The Elder Brother Series

And then verses 27 and 28 He says, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”

And here He’s speaking about their contaminating influence when He calls them whitewashed tombs. And since a person was ceremonially defiled by touching a dead body or a grave, the people in Jesus’ day whitewashed the grave markers every spring so people wouldn’t touch them by mistake. And what He was saying was, all the graveyards looked neat, clean and attractive but they were still filled with dead bodies. And He was saying that even though the Pharisees had the appearance of people who were clean and holy they had the power to defile anybody by their ungodly influence.

And then He concludes in verses 29-33 by saying, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchers of the righteous, and say, if we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?”

And what He was saying was, these very men had claimed to be better than their forefathers who murdered the prophets while they themselves were plotting and planning the death of God’s own Son. And then Jesus finished His denunciations with a simple question when He called them serpents and vipers and asked them, “How can ye escape the damnation of hell?”

The word for vipers describes a small poisonous snake that lived in the desert region of the Middle East. And these little snakes looked like a dried twig and when someone was collecting sticks to start a fire they could easily pick one up by mistake and be bitten and die. We see this very thing happened to the apostle Paul when he was on the island of Malta. These vipers had a reputation for looking harmless but being deadly and deceitful and Jesus says the Pharisees were just like them and when He warned them that the end of their lives would be hell itself He’s suggesting the common practice of the farmer burning the stubble in his field before planting because as the flames approached, the vipers would try to get away but eventually they be engulfed in the flames.

Now listen or you’ll miss this completely, Jesus was pointing out their hypocrisy not so He could gloat over their impending doom but so they would turn and repent of their sin.

Now going back to Luke 15 we see in verse 31 where it says of the father, “He said to him, (That’s the older brother) ‘My child, you’ve always been with me, all that’s mine is yours.’” And when he says “My child,” He’s speaking to him in warm and compassionate terms and listen, that’s the heart of God speaking to a wretched hypocrite. And here we see the patience of God not only with sinners but even the hypocrites.