The Pharisees have a bad reputation that is mostly
undeserved. Their name has become a synonym for hypocrite and legalist. The
Pharisees only wanted to please God in everything they did. A Pharisee was “a separated
one,” as do words such as “Puritan’ or “Fundamentalist” mean—two other words
with bad reputations. Like the
Pharisees, they just wanted to please God above everything.
The Pharisees believed that the way to please God was by
keeping His Laws. They took law-keeping farther than most, though. For example,
some of them believed you shouldn’t walk more than a sixth of a mile from home
on the Sabbath. Others believed that walking with a pebble in your shoe on the
Sabbath was sinful, since you were carrying a burden. One Pharisee writer wrote
satirically that there were seven kinds of Pharisees, including the “shoulder”
Pharisees, who wore their good deeds on their shoulders, the “score-keeping”
Pharisee who kept a record of everyone’s sins, and the “bloody-headed
Pharisees” who had scars on the foreheads from running into walls while
avoiding looking at women. The lengths that some of them went to keep the Law
were amazing!
The same is true of Christians today who have the same way of
thinking as the Pharisees. Some Christians will not enter movie theaters, play
cards, dance, makeup, or wear beards, for fear of offending God. As a boy, I
remember old people who would not drink Coke because the bottles reminded them
of beer bottles. We’ve all heard of the Amish, who refuse to use modern
appliances. And let’s not even talk about what the castrati of Russia did to stay pure!
Pharisees were the largest Jewish group in Jesus’ day, so he
was always interacting with them. Early in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus dealt
with issues regarding these Pharisees. Jesus had to explain His position to
them. If He agreed with them, the crowd would reject Him, because they didn’t trust
the Pharisees. But He couldn’t just reject them either because they were
actually right about the importance of the Bible, even if they were wrong about
how they applied it.
So Jesus started with agreeing with them. “Don’t think I have come to destroy the
Bible,” He said. “I came to fulfill it. The Word of God is important. Not one
dot of an I or line of a T will disappear until it is all fulfilled.” The
Pharisees were right about the Bible. It is infallible, inerrant, and
important. But then he said, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the
Pharisees, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God.”
How would Jesus say it today? Think of the strictest, most
devout and most restricted religious devotee you know, and insert them here in
place of Pharisees. “Unless you out-Puritan the Puritans”, “Unless you are more God-honoring than a
Trappist monk”, “Unless you are more
devout than the Amish”---that is exactly what Jesus is saying.
The problem with the Pharisees and with those like them is
not that they’re too righteous, but
that they aren’t righteous enough.
They try to be righteous, but they miss the point. They have confused obedience
with inner change. They go through the motions, but don’t know why they do it. They have
made a virtue out of ignorance, telling others not to ask questions, but
to blindly follow their interpretations.
I have heard many sermons on morality and obedience, the
evils of alcohol, homosexuality, pornography, or abortion. These are vital,
important issues and we must speak out against them. But most of the sermons I
have heard on these subject could have just as easily been preached by a
Pharisee, a Muslim, or even a moral unbeliever. Is it really a Christian sermon
if there is nothing of Christ in it, but only a lecture on human behavior? Without real devotion, there is no life in
the Spirit. The Pharisees missed the
point--not because they were bad people, but because they never understood God
themselves.
Imagine thinking Moby
Dick was just about catching whales! Imagine thinking Hamlet was just about some Old Danish king! It’s not just what the
Bible says on the surface, but the truth underlying the Word—the rightful place
of God in our lives. The Pharisees read the Bible as a rule book and missed its
purpose. The Bible is about a relationship with God. If you leave out the
story, the rules don’t make sense. The Law come out of the stories--the story doesn’t
come from the Law.
“The Law”--that is,
the set of rules that were kept and embellished by the Pharisees--came mostly from
four books in the Bible—Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. If you
only pay attention to these four out of the thirty-nine books of the Old
Testament, you will naturally miss the point. The Bible is about worship, not Law. Worship is a term that
expresses our whole relationship to God—a relationship of love and dependency
upon Him. We exist to honor, praise and serve Him. The Laws were instructions
on how we worship. Without that relationship, keeping the Law doesn’t mean a
thing.
Think of it like a child’s relationship to her parents. Family
relationships are based on love. We have kids so we can love them. Out of love,
we make rules for our kids-- “Go to bed”
“Say please and thank you” “Don’t
play in the street.” These laws are
temporary. Not every parent on the block
will have the same rules for their children, but that’s all right. When we get
older, if we’ve taught them right, we don’t need these rules.
As we get older, the love relationship with our children
doesn’t change, but the law relationship does. Our kids can go in the street,
since they already learned not to. They can go to bed when we want. The love
relationship with our parents outlives the law relationship. One day, in the
far future when our parents are very, very old, we may even be the ones making
rules for them! Even so, the love stays.
The law is temporary, but the love is forever.
No ritual or law we observe in service to God is permanent.
When we go to heaven, there will not even be the Ten Commandments. There will
be no need to tell people not to worship other Gods, because God will be the
only God there. We don’t have to be told to honor our parents, because we will
honor everyone, especially our real Father. There will be no stealing, killing,
adultery, or bearing false witness. Who’s going to be jealous in heaven, when
we will be able to experience every delight all the time?
The Pharisees mistook the Law of God for God. They were Law-worshippers, not God-worshippers. Our righteousness must be greater than
theirs, because it is based on a love relationship, not a law relationship. We
are free to keep the Old Testament laws or not keep some of them, because our
righteousness is based not in our scrupulous law-keeping, but on our
understanding the Law’s original purpose.
At first, God gave Adam and Eve two commandments. The first
was a positive one—to keep and tend His garden, which is the world. The second
was a negative one—not to eat of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. These
commands gave them a way to show their love and devotion to Him. Love exists
without action, but its expression and practice that requires we do something
to prove it. When someone you love is in need, you want to do something to show
your love to them. When we love God, we want to show it in some way. Keeping
His commandments shows our love.
Adam and Eve’s real sin was not just that they ate the
forbidden fruit. It went deeper than that—they fell out of love with God. The sin
might have been repaired, if only they were willing to repair the relationship.
Instead, they hid themselves, breaking the relationship out of fear and shame. From
that time on, humans feared God more than they loved Him, and their approach to
Him was fear-based, not love-based.
Eons later, God created a special people to love Him—the
Hebrews. Their purpose was to reestablish devotion towards God, and to call the
rest of the world to love Him. In order to maintain that love, God gave them
special laws and rituals, to maintain that love through the generations. God
created a whole culture by decree, based on the love of Him. It included
dietary laws, forms of dress, special days, etc., so they could express what it
meant to worship Him. These traditions provided a necessary structure to
maintain this love-based community. Like a family needs a house to live
together, a community needs rituals and structure to keep it together.
But just as a house is not a family and a set of rules is
not a religion. The laws were made as an aid to worship, but they are not
worship. They weren’t bad, they just weren’t complete.
Here’s the Pharisee’s
problem. They confused the house with the family. Jesus didn’t come to change
the house, but to heal the family. There wasn’t anything wrong with the way
they worshipped, it was the object of
their worship. When we focus on the
details of the Law, It becomes like an OCD obsession. We wind up keeping the
Law for its own sake, not for God’s sake. We take the Bible and make it an
idol, not a tool. We maintain the house, but there’s no one at home.
Have you ever heard of the expression, “You can’t see the
forest for the trees?” I think there are two kinds of people in the world,
those who only see the forest, and those who only see the trees. One sees only
the big picture, while the other sees the details. The Pharisees were “tree”
people. They became so obsessed with the details of theology and morality that
they forgot to love God and others.
The
Old Testament law contains many detailed descriptions about how to keep the
Sabbath, what to eat, etc., but is also includes Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love
your neighbor as yourself.” If the details get in the way of the love, then we
must set aside the details long enough to get the big picture.
Most of us would consider ourselves religious, but that
doesn’t make us right. Just doing religious things don’t make us God’s. In
order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven—that place where God is really our
master—we must enter through the love of Jesus. We must first love Him, with
all our heart, mind, soul and strength. He must be above all things to us. When
we put Jesus, first, it is never an issue as whether or not we will obey. If it
is within our power, as much as we can we will obey. God’s grace does the rest,
giving us the strength to obey.
Jesus can give us what the Law
never could, which is the power to be good. He made us good through the
Cross.
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