How the Pharisees Got it Wrong
Text: Matthew 15:1-14
By: Ken McKinley
(Read Text)
Well we’re taking a little break from Ecclesiastes. We did last week so that I could talk to you all about how we might better serve God as a church. And tonight, I want to talk to you about how the Pharisees got it wrong.
Now if you’ve read through the Gospels, then you know that the Pharisees were an ultra-religious group of Jews, who the Bible tells us, were the enemies of Jesus. Jesus was patient with everyone except for the Pharisees. When sinners would approach Him, He would often show them kindness, forgive them, and even eat with them. But the Pharisees were a different story. He called them a brood of vipers, evil, hypocrites, and sons of their father the devil, white washed tombs, and here in our text… He calls them blind leaders of blind people. And there are several occasions where Jesus implies that the Pharisees aren’t going to make it to heaven. He says they have no part in the Kingdom.
So what I want to do tonight is look at the Pharisees and examine how they got it so wrong. Now you might be sitting here and thinking to yourself, “Why? Why should we care about the Pharisees?” Well for one reason they are important to the context of the New Testament, and for another reason… they help us understand ourselves. We all have a little bit of Pharisee in us. That’s why the New Testament devotes so much time to the Pharisees. If you know your history, then you know that by the time John wrote his Gospel, the Pharisees had probably already been done away with by the Roman Empire. John probably wrote his Gospel around 90 AD, but the Pharisees were done away with in 70 AD. But the reality is, that we all can have some of the same problems that they did. So the purpose of the Bible in telling us about them is to help us identify it in ourselves and then… kill it!
So tonight; what we’re going to do is look at the Pharisees. Their history and origin, what their ideas and beliefs were, and where they went so wrong.
First off, let’s examine their history. About 200 years before Jesus came to earth, Israel and Jerusalem was under the control of the Greeks… this was before Rome came to power. And so Greek thought was prominent and many of the Jews had begun to observe the Greek way of life. If you wanted to rise to any type of prominent position you had to do that. And so that’s what many of the Jews began to do. They stopped circumcision so that their sons could compete in the Greek Games. Some Jews had begun worshiping the Greek gods. They were basically being Hellenized. And anytime you have that, you will also have a pocket of resistance that stands up and tries to turn the tides, and that’s what happened in Israel. You had pious Jews who stood up against the Hellenization of their people. Some of them even took up arms and fought a revolution to save Israel and Judaism. This was called the Maccabean Revolt. And the Jews actually won their revolution and appointed a queen to rule over them. But they didn’t really have a plan after that, and so they began to fracture into groups. And these groups happened to be religious groups, and each one had a different view of how things should be. There were three main groups. The Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Pharisees. The Sadducees are what we would call theological liberals today. They denied the existence of angels and demons, and denied the resurrection from the dead. The Essenes were what we would call ultra-charismatics today. They saw angels and demons behind everything and where the Pharisees denied the authority of Scripture, the Essenes were busy adding extra-biblical books to Scripture. They even claimed that they had other books written by Moses that no one knew about. And then you had the Pharisees… The conservative, fundamentalists of today. These were the guys who were involved in politics, and they even tried to influence things through politics…. Now they didn’t actually have any political power, because once Rome came in, they saw to it that – that sort of thing didn’t happen… but they still tried to manipulate the politics and the people to influence the politicians… Remember Pontius Pilate? They were also, usually excellent scholars, and so they ended up being in charge of the synagogues. And of course the synagogues were not only the places of religious worship and practice, but also like the schools of ancient Israel… So if you can teach the kids, you can influence the kids, and then you eventually influence society. And so basically, the Pharisees had some power and authority, even when Rome was ruling Israel. And when Jesus came along, they became nervous, because people started listening to Him instead of them, and they could see all that they had worked so hard for might slip away, and so they crucified Him. Of course I believe that’s why Rome wiped them out in 70 A.D.
So that’s their history… now let’s look at their main ideas and beliefs.
Believe it or not; the Pharisees started out pretty good. They wanted Israel to be a nation and a people who were saturated with Scripture (of course it was only the OT then). They would preach every Sabbath day. They wrote commentaries on the Scriptures; and they had a strong desire to be obedient to God. So to them; being a faithful Jew meant that your entire life would be governed by the Law of Moses.
The problem with that though, was that the Law didn’t address every detail of life that a person might face. So… they started to read between the lines a little bit and fill in the blanks. Now that’s right out of the Devil’s playbook – remember, “Did God say you shall not eat… of you will not surely die… God doesn’t want you to be like Him that’s all.” And so in their desire to be obedient, and probably more so in their desire to maintain their power, they started adding to God’s Word. And as soon as those things pass from one generation to the next, it becomes tradition. Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with tradition, as long as you realize that’s all it is, and you don’t elevate it beyond where it should go. Of course, that’s what the Pharisees did.
Today we have our own traditions: the way we do our worship services. Having a 3rd Sunday dinner, or a 5th Sunday sing. They type of music we use in our worship, the way we dress for church, altar calls… the list goes on and on; and none of those things are explicitly found in the Bible, but we’ve done them for so long, they have become traditions. We can actually look back through Baptist history and find out where they began, and how we adopted them, and how they became tradition. And those things aren’t necessarily bad; unless we elevate them above where we should.
For the Pharisees, the Sabbath was a big deal. The Bible says that a person wasn’t supposed to work on the Sabbath. But the Pharisees asked the question, “What exactly is work?” Was starting a fire so that you could cook considered work? How far could you walk before it became work instead of a leisurely stroll? And so the Pharisees began to micro-manage God’s Word and they had it down to minute details.
Another big deal for them was tithing. They came up with precise details on how a person should tithe. They said you have to tithe off of your gross, be it money, produce, or whatever. And also, if you went to the market and bought some meat or veggies, you had to tithe them as well, because you don’t know if the person you bought them from had tithed, so you had better cover your bases.
Church order was huge for them. You had to do church in exactly the right way or else. You had to stand at certain times, and sit at others. The music had to be sung at just the right moment. And only a certain number of songs would be used. You had to dress a certain way.
And one of the most important things to the Pharisees was what they called purity, or purity rites. Most of that teaching came from Leviticus and Numbers. It had to do with maintaining the act of circumcision. Not intermarrying, and the types of food a person ate. We all know that faithful Jews don’t eat pork. But it went further than that. They had this notion that these unclean things would defile them spiritually. Especially a corpse. And they took these purity rites to the extreme. One pharisitical commentary said that you had to be careful about drinking wine, because the person who crushed the grapes might have stepped on a grave, and the impurity of the corpse buried in the grave would seep up onto his foot, and his foot would touch the grapes when he crushed them, and if you drank it, you would become impure.
And so they had added to the Law to the extreme.
In Matt. 23:27 Jesus said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead mans bones.” In other words, Jesus was saying to them, “You’re so afraid of corpse impurity, but the reality is… you’re the corpse whose making others impure!”
So what went wrong? How did they miss it so bad?
Well they started out wrong. They thought that they could make themselves right with God by all the things they were doing. They missed the point entirely that only God could make them right. Only God could justify them to Himself. The Pharisees were trying to measure up to THEIR idea of what godliness was, not to God’s idea. And they actually believed that they were doing it… that by all their outward religion, they were justifying themselves before God.
So there were three major errors of the Pharisees, and we need to look at them really quickly.
The 1st one is that they made their tradition necessary for godliness. In our text; Jesus said, “You honor Me with your lips, but your hearts are far from Me.” In other words, they were saying the right things, but they were no closer to being justified than before. Jesus had a problem with the Pharisees elevating their tradition to a level equal to God’s commands. And not only did they elevate their tradition, they began to look down on others who didn’t keep the same traditions and customs. You see; to the Pharisee, it you didn’t obey their traditions, then you were less than godly. But Jesus said this, “The two greatest commands are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself!” God wants us to love Him, and to love and serve others. He doesn’t care about our traditions.
Their 2nd error was that they thought that godliness was about ones outward religious practices. Back in Matt. 23:23 Jesus said, “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law; justice and mercy and faith! These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone.” It was a matter of priorities. They totally missed it. They believed that God valued what they valued. And that God felt what was important would be what they felt was important. In other words; when they elevated their traditions to an equal level as God’s Word, it resulted in them elevating themselves to an equal level with God. And basically they said, “You know what. I’m a pretty pious person. I meticulously keep all these traditions, and go above and beyond even what God’s Law says to do. There’s no way God wouldn’t approve of the things that I approve of.”
Their 3rd error was that they had a wrong view of the Messiah! And it stemmed from their thinking more highly of themselves than they should’ve. They wrongly believed that they were the children of Abraham, and that gave them special privileges that others didn’t have.
Both John the Baptist and Jesus addressed that issue. John told them in Matt. 3 that God could raise up children of Abraham from the stones that were next to the Jordan River, so they shouldn’t rely on that. And Jesus… in John chapter 8 told them that they were children of the devil. He said, “If you were the children of Abraham, then you would do the works of Abraham.”
And so they had this wrong idea about themselves, and it caused them to have a wrong idea about the Messiah. Because they believed that they were so important; they believed that the promised Messiah would be a political ruler who was more concerned about them, and the physical nation of Israel than He was about humanity. They believed that the Messiah would set up a political kingdom… that He would come and throw off the yoke of the Roman Empire, and set up a kingdom like David. And from Jerusalem, the nation of Israel would be the worlds lone super power, and that the Jewish people would rule forever under His reign. They believed that Judaism would be the only religion in the world and that people from every nation would come to the temple and offer their sacrifices. They never would’ve imagined that the Messiah would be the sacrifice, and that He would tear the veil in two. And then later allow the Roman Empire to destroy the temple.
Here’s the point… and I’ll close with this. God wants His people to declare His glory! One of the best ways we can do that is by showing the love of Christ to a lost world. Secondly; God wants us to be in an intimate relationship with Him. And we do that by loving Him, not by doing rituals or by our external religious practices. We love God, and love our neighbor. That’s all the Law. And it’s not that our religious practices or our traditions are wrong… it’s just that our religious practices and traditions should flow from our loving God and loving our neighbors.
And so as we pray, I’m going to ask the Lord to show us if there is any part of our lives, that’s like the Pharisees, so that we can get it out of our lives, and instead live for Him and for His glory.
LET’S PRAY
