In the entire chapter of Matthew 23, Jesus gives one of the most stern rebukes of the teachers of the law and the Pharisees. Remember that these were the people who were supposed to be teaching and leading the Jews in the ways of God, helping the people to see their hopelessness in themselves and their need to trust in God’s grace for their salvation and righteousness. Instead the Pharisees made up their own rules and made them more important than God’s law, then condemned the people for breaking the Pharisees endless and pointless rules. The Pharisees distorted God’s law, taking the emphasis off of the heart and meaning behind the law, and placing all the focus on earning self-righteousness.
Jesus gives many examples of the Pharisees hypocrisy through their distortion of God’s word. Some examples are:
- Wearing extra large and visible “religious” clothing so that everyone can see how “holy” they are.
- Their prideful pleasure in having people call them “Rabbi”.
- Making up rules to create loopholes for keeping oaths.
- Pay extremely close attention to some parts of the law, but completely ignore the most important parts dealing with justice, mercy, and faithfulness.
- Make tombs and decorative graves in honor of God’s past prophets who were killed by the Jews, but rejecting John the Baptist and Jesus who are with them now.
There are a couple of areas in this passage that we will look at which remind us of mankind’s hopelessness to attain salvation apart from God’s grace offered to us through Jesus.
Verse 13:
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
The Pharisees, the most “holy” people around are not good enough to earn their way to heaven. Not only do they destroy themselves, but through their false teaching, they keep others from the truth that salvation comes through trusting in God for salvation on His terms: Salvation through the Christ, Jesus.
Verses 37-39:
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”
In these verses Jesus is talking to Jerusalem, the heart of the Jewish nation. He emphasizes their need to be children of God, yet throughout their history and in Jesus’ time, the majority of the Jews rejected God and His prophets. And they will not see God until they recognize that Jesus is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.