Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven. You won't be in it spiritually, you won't be in it millenially, and you won't be in it eternally either unless you have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. It's a fact of life. We can't be right 100% of the time.
You may mistype an email address or a phone number or remember the wrong date for a friend's birthday. But of course, getting those things wrong won't change your life dramatically. There is one thing that you can't afford to get wrong. Your eternal life depends on it, and I'm talking about the Gospel. What it takes to be right with God. Who can be right with God? That's the question John's current series is asking.
To make sure you know the correct answer, stay with us. But before the lesson, John, I wanted to let you get back to something you talked about a few days ago. Some listeners who support Grace to You may have missed what you said, and it's definitely worth repeating.
It is worth repeating, and that's why around here at Grace to You, we've been repeating it moment by moment by moment, day by day. We came back from the holiday break, and what we found was an outpouring of support that was generous and sacrificial. It came to us, I know, as a gift from God, but through You.
Before the year ended, I kept telling you, year-end giving is a significant portion of our annual budget, about 25%. Our ability to do what we do through radio, books, internet, television, is really dependent upon the give giving of our people. We just teach the Bible.
We don't raise money. We minister the Word of God, and we trust the Spirit of God, prompt the hearts of those to whom we minister, to support the work. And that's what God has done. By all indications, we're beginning the year in strong condition as a ministry. We're committed as ever to investing in the lives of God's people and taking the gospel to those who don't know our Christ.
We're doing it because you're our partners. It wouldn't happen without you, and we want to say again how deeply grateful we are. From all of us here at Grace To You and all our partners in the radio stations around the country and around the world, a big thank you.
And friend, to echo what John said, thank you for all the ways you support Grace To You. And now to continue his study, Who Can Be Right With God?, here's John MacArthur. Turn to Luke chapter 18 and look at verses 9 through 14...Luke chapter 18 verses 9 through 14. As is true of so many of our Lord's stories, they are counterintuitive. But not just counterintuitive, utterly outrageous, shameful by all existing religious standards.
And this is one that fits into the category of an outrageous and shameful story. For in this story, Jesus describes the unrighteous man as the one who was right with God and the righteous man as the one who was not. How is one made right with God?
How is one reconciled to God? That is the big, big question. And that is the question our Lord answers in this simple story.
How can a person be right with God? That's the most compelling question. And this simple story, isn't it amazing? Simple story, verses 10 through 14 answers that question with amazing profundity, simplicity and clarity.
And you might think that that kind of a question could lead to the most convoluted, complex, massive discussion of theology and religion ever. No, it's not complicated, it's not complex, it's just this simple. You want to know how simple it is? Here's how simple it is. Either you can make yourself right before God, or you can't. Is that simple enough?
There are no more options than that. Powerful story. Two men, two postures, two prayers, two results.
Now we're going to break it down. Point number one, the comprehensive audience. Now his audience is certain ones, certain ones, literally whoever the ones in the Greek, whoever the ones, very, very broad. Anybody and everybody who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus at the beginning of that sermon says this, Matthew 5.20, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven. You won't be in it spiritually, you won't be in it millenially, and you won't be in it eternally either unless you have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. Nobody could comprehend that.
What are you talking about? They were the personification of human righteousness. How could anybody surpass that? It was the sixteenth century and it was Germany and there was a monk named Martin Luther. He sat in the tower of the Black Cloister, called that because they wore black. Wittenberg meditating on the perfect righteousness of God. He was the most scrupulous of monks. You read the biographies of Luther, it is amazing how scrupulous he was.
Attention to detail in his life. He confessed his sins multiple hours per day. He sought forgiveness for the minutest of sins. He realized, however, that with all this effort as he looked at the standard of perfect righteousness, it was utterly and absolutely unattainable because he knew his own heart. In fact, he concluded that divine righteousness is unrelenting, unforgiving, avenging, it is a kind of wrath.
He believed his state was hopeless. He had been told as a child that God is full of vengeance, that Jesus sits on a rainbow, pouring out vengeance and the only hope you'll ever have to be saved is to go to Mary. And when he understood that the righteousness of God was perfection and that that's what God required, it made him angry. This is what he said, the expression, the righteousness of God was like a thunderbolt in my heart.
I hated Paul with all my heart. He hated Paul because Paul wrote in Romans about the righteousness of God. Only, he said, when I read these words, the just shall live by faith, only then did I find relief. And he was helped by reading Augustine, when I learned that the righteousness of God is his mercy and that he makes us righteous through it, a remedy was offered to me in my affliction. Well, the Pharisees never did come to that discovery.
People hadn't come to that discovery and the world doesn't come to that discovery. The world basically is on the trail to God being good. The Pharisees were sickeningly self-righteous, or as Walter Leafield says, they are obnoxiously self-righteous. And that's why you have a further description of them at the end of verse 9, not only did they trust in themselves that they were righteous, but they viewed others with contempt...they viewed others with contempt. Contempt is the worst scorn that you can heap on somebody. Luke 23.11, the only two times this word is used in the gospels, once here in 18 and once again in 23.11, Herod with his soldiers after treating Jesus with contempt and mocking Him, dressed Him in a gorgeous robe and sent Him back to Pilate. Scorn, ridicule, mockery, sarcasm, the lowest form and the most biting form of derision. The Pharisees were that way.
They looked at anybody below them outside their group with contempt. The word, I think, is interesting enough to kind of break down exuthaneo. It comes from two words, as do many Greek terms, many of the verbs combining a preposition at the beginning, ek, out of, uden, not, not even, out of not even anything, the nobodies, the nothings, the non-existence. They viewed them as if they didn't exist. By the way, that same word is used by Peter in Acts 4 when he preached a sermon and he said this about Jesus, he is the stone which the builders rejected.
That's the same verb. Jesus was treated as if He was nothing, absolutely nothing. By the way, the word is also used in 1 Corinthians 1 where the Lord has chosen the base things and the despised, the nothings and the nobodies God has chosen.
So there is in this self-righteousness, in this pride, a contempt for anybody beneath you. The Jews, the law keepers were called the habarim and the law breakers were called the amharits, the lowlifes. And in the eyes of the Pharisee, he couldn't get near to anybody who was an amharits.
That was an absolutely unthinkable thing for him to do. Kenneth Bailey writes, in the eyes of a strict Pharisee, the most obvious candidate for the classification of amharits would be a tax collector. But there was a particular kind of uncleanness that was contracted by sitting, riding or even leaning against something unclean.
This uncleanness was called midrash uncleanness and for Pharisees, he writes, the clothes of an amharits count as suffering midrash uncleanness. They didn't get near any of the lowlifes and the riffraffs that they disdained, not even so much as to teach them the Law of God. And so here we have these two men and they are at extreme poles and they're going to be the ones that convey the message Jesus wants to convey to the people who think they can be good enough to get to heaven on their own.
The audience is really universal, a comprehensive audience. Second point, a contrasting analogy...a contrasting analogy. Verse 10, two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax gatherer. The Pharisee stood and was praying thus to himself, God, I thank Thee that I'm not like other people, swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax gatherer, I fast twice a week, I pay tithes of all that I get.
We'll stop there. What's the scene here? Two men went up to the temple to pray. That happened twice a day basically, every day, 9 A.M., 3 P.M. Morning and evening sacrifice prescribed for the burnt offering which was laid out in the first chapter of Leviticus. They were to go up and make an animal sacrifice, a blood sacrifice as a symbol of atonement.
That was a very, very important thing. They were very, very fastidious people who made sure they showed up at 9 A.M. and at 3 P.M. every day, particularly Pharisees who were in the proximity and could do that. The crowd would go up the steps at the prescribed time. The sacrifices would be offered on the altar following the sacrifices which would symbolically open the way to God because atonement had been made. Incense would be burned, symbolizing prayer. Now because atonement has been made, prayers can be offered and prayers would be offered. There would come a priestly benediction upon the people who were faithful enough to be there as well.
And that would be the typical scene. When it says they went up to the temple to pray, pray would embody all of the worship, all of the activities that went on. The temple, according to Matthew 21, 13, by the mouth of Jesus Himself is a house of prayer. Remember Jesus said, My Father's house is a house of prayer, taking the language from Isaiah 56, 7, and you've turned it into a den of thieves.
A house of prayer, prayer synonymous with worship, a house where you go to offer yourself and your petitions and your praise to God. It was that time and the crowd ascended the long steep steps up to the temple mount. They went up on Abino, they ascended up there to worship.
The two men are in the crowd and everybody would understand this very familiar scene every morning, every afternoon, the same scene went on. They're going up there because an atonement is going to be made for sin. Some are going up there feeling they need the benefits of that atonement.
Some are going up there to display themselves and they're just looking for a crowd to gather for that purpose. There would be a time when all of the people would gather around the altar as the sacrifice was being made, after which the incense being burned, people would then pray. The Pharisee, very familiar to us, we don't need to say any more about them. You know all there is to know, self-righteous, self-promoting, self-satisfied purveyors and protectors of the religion of human achievement.
Tax collector, also familiar. We've seen tax collectors already in four chapters. This is the fifth time we know they were the lowlifes of that society because they had purchased tax franchises from the Romans who were the idolatrous oppressors, thus desecrating themselves.
They then extorted money from their own people using strong-arm thugs and any intimidation, manipulation, or criminal activity they could and were surrounded by the lowlife riffraff of society. So they are shown going up together with the crowd, but they separate when they get there. And first we see the Pharisee. The Pharisee stood. Nothing wrong with standing. In fact, standing wasn't acceptable and frankly normal posture for prayer. There were many other postures, kneeling, lying prostrate was also a proper posture for prayer, hands down, hands up, eyes down, eyes up. But it was a common way to pray, put your hands up, lift your eyes up, standing. We see that many times in Scripture. We see it with Solomon in 1 Kings 8, standing to pray, Nehemiah 9, the leaders of Israel standing to pray. Jesus even talks about in Matthew 6, 5, standing in a posture of prayer but not doing it to be seen of men. He says, don't be like the hypocrites who stand in order to be seen by men. Well here's one of those hypocrites, not wrong to stand but to stand to be seen by men.
Again you go back to the issue of the heart. Very likely he would take his place in a most visible location and nearest to the holy place that he could get to show his proximity to God. He wants to be wherever God is believed or deemed to be, to give the unwashed around him a good look at a truly righteous man.
He takes his posture there. You see not only his posture, one of self-promoting pride, but you see here his prayer. And this is an interesting statement, he was praying to himself...praying this to himself.
That can have two possible meanings. One, he was inaudibly praying. When you say you're talking to yourself, you probably mean you're talking so nobody else can hear you. That is possible but not likely that he was just mumbling and moving his lips like Hannah in 1 Samuel 1, a kind of a private personal soliloquy. It's unlikely that that is the idea here and the construction lends itself better to understand that he was actually directing his prayer in a self-congratulatory fashion. And that is fairly well indicated by the fact that in two verses he refers to himself five times. That's pretty hard to do.
You have to have short sentences and a lot of first-person pronouns. This is a self-congratulatory prayer and the translation of the NAS is a good translation. The Pharisee stood and was thus praying to himself.
He is parading himself. This is no prayer to God. He gives God no praise. He asks nothing from God, no mercy, no grace, no forgiveness, no help, but he does refer to God. God, because you're supposed to, that's the way all prayer is supposed to begin, I thank you that I'm not like other people.
Wow! Well what's there to thank God for? You've done this on your own. This is sheer hypocrisy. This is an unequivocal confession to God of His worthiness, of His righteousness. Thanking God for what you are on your own?
This is where self-righteousness leads you. I'm good enough. God, I thank you that I'm good enough. I'm good enough to have a relationship with you. I'm good enough to be here in your temple. I'm good enough to be standing by this holy place. I'm good enough to be the paragon of religious righteousness and virtue. I'm good enough to stand here so all the low-lifes can see what a really godly man looks like. My guess is that the intent of our Lord is to say that He prayed in the direction of Himself in a self-congratulatory prayer, probably audibly since typically Jewish people did pray audibly.
The only prohibition the rabbis give is that you are to pray audibly but not to yell. But He is really putting on a demonstration. And so everybody gets the message and so God can truly appreciate His achievement. He gets specific. And the way all self-righteous people do, He compares Himself to the worst. So He says, I'm not like other people, swindlers, our pox is the Greek word, it's robbers...robbers, unjust, adikos meaning cheaters, dishonest, adulterers, moikos, immoral, sexual sinners.
I'm not like that. And by the way, those are all categories of people who fit into the association of the tax collectors...tax collectors and the assorted sinners and prostitutes that were part of the low life of society. So He compares Himself to the people He despises, the lowliest of the people He despises.
All those kinds of sins associated with tax collectors and their companions. And then at the moment He sees a good illustration of exactly the kind of person He is not, and so He says, or even like this tax gatherer. Now that's that obnoxious self-righteousness. He's praying to Himself, putting on a demonstration for people that He thinks God is also impressed with, asks nothing from God, seeks nothing from God, needs nothing from God. He just wants people to hear what a truly righteous man is like. And He must have kept Himself a little bit of distance away.
If He were to brush against any amharitz, He would be unclean. And physical isolation for a Pharisee was a statement. They stood aloof from others when they gathered around the altar.
They stood aloof from others at all time in society. They never had a dinner or a lunch at their house with anybody but another Pharisee unless they invited somebody in which to trap Jesus. But His prayer is not complete in saying what He's not. He wants to let you know and let God know and let everybody else know what He is. He is not only not immoral, He is very religious. He qualifies on both counts. He is moral and religious. How religious is He? Verse 12, I fast twice a week.
Impressive, huh? By the way, the Old Testament only prescribed one fast, Day of Atonement, preparation for the Day of Atonement, Leviticus 16, 31, called for a fast. There are no other required fasts. There were times of sorrow, times of penitence, times of mourning when people fasted and that was something you could choose to do. But there was only one prescribed fast. But as I said, these self-styled, self-righteous external legalists like to invent rituals and ceremonies as all false religions do.
And they get more complicated and more complicated and more complicated and more symbolic and more symbolic in direct proportion to the absence of truth and reality. And so, they had developed a scheme of fasting on Monday and Thursday...Monday and Thursday. Why Monday and Thursday? Because those were the market days and the crowds were bigger. So you could go into the big crowd and throw a bunch of ashes on your head and look sad and fast. A spiritual impression would be made.
And why? Monday and Thursday, some other writers say, well because it was a Monday, according to some rabbi, that Moses went up to Sinai and forty days later he came down on a Thursday. So Monday and Thursday.
Some other rabbi offers this explanation because Monday and Thursday are equidistant from the Sabbath while being as far from each other as possible. So in all these little twisted convoluted things, they had developed a way to make a fair show in the flesh. That's what Paul says in Galatians 6, 12. And fasting was part of it. Jesus condemned that, remember, in the sixth chapter in the Sermon on the Mount when He said, don't fast like the hypocrites fast in the public streets and in the corners, calling attention to yourself.
He's talking exactly about this. People putting on external spiritual displays by ritualistic ceremonial behavior, by the clothing they wear, the garb, the way they dress as if this is the mark of real holiness. Further He says, I pay tithes of all that I get. I pay tithes of all that I get. The Old Testament laid down prescription for tithing. Ten percent of what you get goes to fund the national theocratic government. Ten percent goes to fund the national festivals and feasts on high holy days and ten percent every third year for the poor.
So it was three and a third a year, so about a 23 and a third percent tax. That was what funded the theocratic Kingdom of Israel. Now that's all that the Lord required. Then it was a half shekel temple tax and that was it. But again, they wanted to invent laws to appear righteous. So in Matthew 23, 23 and Luke 11, 42, I think it is, it says that they tithe of mint and anise and cumin. Those are tiny little spices. They tithe the tiny little seeds and leaves of the spices as a way to demonstrate their virtue, their holiness, their law keeping.
They went beyond the law. A Pharisaic prayer dating from about the time of Jesus goes like this, I thank Thee, Jehovah my God, that Thou hast assigned my lot with those who sit in the house of learning and not with those who sit in the street corners. I rise early and they rise early. I rise early to study the words of the Torah and they rise early to attend to things of no importance. I weary myself and they weary themselves. I weary myself and gain thereby while they weary themselves without gaining anything. I run and they run.
I run toward the life of the age to come and they run toward the pit of destruction. That was self-righteousness in Pharisaic mind. So Jesus is telling this parable to those kinds of people who think they can be good enough to please God, satisfy God, achieve righteousness, be acceptable into His kingdom and into His heaven by being moral and religious. It's John MacArthur, pastor, author, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. His current study here on Grace To You is answering the critical question, who can be right with God? Well, friend, if I could ask a favor, if something John said today encouraged you, would you let us know?
It's always helpful to hear about how you've benefited spiritually from John's verse by verse teaching. So when you have a free moment, write a note and send it our way. You can mail your letter to Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California 91412. You can also email your note to letters at gty.org. One more time, that's letters at gty.org.
And thank you for your feedback. Thanks for remembering to mention the call letters of this radio station anytime you get in touch. And I encourage you to visit our website, gty.org, where you can take advantage of the thousands of free Bible study tools you'll find there. You can watch video from John's conference appearances. You can download more than 3,600 of John's sermons free of charge in MP3 and transcript format and follow along with a reading plan for the MacArthur Daily Bible. All of these are great tools for helping you build consistent study habits in 2025. And all of those things and much more are available free of charge at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff, I'm Phil Johnson with a question. While being able to meet your own needs is a good trait to cultivate, how might self-reliance be a dangerous and even deadly pursuit? Consider that when we return with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Tomorrow's Grace To You.
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