“But the Lord said to him, ‘Now you Pharisees clean the
outside of the cup and of the platter; but inside of you, you are full of
robbery and wickedness. You foolish
ones, did not He who made the outside make the inside also?’” Luke 11:39-40
The Pharisees
were a brotherhood of Jewish men who gathered together to study and live the
Law of God as closely as possible. They
emerged as a group as far back as the Babylonian captivity, and it is estimated
that there were 6000 of them in Israel at the time of Jesus. The picture we have from the gospels is
mostly negative, but historically they contributed many positive things to the
Jewish nation.
When the
nation of Israel was exiled all sacrifices stopped. The people were captive in a foreign land and
could easily have been assimilated into a pagan culture. The Pharisees were the group that studied the
law and kept it a part of Jewish thought.
They cultivated a religious consciousness and nationalism that kept the
people separate, and after the people were allowed to return to Israel they
redeveloped and reorganized religious life.
They put great emphasis on the unity and holiness of God, they believed
in and taught the resurrection, and they lived moral lives as an example to the
people around them. Problems developed
over time.
When God
gave the law it was an act of supreme grace.
People were in darkness, not knowing what God required for a
relationship with Him. The law revealed
God’s standard. The Pharisees took God’s
law, His guide for a relationship and changed it from an act of grace into a
burden. They taught a set of rules. If you failed to keep the rules, God would
punish. If you kept the rules, God would
have to accept you because you were righteous enough.
They missed
the point on a couple of counts. No one
was righteous enough to keep the whole law and live up to God’s standards,
including the Pharisees. They placed so
much emphasis on outward action that they forgot about the inner attitudes and
heart of man that desired a relationship with God. They substituted their own pathetic try at
righteousness for God’s grace, based on faith.
No wonder Jesus called them white washed tombs.
Our
churches today are amply supplied with modern Pharisees. We need their better qualities. We need people who remind us that God is
holy, never tolerant of sin. We need
people who remind us to keep ourselves from blending in with the pagan culture
around us. But we must be ever vigilant
to wash the inside of the cup as well as
the outside. We need to be people of
character, who are good and not just
look good, in whom God is affecting change.
We need to remember that the only way we can be righteous is by
accepting the covering of God’s grace.
We need to remember that “God sees not as a man sees, for man looks at
the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.”
The
Pharisees, because of their blind legalism, rejected the Messiah and so became irrelevant
to the society around them as well as eternally lost. May we never lose sight of the grace of Jesus
and become irrelevant in our society.
May we instead be agents for morality and a beacon pointing the way to
salvation. We can speak grace and mercy into every relationship, loving and
drawing the people God puts in our lives into relationship with him.
The
Pharisees were so focused on looking good that they used righteousness to drive
a wedge between people and God, between themselves and others. They forgot that
God looks on the heart, and calls us to reconciliation with each other and with
him. God wants to be with us. He wants a relationship with us, and with the
people we come in contact with. The outside of the cup needs to be clean; the
inside of the cup has to come first.
Now all these things are
from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry
of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to
Himself, not counting their trespasses
against them, and he has committed to us the word of reconciliation.
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were entreating through
us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 2 Cor. 5:18-20
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