THE DIVINE REBUKE OF MATTHEW 23 ~ EXPOSING HYPOCRISY ~ Part 40
Are you a rule keeper? Why do people keep rules? The purpose of laws and rules is the safety and protection of the people. Good leaders are those who want the best for the people they lead. Godly leaders are those who know God, help others know Him better, and follow Christ’s example as they lead the people God has entrusted to their care to His Kingdom. God’s Law is good. Galatians 3:24 describes the Law as a guardian or tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. The Law was never intended by God to be a club with which to bully people into the Kingdom, but a guardian to lead us there.
Growing up in the 70s, I remember one episode of The Brady Bunch entitled “Law and Disorder” when Bobby was appointed Safety Monitor at school. He didn’t want the job, but his teacher chose him when nobody else volunteered. His parents convince him that he should be the best safety monitor he can be. Quickly, however, he begins to lose all his friends when he snitches on them for breaking the rules. The armband of authority goes to his head when he takes on the self-appointed role of safety monitor at home reporting every single violation, whether small or large, involving every family member. Even when the members have good reasons for their infractions, Bobby insists they be punished. Now, not only is Bobby public enemy number 1 of the student body population, but he also fits the bill at home. Bobby learns the hard way that there are sometimes good reasons for “breaking the rules”.
The scribes and Pharisees were all about not breaking any of God’s laws, or at least having the outward appearance that they kept the very letter of the law. In order to ensure this, over time they devised an elaborate system of oral tradition to keep the Jews from breaking the Mosaic Law—oral tradition based upon their own authority, which went over and above what God called the people to obey. God had given Moses 613 laws (the “Torah”) to guide the ancient nation of Israel. The “Mishnah” was the oral tradition—the commentary on the Mosaic Law—additional man-made rules that “built a fence” around the Mosaic Law so the people would not even come close to breaking God’s commandments. They thought it was a great idea. It wasn’t!
You would think, and they probably thought, nobody in their right minds would call them out for anything they were doing wrong. Like all proud, egocentric *narcissists who hate to have their authority challenged, they didn’t ever admit to themselves that they made mistakes. Why, they were the cream of the crop, the choicest fruit of God’s vineyard, the very best of the best. Jesus didn’t just challenge their actions…challenging their authority, He delivered a diatribe against them that has defined the epitome of spiritual hypocrisy for all the ages; and they hated Him for it. Pride in their self-appointed status would never allow them to hear or heed a rebuke from a lowly carpenter, a Galilean from Nazareth. One can imagine their thoughts: “Just who does this “low life” think he is, anyways?” Instead of eliciting overflowing admiration and adulation from Him, they received only condemnation. They were relentless enemies of Christ and His followers. And Jesus did not hide from them but confronted them head on. Why? They had a wrong view of God, salvation, and themselves and were teaching the people their heretical ideology. Their God was demanding, not gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love as Psalm 145:8 says. (*Narcissism = insolent pride in the Bible. It is described as those who are “proud”, “haughty”, or “scoffers”. DC Robertsson says that “insolence is contemptuously rude or impertinent behavior or speech. Insolent pride is more than just pride. It is pride that looks down on others.)
Jesus did not acknowledge and had no time for the multitude of petty rules they had devised to keep the people under their control—the very rules they elevated to the level of Scripture. When Jesus ignored or completely violated any of their rules for breaking the Sabbath, they were incensed. Jesus came to earth to save the souls of men. His eyes were fixed on Calvary during the three years of ministry leading up to the Cross.
The scribes and Pharisees placed heavy burdens upon the people whom they were called to serve. Completely missing the spirit of the Law, they enforced the strict letter of the Law while ignoring it themselves. Lording their own authority over the people God had entrusted to their care caused much physical grief. The Lord, however, saw the damage their teachings and actions caused spiritually, and He addressed it with a divine rebuke against the religious elite in Israel. Enemies of the gospel of Christ, they attempted to thwart the salvation of the souls of men. Matthew 23 is one of the greatest exposures of religious hypocrisy in all of Scripture.
What drew my attention to this chapter in an eye-opening way in my early walk with Christ was the similarities I saw in the Roman Catholic Church, having witnessed firsthand the legalism found therein.
The Roman Catholic Church has their own Commandments of the Church, certain laws considered binding on the faithful. In modern times, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, there are six in number:
1. You shall attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation.*
2. You shall confess your sins at least once a year.
3. You shall humbly receive your Creator in Holy Communion at least during the Easter season.
4. You shall observe the prescribed days of fasting and abstinence.
5. You shall help to provide the needs of the Church.
6. You shall observe the laws of the Church concerning marriage.
*It is important to note that the idea of consecrated days, or days when worshipers are required to obey particular rites or traditions, comes from one of two places: the Mosaic Law or paganism. It is also important to note that the New Testament never commands the observance of special days. This is not to say that observing a holiday is wrong or sinful, simply that holidays are not something believers are obligated to observe. The Holy Days of Obligation should not be obligated. Holy Days of Obligation
The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church has only five:
1. to attend Mass on Sundays and other holy days of obligation and to refrain from work and activities which could impede the sanctification of those days; (What about activities which could impede the sanctification of other days? The Bible says of all days: This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!)
2. to confess one’s sins, receiving the sacrament of Reconciliation at least once each year;
3. to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist at least during the Easter season;
4. to abstain from eating meat and to observe the days of fasting established by the Church;
5. to help to provide for the material needs of the Church, each according to his own ability.
According to Wikipedia: The Church commandments are generally seen as “minimum requirements” for leading a Christian life in Communion with the Catholic Church.
The biggest problem with all the added rules in the Roman Catholic Church is that they are seen as the means of receiving grace. What this says to the Roman Catholic people is that grace is not the free, unmerited favor of God, but that grace must be earned by the works they do as they adhere to the rules set forth by the church. This, then, becomes a burden or a religious requirement rather than a form of praise and thanksgiving from a heart that has been delivered from sin by God to worship Him freely.
Even the Ten Commandments found in Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21 given by God to Moses have been “tweaked” by the Roman Catholic Church to suit their idolatrous practices. This is a prime example of how the hypocritical religious elite of man-made religions take on an authority to rule the people that legitimately belongs only to God. By eliminating the second commandment against idolatry and subdividing the tenth commandment against covetousness in order to keep the number of commandments at ten enables the Roman Catholic Church to command its faithful to bow before statues and crucifixes, light candles, burn incense, and pray to the dead. Rome commands veneration of the host, the wafer which it claims a priest has turned into the body of Christ by an incantation recited over it. Relics, the remains of dead saints, are also venerated.
Any lover of God’s Word should be outraged at any church that attempts to deceive its people by tampering with God’s Word. The Got Questions website (a resource I highly value) is more charitable in their assessment of how the Roman Catholic Church divides up the Ten Commandments. They say, “It is not necessarily wrong for the Catholic Church to combine the first and second commandments and split the tenth commandment into two commandments as the numerals 1-10 do not appear in any ancient Hebrew manuscript to settle the issue of how the commandments should be divided.” They go on to say, however, “It is suspect, though, that the Catholic Church would summarize the second commandment as “you shall not have other gods beside me” and leave out “you shall not make for yourself a carved image” and “you shall not bow down to them or serve them,” considering that the Catholic Church has long been accused of idolatry for its use of images and iconography in worship. Due to the importance of the first two commandments, and in light of the fact that the ancient Israelites greatly struggled with idolatry, maintaining the clear and explicit condemnation of graven images seems to be the biblically prudent choice. The Catholic Church leaves out part of the second commandment, apparently trying to hide the fact that their own images and icons are violations of that very command.”
WOE! Not, Whoa!!! When Jesus pronounces a woe, He is not expressing surprise, interest, alarm or commanding someone to stop or wait. The only similarity between the words is that of commanding attention as a word of exclamation. Woe is a primary exclamation of grief, denunciation and distress. It can say, “Woe to you”, or “Woe for you”. In Matthew 23, the ‘woes’ can be equated to a judicial sentence from the Judge. He is not saying that He wishes these woes upon the scribes and Pharisees, but that “they are what they are.” They are the facts, the verdict, the true judgment by the Supreme Judge of all men.
Incidentally, eight woes compare to eight beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:3-11.
Matthew 23:13-14—“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense you make long prayers; therefore, you will receive greater condemnation.”
The word but ties this verse to what precedes it. Servant leaders humbly led people into the kingdom of God as they followed Jesus. One enters the kingdom of God by grace through faith in the finished work of Christ who provided salvation for all who would believe in Him. Legalistic teaching that nullifies the sovereign grace of God in salvation keeps people out of the Kingdom. The teaching of the scribes and Pharisees, along with the Roman Catholic clergy, encourages adherents to attempt to work their way to heaven contrary to what the Word of God teaches. Because one can never work her way to salvation, can never merit God’s righteousness, or can never be ‘good enough’, she cannot have assurance of salvation and peace with God. Rather than pointing men to the narrow road that leads to eternal life, scribes, Pharisees, and the like, point people to the road upon which they, themselves, are walking—the broad road that leads to destruction. No one enters the gates of heaven in his own righteousness.
The key that opens the Kingdom of heaven to men is Jesus and His Gospel of grace—which is truly Good News. The scribes and Pharisees locked the doors to the Kingdom with their human traditions and religious rules, making them more important than God’s Word. Jesus said: “I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.” He also said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life (as in the only way, the only truth, and the only life); no one comes to the Father except through Me.” Instead of grace being understood as God’s favor toward the unworthy, God’s benevolence on the undeserving, the free gift of God’s salvation to unworthy sinners, the meaning of grace distorted by man-made religion is that which can only come through keeping the sacraments of that religion. In man-made religion, the church is the dispenser of grace that saves. But the Bible is clear that salvation is not by works, and grace is a free gift of God.
Shut off means to obstruct the entrance into the kingdom of heaven. The word allow is interesting. It can mean to send away, to let go, to give up, to desert wrongfully, to abandon, or leave destitute. It is interesting because as self-appointed teachers over God’s people, they believed they had all authority to govern God’s people. Yet, their authority was leading God’s people away from Him!
Some of those among whom the scribes and Pharisees were keeping out of the Kingdom were those most vulnerable in society. God’s Word has much to say about widows and orphans. It is a special ministry after God’s own heart to care for widows and orphans. James 1:27 says: Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
The scribes and Pharisees were devouring the houses of widows. To devour here is to forcibly appropriate: widows’ property. One commentator said this spoke of the goods in the houses of widows left with fatherless children, but little else to support them. These greedy dogs, as Isaiah calls them, who never had enough, easily imposed upon widows who were left alone, weak, with none to advise them who were often prone to superstition. These predators persuaded their vulnerable prey to give all they had, sell their houses and goods, and give it to them! On the supposed pretense of handling the estates of widows while pretending to care for them, these devious schemers disposed of them to their own advantage and gain. While this verse is not here in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew, it is in Mark and Luke. The point is this: While all they did was for show, putting on a pretense to be noticed by men for their piety, Jesus was saying that their religion was anything but pure and undefiled in His sight and the sight of God the Father.
In the early 80s, I worked for a Word of Faith ministry in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At the time, I sincerely believed I was a Christian, but a decade later realized genuine faith was not mine until 1991 when the undoubtedly Lord saved me. While part of this ministry, I got really put off by the tactics used to get people (usually elderly widows) to support this organization. The hypocrisy I saw while working in this ministry led me down a path of religious confusion for the next ten years. In the late 80s, I worked as an administrative secretary for a partner in a Pittsburgh law firm. An estate attorney, he managed the estate of a dear elderly woman whose checkbook I helped to manage. I was amazed at just how much money she gave to every religious organization under the sun. I have witnessed elderly women in my own family do the same. My cousin and I were horrified to watch my dear aunt of 80 plus years entertain shysters on the phone for lengthy conversations as they tried to get her to give them her personal data and credit card numbers. After a lot of urging, “Please, just hang up on them,” and to our great relief, she began to be leery of ever-so polite telemarketer scam artists.
Matthew 23:15—“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.”
“Children of hell”, themselves, the wickedness of these religious, hypocritical scribes and Pharisees was not hidden from Jesus’ sight. He could see beyond the mask they wore into the very motives of their hearts. So, what ultimately made them children of hell? Not the wicked deeds they worked hard at hiding from others in order to deceive them into believing they were the supreme examples of piety in Judaism. The wicked actions Jesus saw were just the evidence of unbelief in their rebellious hearts—they had rejected God’s sole provision for salvation by attempting to justify themselves according to their own self-righteousness.
Part of what cemented their guilt and the punishment that awaited them was the fact that they went to great lengths to make converts to their brand of ‘religion’. Once a former pagan (already a child of hell) became a convert, he was double the child of hell than he had been—twice the hypocrite, swapping one false belief system for another. When a pagan was ready to embrace Jesus as the Messiah, these hypocrites prevented that from happening by slamming the door to the Kingdom shut in his face.
In Luke 11:52, Jesus said to the scribes: “Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering.” John MacArthur says about this verse: They had locked up the truth of the Scriptures and thrown away the key by imposing their faulty interpretations and human traditions on God’s Word.
I’ve known believers who have been in churches that were more focused on their own rules and a legalistic approach to ministry rather than ministering the Gospel of Christ. One man in our community, who called himself an apostle, was known to rule over the businesses of his parishioners and even over the lives of their children. When a couple I knew finally were able to break free from the control of this man, the woman began coming to the Bible study in my home. The oppression she had experienced had led her to a state of confusion. Often, when people break free from this type of tyranny, a wall of distrust goes up in their hearts towards anyone who tries to speak truth into their lives. The same thing happens in a marriage when an abusive husband rules with an iron hand.
Sometimes, even true believers can fall into the trap of Pharisaism by adding their own man-made rules to Scripture. It is seen by others as harsh, unbending, and unloving when one cares more about the letter of the law than the spirit of the law which only serves to crush the spirit of the one for whom Christ died.
Believers must be careful not to elevate cultural convictions above the Word of God. A good example of a cultural conviction today would be those convictions some Christians hold regarding either side of the Covid vaccination debate. They might be tempted to judge another believer who doesn’t hold to their same convictions. Does Scripture mandate that believers have a social responsibility to be vaccinated? What if a believer goes against her convictions to not be vaccinated after a season of prayer but then is shamed by another believer and has complications after she receives it? What if a child dies after having been inoculated because a parent was shamed into doing so? What if a believer stands behind the Bible (on an issue for which the Bible is silent) to shame an unbeliever into doing something, and something goes wrong? Much spiritual damage can be done in a situation like this. Cultural convictions that are not derived from Scripture should never be judged as if they were. Another great example is the Social Justice/Critical Race Theory ideologies— social issues arising from our culture that some want to bring into the church claiming they are Gospel issues. They most definitely are not! We all need to learn to discern the differences between judging according to Scripture rather than according to our own mores or those of the culture we live in. While it is good to have our own convictions regarding cultural issues, they should never be elevated to having the same weight of authority as Scripture. Judgmentalism is as much a problem in Christianity today as it was in the days of the scribes and Pharisees. We must be careful we don’t become modern-day Pharisees, or we just might incur the same divine rebuke.
When Jesus says, “Woe to you…” we must not only understand to whom He was speaking; we must also understand what caused Him to utter such a harsh condemnation. Then, we must examine our own lives in light of what we learn.
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