175 - Woe. Woe. Woe. Part one

You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?

Is there anything here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages.

Welcome to More Than Ink. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild. You've heard that said about Jesus.

I have. It's kind of a Sunday school saying, but today we're going to see as the days are getting short, Jesus goes on the offensive. And he'll do that with the religious leaders, the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

And what is he going to say to them? Find out today on More Than Ink. Hey, you've joined us. I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy.

And this is More Than Ink. And what we do is we read the Bible together, but we do more than just read the Bible, don't we? I mean. Well, we talk about it. We ask questions. We ask questions of it.

I was going to say that's one of the most important skills you can have as a Bible student is how to ask questions of the text and how to scratch your head about what you're reading. You don't just read it and go, well, that's what it says. You just say, well, no, wait a second. No, how do we engage with it? Yeah, you engage with it. So that's what we do. And we find that we engage with the text better when we do it with somebody else. So we do it with one another and hopefully you can do this with other people. I remember doing this, gosh, when I was in high school, I was over at Andy's house and Jeff was there and we were talking about the beatitudes from the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount and then Andy had to go off to work and then we stayed at Andy's house and Jeff and I talked about the beatitudes for the rest of the afternoon. Well, you talked about those guys. I remember you and I doing this in high school. Yeah, we did. Yeah. So anyway, so we're engaging with the text.

So we're glad you're with us so you can engage in the text with us. Where we are right now, we're in chapter 23 of Matthew. We are literally a day or so away from the crucifixion and during this very, very busy Passover week in Jerusalem and Jesus is having a lot of public discourses, not only teaching the crowds but also engaging with his spiritual enemies which are the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the guys who are really threatened by Jesus' rising popularity. And so they've been trying to take him out. Last time we were here, they tried to take him out with another good trick question and instead he asked them a question, shut him down. So today, he's going to go on the offensive with the Pharisees, with the religious leaders who have been tasked with caring for God's people, Israel, and they're doing a very poor job at it. So Jesus decides to, well, to take them to task publicly. Well, yeah, because he's given them every opportunity and brought, he's listened to their questions and he has engaged them and tried to pull it into a deeper conversation.

More substantive topics. Always about God and the heart of man rather than their trivial questions. So here, he's turning the tables around.

He says, no, I've got something to say to you. But he says it to the crowds and to his disciples. Yeah, he says it to the crowds and the disciples.

This is not an interchange with the Pharisees but you know what? They're there. They're listening.

They're there. So that's what Jesus is going to do today. Very famous section in Matthew called The Woes, The Seven Woes. And so let's see what Jesus thinks about the religious leaders during this week. In Matthew chapter 23.

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, the scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat. So do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens hard to bear and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others.

For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. But you are not to be called rabbi for you have one teacher and you are all brothers and call no man your father on earth for you have one father who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Whoa, that's a mouthful. Well that's his introduction to the woes. However that last statement you just said kind of summarizes what he's saying. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

And clearly that's the problem. That's the heart of the problem with these religious leaders is they are using their position to exalt themselves and now Jesus is going to start the humbling process right here. Well okay but he says they have placed themselves or sit on Moses' seat which they have put themselves in the place of experts in terms of understanding the scripture. So he says whatever they tell you about the scripture listen to that but not what they do. So to the degree to which they are actually reading the Bible to you.

Because that's actually what scribes did. That's right. So listen to what they say there. That's what it says when they are on Moses' seat they are actually speaking for Moses what Moses writes. So you know take that serious.

That's a big deal. When he reads the Ten Commandments take that serious right. But he says but don't look at the works they do and copy that because that's deeply flawed. And how is it deeply flawed? Well they don't practice what they preach.

They don't practice what they preach. Yeah. And then because the Pharisees in particular had this tradition of kind of over writing and over burdening the biblical text right. They would take the text and they would add all this stuff to it in order to make it finely tuned detailed obedience right.

Right. That was the product of a lot of their debates among one another about what it means and it would just get big and fat. So that's what Jesus is talking about. They tie up these heavy burdens and lay them on people's shoulders but they are not willing to move so much a finger to help you do it. Which is a way of saying this is what you should do but I'm not doing it and I'm not going to help you do it.

But this is what you got to do. Like for instance there was a very restrictive Sabbath law that they kind of logically deduced from the Sabbath laws and it was very restrictive on their lifestyles or had something to do that kept them from doing something good like saving an animal that's trapped in a well or someone who's hurt or something like that. They would say well you know you can't do that but that doesn't apply to us. That doesn't apply to you. It's a burden to you but it's not a burden to us. So what he's saying is they place these burdens, these heavy burdens that is things that are impossible to do, to really do.

And they put that on you but they don't seem like they're willing to help you at all figure out how to do it. Which you know occurs to me as the opposite of what Jesus said about his burden. Jesus says his burden is light. Their burden is heavy.

And in this heaviness it tends to give you this impression that you're just a total failure. But the Pharisees they're on top of things because they're telling you what you're supposed to do. So Jesus says they do all their deeds to be seen by others.

Their total motivation is an external one, an appearance one. The comment about their phylacteries broad and their fringes long is how they dress. The phylacteries were those little boxes that you wore on the hand or on the forehead that actually contained scripture and was there as a reminder to them to obey, to love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul and mind. And their fringes long, those tassels were from Deuteronomy they were to be reminders of prayer and who they were. So these have connections to Deuteronomy and Numbers.

These have connections. But they're doing them in order to be seen. That's what Jesus says in order to be seen by others.

And recognized. They have really no personal import about what it's all about. In fact when you read the passage like in Deuteronomy it says bind them as a sign on your hand and be as frontlets between your eyes. He's talking very figuratively about the fact that God's word needs to inhabit the work of your hands and your thoughts. I mean it's really clear. But they're putting them in these physical things and tying them on the outside hoping that people see how serious they are about this.

And the bigger they are the more serious they are. Right, but are they actually going for the intent of that comment? Are they actually going towards taking God's word and incorporating it into the work of your hands and the thoughts of your mind? No, they're not. They're just doing what they're doing to be seen.

Well they would say they were. Right, right, yeah. But they loved the recognition of being seen as experts and seen as the ones who were the authority and the teaching. But Jesus says don't be called Rabbi by others.

Don't be recognized as a teacher or an expert. You have one teacher and you're all brothers. And you're all brothers, right, right. So he's just really taking down their authority, their love of the recognition of being in spiritual authority. The love of the recognition, the admiration that they get, the kind of lifted up, I don't know, respect they get from it. That's the whole thing that they get. In fact Jesus warned us about this much earlier in the Sermon on the Mount. Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them for then they will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. That's from Matthew 6. Well if that's what you're after then that's what you get. That's all you get is the admiration of people.

And the other benefits don't come. And don't call any man your Father on earth. These were terms that they used with the Rabbis.

You have one Father who is in heaven. And don't be called instructors. You're the smart teacher, oh Rabbi, Mr. Pharisee. For you really have one instructor, the Christ, the Messiah.

So that's fascinating. He's really described a really interesting thing here in the structure of Israel and even in the present day church. You have the one, Jesus, who's both our Rabbi, our teacher, our Father, our instructor, and then you've got all the rest of us. Everyone else is on an even playing field from that sense.

There really is no distinction in there. This is one of those passages along with a couple others that I look at and say, I think this is probably the right ordering of how a collection of believers and followers of Jesus should be. None of them are putting themselves above others. Well Jesus goes on to say here and what he has said before, whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled.

Yeah, yeah. So we have Jesus the Messiah and then there's the rest of us. And he's all. But by implication what he's saying is that these Pharisees go around eager to be called Rabbi and the respect and admiration that comes with that. Eager to be called Fathers with the respect that comes with that.

Eager to be called instructors and teachers because of the respect that comes with that. That's what they're aiming for is that admiration, that respect. And that's all they're trying to get. And the only way you can get that is if you get above other people, if you exalt yourself. And Jesus says, nope, it's not supposed to be the way it's supposed to be.

That's not how it goes. So now he's going to get a whole lot more pointed. Woe does he ever. Because he's just said, you know, don't be like them.

They don't practice what they preach. And now he's going to say, woe to them. Right? Well we don't use the word woe very much.

Only with horses. A woe is a deep sorrow mixed with regret because you've been wrong. Right. So this is the first of six or seven, actually seven woes.

But we're only going to talk about three of them. Let's start reading. And I might mention since you brought that up, there's a really famous section in Isaiah five.

Yes. Which is known the woes in Isaiah. It's very closely parallel.

And if you go take a look at that, I'd encourage you to go look at it. Just go to chapter five of Isaiah and start reading and see how much it looks like this section in here. Well and actually we talked about Isaiah five just last week, I think about that parable that begins with the vineyard.

That's right. And the vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel. And then it goes on to talk about the shepherds of the house of Israel. So here we have another parallel thing happening.

So let's do some woes. Okay, verse 13. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. Hypocrites, whoa.

For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces, for you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Stop there. Whoa.

Whoa. That's a pretty powerful indictment. Well, if he's looking in their face and say, you are hypocrites. You shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. You shut the door. You slam the door shut. And on top of that, you're not even entering yourself and you won't allow those who would enter to get in.

Wow. He says, you're in the way of everything. Well, because they're totally misrepresenting the kingdom by making it so hard to get in, right?

And redirecting everyone's attention. How do you get into the kingdom? Yeah, exactly. The real way in is repent and believe, not keep the law and keep it harder and better. Yeah.

And yet these guys' jobs, their job is to point people to the kingdom of heaven and to be priests in a sense, go between them in order to get people there. And he's saying, you guys are the problem. You're not the solution. You're the problem. Woe to you. Whoa.

And you're not entering yourself, by the way, he says. Oh my gosh. So he's going to amplify that.

The second one is related. Verse 15, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte. And when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. Oh my gosh. Wow. What is he talking about?

Wow. Well, he's talking about their zeal. They're zealous, so zealous to make proselytes, to get people into the religion, to get people into the kingdom of heaven, which is their job. I mean, they'll travel across sea and land just to make a single proselyte. But what you do is you actually do the opposite. You don't make them a proselyte. You make them twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

Well, because they make it so cumbersome and so hard to be a child of the kingdom that they make it a living hell. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's a place of constant torment because you're always on pins and needles about whether I'm obeying the law properly.

Yeah, that's exactly right. It's a horrible condemning, burdensome kind of system. And what we call it in the modern day is a works of righteousness. You have to do enough works to get there. And I dare say maybe the majority or all of the false religions in the world are all based on this.

They're based on the fact that if you work hard and do all the right things, what are the right things? Well, find an expert. That's what these guys would want to put themselves in. If you do all the right things and maybe you might get there, you just got to do enough of them. And the expert will delight in telling you how difficult it is and how much work you have to do. And they themselves are probably not doing it, but they'll lay that on you. But what's interesting is in this first woe, he says, you're stopping people from getting in. The second woe, he says, you're not only stopping them, you're making them even worse.

You're making them even worse, a child of hell, twice as much. And you're totally misrepresenting to them what the kingdom is, right? The true kingdom is love, joy, and peace in the Holy Spirit, as Paul said later. And Jesus said, it's freedom from condemnation.

I don't condemn you. Right, right. And the whole treatise in Romans, a condensed version in Galatians, is all about the fact that even all the way back to Abraham, it wasn't what you could accomplish, the worst you could do. It was all about faith, always has been faith, which results in your trust in God. And that's the key to the kingdom of heaven, is trust in God. And that kind of leads us into the next oath.

Right, right. Because in verse 16, he says, woe to you blind guides who say, if anyone swears by the temple, it's nothing. But if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he's bound by oath, right? They're going to begin talking now about oaths. Oaths, right. But it's not about your oath keeping, your promises you make to God. It's about your faith in what God has done for you.

Yeah. Well, and he's talking about how illogical even this swearing by the gold of the temple is. Because then he says, 17, you blind fools, which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? I mean, you've got it totally upside down. You're focused on the thing instead of what it represents.

Yeah, you've got it. So he calls them blind guides in 16 and blind fools in 17. And because they are actually, they're selling this idea to people and people are buying this, this the blind leading the blind is what it is. You've got it totally wrong. And you know, Jesus said in another place, that the blind who leads the blind, they both fall into a pit.

Don't pay attention to either one. That's right. Yeah, that's what's going on. And he goes on with his oath taking in 18. And you say, well, if anyone swears by the altar, it's nothing. That altar that they burn the sacrifice, it's nothing. This is what the Pharisees say. But if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, well, he's bound by his oath. You blind men again. You blindies.

Which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred. So they don't even understand the relationship between these things. And they're putting their hopes in these oaths anyway, which is really kind of silly.

But even on top of that, they've got them founded on the wrong parts of the imagery even. That's how blind they are. And he's called them blind guides, blind fools, blind men. Blind, blind, blind.

You just can't even see the reality behind these things that you're talking about. Verse 20, so whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. Because it's the sacrifice on the altar that is the holy thing. And whoever swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it. Ah, that's what makes the temple a big deal.

Temple is such a big deal. It's the God who dwells there. And verse 22, and whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. So it's like they had completely backed the presence of God out of the equation and focused completely on the external expression.

All the external things that express it. And the temple isn't really sacred to any more of the degree than that's the place where God results. It's the presence of God that makes it a holy place.

It's the presence of God, right. And he brings up the altar too. The altar, it's the sacrifices.

Really the big deal here because the sacrifices, we're talking about sin. So when you start looking at all these things they actually end up connecting to your relationship with God. We talked a little while ago about loving God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. A lot of what he's talking about even here in the temple and the sacrifices, even when you swear by the heavens, we're talking about the place that God has made. We're talking about relationship with God. And you swear by the things that are around you, but are you really looking more critically at your relationship with God or at the things you swear by? So that's the bait and switch that we often see in false religions. And particularly where we live is this emphasis on all the external things, the trappings. And that's what you have to focus on instead of the presence of the one that those things are intended to speak to you about.

Right, right. And it makes me think, even Paul himself when he was doing his presentation in Athens at the Areopagus, he says that God made us so that we'll, he uses the word grope, look around in the dark to find him. Even though he's not far from any of this, he's near. And so you look at that and say, so then actually my relationship with God and religion at its core in terms of God is about a relationship with him and an intimate and near thing and has nothing to do with those trappings, has nothing to do with all those big buildings and all that stuff going on. It's something much more relational, much more intimate than we surmise when we look at things like the temple and stuff like that. Well, and it has nothing to do with my oaths or my sacrifice or where I am. Remember Jesus in that conversation with the woman at the well, he says, the time's coming when you're not going to worship on this mountain or any mountain, God is seeking worshipers who will worship in spirit and truth. Those things are not attached to a place, a building, a specific altar. Right, right.

And yet here this woe he's bringing against the Pharisees is the fact that instead of focusing people on their intimate relationship with the God who is near, what they're doing is they're pointing around on the temple area and saying, look at that building over there, look at the altar over there, look at the gold that's on those things. You need to connect your religious life to all these things. Right. These are the hurdles you've got to get over.

Right. And you've got to make your covenants to God based on these things and oh, I swear by the gold on the temple. It's like they're completely misdirecting people away from the core of what God intends in order to have people's hearts changed by coming in a near relationship with him. They're completely putting all this stuff in between.

And that happens today as well. You know, you talk about temples and different kind of religious systems and you've got to go ring the bells and you've got to go do all this kind of stuff. And it's not that complicated. But the people who are in charge of these religions push these things because they've got those things. They've got them.

And so they say you need to use our things. That's how you get there. And yet what God has been saying from the very beginning, just as simply as Abraham is standing out under the stars in Genesis 15, he believed and it was counted to him as righteousness. That's as simple as it gets. The gospel is extraordinarily simple.

And yet these guys are shoving all this stuff in between. And the way in to the kingdom is simply repent and believe. Turn from self and to God and believe in the one whom he sent as Jesus said. I mean, that's how Jesus opened his ministry right after John the Baptist was in prison and Jesus started his ministry. And he says the same thing John the Baptist says, repent and believe. So you know, it's that that the religious authorities were misdirecting the people about how do you get into the kingdom.

Yep, yep, yep. And it really is too bad because in Abraham, these Pharisees and the Sadducees, in Abraham they have such a good example of what the core religious position that God has put man in which is, it's just between you and me. It's the belief. It's repentance and what your sins are all about. It's coming to me in trust.

It's very simple. I mean, you look at Abraham and these guys could have been going around talking about Abraham and yet they're talking about the temple buildings and they're talking about the gold on them and all this other stuff that's just, it's just so worthless in so many ways. Okay, but it's probably worth remembering that the temple was built according to God's instruction.

God is the one that gave it. God is the one that instituted the sacrificial system. That was all God's idea, but all as a pointer to the reality that now the fulfillment of all that reality was standing on the very pavement in that temple telling them the truth. Yeah, and I'm not saying this stuff was wrong to be there, but I mean, imagine they could say to people, you know, have you noticed, have you noticed that as you, as you come closer to the presence of God, who's in the Holy of Holies, as you come closer, you have to deal with your sin. You have to deal with the sacrifice for your sin because you come past this altar right here. I mean, they could, they could, like we did when we were in Exodus, you can make all these conclusions about the heart of the, of the real relationship with God as they're pictured there.

If you will, or you can just stop your thinking process at the external execution of the thing. Right. And that's, that's the sadness here because Jesus says that's what you're doing. You're pointing at the stuff in between and you're not pointing at the gigantic significance of what you're seeing. And it destines you for, whoa, there is coming great regret, great condemnation, great sorrow for you.

Yeah. And the Pharisees are going to look back and they're going to say, you know, we shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. We shut the kingdom of heaven. I mean, we, we focused on the wrong thing. We didn't focus on the God who is near and the problem with our sins and the need for a living sacrifice on our behalf. And the one he sent to be the sacrifice. Exactly.

We missed up and we did not, we did not open the door to the kingdom because we focused on these wrong things. Wow. It's, I mean, that's why it's a whoa.

It's like, Oh my gosh, wow. Well, it's going to get thicker in the next, next little passage. Yeah, we're almost out of time, but we're going to come to the second part of the woes. And next time you already mentioned this about the fact that Pharisees were just extraordinarily good at, at doing the detailed part of the law, but what he's going to get at is in your, in your focus on the detail of the law, you're going to miss the most important things in the law. And what we call it today is you missed the forest for the trees.

And so Jesus is going to take them to task about that and about how they took that detailed burden and put it on people. So anyway, I'm Jim and I'm Dorothy and you're listening to More Than Ink and we're listening to Jesus as he teaches about the kingdom of heaven and he teaches about the blind guides, unfortunately. See more next time on More Than Ink. There are many more episodes of this broadcast to be found at our website, morethanink.org. And while you're there, take a moment to drop us a note. Remember, the Bible is God's love letter to you. Pick it up and read it for yourself and you will discover that the words printed there are indeed more than ink. I wouldn't repeat that phrase.

I would neither. This has been a production of Main Street Church of rhythm city.