If you've been prone to think of Jesus as a meek and mild personality, today's study will shatter that stereotype.
He was anything but. Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll is teaching from Matthew Chapter 23. This passage contains a blistering attack by Jesus against the hypocritical behavior of religious leaders. He regarded their pompous behavior as not only despicable, but damaging to anyone who tried to abide by their impossible standards. Greatfully, Jesus doesn't call us into a life of perfection, but rather a life of humility. Let's begin by reading the passage together.
As we learned last week, this chapter is clearly a severe and a strong worded body of information. This is the final sermon Jesus would preach to the general public before he would draw back and minister in the shadows, if you will, to his disciples and to individuals before he would be taken under arrest and ultimately nailed to a cross. So these are words that are set aside for those who have over the years taken advantage of others through their demanding way of life and their legalism. And their requirements to maintain a religious approach to life that they themselves were poor models of.
So they were hypocrites. The sections I'm going to read, since we don't want to take the time for all of these 39 verses of Matthew 23, I want to read only those seven woes and then when we come to the end where he cries out to the city of Jerusalem in a wail kind of lament over the city. If you had your Bible open to Matthew 23 verses 13 through 39. Verse 13. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you cross land and sea to make one convert and then you turn that person into twice the child of hell you yourselves are. Blind guides, woe to you, for you say that it means nothing to swear by God's temple but that it is binding to swear by the gold in the temple.
Blind fools. What is more important, the gold or the temple that makes the gold sacred? Now verse 23, the fourth woe. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens but you ignore the more important aspects of the law, justice, mercy, and faith. Verse 25, the fifth woe. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish but inside you are filthy, full of greed and self-indulgence.
27. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people's bones and all sorts of impurity. Then the final woe is in verse 29. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you build tombs for the prophets your ancestors killed and you decorate the monuments of the godly people your ancestors destroyed. Then you say, if we had lived in the days of our ancestors we would never have joined them in killing the prophets but in saying that you testify against yourselves that you are indeed descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Finally, verse 37. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones God's messengers, how often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings. But you wouldn't let me and now look, your house is abandoned and desolate but I'll tell you this, you will never see me again until you say blessings on the one who comes in the name of the Lord. You're listening to Insight for Living.
To study the book of Matthew with Chuck Swindoll, be sure to download his Searching the Scriptures studies by going to insightworld.org slash studies. And now the message from Chuck titled Seven Woes and a Whale. A man in New York had a wife who had a cat. Perhaps I should say the cat had her. She stroked it and she combed its fur and she fed it expensive food and she pampered it day and evening and the problem was the man in her life detested that cat. He was allergic to cat hair. He resented the money she spent feeding that thing. He did not enjoy the smell of the litter box. And he could even get a good night's sleep because the cat kept jumping on and off the bed and on and off the bed.
One weekend she left to spend time with her friends and he saw it as his moment. He got the cat, put it in a bag, dropped in some rocks, tied it up, dropped it in the Hudson River, waved goodbye. His wife came home over that following weekend and, looking for the cat, couldn't find him and began to be sad about it. He said to her, sweetheart, I know how much the cat meant to you.
I'll tell you what, I will put an ad in the paper for $500. Anyone who finds the cat can bring it to us. I want you to know how much I care about your happiness. No cat showed up.
Her grief went deeper and he said to her that next Saturday, arms around her, honey, nothing means more to me than your happiness. I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to double the reward. I'm going to take out another ad for $1,000 for anyone who could find the cat and bring them to us. His friend that next week saw that ad and said to him at work, are you crazy? No cat is worth $1,000.
What are you thinking? And the man said, well, when you know what I know, you can afford to be generous. You know why I like that story? Not because I hate cats, though I do. I like the story.
We're going to get mail on that boy. I like the story because it reveals that being in the know can have a profound effect on your attitude and actions. What you know and others don't know puts you in a very distinct position. I have just described the reason Jesus' ministry was so effective. He knew what no one else knew. He was in the know.
He knew fully what was in the human heart that gave him strength and confidence when he confronted those whom no one else had the audacity to confront. You must understand that in that first century, there were very powerful people. In fact, if I were asked to describe the realms of authority, I would name four groups. First, there was the priesthood made up of priests, chief priests and the high priest. Second, there were the religious parties, the Sadducees, the Pharisees and the Herodians. Third, there were the scholars, the religious scholars. They would be the scribes. Fourth, and finally, there were the councils, the local synagogue councils, and then the ultimate supreme council, not unlike our Supreme Court, but called in that day the Sanhedrin. The general public lived under the thumb of those authorities. Those that influenced the people the most were the scribes, those who interpreted the Scriptures, and the Pharisees, those who guarded and kept the Scriptures. The problem is, even though they were in authority, their voice had a hollow ring to it because they were eaten up with hypocrisy.
But who would tell someone in authority that that was true unless they could prove it and knew it? Only one, and that's what Jesus does when he comes to this last major message of his public life, before he goes into quasi hiding and ministers to his disciples regarding future things, ultimately to be taken under arrest and finally pushed through six illegal trials and nailed to a cross. But before we get there, appearing in this chapter, the 23rd of Matthew, not one, not two, not four, not five, but seven specific repeated woes. Woe to you.
Woe to you. We need to know what the word means. It's difficult to translate the Greek word translated woe. It's a mixture of two things. First, wrath and second, sorrow. There is a righteous anger here, writes one man, but it's the anger from a heart of love broken by the stubborn blindness of men. There is not only an air of savage denunciation, there was also an atmosphere of poignant tragedy, writes William Barkley. You know what I would liken it to? I would liken it to a faithful, loving wife who for a period of 30 to 35 years has been everything a wife could be to her husband, while her husband has lived secret affairs from one woman to another to another, all the while looking like a faithful husband. But in fact, during these 35 years of their marriage, he has been an adulterer. When she discovers it finally and the facts are laid in front of her, her words to him would be like this word, woe to you.
But they would come out in how could you? Hear the anger? Hear the anguish? Hear the disappointment and the sorrow?
How could you do that year after year after year as our children were growing up in this home thinking you were one kind of person and now I and they will soon realize you were not that person at all. Woe, woe to you. And to make matters even worse, hypocrite. That word also needs to be understood.
We use it, but probably you've never studied the etymology of the word, hippocrates. It means in Greek the one who wears a mask and plays a part on the stage. You've seen those masks smiling for the comedy lines and frowning for the tragedy lines. The one behind the mask was called a hippocrates, a hypocrite. Interestingly, as years passed, the word left the stage and moved into the street and it came to be used for anyone who played a part that didn't represent the truth. In other words, there was an external show, but in fact, they were pretenders. Outwardly, they looked one way, but inwardly they were another.
Now to our part, now to our passage. The scribes and Pharisees are acting apart, but no one has the courage or the authority to confront them until now. Jesus being God has seen right through them, and if there's anything a hypocrite doesn't want to happen is that someone see through them and call it out. It's exactly what Jesus is doing. He's telling them that your outward observances, nothing to them. The wearing of these elaborate looking garments, nothing to it.
The keeping of meticulous, tedious rules, nothing to it. The legalistic demands that you make of others, you have no right because you yourself are living a lie. Which is why he repeats again and again, hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite, hopefully by the repetition it will sink in. Because the truth is, what was deep within them, get this, was bitterness, envy, hatred, pride, arrogance, and even murder. They are the ones who conspire with Judas so that they would be able to corner Jesus at a vulnerable place like the Garden of Gethsemane, take him under arrest, send him to a Roman court, where ultimately, to begin with, Jewish court, and then the Roman as he stood before Pilate, and ultimately nailed to a cross, which is the Roman method of capital punishment since the Jews were not allowed to take a life. Only the Romans. But all of this was conspired by these who looked so religious. I'm going to use a word for them that you may have never heard used for any religious person. They were members of the religious mafia. The Godfather was the high priest, and the one who led them in their way were those priests and Pharisees and scribes that were determined to have their way as they nailed Jesus to a cross. This is on the edge of all of that happening. Jesus decides now's the time.
So he would, in today's terms, he would unload the truck, which is exactly what we find in the verses of Matthew 23. Let's work our way through them, and there's no reason to go over every single word, because you get the picture, but let me give you categories that he rebukes them for. The first woe is in verse 13. You see it for yourself.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. Why? See the word for, f-o-r? It's the word for because.
It's an explanatory connective. I pronounce woe on you because you shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. You won't even go in yourselves, and you don't let others go in either. Christ came offering himself as the gift of eternal life, and these people kept them away from him. Not only did they not go in, they were busy keeping others out, so they are guilty of exclusion. The first woe is a woe as he charges them with exclusion.
The second is a charge of subversion. See the following 15th verse. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. I mean your missionaries, your proselytes, you cross land and sea to gain those that will join up with you. See how he puts it? You make one convert, and then you turn that person into a person or child of hell, just as you yourselves are. And he rebukes them for their zeal without knowledge.
You're actively engaged, but engaged in the wrong activity. The third woe is in verse 16, and now he comes to one of his favorite analogies, blind guides. Think about the analogy for a moment. If there's one thing a guide needs is good eyesight, good perception, the ability to know the direction that the group ought to be going. But if they are blind, then those who follow follow in a blind manner, which is the tragedy of it all. You blind guides.
Woe to you. You say it means nothing to swear by God's temple, but that it is binding to swear by the gold in the temple, blind fools. Which is more important, the gold in the temple? Which is more binding, the gold or the temple that makes the gold sacred? You say that to swear by the altar is not binding, but to swear by the gifts on the altar is binding. How blind.
For which is more important, the gift on the altar or the altar that makes the gift sacred? And he probes deeper so that they will realize that they are majoring in the minors in this, or they are twisting the truth. You are taking what is meant to be truth and you are twisting it to fit your own system of thinking.
Now, the fourth is when they major in the minors. That begins here at verse 23. What sorrow awaits you? Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. You're careful to tithe even the tiniest, the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law. You overlook justice and goodness and faithfulness while you're busy about the intricacies of every nitpicking tithe.
You should tithe, yes, but, he adds, do not neglect the more important things. And he uses the words again, blind guides. And now look at this one. You strain your water or your wine or your milk or whatever may be the beverage you're going to drink. You stretch the muslim over the container and you pour the liquid onto that so that you can strain out the nat, which by the way was considered unclean to the Jew. The same time you are getting ready to swallow a camel. Now, there's supposed to be a little humor in that for sure. You're fussing around with gnats, which are unclean, and you overlook the fact that what you're spending your time on is the swallowing of camels. How ludicrous and examples of majoring in the minors.
Jesus withheld nothing in his severe rebuke of the religious Pharisees. And in fact, there's more. We're only midway through this message from Chuck Swindoll titled, Seven Woes and a Whale, W-A-I-L. And to learn more about this ministry, please visit us online at insightworld.org. Well, you've likely noticed there's an overarching theme rising out of this study in Matthew's Gospel. And it's consistent with our core mission at Insight for Living. I'm referring to the responsibility that falls to every follower of Jesus to study the Bible.
By God's design, there's no rabbi, no teacher, no religious authority that stands between us and the person of Jesus Christ. God has entrusted us with his inspired word, the Bible, and it's our privilege to dig into the scriptures on our own. Well, to that end, Insight for Living provides a variety of helpful resources to guide your personal study of the Bible. And today, I'm pleased to point out a devotional book from Chuck. It's titled, God's Word for You. The subtitle gives you a taste of what this book is all about, an invitation to find the nourishment your soul needs. You can purchase a copy by going to insight.org slash offer, or call us.
If you're listening in the U.S., dial 1-800-772-8888. As you're led to give a donation to Insight for Living, we'd like to assure you that your investment truly makes a difference. For instance, I just saw a glowing note from a local police officer that said, Your devotional on Habakkuk became my cry during the terrible months of rioting in 2020.
I'm thankful for it and can attest to God's grace. Well, as you sense God prompting you to support Insight for Living Ministries, we invite you to give whatever amount suits you. Every gift, large or small, truly makes a difference in those who rely on this program. Once again, if you're listening in the U.S., dial 1-800-772-8888. To give a donation online, go to insight.org.
I'm Dave Spiker. Chuck Swindoll describes what he calls seven woes and a wail tomorrow on Insight for Living. The preceding message, Seven Woes and a Wail, was copyrighted in 2017 and 2021, and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2021 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-08-13 19:08:31 / 2023-08-13 19:16:40 / 8