Dangerous Hypocrisy

You cannot save your soul by putting up a good religious front. That is hypocrisy. We need to submit to God’s Word and be transformed from the inside out by Christ.

00:00:00.44] Well, the passage of Scripture we’re going to look at today is on the more difficult side. You might have caught that from the Old Testament readings you just heard. We just heard from Genesis chapter four, the first time in human history when someone is killed because of his righteousness, because of his faithfulness to the Lord. Cain kills Abel, according to Hebrews, because he offered a more acceptable sacrifice. We also heard from 2 Chronicles about the death of Zechariah, who stood before God’s people and said, why do you break the commandments of the Lord so that you cannot prosper? Because you have forsaken the Lord, he has forsaken you. And instead of repenting, the people conspire and they kill Zechariah. Now, what you need to know is that the Book of Chronicles is the last book in the Hebrew Scriptures. It’s what we call the Old Testament. Our English Bibles put the books in a different order. They put them in the order of genre. So you have history followed by wisdom and poetry followed by prophecy. The Hebrew Bible also has three sections, but those sections are the law, the prophets, and the writings. The last book of the writings is Chronicles, and this means that the story of Abel’s murder is the beginning of the Bible, and the story of Zechariah’s murder is the end of the Bible. In a moment, we’re going to hear Jesus, who is speaking to a large group of religious leaders. They’re eating with him, but they they secretly hate him. They’re jealous that the crowds listen to him. They don’t like that he challenges their practices, questions their authority, and warns people against them. And Jesus is going to do all three of those things in this passage today. He is not going to coddle them and tell them that they’re doing their best, and that their sin is no big deal. And he’s not going to do that for us either. Right at the end, Jesus is going to say that the death of Abel and the death of Zechariah is charged against this generation. And what he means is all throughout human history, from the very beginning, all the way back, all the way up to the present day, God sent individuals to declare the truth, to help people see their sin, and to turn from their error and find his healing grace. And the people, especially the religious leaders, shut those prophets up with violence because they loved their sin more than they love the Lord. Church, I hope that you came this morning ready to be challenged by God’s Word, because that’s what it does this morning. Sin has given us a built in resistance to hearing, listening, and responding faithfully to God’s Word. And I’ve been praying for us this week that God would not allow us to put up a resistant front to his direct challenge to us today.

[00:03:07.79] You cannot save your soul by putting up a good religious front. You can’t do it that way. That is hypocrisy. That’s what Jesus is going to use that word. He’s going to use the word hypocrisy. Instead, we need to submit to God’s Word and be transformed from the inside out by Christ. So if you have your Bibles, please turn with me to Luke chapter 11. We’re going to begin in verse 37, and I’m going to encourage those of you who don’t typically turn and expect it to be on the screen, it won’t be on the screen, and it’s a larger passage today. So go ahead and grab one of those pew Bibles in front of you. Maybe open it up on your phone. I almost don’t need to preach what Jesus says here today. Really, what we need to do is hear him say it. Which is why I’m going to read it in full, beginning to end first. But once I do, we’ll go back over it and we’re going to see how each of Jesus warnings are poignant. And they’re just as poignant for us today as they were in the first century. It begins with an image. Jesus gives us an image, and then this image sets the stage for six pronouncements of woe or woe is a way of of warning or saying, watch out. That’s what Jesus is saying. You’re in spiritual danger here.That’s what a woe is.

[00:04:29.47] So I’m going to read the whole passage, and then we’ll start with that image beginning in verse 37. While Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him. So he went in and reclined at table. The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner. And the Lord said to him, Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools did not he who made the outside make the inside also. But give as alms those things that are within and behold, everything is clean for you. But woe to you, Pharisees. For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and you neglect the justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. Woe to you, Pharisees! For you love the best seat in the synagogues and greetings in marketplaces. Woe to you, for you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without knowing it. One of the lawyers answered him, teacher, in saying these things you insult us also. And he said, woe to you lawyers also, for you load people 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 whom your fathers killed, so that you are witnesses, and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them, and you build their tombs. Therefore also the wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets and apostles. Some of whom they will kill and persecute, so that the blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation. Woe to you, lawyers, for you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering. As he went away from there, the scribes and Pharisees began to press him hard, and to provoke him to speak about many things lying in wait for him to catch him in something he might say. In the meantime, when so many thousands of people had gathered together that they were trampling one another, he began to say to his disciples, first, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed or hidden that will not be known. Therefore, whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light. And what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops.

[00:07:12.78] Let’s begin with this image. I guarantee you, that Pharisee had no idea that by noticing that Jesus didn’t wash his hands, he was inviting this level of condemnation. No way he knew this. If you’re not familiar, Pharisees were a Jewish religious leadership sect known for their strict adherence to the Mosaic Law as they interpreted it. And lawyers are men who study that mosaic law. So Jesus is dining with men who, in theory, know God’s scriptures better than anybody else. And the problem is, all this knowledge and all of this rule keeping didn’t sink down into their hearts. They were good at external displays of religious practice, but they did not have hearts that matched that practice. Now, this Pharisee didn’t say anything so either he made a face or Jesus just knew what he was thinking, which Jesus often did. And it was just the teachable moment that Jesus needed to address the danger that these leaders were in. See, they were thinking what kind of a proper teacher of the law would hang out with sinners like Jesus does and then not wash his hands before he eats. Now understand they are not concerned about germs here. They are concerned about demonstrating their holiness and their spiritual cleanliness before the people. There is no command in the Mosaic law that you must wash your hands before you eat. Sorry, moms of Calvary. It’s not in there. This was an add on. This is one of those add on rules that they made up which Pharisees love to do.They love to make up laws. And then they like to hold other people to those laws. And so Jesus says, I know you guys are really good at outward shows of cleanliness and holiness, but it hasn’t changed your heart, hasn’t gotten in there. And he gives them this this image of washing the dishes. They’re really, really good at cleansing the outside of the dish and the cup, but the inside is still dirty. He says it’s full of greed and wickedness.

[00:09:35.10] Now, in a moment, we’re going to look at six examples of this wickedness. But this is the controlling image for all of them. Okay. This cup and dish issue, this is the controlling image for all of those. It’s six examples of the same problem. We tend to to think that what God wants from us is some sort of a show, an external show of obedience or submission. And this is an impulse that is as wide as humanity. Okay, this isn’t just a Christian thing or Jewish thing. This is a humanity wide issue. You can* watch Hindus bring food sacrifices to their little idols. You can watch Muslims carry out their five pillars. You can watch Catholic people adhere to church laws. You can watch evangelicals who miss the gospel go through the motions of Christian practice. You can watch atheists who just try to be good people. Humanity wide. Its humanity wide. There’s this impulse within us to put on a show, both for others and for God, assuming that it will be accepted by both others and God. We cleanse the outside of our lives, assuming that it doesn’t matter what it looks like on the inside of us at all. And to that Jesus says, what a remarkably silly way to think. The word he uses is foolish. Only a fool would would think like that. That’s a silly way to think. Why? Because if you’re trying to impress your creator that way, don’t you think he can see the inconsistency? Don’t you think he can see that? He made you. He made you. He created you. The one who made the outside of you also made the inside of you. He made your mind and47 heart. You don’t think he can see those things too? See, we can manipulate people. We can manipulate people because they can only see the outside of us. For example, you can be kind to someone, show someone kindness in an effort to get something from them. It’s not real kindness, but you can fool a person into believing that it is. You can’t fool God that way because he sees and knows you completely. He knows you inside out because he made you inside out. He’s omniscient. His knowledge of you has no end. There’s no limit to it. So the solution to this problem, then, is to stop trying to impress with your outside behavior and address the issue of the wickedness of your heart. And that’s what Jesus means when he says in verse 41, give as alms those things that are within. So to give as alms is an old fashioned way of saying, giving to charity or sacrificing your possessions in worship. As opposed to just giving as an outward religious show the sacrifice that God actually accepts comes from a person’s pure heart that is submitted to the Lord. The whole cup or dish becomes clean if you clean the inside of it first. You see these religious leaders have their view of God completely backwards. They have it completely backwards. That’s really the challenge for us today church.

[00:13:11.17] We’re going to look at six warnings, six ways that you can get the gospel of God’s grace completely backwards. And if you do, the result is a man made hypocritical religion. Can the church fall into creating a man made hypocritical religion? Absolutely we can. Absolutely we can. I’ll get into some examples here in a moment. But it is not hard to take God’s word full of grace, full of gospel light, turn it into performance. It happens all the time.

[00:13:50.93] The first warning is against neglecting justice and love. Jesus says the Pharisees are very good at carving out a 10th of everything they have and giving it to the Lord as an offering.And so they are careful with tithing, and it’s all the way down to the herbs. Okay. All the way down they are dividing out a 10th of their spice rack. That’s how seriously they take this. They want to be sure that they are giving to God what they’re supposed to give to God. And it’s important to note here that Jesus doesn’t tell them not to do that. In fact, in his correction there at the end of verse 42, you’ll see it says, don’t neglect doing that. Keep doing that. The warning here isn’t about the sacrifices that they’re making. The warning here is about the sacrifice that they’re not making. See, they’re missing the justice and love of God that should be flowing out of their hearts. When Jesus says justice, he’s talking about the same condemnation that the Lord brought against the Israelites of the Old Testament who mistreated the poor by creating laws that would extort money from them and abuse them. The love of God that’s mentioned here is simply the love that God gives to us, that we are then supposed to turn around and show to others, the love that we’re given to give away. And Jesus accusation here is then pretty clear. You guys put careful, careful effort into making sure that you follow the law for your own spiritual benefit, even when it comes down to minor details like spices. But when it comes to the care of others in the big matters, you don’t lift a finger. And the Mosaic Law contained both. It contained instruction for tithes, for sure, but it also instructed what love and justice were to look like among God’s people. But what had happened was by the first century, the religious elite cared more about the external shows of religious adherence than they did about caring for people. Our mission statement here at Calvary is to glorify God by making disciples of Jesus, who live out a passion for Christ and compassion for people. And I love that statement because it reminds me that we cannot untie our passion for Jesus Christ from our compassion for others who are in need. They have to go together. They have to. And if somehow they become separated, what happens is you end up with either a kind of godless pseudo Christian environment, talking about loving people, but without reverence for the Lord. Or you end up a Pharisee. You end up going through the motions of religion, but with a cold heart.

[00:16:50.64] The second warning is desiring power and honor. The Pharisees sought out places of honor. So the best seats in the synagogue and greetings in the marketplace. This isn’t just about getting good seats and having nice greetings, by the way, these guys had taken God’s law, which was meant to honor the Lord, and they had added rules so that they could honor themselves. We actually have ancient instructions in the Talmud that give prescriptions for types of greetings that religious people were supposed to receive in public. It’s written right in there. And at first I thought, come on, no, Christians, Christians wouldn’t struggle with this sort of thing, would we? We wouldn’t. We wouldn’t struggle this way. We know that Jesus was a humble servant. We talk about it all the time, right? Jesus himself said if anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all. That’s Christianity, right? And then I remembered that there was a time in our history when pastors would sit on high backed thrones on the stage during service. You ever seen that before? That was a real thing for a while. I remember talking to one of my friends at seminary who came from a church tradition where the wife of the pastor was known as the First lady of the church, and the pastor would have a young man follow him around at the church behind him with the pastor’s Bible, and he was known as the armor bearer. That’s a real thing. And those are extreme examples. that’s some that’s some visual. I wanted you to have that visual. Okay. That’s an extreme example. But there are lots of examples that are, that are not extreme examples of people who use the church to be honored, to be thought of as a great teacher, to have the title of an elder, to be seen as an authority, to wield power over other people.How many churches have fallen apart because of the aspirations of people who wanted to be honored, instead of honoring the Lord above all things. They write articles and make podcasts about it now.

[00:19:03.20] The third warning is against misleading others. Now, this one is a little different because it’s a picture and it requires some Old Testament knowledge to understand it. Jesus says the Pharisees are like unmarked graves that the people walk over and they don’t even know it. This is about ceremonial cleanness and uncleanness in the law. The law required ritual cleansing for a person to be able to enter into the temple, to be able to stand before God in worship. And these cleansings were meant to show, to teach the people the holiness of God, the sinlessness of God, and our need for his grace to be able to be in his presence is pointing us to Christ. He’s is pointing us to the gospel, and touching a dead body was one way that a person could become unclean. Now, we don’t follow this part of the law anymore because Jesus has fulfilled the law. Faith in Jesus takes away our uncleanness. So if you trust in Jesus as the sacrifice for your sins, you are in a state of being clean and being pure before the Lord. That’s partially what baptism pictures. These Pharisees postured themselves as the cleanest, purest, most holy of all people because of their rituals and their practices. But because they weren’t transformed in their hearts by the grace of God, not only were they unclean and condemned by God themselves, anybody who listened to them was also led astray to be condemned. Their disciples were being led to death and they didn’t even realize it. They were looking to them as religious authorities. These people must be taking me in the right direction. But they were walking over unmarked graves. They didn’t realize. They didn’t know. Basically, Jesus is saying these Pharisees are false teachers. They added rules to God’s law. They didn’t teach or model the love and justice of the Lord. In everything they did, they led people to a false God that can’t save them. If we, as the church today, teach people that God requires us to follow his rules and to put up a good front and to be good people, but we leave out the gospel, we will be a death trap just like these Pharisees. The message of the gospel is to sinners who need God’s grace. It’s God’s love given to us as a gift, not through earning through religious practices or good works. But what sometimes happens is that a church or a family, maybe your family, will lose focus on God’s gracious mercy in Christ, and they’ll turn the Bible into simply a rule book.

[00:22:01.67] You know, what does the Bible say? What are the rules we need to follow? That kind of thing. Those who hear this biblical teaching that’s devoid of the gospel will assume that way to be with right with God, will be to follow those rules. Now, the Bible does contain commands and instructions. Jesus himself gives commands and instructions, but these are not given to earn God’s love. They’re given so that we know how to express our love back to God because of his free gift of forgiveness and grace to us. And if we turn that around like the Pharisees did, we will lead people to death like the Pharisees did. Just then, a lawyer of the Mosaic Law jumped in. Hey, Jesus when you insult the Pharisees, you’re insulting us too. That was not the right play. Woe to you lawyers also. Oh, boy. Fine, you want some of this? Jesus said, I’ll turn to you lawyers, woe to you too. I don’t know what that lawyer was hoping was going to happen there. This guy must be new to Jesus. This must be his first time with Jesus. What did the lawyers do? They made really heavy burdens for the people to bear. That was their job. And they did this by adding thousands of laws on top of God’s law.

[00:23:29.83] For example, they would make people count how many steps they took on the Sabbath day to make sure that they weren’t working on the Sabbath day. But then there were always exceptions for the religious leaders. There was always a loophole where the religious leaders could get through. So in Matthew 23, for, for example, Jesus points out a word game that they liked to play when taking oaths. So if you if you made an oath on the temple,if you swore on the temple, that was not binding, but if you swore on the gold of the temple,that was that was binding. Sounds like little kids with their fingers crossed behind their backs, doesn’t it? If you make the rules of the game, you can trap everyone and then bend them for yourself. That is what all man made religion does. All of it does that. It always favors the one who are making the rules. Note how the true gospel is exactly opposite of this. See, these lawyers are adding burdens onto the backs of the followers of the people that are looking to them for guidance. The gospel is the opposite, seeing the great burden of sin on our shoulders. Jesus came into the world not to add to add to the burden, but to take the burden himself. Paul makes this point very clearly in his letter to the Galatians, when he says that the Mosaic Law points us to our need for God’s grace.

[00:24:57.02] That’s what the law does. It points us to our need for him. The gospel is the relief that we need to give us the holiness before the Lord that we can’t achieve on our own. We can’t bear the burden on our own. And in Galatians, Paul warns the church not to go back to giving people those burdens that they can’t bear again, just like the Pharisees did, and the lawyers, scribes. This is such a warning to us as Christians. This is such a warning to us whether here at church or back in our homes, with our families. If we create a rules driven Christianity, we will crush people. Some of you have carried that burden before. You know what that’s like. If we create that, it will crush people. If you teach your children to just be good little boys and girls, you will give them a burden that they will never be able to bear. But if we are constantly remembering, returning, and rehearsing the gospel of God’s grace to us in Christ, then the burden of our sin is lifted, and then we’re free to walk in obedience out of a heart of love for the God who saved us by his grace. That’s how it’s supposed to work. The fifth woe Jesus gives is about continuing to reject God’s Word. Now, this is the longest of the warnings, and it’s a little bit rhetorical, but I’ll try to summarize it here. [00:26:24.58] The religious elite and people in power in the Old Testament would reject and kill the prophets that God sent to them to turn the people back from their sin. And Jesus, speaking in the first century to the people in front of him, said that this generation, these people, these religious leaders in front of him, they are building the tombs of those prophets that were killed by their fathers. Now, I don’t believe he means that literally. What I think he’s saying here is that the Pharisees and scribes are in agreement with their murderous ancestors. Basically, you kill them, we’ll bury them. We’re in lockstep together. See, because they don’t want God’s Word stepping in and challenging their authority any more than than the unfaithful men of ancient Israel. But Jesus explains, this is all part of God’s plan. In God’s wise plan, he sent prophets. He knew that some of those prophets would be killed. Some people would listen to them, they would repent,they would turn from their sin and others they would shut them up with violence. And Jesus is saying, this generation of religious leaders joins in the guilt and are as condemned as their ancestors who rejected God’s Word before them. In preparation for some teaching that I’m going to be doing with our youth here in February, I’ve been studying the so-called movement called “Progressive Christianity”. I put it in quotes because it’s not really Christianity at all. It’s something completely different. But if you’ve ever wondered how we have organizations today that call themselves churches, but flatly deny the gospel and the deity and the miracles of Christ and the clear moral commands of Scripture, it’s because a long time back, those religious organizations left God’s Word altogether. They left it behind. They attacked, and they questioned Scripture’s trustworthiness and its authority. And like Satan, they began to twist Scripture. And they would ask, Did God really say? Did he really say that? And at the same time that they were doing this scripture twisting and Scripture denial, they were also claiming that God was still speaking. Only this time when God spoke, He contradicted his own written word, and he sounded an awful lot like the preferences of the church leaders at the time. Jay Gresham Machin, who was one of the founders of Westminster Seminary, was writing in the 1930s when this was all a big deal. As churches were dividing, denominations were breaking up. And back then, in the 1930s he wrote this. He said,the present time is a time of conflict. The great redemptive religion, which has always been known as Christianity, is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology. Church, you can sound an awful lot like the church, and an awful lot like the Bible and create something that is totally anti-Christ.

[00:29:39.42] You can use Christian terminology to deny Christ himself. You can speak like the Bible. You can come near to God’s Word without actually accepting and embracing God’s Word. And if you do that, you’re in as much spiritual danger as anyone who openly rejects Christ. In fact, I would say that you’re even in a more dangerous position because you may not even realize the danger that you’re in. And that leaves us with the final warning of preventing others from God’s wisdom. As Jesus put it, they’ve taken away the key of knowledge by denying God’s Word, ignoring God’s revelation, and creating a religion in their own image. Anyone or anything in this world that turns your eyes away from the truth of God’s Word, from the truth of the gospel, is denying you real knowledge. It’s taking away the key to real knowledge. And if you are a person like this, if you do this to someone, not only are you, do you not know the truth, you are hindering other people from finding the truth when you lead them astray. This week, I listened to a former youth pastor tell the story of how he had decided to to walk away from the church and deny all the things that he had taught and had ever been taught or ever taught about the Bible. And among the the list of complaints that he had was that it was immoral to teach that children needed to be saved through Jesus. That was the argument. It’s immoral to teach that children need Jesus to be saved. And that’s a very typical argument among people who walk away from the church, the immorality of teaching Christian doctrine. How can these awful Christians damage impressionable children by talking about sin and justice and salvation? And after going on and on about how immoral it is to tell this to children, the guy says, and I’m going to quote him here because I want to get it exactly right. This is what he said. It’s something I think about a lot as a dad, because I’m giving my kids a version of faith. I hope it’s a version of faith that’s affirming, life giving and enjoyable. Did you hear the argument? You hear that argument? You can’t tell kids about biblical Christian faith, that’ll scare them, they won’t enjoy it. But it’s fine to give your kids a version of faith trimmed to your preferred specifications. How many of you know that truth doesn’t work like that in anything? It doesn’t work like that’s not how truth works. You can’t custom tailor truth to your preferences, to your likes. You can’t custom taylor Christian truth to your liking. And did you know that the truth isn’t responsible to bring you joy? It’s not its job. It’s not what truth does.You either have biblical Christianity or you have no Christianity. And if it’s immoral to share the gospel with a child, I’d sure like to know by what standard it would be okay to share your own homemade religion with a child. Seems like we’re just making up the rules as we go. Which of course, is exactly what’s happening.

[00:33:01.09] Six warnings. Six warnings, church. Six warnings that we need to heed as Christians today. Jesus issued six woes to these religious leaders that cut right to the heart of false religion. And when you put them all together, they are a warning to us of how easy it is to lose the gospel, to make religion serve our purposes, to lead ourselves and others into spiritual death. Now, you’d think that these leaders, upon hearing this from Jesus and seeing their error, they would repent and get right with the Lord. But they don’t, do they? Instead, they get insulted. They’re insulted. This is how you know if you have a resistant heart. Okay. You want to know? You want to diagnose yourself? You want to know if your heart is resistant? God’s word confronts your sin and instead of being convicted by it, you’re insulted by it. Remember the lawyer from from verse 45, teacher, you’re you’re insulting us with these things that you’re saying. Being insulted by God’s Word means that you are placing yourself in a position of judging God. You stand over the top of him. You say, this is okay. This isn’t okay. You are in opposition to God. In verses 53 and 54, it says the religious leaders tried to press Jesus so that they could trap him in something that he might say. See, they don’t care about what God has to say. They don’t care what God’s Word has to say. They want to get rid of Jesus like their fathers got rid of the prophets. They want to shut him up because they got to keep their own little religious way of being. And Jesus goes on to teach the crowds to avoid the hypocrisy of these men. They need to reject their false religion and they need to listen to God’s Word. Church,I would suggest that is exactly what we need as well. I would encourage you to do the same. If someone adds or subtracts from God’s Word, if they deny its truthfulness. If they craft a type of Christianity, a version of faith that doesn’t have the gospel of Christ at its center, we need to avoid it. We need to get better at searching these things out too. We got to get a lot better at discerning these things, especially in a technological age where anyone can say anything they like to anyone around the world who will listen. We need to become discerners. We must be diligent to discern what aligns with God’s Word, and everything else can be safely confronted with love or avoided. Let’s pray.