truth of this teaching in this text.

So hear and understand. The first point, the first thing is that it's wrong thinking to fear spiritual defilement from the physical world. Jesus is here correcting a significant religious misunderstanding that arose from the logical conclusion of the Old Testament.

I say a logical conclusion to the Old Testament because in the Old Testament, there were many laws about what you could and couldn't touch. There were many laws that pertain to ritual preparation for entering into the worship of God or coming into his presence.

And those were certainly binding on the old covenant people of God because God gave them those rules as Israel. But they then of course, we know took them even further and as I mentioned, added rules on top of rules on top of rules.

Many of those Old Testament laws had to do of course with dietary restrictions. And so in verse 11, Jesus explains that it's not what goes into the mouth that makes a person spiritually, a way of thinking of defilement is spiritually gross, like disgusting to God.

And it's not by what you eat, by what goes into the mouth, but what comes out of the mouth that makes you spiritually disgusting. You see, Jesus is mixing his speech between physical metaphor and spiritual metaphor.

He's mixing the physical with the spiritual here and he's talking about the physical because they were concerned about the physical. They were concerned about literally washing their hands. They're not using that as a metaphor.

They're not saying metaphorically your disciples don't clean themselves spiritually for, they're talking about physically washing their hands here. They're concerned with the hang up of all of the externals and the way that we actually do the physical things around us.

But he's gonna, he's trying, you see Jesus is trying to take it in a different direction. He's gonna take it into the heart. He's gonna take it into the spirit. He's gonna talk about being spiritually defiled, not physically defiled, not like eating with dirty, with dirt under your fingernails or something.

It's about your heart and Jesus is going for the heart of people. He's not going for your external conformity. He's not going for your, this just merely just doing things, just going through the motions or just, here's what God wants.

He wants you to behave in this way. Now in the end, of course, there are some things that we should do, but that's gotta flow from him having our heart first. And that's what Jesus is getting to here is the problem with this first point.

They took all of these laws and they added laws on top of laws about the way that people would act on the outside. So he's saying it isn't the physical eating of food or dirty food that makes you impure before God, but it is the speech that comes out of your mouth that defiles you.

Verse 11 is the primary teaching of the text that everything else revolves around. You can look at that and read that while I'm talking. Verse 11, the Pharisees had come to Jesus with a question that on the surface looked like it was about washing hands.

But Jesus is faithful to drive for the heart of the question. Really, these religious leaders had a question about the fundamental problem of humanity. They thought the primary problem was good people being easily corrupted by the world around them.

And so they tried to protect people and tried to protect themselves from the world around them. And I'm sure that most of these religious leaders thought they were super good before God. They thought they were, like, crossing all their T's and dotting all their I's.

Many of them wouldn't even associate with someone that they perceived to be impure because they were too good for those common sinners and they expected to catch the cooties. They thought it was gonna jump off of those people onto them.

And so they wouldn't be around those kind of dirty people. As a matter of fact, the Pharisees were ticked at Jesus for even what he said in verse 11. How dare he imply what they were experts in was not that important.

You see what I'm saying? They're experts in the law. They're experts in making people jump through their hoops and Jesus is like, let's just slide all that off to the side for a second and they're offended by that.

I love the fact, by the way, that Jesus, that in verse 12, the disciples felt compelled to make sure that Jesus knew how he was coming off to the Pharisees. Do you see, do you hear that? Jesus, do you, I mean, Jesus, I'm not sure if you understand with the tone and the questions and the way that you're talking right now, I'm not sure you know how you're coming off.

So I picture the disciples saying something like, hey, Jesus, just wanna let you know you've really, really, really triggered the Pharisees here. I mean, they are, they are, they are triggered right now.

So would you, you know, I mean, the mic in Jesus's face, would you like to amend your statements? Would you, would you like to change what you just said? You know, isn't that really popular in our culture?

Somebody says something and the next day they're retracting that statement because everybody hates them and hates them on Twitter or whatever and so now all of a sudden, no, I didn't really mean that or I'm really sorry for what I said.

Jesus is identifying something about that very nature of things, by the way, that what you said you meant because it came from where? Your heart. So I think we need to, even in our relationships with each other, we need to own some of the problems of the things that come out of our mouth, right?

Like in your relationship with your spouse or with your family or with others around you, a lot of times it's like, oh, I didn't really mean that, I just said it. Guess what the problem is with that? You said it so you meant it.

So you need to deal with that at a heart level because there's a problem in here. What comes out of here started in here, in your heart, in yourself and so these people are offended. I mean, the Pharisees are offended in Jesus, by the way.

I think intended everything that he said. He meant it from his heart when he's triggering these Pharisees. He kind of wanted it, wanted them to, wanted to get at them and wanted to get to their, the very belief structure of the way that they look at the world.

They were offended by the statements but there's no surprise there because how many of you just could identify that religious people in general are very easy to offend? Did you notice, have you noticed that?

No surprises there. I think Jesus could have said the sky is blue and they would have been offended. So he's offended the Pharisees but Jesus is attacking for them a fundamental belief and that fundamental belief reaches all the way down to where we live in Matawan, Michigan in 2017.

It even can be in our own hearts if we're, if we're not careful and so we need to think through this. Many people believe that humanity is basically good and just needs to avoid bad stuff. That's what religion teaches.

You're good and you need to avoid bad stuff and then you'll be acceptable to God. If we can keep free from drugs, if we can keep free from sexual immorality, if we can give money to United Way and be mostly honest on our taxes and not cheat our employer by shopping online for Christmas gifts this season, then we've done well and that's, wow, great job for us, right?

Look at all these things that we've avoided. We haven't, I don't do that, I don't do this, I don't do that, I'm not tempted by that and that's what the religious person is like, right? That's, and that's, how many of you would say that there have been times in your life, seasons in your life where you've operated in a relationship with God on those premises, on those presuppositions that it's just kind of like what I need to avoid?

I just need to, I need to just skip this and so many, so for many, the life of religion is like a dodgeball tournament where we're trying to avoid being hit by the red rubber balls of temptation and bad things that come at us throughout the day and if I could just live this day without getting hit by one of those bad things that tempts me, wow, then I'd be really acceptable to God, then he would really love me, then he would, then I'd be okay.

So we're trying to avoid the things that the world and the devil might throw at us. The biggest problem with that is that in that process, we forget the greatest enemy of our own souls. We only have eyes out for the enemy around us and we're in mortal danger of missing the greatest enemy and that is the one who looks out of the mirror at you every day, the greatest enemy.

Am I being overly dramatic? How serious is that problem? Look at the danger of the wrong understanding about the nature of the human heart and your own sin in verses 13 and 14. If you get this wrong, Jesus says, like if you get this like the Pharisees got it, if you operate out of the worldview that the Pharisees are operating out of, which is all the corruption is out there and there's none of it in here and I'm great and I'm perfect and I've got it together and those people need to be more like me and I need to avoid them so that they don't make me filthy.

If you get this wrong, verses 13 and 14 declared that those people are not with God. They will not be with God. In the end and further, they're in danger of leading others to the pit with them. Blind leading the blind.

Jesus uses two metaphors for those who teach that our primary problem is outside of us. He dovetails with a parable he had already told and so bear with me while I kind of explain this parable because he alludes to it here by saying they're not planted by the Father.

The Heavenly Father has not planted some people. Well, he told a parable that I believe that he's connecting with here where a man had many fields and he had servants that sowed wheat in those fields.

But at night an enemy came and sowed a weed that looks much like wheat in that same field and as it grew, they identified, oh no, we've got tares, this specific kind of weed among the wheat. But the root structures by that point, by the time that they could distinguish the two, the root structures were all embedded together and to pull up the weeds was gonna destroy the wheat and so the owner of the property says, let's wait until the harvest, we'll separate it out then.

And that's what I believe he's alluding to when he says, these are not planted by my Father. These are not the ones that are planted by my Father. The wheat represents God's people who have run to him for a new heart but the weeds represent those who will not humble themselves and admit their own depravity and their own need for a Savior.

And so here Jesus identifies the religious leaders with the weeds that were not planted by the Heavenly Father but instead, they are instruments of the evil one. Going about telling people things like, they don't really need a Savior.

Telling people that they just need to try harder. Telling people that they need to obey more. Telling people that they just need to follow a formula, the formula of the religious establishment. Telling people they need to give more.

Telling people they need to attend more religious services. Telling people they need to avoid evil and then God will love them. Then God will accept them. And all of this sounds good except that Jesus says, it is deadly to your soul.

It leads to being rooted up in the end. And then a further illustration, people who teach that the problem is outside of you are like blind guides leading the blind. Jesus dismisses them outright in this text.

I don't ever want to be dismissed by Jesus. You ever want to be dismissed by Jesus? You don't want to be dismissed by Jesus. And he says, leave them alone. Let them go their own way is another way you could translate that.

Don't bother with them. Don't trouble. He's speaking to the masses. He's speaking to those who are hungry for religious teaching. And he says, don't even trouble with these Pharisees and these scribes unless you want to fall in a pit with them.