Woes to Hypocrites

Can you imagine when it's time to wash the dishes, that you had a glass that you had used for something to drink, and you only cleaned the outside of the glass? Didn't clean the inside of the glass?

The backside of the plate, but not the part of the plate where all of the scraps and the dirt was adhering to the surface? Nobody would do that in their right mind. But Jesus said, this is what you're doing to the Pharisees. We read in Luke chapter 11 that Jesus rebuked the Pharisees. It was a bold and pointed rebuke.

He knew exactly what they were doing, and He made it clear they had to change. Do you ever find yourself shaking your head in disgust at the Pharisees? How could they be so foolish? Today on the Lord's Day edition of Renewing Your Mind, R.C. Sproul preaches from the Gospel of Luke and cautions us not to think of ourselves more highly than we should. We continue now with our study of the Gospel according to St. Luke.

We're in the 11th chapter. I'll be reading verses 37 through 53. The outside of the cup and dish clean, but your inward part is full of greed and wickedness, foolish ones.

Did not he who make the outside make the inside also? But rather give alms of such things as you have, and that indeed all things are clean to you. But woe to you Pharisees, for you tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, but pass by justice.

And the love of God, these you ought to have done without leaving the others undone. Woe to you Pharisees, for you love the best seats in the synagogues and the greetings in the marketplaces. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you're like graves that are not seen, and the men who walk over them are not aware of them.

By saying these things, you reproach us also. And he said, Woe to you also, lawyers, for you load men with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe to you, for you build the tombs of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. In fact, you bear witness that you approve the deeds of your fathers, for they indeed killed them, and you build their tombs. Therefore, the wisdom of God also said, I will send them to the prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute, that the blood of the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation. From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the temple, yes, I say to you, it shall be required of this generation. Woe to you, lawyers, for you've taken away the key of knowledge.

You didn't enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in, you entered. And as he said these things to them, the scribes and Pharisees began to assail him vehemently, and to cross-examine him about many things, lying in wait for him, and seeking to catch him in something he might say, that they might accuse him. Again, we've heard from Jesus this morning.

This is his teaching. This was his admonishment to the religious leaders of his day. In no time during his earthly ministry do we hear our Lord speak with such vehemence against a particular sin as he does in this occasion. And so we must ask this morning that the Holy Spirit will give us ears to hear what our Lord said in this text.

Let's pray. We know that you have every right to be displeased with us as we fail again and again to honor you and to keep your commandments. But we pray this morning that you will give us ears like the Pharisees didn't have, by the power and the mercy of your Holy Spirit we ask.

Amen. We encounter a significant amount of resistance from people, and we listen to various objections to the proclamation of the gospel again and again. And he said, well, we've kept notes over the years and collated the objections that we hear with regularity. And he said, of all of the objections that people raise to the gospel, we have listed the top 10 in terms of numerical frequency.

I said yes, and he said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to write a book answering these 10 objections. And so I did with the title, original title, Objections Answered.

But the point is this. Of those top 10 objections that people raise to the gospel, included was this one. The church is full of hypocrites.

Have you ever heard that objection? The church is full of hypocrites. Jim Kennedy used to say when he would hear that complaint that the church is full of hypocrites, he would say, there's always room for one more. And then he said, if you find a church that is perfect, whatever you do, don't join it.

You'll ruin it. And so he was trying to resist that argument in a kind of half-hearted comical way. But bottom line, the charge that the church is full of hypocrites, I believe, is slander against the church. I simply don't think it's true that the church is full of hypocrites. There may be hypocrites in the church. I don't doubt that. But that the church is filled with them?

I don't think so. So then I ask the question, why is it people make this charge over and over and over again? I think part of it is if they don't understand what hypocrisy is. If you ask them why you think the church is full of hypocrites, they say, well, I know Mr. So-and-so, and I know he never misses church on Sunday morning. In fact, he's an elder at the church down the street, but I see him during the week, and I see him do A, B, and C. I said, in other words, you see him sin. Now, if this man claimed that he was not a sinner, and then you saw him sin, he would indeed be guilty of hypocrisy. But hypocrisy is only one sin among many. In fact, for a Christian to sin does not make that person a hypocrite.

Why not? Well, the only organization I know of on the planet that requires that you be a sinner to join it is the Christian church. Now, if the complaint was this, the church is full of sinners, that would be an accurate evaluation. But again, hypocrisy is a particular sin. It's the sin of fraud by which a person claims to be something that he isn't. If I claim to be sinless and then sin, I'm guilty of hypocrisy.

If I say I don't do X, Y, Z, and in fact I do do X, Y, Z, that would be hypocrisy, because a hypocrite is a person who lives a life that is a sham. In antiquity, the hypocrite came from the idea of the theater, where a hypocrite was a person who was a play actor. They pretended to be something that they were not. They put on a facade that an outward appearance of being something that they in fact were not. You remember the old Western movies where the cowboy would ride into town and there'd be a general store and a saloon and you'd see all these buildings. Then you find out at the back lot at Hollywood that these were just front structures, sometimes made of cardboard, and that there was nothing inside. Outwardly, they appeared to be true buildings, but inside there was nothing. That's what Jesus is dealing with in this text that we're reading today.

It begins with this contextual introduction. A certain Pharisee asked him to dine with him. This is the beginning of the hypocrisy, because it's obvious from the rest of the text that this Pharisee did not ask Jesus over for dinner as an act of graciousness or of kindness. He wasn't interested in giving Jesus a nice meal. He was trying to have an occasion where he could trap Jesus in one way or another.

We see it right away. A certain Pharisee asked him to dine and so he went in and sat down to eat. Jesus said, sure, I'll have dinner with you.

He comes in, sits down. When the Pharisee saw it, he was shocked. What shocked him? That Jesus didn't first wash his hands before going to the table. Why was that so shocking to the Pharisee? Because according to the Pharisees and the laws of the rabbis, it was a requirement not of hygiene, not of cleanliness, not for health reasons, but for religious ceremonial purposes that a person go through this liturgical rite of cleaning their hands. A law not required by God in sacred Scripture, but a tradition instituted and ruled over by the Pharisees.

In other words, it was a law added to the law of God, an act of legalism, and Jesus would have nothing of it. He didn't go in and say, alright, I'm not going to wash my hands. He didn't make a big deal of it.

He just simply omitted it and went in and sat down to eat. Now remember, no human being ever sat down for dinner with cleaner hands than Jesus Christ. The psalmist raised the question, who will ascend into the mountain of our God, he who has clean hands and a pure heart? Jesus' hands were clean and his heart was perfectly pure. In vivid contrast to him, the Pharisees were assiduous in making sure that their hands were clean, but their hearts were filthy. And that's the point Jesus is making here. He said, you Pharisees, make the outside of the cup and the dish clean.

But the inward part is full of greed and wickedness. Our house almost burned down this week. In the middle of the night, Vesta awakened me because she smelled acrid smoke of some sorts. I went into the kitchen and there was the dishwasher. It had shorted out and it overheated and the island was red hot and there was smoke and plastic burned.

It was awful. And I said, these dishwashers, they're ready to kill us. But I said, can you imagine when it's time to wash the dishes that you had a glass that you had used for something to drink and you only cleaned the outside of the glass? Didn't clean the inside of the glass, the backside of the plate, but not the part of the plate where all of the scraps and the dirt was adhering to the surface?

Nobody would do that in their right mind. But Jesus said, this is what you're doing to the Pharisees. You make the outside of the cup and the dish clean. But the inward part is full of greed and wickedness. Oh, foolish ones, did not He who made the outside make the inside as well? But give alms of such things as you have and then everything's clean to you.

You look good on the surface, but inside the filth remains. And now Jesus makes use of the oracular formula that I've mentioned before. When an oracle of doom is pronounced by a prophet of God, it is prefaced by the word woe. Anytime you see that word in sacred Scripture, woe, you need to sit up and take notice because this is the strongest verbal form of judgment and warning that God can give to people.

And so now after this little conversation about the inside and the outside of the plates and the cups, the conversation heats up. And now Jesus, in the prophetic tradition, pronounces a divine judgment on His host and the friends that are gathered for this dinner. Woe unto you, He says, Pharisees, because you tithe. He wasn't pronouncing a judgment on them for tithing. He said, but you tithe mint and cumin and all manner of herbs that you overlook the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and the love of God.

Oh, you're tithers. You not only give 10 percent of your produce and then your increase in your flocks and so on, but if you find a little piece of mint on the ground, you make sure that a tenth of that goes into the plate. These people who receive the judgment of God were scrupulous in their tithing. I wonder what He would say to those of us who don't. We're not even qualified to be Pharisees. You tithe these things with great scrupulous, but then you omit the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy was Matthew's version of it. What is He saying here?

What does He say? Anybody can tithe. That's easy. That's the small stuff. To be a follower of God, that's elementary.

That's foundational. To be a tither doesn't make you a super Christian or a super believer, but He said these things you ought to have done without leaving the other things undone. He's not saying to the Pharisees, don't tithe and do the others instead. He's saying, yes, tithe, but don't think that just because you tithe you've done that which is pleasing to God. There's so much more.

This is small stuff. The heavy stuff is justice and mercy and manifesting the love of God. Again, the oracle of judgment. Woe to you Pharisees. You love the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. Well, where were the best seats in the synagogue? People would come to the synagogue and the people who were the people of honor and the people of status. The visiting rabbi, for example, got to sit where Burke's sitting right up in front where Randall's sitting. That's the chief seat in the synagogue.

And they loved it. The Pharisees loved it when they were walking down the street and the people would recognize them for their religious austerity and greet them with greetings of honor. This is a problem usually reserved for the clergy as was the problem in the first century. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. You're like graves that are not seen, and the men who walk over them are not aware of them. Now again, in the ancient world, if you've ever been to Palestine, if you even go to the Mount of Olives, you see a cemetery there now, and all of the graves are whitewashed. And Matthew speaks of whitewashed sepulchres that are beautiful and pristine and clean on the outside, but inside filled with dead men's bones. Now, what Jesus is alluding to here is that on times of feast days when the pilgrims would come up from all of the different villages and come to Jerusalem for a feast, it was part of the custom to put fresh coats of whitewash on gravesites. Because all the graves weren't in cemeteries, but they could be found outside of the cemeteries, and you would be ceremonially unclean if you walked over somebody's grave. And so in order to help people not to become defiled by stepping on a grave, the owner of the grave or the family who owned the grave were required to paint the whitewash over them as an indication that this is a gravesite, don't walk here. And Jesus says, you're just like these graves, the ones that haven't been whitewashed, that nobody can see.

People come by you, and it's like walking over death, and even though they're not aware of them. At this point, one of the scribes couldn't take it anymore. The scribes were the lawyers.

They were the experts on the law of God in the Old Testament. One of the lawyers answered and said to him, teacher, by saying these things, you reproach us as well. Or to put it in another way of translating, by teacher, when you're saying these things, you're insulting us.

And they don't like to be insulted. And so Jesus said, oh, I'm so sorry I didn't mean to include you in this scathing denunciation. Now instead, he uses another woe, woe to you also, lawyers, for you load men with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves won't touch the burdens with one of your fingers. You put all kinds of legal requirements that God doesn't make on people, but you won't obey them yourselves.

Woe to you. You build the tombs of the prophets. And of course, right outside of the city wall of Jerusalem was the sculptured tomb of the ancient prophets of the Old Testament. And there's a monument there to the great works of the former prophets. And he said, you built these tombs to honor the prophets, the same prophets that your fathers murdered. And the implication is, you would have murdered them too.

In fact, what you're doing here this afternoon at this mealtime is setting plans to murder the supreme prophet, all the while getting all kinds of public recognition and good press for building these wonderful tombs. Therefore, the wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute, and that the blood of all the prophets which was shed from the foundation of the world may be required of this generation. Remember earlier he had said, this is a wicked and adulterous generation. He singled out that generation of all the generations in human history as the worst, not because inherently they were any more sinful than anybody else. But this generation received more light from God than any generation in antiquity. And the principle was this, to whom much is given, much is required. And this generation were eyewitnesses of the incarnate Son of God who came to His own, but His own received Him not.

Woe to you, lawyers, for you've taken away the key of knowledge. You didn't enter yourselves and those who were entering in you hindered. These were the theologians. These were the clergy of the day. And instead of opening the doors to the kingdom of God, they were closing them. I had a conversation with somebody just recently and said, you know, one of the biggest problems we have in the church today is the unbelief of the clergy. And this person looked at me like I was from another planet. They said, you're kidding, aren't you?

And I said, no. In the 19th century, we had this massive movement called liberal theology, which denied all the miracles of Jesus, denied the virgin birth of Jesus, denied the atoning death of Jesus, denied the resurrection of Jesus. And these theologians won the day in Europe. That's one of the reasons why the church is almost nonexistent in Europe today and had a massive influence in American theology, particularly in the mainline churches. A Swiss theologian by the name of Emil Bruner wrote a magnificent work of Christology entitled Das Meikler, that is, The Mediator, and in that book, he made this observation. He said the problem with liberalism, liberal theology, is that in bottom, it is simply unbelief, and those who embrace it are unbelievers. And we have whole generations of clergy and seminaries that teach that. I heard a man rebuked in the seminary I attended when he gave his student sermon and spoke of the atoning death of Christ, and the professor was furious, and he said, how dare you preach the substitutionary atonement in this day and age? Another student was rebuked for coming to seminary with preconceived ideas. Among them was the deity of Christ. I can't read people's hearts, but I felt confident that the, not just some, not even the majority, but the vast majority of our professors in seminary were unbelievers. I would also guess, without knowing their hearts, that the overwhelming majority of the students I went to seminary with were unbelievers. And yet that's shocking to people. You talk about the greater judgment, that those of us who have been given the responsibility of preaching the Word and tending the flock will be held to a higher judgment.

But there's nothing new about this. It was the clergy that hated Jesus. It was the clergy that killed Jesus. The Pharisees began as a group committed and dedicated to righteousness.

They never achieved it. They were counterfeit. And when the genuine appeared in their midst, it exposed the counterfeit righteousness that the Pharisees proclaimed. That's why Jesus had to go. He wasn't killed because He said, consider the lilies how they spin. But because He said, consider the Pharisees how they lie. That's why He was killed.

And He said these things to them, and as He did that, the Pharisees began to assail Him vehemently and to cross-examine Him about many things, lying in wait for Him and seeking to catch Him in something He might say that they might accuse Him. Listen. Listen to what He says. Write it down. We'll use it against Him.

We'll take this matter, and we'll get rid of Him. They claim to be religious, but it was a surface thing. A question for you. Is your Christian faith and Christian commitment a matter of the surface? Are you playing at being a Christian? Or is it real?

Is it the real thing? I'm not asking you if you still sin. We all still sin.

But I want to know if your faith is something that's in you and not something that you just wear on the outside on Sunday morning. We need to ask ourselves this question, dear friends, regularly. Otherwise, we're just like these scribes. We're just like the Pharisees. And instead of being friends of Christ, we would be His enemies.

God grant that no such hypocrisy exists in this room this morning. A very clear call there to examine ourselves and our faithfulness to Christ. That's R.C.

Sproul from one of the sermons he preached from the Gospel of Luke. Each Sunday, we return to this series, and over the course of the next few months, we will complete this entire gospel. Our resource offered today is a helpful study companion for you as you continue your study with us. Contact us today and request the digital download of R.C. 's commentary on Luke. It's nearly 600 pages, and every passage is explained with R.C.

's easy-to-understand commentary. I commend it to you because it will be a great help in your study of Luke for years to come. To receive it, just contact us with your donation of any amount when you go to renewingyourmind.org. Our goal here at Ligonier Ministries is to faithfully proclaim the holiness of God to as many people as possible, and your gifts to this ministry help make that possible. So we do hope to hear from you, and in advance, let me thank you. I hope you have a great week, and please make plans to join us again next Sunday for Renewing Your Mind. .