Exposing False Spiritual Leaders, Complete Edition

Exposing False Spiritual Leaders, Complete Edition

By John MacArthur

The Characteristics of False Spiritual Leaders, Part 1

Let's open our Bibles together to Matthew Chapter 23, Matthew Chapter 23. It is our privilege this morning to look at one of the most fascinating provocative stirring portions of Matthew's gospel as we embark upon this 23rdChapter. We're going to being this morning a look at the first 12 verses. And if I were to entitle this particular section I would simply entitle it False Spiritual Leaders, False Spiritual Leaders.

There have always been and there always will be in this world false spiritual leaders who pretend to represent God, but in fact do not represent God. The Old Testament talks about them, identifies them, and warns people to stay away from them. The New Testament does the same. In fact, Moses was in conflict with them in Egypt. Jeremiah was fighting with them in Judah. Ezekiel faced them and called them foolish prophets that followed their own spirit and have seen nothing. Our Lord warned of them as false Christ's and false prophets who shall show great signs and wonders. The apostle Paul struggled against them as preachers of another gospel in Galatians Chapter 1, and purveyors of the doctrine of demons he called them in writing to Timothy.

Peter said they were false preachers who secretly bring in damninable heresies and they are like dogs who return to lick up their own vomit. John, the apostle, saw a coming anti-Christ and many anti-christs already present who denied Jesus as the true Christ. Jude saw them and called them deluded dreamers who defile the flesh. And Paul may have summed it up well when he said they are wolves whose desire is to enter in not sparing the flock. They're always present and they're always eager to counterfeit the work of God.

In the second coming of Jesus Christ as the great event unfolds we see the false prophets amass and congregate as portrayed for us in those apocalyptic visions of Scripture that look to that future time. And it seems to us that that may be the time when they flourish as it were in their hey day, but if there is a time equal to that time for the working of false prophets it must have been in Palestine during the time of the Lord Jesus Christ. For in His first coming all hell amassed its forces for a three-year assault on Him and His truth. Therefore, false spiritual leaders take a very high profile, a very great visibility in the gospel record. And in this particular chapter we hear the Lord Jesus Christ confront them with a denunciation that blisters and burns as it comes from His lips. Right thorough verse 36 is the scathing rebuke of false prophets and only in the last three verses of the chapter are there words of tenderness and words of pity.

Now as we look at this particular text I want you to note that it fall into three sections does Chapter 23. The first twelve verses are spoken to the crowd and the disciples. From verse 13 to 36 it's spoken to the Pharisees themselves and the last moment of tender compassion over the plight of the lost of Israel.

Now we're looking at the first twelve verses and to get the scene in mind let's look at verse 1. "Then spoke Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples, saying. Now the word then just hooks us up with the past. We know we're on the same day, it's Wednesday still, as I said last time, a very long Wednesday. A Wednesday that began in the morning, with the Lord coming into the city from Bethany, where He had spent the night near or with Lazarus and Mary and Martha. And along the way they had passed the cursed fig tree and He taught His disciples a lesson then coming to the temple, which He had cleansed the day before He began to teach and as He was teaching the massive multitudes collected for the Passover He was stopped by the religious leaders and they began this dialogue, which has gone on now for several chapters. They wanted to know by what authority He did and said the things He did and said and He didn't give them that authority at first, but rather gave them three parables, which condemned them and told them they would be shut out of the kingdom of God and replaced by others. They then counter those parables of condemnation with three questions meant to discredit Him, each of which He answered in such a way as to discredit them. And then He finally asked them a question about the Messiah, which proved beyond shadow of a doubt that the Messiah was both man and God and at this point they stopped asking anything at all.

And so the dialogue, as such, has ended. And beginning then in verse 1 of Chapter 23, the Lord gives His last sermon to the people of Israel. This is it. His ministry to them is over. This is the last public speech and it is a denunciation of these false religious leaders and a warning for the people to stay away from them. It is a very severe serious presentation, but a very necessary one. They are false shepherds, they are wolves in sheep's clothing, they damn people, and they must be avoided. And our Lord pulls no punches in making that abundantly clear.

Now it isn't the first time that He has denounced them. A year earlier He had and a few months before as recorded in Luke 11, He had said some very similar things to what He says now. So He's already confronted them and called them what they truly were, but now he warns the people particularly to stay away from them because they damn men's souls.

Now there's another thought that you need to have. The Lord knows that He's about to die on Friday and soon after that He will ascend to heaven and the work will be left with His disciples. And it is essential that the people be warned to stay away from the false religious leaders and to be turned toward the true spiritual leaders. And He knows that the true spiritual leaders will be His disciples who after His ascent to heaven will be filled with the Spirit of God and will go everywhere preaching the gospel. And He wants the people to be ready to listen to them. And so He warns the people about the false spiritual leaders so their hearts will be open to the true ones. And in a sense He's setting us His disciples for their ministry, that's why down in verse 8 to 12, He calls His disciples to be distinctly different than these false spiritual leaders are. So it isn't just a denunciation of the leaders, it isn't just a warning of the people, it is both of those with a purpose, that the people might listen to those who are true spiritual leaders, who manifest, in fact, the very opposite kind of characteristics to the ones that He will denounce in the false leaders.

By the way, He succeeded in calling the people away from them to some degree and to His disciples because you'll remember the very first day they preached on the day of Pentecost three thousand people believed and were baptized and that is in Acts Chapter 2. And you don't move much beyond that in the Book of Acts until you see even greater things occurring, thousands more coming to embrace the Savior. And perhaps by Chapter 4 there are as many as twenty thousand who have heard and believed in apostolic preaching. And by Chapter 5 and verse 28 they complain that these preachers have filled all Jerusalem with their teaching, and so the Lord paved the way here for the true spiritual leaders, His own disciples, to do their work and call the people away from the damning doctrines of the false leaders.

Now notice in verse 1 He speaks to the multitude and His disciples. This doesn't mean the scribes and Pharisees didn't hear because they did. The religious leaders were all gathered. They were there because they had been there for the whole questioning process. They heard but the message was directed to the multitude and the disciples. Primarily the disciples are in view in verse 8 to 12, as we'll see next time, but they heard. And in verse 13, when He directs His words eyeball to eyeball to these false leaders the rest of the crowd heard as well.

So they are denounced publicly in the presence of the multitude and in their own presence also. This then is an electrifying scene. And again it helps us understand why they had to get rid of Jesus, why they had to have Him killed by the Romans, especially after such a blistering public denunciation, which threatened their own credibility and career.

Now notice in verse 2, it says He said, "The scribes, etc." They are the subject of these first remarks. Now not all the scribes were equally deserving of this rebuke. There may have been some scribes that had some integrity. Not all the Pharisees were either. There must have been some of them that had an honest heart toward God like Paul the apostle who was a Pharisee and who had some genuineness and did what he did ignorantly and unbelief. But for the most part they are generally characterized by the words of our Lord. There were some and few, I suppose, exceptions.

Now keep this in mind. There were various sects in Judaism. But the dominant sect was the Pharisees. The were the religious spiritual leaders. The Sadducees were primarily into politics and in amassing fortunes. They weren't really involved in the theology and the spiritual leadership though they had some positions of authority in the hierarchy of the temple. Theirs was pretty much a political and economic operation. And there were the zealots who also were political nationalists. And there were the Essenes who were monastics and they never really had an impact on society because they utterly separated from society. And then there were the Herodians and they were a political party that pro the Herods. That leaves the bulk of spiritual leadership to this group called the Pharisees, of which some say there were no more than six thousand, but highly influential.

Now they were the ones committed to the law. You remember back in 586 when Judah was taken into captivity into Babylon. They were there for seventy years. They came back from Babylon, they started to reestablish life in the land, and you remember that Nehemiah and Ezra brought the Scriptures to the people again, and the Scriptures were discovered and in Nehemiah 8 there was a standing and a reading of the Scripture, you recall that? And this was after all these years of not having that, and the people all stood up and heard the reading and they swore to obey the Scripture and they swore to be committed to God' authority and God's word. And the law was put back in the center of their life. The law was put back in clear focus for them. And it became that which they were committed to.

Now at that time a group of people then became committed to studying and teaching the Scriptures. Out of this group grew this Pharisaic mentality, where the Scripture was everything, the Scripture was everything. And over the years from the time of Nehemiah's reading of the Scripture, Nehemiah 8, right down to the time of our Lord, these people have studied the law, interpreted the law to the point where there were in excess of fifty volumes of their commentary on the law. And they had added all kinds of things: ceremonies, rituals, regulations, add infinitum ad nausem, myriads of them and they had enjoined them on people. And for them life was all about the law.

Now all Pharisees were scribes, but within the group of Pharisees were a group of scribes who were among the Pharisees the experts in the law. All the Pharisees were committed to law keeping, but the scribes were the experts. They were the ones who cared for the law; they were the ones who dispensed the law. The old Jewish saying was that God gave the law to Moses, Moses gave the law to Joshua, Joshua gave the law to the elders, the elders gave the law to the prophets and the prophets gave the law to the men of the synagogues and the men of the synagogues were the scribes who were a part of the Pharisaic whose job it was to interpret and bind the law to the hearts of the people. Now that was their task.

So they were the spiritual leaders. They had the law they said. It wasn't just the law of God, it was the law of God and all the rest of that stuff and they bound it on the people. William Barkley who spent a part of his life in the land of Israel researching background material say there were seven kinds of Pharisees and he described them with these terms. First there was the shoulder Pharisee, so called because he wore his good deeds on his shoulder. He paraded the good that he did. When he prayed he would put something, ashes, on his head and he would look sad so everyone would know how pious and spiritual he was. He was the shoulder Pharisee.

And then there was the wait a little Pharisee. This was the Pharisee who could come up with a spiritual reason to put off doing something good. He always had excuses but they sounded very pious.

And then there was the bruise and bleeding Pharisee who thought it was a sin to look at a woman and so whenever women were around he bent over and closed his eyes and he kept running into walls. And according to the Pharisees the more bruises you had from walls the more holy you were.

Then there was the humpback tumbling Pharisee and the humpback tumbling Pharisee was called that because he wanted to demonstrate his humility so he slouched way over and bent his back and walked around all day in that humble position and thought it was wrong to lift his feet so he shuffled his feet and he kept tripping on things and tumbling. And he was called the humpback tumbling Pharisee.

Then there was the ever reckoning Pharisee. He was the Pharisee who kept count of all of his good deeds so he's know what God owed him in terms of blessing.

And then there was the fearing Pharisee who did all that stuff because he was scared to death of going to hell. And then William Barkley suggested there was the God-fearing Pharisee who did what he did because he thought it was right to do it and he had integrity to some extent. He was the one out of the seven who was a really good guy. And that's the group to whom our Lord speaks in this chapter and of whom he warns.

Now in looking at verses 1 to 12, I want to suggest to you that a good way to see this section is to see it as a description of the characteristic of a false spiritual leader. And there are five elements that false spiritual leaders lack and I believe the Lord gives them to us right here. They lack authority, they lack integrity, they lack sympathy, they lack spirituality, and they lack humility.

Now conversely, beloved, those are things true spiritual leaders possess: authority, integrity, sympathy, spirituality, and humility. So it's a study in contrast. Now listen, this is historic, this is a description of false spiritual leaders in that time and that place, but you can take the principles right out of here and apply them today as if our Lord was standing here and saying it in relation to our time. They are truly the marks of false spiritual leaders, and they are important for us to know so that we can identify these people.

First of all it is implied in verse 2, that they lacked authority, that they lacked authority. You notice it says that Jesus said, "The scribes and the Pharisees," and the text says, "Sat in Moses' seat, sat in Moses' seat."

Now in the synagogues there was a special seat. It was called Moses' seat. It was the chair of Moses and in that chair, which may not have been a real chair, but stood for a place of authority was the leading teacher, the leading Pharisee, the leading scribe. If you had the seat of Moses in your synagogue you were the chief teacher. You represented the authority. In fact, the word seat is the word cathedra, from which we get cathedral, but maybe more significantly than that the Latin's took that Latin word cathedraand made a phrase out of it, excathedraout of the place of authority. And they said in the Roman Catholic system, when the Pope speaks he speaks excathedrait is then binding on the conscience, it is binding on the life because it is out of the throne of authority, or out of the seat of authority.

And so cathedrahas to do with the seat, Moses has to do with the law, and so they spoke as the law authority. They were the authority. Like our modern universities have a chair of philosophy or a chair of history or a chair of biology or a chair of whatever, so the synagogue had a chair of Moses, a seat of Moses, a place of authority. The person occupying that seat would have great weight and great authority.

However, there is nothing in this verse to indicate that they had a right to sit there, that they had a right to pontificate about what the people should do, that they had a right to represent God in that place or the law of Moses. There is nothing to say that they had earned it, that it had been given them by God, that they were qualified to take it. All it says is they sat in it, they took it. In fact, they did everything they could to try to keep Jesus from taking it from them and when He did go into their synagogue and teach they were infuriated just as they were when Paul did that. And that's why John 16 says, "The day is going to come," when Jesus talks to His disciples, he says, "The day is going to come when men think they do God's service by killing you," and they're going to throw you out of their synagogues because a truth teacher who has real authority is always a threat to someone who is a usurper. And these usurpers had gone in and occupied the chair of authority when in face they did not delineate the divine authority but gave their own tradition and their own ritual and their own routines that they themselves through the centuries had invented. And did all they could to keep others out.

They are parallel to some men identified in the time of Jeremiah. Look to Jeremiah 14 for a moment. And Jeremiah faced the same kind of situation. Jeremiah was a true prophet. He was really a lonely prophet. He was crying out one message when all the other prophets were crying out a lie. He was telling the truth and all these other prophets were lying. They were all saying, "Oh it'll all be well. Everything is fine." And Jeremiah was saying, "It isn't," and the people would go to the teachers that said what they wanted to hear. They're identified in Jeremiah 14:14, "The Lord said to me, 'The prophets prophesy lies in My name.'" That is a fearful thing. To use the name of God to propagate lies. "I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spoke unto them. They prophesy unto you a false vision and divination and a thing of nothing and the deceit of their heart. Therefore, thus saith the Lord concerning the prophets that prophesy in my name and I sent them not." He goes on to describe what He's going to do. He sent them not.

In Chapter 23, several times the same thing is indicated again, verse 21, "I have not sent these prophets yet they ran, I have not spoken to them yet they prophesy." Verse 32, "I am against those who prophesy false dreams," says the Lord, "And do tell them and cause my people to err by their lies and their instability, yet I sent them not, nor commanded them." And you find in Chapter 27:15, "I have not sent them." And it goes on like that Chapter 28, Chapter 29.

Isaiah, another of the great Old Testament prophets faced the same kind of thing. I believe it's Chapter 30:10, It says, "Say to the seers, see not, and to the prophets, prophesy not unto us right things. Speak unto us smooth things prophesy deceits. Get out of the way, turn aside out of the path, cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us." Don't tell us the truth. We don't want to hear what God wants us to know. That's an amazing thing. One of the reason people go into untrue religions, go into false religions is because they don't want to hear the truth. They don't want to hear what God really has to say. And so there's always an audience for false prophets.

In John 10:1-2, Jesus said, "The true shepherd enters the sheepfold through the door and those that climb into the sheepfold and don't come through the door are thieves and robbers, and they have come to steal your life." That's another characterization of false religious leaders, usurpers who have no right, who have no authority, who speak not for God nor are sent by God, but they take the place of authority and they put demands on people and they tell things in the name of God that are not the truth of God, usurpers, quite in contrast, by the way, to the one sent by the Lord; those who have been, like Paul, made a minister by the dispensation of the gospel, which is committed unto them. Those like Timothy who have been called by God and set apart by the laying on of hands is confirmation. Those like the apostles on whom the Lord breathed and said receive ye the Holy Spirit and to whom He said go into all the world and preach the gospel.

So the false spiritual leaders lacked authority. They had taken self-appointed seats of authority, filled them with their own ideas, filled them with their own traditions, filled them with their own regulations in addition to the law of God obscuring the law of God and when anyone threatens that seat of authority they become instantly hostile to those who threaten. It's the same today. There are usurpers all over the place. There are liars by the multitude uncountable, fostering their falsehoods, their diluted dreams, making up their supposed visions, saying the represent God speaking in His name and spewing out lies right out of hell that damn men's souls to one end of this world to the other. There is only one authority and that's the word of God and when the deviate from that they are usurpers as were these.

Now the second our Lord says and this not by implication but by explication directly is that they not only lacked authority but they lacked integrity. Lacking authority they were usurpers, lacking integrity they are hypocrites. A most interesting verse, verse 3, follow it. "Paul, therefore, whatever they bid you observe, observe and do, but do not after their works for they say and do not."

Now listen very carefully to this or you will misunderstand it. He says all that they bid you do it. Now you could stop and say wait a minute, wait a minute, how comprehensive is the word all? Obviously this can't be a general comprehensive command to absolutely obey everything the Pharisees and scribes say because we've been told not to do that. That's what this whole speech is about. Then if you go back to Chapter 5 in the Sermon on the Mount from verse 21 to 28, the Lord was there saying the rabbi's and your tradition and all that says this, but I say this. And you've heard it told this and I say this, and you've heard this and I say this. In other words He says you're wrong. You're wrong about murder and you're wrong about fornication and you're wrong about divorce and you're wrong about adultery, and you're wrong about swearing and your prayers are wrong in chapter 6, and your alms are wrong and your worship is wrong.

And he condemns so many of the things they taught in chapter 6 and in Chapter 15 of Matthew He indicts them for having taken the commandments of God and set them aside and in their place put the traditions of men. And He says to them, "You have substituted the tradition of men for the commandments of God." So He has condemned much of their teaching. He has condemned much of it and He can't be giving blanket approval whatever they tell you to do, do it. What then is He saying? Well the idea is this: the key to it is to understand what He said in verse 2. They sat in Moses' seat, and listen carefully, insofar that they rightly reflect Moses you do what they say. If they read, as they always did in the synagogue, the law, you obey it. In other words in condemning these leaders there was always the potential problem that having condemned the leaders He would with them condemn their whole message and the people would; therefore, throw the whole baby out with the dirty bath water.

And what He is saying to them is look, we will condemn these individuals, but even these individuals speaking the law of God are speaking that which you must do. In other words the message from God is still the message from God even in the mouth of a false teacher. And so it was when the Pharisees read the word of God it was binding on their hearts. And when they said to love God, worship God, love your fellowman, love righteousness and hate evil, they were to do that. Insofar as Moses' law and the law of God was reflected it was to be obeyed.

You see the word of God is not corrupted even in the mouth of a false prophet. It remains the powerful word of God. So if they teach what Moses taught you must respond.

Now He says to them observe and do, it says in the King James. The Greek words are first word is really do kueo, it means it's an aris tense so it's the idea of immediately respond, do it. If it's out of the law of Moses do it, even if it's in their mouth, do it.

And then the second one is the verb tayreho, which means to go on doing, present tense. Do it and keep doing it. Do it and keep observing it. So He's calling them to an instant and continuous obedience to the law of God no matter who articulates it. I mean when a Mormon comes down the path and reads the Bible and calls people to love one another that's the word of God. Even in the mouth of a false prophet it's still the word of God. Don't throw that away because you eliminated the false prophet. So when they say the truth, and like a clock that doesn't run, it's still right twice a day, false prophets tend now and then to hit the truth. So as far as they fulfill the role of representing Moses you respond, because the issue is the word of God and there is no other authority.

But, the end of verse 3, watch this: "But do not after their works." If they recite Moses do it, but don't do what they do, because they say and, what, and don't do. They're hypocrites. I mean follow the word of God, but don't do what they do because they say something and don't do it. Oh my what a telling thing this is. They are phonies without integrity. They could teach the law of God, worship God, love righteousness, love your fellow men, hate evil, but they didn't live it.

I'm going to say something very important, listen. They couldn't live it, no way, because the flesh unredeemed has no internal ability to restrain evil and promote good. You understand that? It has none. They could be outwardly moral and outwardly ethical and they can develop very sophisticated ethics and morality and you listen and you say my that's good. It talks about God, it talks about love everybody, and they're nice to the poor and they're strong on the family, or whatever, and all this is really nice; the truth of the matter is they aren't even able to do what they're asking you to do because they have no internal power to restrain evil and promote good. Neither does anybody else who is unredeemed because it is only in redemption that you receive a divine nature, right. It is only in redemption that you are a new creation. That you are in terms of Ephesians 2:10, "Born again entering in to new life, which God has foreordained should be a life which exudes good works."

That's why Paul in Romans 7, having been redeemed says, "In my inner man I delight in the law of God," but you see unredeemed people no matter what their ethics are, no matter what their morality is cannot restrain the flesh internally and cannot promote good internally because they have an unredeemed and vile and fallen and vicious sin nature. Hypocrisy can't restrain the flesh.

You look at false religious systems and you see oh they look so moral. I think of the Mormons because they're sort of the classic illustration of this. They look so ethical. They have all these moral codes and all this morality. Their hair is even cut in a conservative manner and they operate their lifestyle very conservatively and they seem so nice and so warm hearted, and the truth of the matter is on the outside they're making demands on that and even the people who are making the demands on the rest, those who sit at the top as the prophets are unrestrained vice on the inside, because there is no capacity in an unregenerate individual to either confine the flesh or to promote righteousness. And even the things he thinks he does that are good the Old Testament says are nothing but filthy rags.

Now this characterization is carried further if you look over to verse 23 in Chapter 23, and when the Lord gets into a direct hit on the Pharisees and scribes He calls them hypocrites here for about the fourth time in verse 23, He says you pay your tithe of mint, that's this little tiny herb, anise, a small plant, cumin, that's a little tiny seed, you tithe all these little deals. You've got ten seeds and you're taking out one little seed, you've got ten herbs, you take out one little herb and you omitted the weightier matters of the law like justice and mercy and faith, why, because they can't handle that. I mean they can count seed and they push a bunch of herbs around and fool with some little plants, but they can't produce justice and they can't product mercy and they can't produce faith.

And verse 25 He says, "You clean the outside of the cup and the platter and within they're full of extortion and excess." And in verse 27, "You're like whited tombs you appear beautiful outside and within are full of dead bones and all uncleanness." And then in verse 33, He says, "You serpents, you generation of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell." And verse 28 sort of wraps it up, "Outwardly you appear righteous; inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness." You see that's the characteristic of a false spiritual leader. He tried the best he can to put a cap on his vice and it just fills him on the inside. It pushes its way out somewhere. There's no power to restrain evil.

That's why Paul writing to Timothy characterizing false spiritual leaders says, "They speak lies in hypocrisy. They can't live what they tell and their conscience is seared with a hot iron," very very vivid phrase. It's like scar tissue. I was thrown out of a car and on my back I have a whole large area of scar tissue that's not sensitive to feeling at all. You could stick a pin in my back, I'd prefer that you not experiment, because if you miss the area I will feel it, but you could stick a pin in my back and I wouldn't feel it because of that scar tissue that's there because of the friction burns as I slid along the highway.

And here he's saying these false prophets have lived this hypocrisy so long that their conscience is like scar tissue. It's formed callousness so that they are no longer even sensitive to the hypocritical nature of their existence. They are just liars who have lied so long, hypocrites who have hypocritically so long that they are desensitized to it. The truth is inside is wretchedness and rottenness that they cannot restrain.

In II Peter Chapter 2, you have a description of these false spiritual leaders in terms that are so vivid they're almost shocking. He says, and there are many places to step into this second chapter, in verse 1 there were false prophets among the people and there shall be false teachers among you who secretly bringing in damnable heresies and then he goes on to describe them. And if you look down, for example, to verse 10, it says, "They walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness. They despise authority. They are presumption and self-willed." Verse 12 calls them, "Natural brute beasts, and they speak evil of things they don't understand and will utterly perish in their own corruption."

Verse 13 calls them, "Scabs and flesh spots reveling with their own deceivings. Verse 14, "Their eyes are full of an adulterous, they're sexually unrestrained, even though outwardly they may restrain it, inwardly they're not, their hearts are exercised with covetous practice. They are cursed children. They have forsaken the right way. Verse 17: "They are wells without water. Clouds are carried with a tempest; _____ the midst of darkness is reserved forever. They are servants of corruption," verse 19, that's the coup de gras, folks, they are servants of corruption, corrupt to the very core."

Now Jude refers to them in much the same terminology that Peter does. He calls them "deluded or filthy dreamers. They defile the flesh," Jude 8, "they despise authority" again, and then it says, "They are brute beasts again. "They corrupt themselves," verse 10. In verse 12 again that idea of "scabs, clouds without water, trees with withered fruit, without fruit, twice dead plucked up by the roots, raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame, wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever." In other words the point is these aren't just nice folks who have a nice moral approach to life and just happen not to know Christ. They are on the outside calling for a standard, which their inside can't live up to. They say it they don't do it. They can't do it. Vice is not restrained nor is righteousness promoted in an unregenerate fallen heart.

Now you look at these systems today, I don't care what they are, you look at any of the religious systems that you see around the word that are false systems that don't adhere to the gospel of Jesus Christ and that add to the holy Scriptures and you will find people advocating ethical standards and advocating moral standards and binding those standards on people and the truth is in their own hearts they're filled with garbage that they can't restrain. And there's an utter absence of true righteousness. So look at their life.

The world shouldn't be shocked with a Jim Jones proves to be exactly what he was eventually. That stuff is going to ooze out somewhere, the filth and corruption of one who appeared to be so ethical and so moral and so upstanding and so concerned for the poor and the needs, and etc., etc., etc. It doesn't always come out, however, quite that dramatically. In fact, sometimes we don't even know it until final judgment.

There's a third thing that I would call your attention to and I'll stop with that one this morning. The Lord condemns him for a lack of authority and he condemns him for a lack of integrity and thirdly for a lack of sympathy, for a lack of sympathy. They were not only usurpers and hypocrites they were loveless.

Verse 4, "They bind heavy burdens and grievous to be carried and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not remove them with one of their fingers. Unbelievable! No sympathy at all. No love, no care. The picture is of a guy loading up his burro, his donkey, and if you've been in the Middle East it's incredible what they put those donkeys. It's a good thing they're dumb. They can pile that stuff high up to the top and hang down over the sides and strap it all in so that you can't find the animal. That thing is carrying stuff; we saw boxes piled 10-15feet high, those slat kind of crates. I saw a donkey with chickens hanging all over it in little crates. It's the Arab pick-up truck and they would just pile it on and pile it on and pile it on and pile it on and a guy walking alongside with nothing, carrying nothing. And some of those donkeys are listing ten degrees to the left, fourteen degrees to the right and no movement to straighten up that burden at all. That's the picture here and it would have been a vivid picture to these people. "And that's what the Pharisees do," says the Lord. They pile on regulations and rules and traditions. It's an impossible load, so that you're totally obscured and frankly it'd be better to be asleep or dead than to be alive and try to carry it all.

And not only that but the guilt of not making it and the whole of life, the biggest burden of all for them was the works righteousness system that said God is counting up your bad and He's counting up your good and if your good gets better than your bad when you die you're going to get to heaven and if your bad beats your good you're going to hell. And there was no way to get rid of the bad pile see, the bad pile just stayed there all the time, just stayed there and he just kept trying to get ahead of it with the good stuff. What a burden, what an interminable burden. They just piled it on, piled it on, piled it on, heavy burdens, the heaviest, as I said, works righteousness, the idea that you had to keep piling up your good deeds. So religion for them was depressing. Religion to them was a horrifying impossible life of demands and demands and demands and there wasn't any hope, and they never came along with the finger of grace to remove the burden, they never bothered to give the gospel that says there is no bad pile. That's the good news, folks. Jesus takes the bad pile away totally. All's left is the good, that's all.

And even when the apostle Paul preached the gospel in Galatia he went through preaching grace and forgiveness and mercy and here came these same guys dogging his steps and they went in and said, "No sir, you've got to keep the law of Moses and you've got to be circumcised, and you've got to do everything Moses said, and keep the traditions and they just wanted to pile it all back, and Paul writes to the Galatians and he is livid when he writes and he dispenses with any amenities and he says, 'I don't care who they are and I don't care if an angel from heaven shows up and give you that message, that's another gospel they ought to be damned." And he goes on to say in Chapter 5, listen, "For liberty Christ has set us free, now don't you be entangled again with that yoke of bondage."

But the Pharisees with all their religious stuff were not interested in talking about grace and forgiveness and mercy. They wanted to pile people up with this morality and then live under the interminable guilt of not being able to make it. No sympathy, no love, no tenderness, no caring, no helping to shoulder the burden. They never heard what Peter said, "Casting all your care on Him, He cares for you." They didn't know the tender shepherd that carries the little one in His own arms. Nobody ever picked their load up for them.

In fact in Mark 12:40, which is a parallel to this passage, our Lord says it's typical of the scribes and Pharisees to devour widow's houses. It's like the Simon Legree. They move in on the widow that can't pay the rent and eat up her house and make her destitute. They abuse people they grieve people.

Paul writing to Timothy in I Timothy 4:3 says, "They come around pontificating and forbidding people to marry." What a ridiculous thing. How stupid it is to make men who want to supposedly serve the Lord, for example in the Roman Catholic system, swear never to be married all their life long and to add that kind of bondage to them. It's a far cry from what the Lord intended when He said that through the apostle Peter, "Marriage is the grace of life."

And then it says in I Timothy 4:3, they make them abstain from certain kind of foods. They say there are certain things you can't eat. How foolish. Who cares whether you eat meat on Friday or not, or whatever else? God has given us all things to be received with thanksgiving.

In I Peter 2:3, I think it is, he says they make merchandise out of you, they just use you, just abuse you, that's all. You're part of the building of their empire, you're part of the feeding of their supposed spiritual egos. And it isn't new. Isaiah, he saw it, the same kind of unsympathetic attitude. Verse 1 of Chapter 10, "Woe unto them who decree unrighteous decrees." In other words they make laws that aren't even fair, aren't even right. "They turn aside the needy from justice." If you don't have the money to buy it you can't get justice. "They take away the right from the poor, that widows may be their prey, and they rob the orphans." What kind of people do that? Only religious leaders do that. Fleecing the sheep instead of feeding the sheep.

Jeremiah talked about that, Chapter 7, "Trust not in lying words." They say the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these. In other words, this is what God requires, this is what God requires, this is God's truth. Then he says, "If you thoroughly amend your ways in your doings you thoroughly execute justice between a man and his neighbor if you'll press not the stranger and the orphan and the widow, shed not innocent blood in this place, or walk after other gods to your harm, then will I cause you to dwell in this place," and so forth. Don't give me that the temple and all that pious talk, go out and be fair to a stranger and take care of an orphan and a widow, and stop devouring these people for your own ends.

And then there's that credible passage in the 34thChapter of Ezekiel, which indicts the false shepherds of Israel. Just listen to this: "And the word of the Lord came to me saying, 'Son of man prophecy against the shepherds of Israel, prophecy and say to them thus saith the Lord God unto the Shepherds woe or curse you shepherds of Israel that do feed yourselves. Should not the shepherds feed the flocks?'" You know we are criticized so often because religious leaders in the public eye are known to eat people alive, to build great empires, to amass great fortunes, to build great prestige all at the expense of poor unwitting people. How many people have been bilked and ripped off by religious charlatans only God knows. It's nothing new.

"You eat the fat and you clothe yourself with the wool." In other words, you're feeding on your own sheep. Instead of reaching out to meet their need you're devouring them, taking everything they've got. "You kill those who are fed you feed not the flock. The diseased have you not strengthened, neither have you healed the sick, neither have you bound up what was broken, neither have you brought again that which was driven away, neither have you sought what was lost? But with force and cruelty you have ruled over them." Boy that is such a definition of false religious leadership. Just brutalize people. Get everything out of them you can and build your own empire. "And when they were scattered because there's no shepherd they became food to all the beasts of the field, My sheep wandered through all the mountains, on every high hill, my flock was scattered on the face of the earth and no one sought after them; therefore, you shepherds hear the word of the Lord. As I live says the Lord God, surely because my flock became a prey and my flock became food to every beast of the field because there was no shepherd, neither did my shepherd search for my flock, but the shepherds fed themselves and fed not my flock. Oh Shepherds hear the word of the Lord. I am against the shepherds."

God's against them. And Jesus in His day looked out over the multitude and He saw them as sheep without, what, shepherds. There wasn't anybody to feed them. There wasn't anybody to pick them up and carry them. There wasn't anybody to bind up their wounds, to restore them, to carry them. There wasn't anybody to move a finger to ease the load. The Pharisees wouldn't remove the burden. The word move there could better be translated remove as the same term is in Revelation 6:14, they wouldn't remove that burden at all. They wouldn't preach a grace message. They wouldn't act in love. I'll tell you in some people's hearts it must have been in wonderful moment when they heard Jesus say this: Matthew 11:28, "Come unto Me," as opposed to them, "Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden." In other words you have this big burden, come to Me. I'll give you, what, rest. "Take My yoke and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart and you shall find rest for your souls for My yoke is easy and My burden is light." That's all in contrast to the horrifying bondage the false spiritual leaders put on the people.

It's the same today. These false religious systems bind people with ethical weight, with moral codes, with strictures of life from one kind of demand to another they have to do this. Some of them tell them who they can marry, where they can live, how many kids they can have. Some of them say you've got to do this, light these many candles, or go through here on your knees, or crawl up these steps and do that, or you've got to come and study so long these kind of things, you've got to crank out these rules and make sure you do all this. They bind that on them and never a word of grace, and never a word of forgiveness, and never tenderness and never a caring to meet the need that can only be met by forgiveness. It's just the same.

And so the first three things we see of a false teacher, false spiritual leader, they lack true authority, integrity, sympathy. Let me turn it over. Listen very carefully. You want to know how to identify a true spiritual leader? He has true authority. Where does it come from? Where does the authority come from? Right here. Never goes beyond this, always interprets this properly. He has integrity. Look at his life. Look at it over the long haul and see that he endeavors to live and love what he calls other people to live and love. Thirdly, is he sympathetic? Is his greatest heart's desire to feed or to fleece? Is he building his own empire or is he carrying those who are wounded?

Father we thank you that we've been able to look beginningly at this. We know that it's a rebuke almost unequaled in the gospels. And yet at the same time it teaches not just that negative truth, but a very positive lesson about what true shepherds are by contrast. We have real authority. Jesus told his own, "All authority is given unto Me," and in so many words said I give it to you and that authority is Your word. And oh God we must have integrity. If we preach it we have to live it. And sympathy, the compassionate Jesus who showed the tenderness and pity of the heart of God by alleviating disease and pain, set the pattern for the tender shepherds who represent Him. Save us Lord from those false leaders and give us true shepherds. We thank you in Christ's name, amen.

The Characteristics of False Spiritual Leaders, Part 2

We worship the Lord now by hearing Him speak in His word. Matthew Chapter 23 is our Chapter, the first 12 verses the particular setting for the message of the morning. Turn with me would you in your Bible to Matthew Chapter 23. And we want to continue what we started last Lord's day in looking at these 12 verses that open this great chapter. One of the duties of pastors is to warn their people. The apostle Paul told the Ephesian elders that he had spent night and day for years warning them. And he was warning them about those who would try to destroy their faith. Those who would come as false spiritual leaders to take them away from the truth.

But he was not the first to warn his people for true spiritual leaders throughout all of the history of God's redemptive plan have always been called to a ministry of warning. There must be warning as a part of the ministry, because the world is filled with false prophets, false teachers, false shepherds, false spiritual leaders. They are every place. You can see their advertisements in the church page of the Saturday paper. They occupy the places of authority in leadership in the false religions of the world, the cults, the occult; they have found their way into the forms of Christianity. They masquerade as those who represent God and do not. And the sad fact is that they damn the souls of men and women to hell while promising them heaven.

In the 15thverse of this 23rdChapter our Lord says to the scribes and Pharisees who are the false spiritual leaders of His day, "You compass sea and land to make one proselyte," or one convert, "and when he is made, you make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves." False spiritual leadership has to be dealt with with great seriousness for it damns the souls of men in the illusion that they have found God and are pleasing Him. And that is why false spiritual leaders are the most cursed of all sinners in the Scripture.

This particular chapter is the greatest single tirade against them on the pages of holy writ. And in it the Lord Jesus Christ fully denounces them. Now the chapter really falls into several parts. It begins with a call to the people to avoid these damning teachers. And then there is a condemnation of the teachers themselves and it closes with a compassionate word of pity about the people who have been under their influence being judged. So it's a very significant chapter. It's a hard chapter. It's a stern one.

And Jesus said, and I will do my best to relay to you what He said, things that are hard to hear and biting and sometimes painful, but necessary. Now the scene opens in verse 1. "Then spoke Jesus to the multitude and to His disciples." It is Wednesday as you know, the passion week, the Lord will be crucified on Friday and rise on Sunday. During this week He has been in conflict with the Jewish religious leaders. He is now in the temple. It is filled with people who are there as pilgrims and residents of Jerusalem celebrating the Passover. All day long He has been in encounter with these religious leaders.

They have stopped asking Him questions as Chapter 22, verse 46 says, because they had such profound answers given to them that they were silenced. And now in His final speech on Wednesday, and in fact, His final sermon ever given to the multitude before His death, Jesus calls the people away from these false spiritual leaders. And then He condemns the leaders themselves. And then He offers a word of pity for people who have been so deceived.

So it is the last public message of the Lord. And it is a warning to stay away from those who steal men's souls from God, from truth with the lies of false religion. Now in the verse 12 verses He talks to the multitude and the disciples, the leaders are there and they can hear everything He says, but His message is directed to the people and it is a warning to stay away from these false religious leaders. And He says they are disqualified because they lack five things and we're working our way through those five.

Remember, first they lacked authority. Notice verse 2. "When Jesus spoke He said the scribes and the Pharisees sat in Moses seat." And we pointed out the fact that they are seen here as those who took a seat they really didn't deserve. Moses seat was a title for the place of the primary teacher in a synagogue. He taught the Mosaic Law. The chair of Moses. He was the one who was to articulate the will of God as expressed in the Old Covenant.

Well, they sat down in that place of authority in the synagogue as if, in fact, they were representatives of God and God's word and God's law and the truth was they were not. They were usurpers, they didn't belong there. And they substituted the traditions that they had invented for the commandments of God, so says Matthew 15. So they were usurpers without a God given authority and without an authoritative message. Oh there were times when they articulated the law of God, but the embellished it and enhanced it and overwrote it and obscured it by their multitudeness traditions, rules, and regulations.

In fact, in John 10, Jesus said the true shepherd comes through the door of the sheepfold and those are thieves and robbers who try to climb in over the edges. And so they are thieves and robbers bent on stealing the souls of men for their own purposes. And they are denounced. They lack authority. They're not sent by God like the prophets of Jeremiah's time of whom God said the prophets speak and they are not sent. They have no word from God. They tell you what they themselves wish to tell you.

And so spiritual leaders who articulate a message other than the biblical message who usurp a seed of authority other than that which is given by God for the speaking of His truth are usurpers without authority. Secondly, we remember last week, we said they also lacked integrity. Integrity is consistency. Integrity means you live what you say. They didn't do that. Verse 3, it says at the end of the verse, "Do not after their works for they say and do not."

Now earlier in the verse, He says, "whatever they bid you observe." In other words, when they do speak for Moses, when they do reiterate mosaic law, do it, because the law of God is the law of God no matter who teaches it. So when they do relate Moses truth, insofar as they are true to the text of the Old Testament, you must respond to it. But don't do the way they do because they say the thing that ought to be done and they don't do it. In other words, there was no integrity. And it will always be that way with spiritual leaders who are false. They may advocate morality, the may advocate a system of ethics, but they'll never be able to live it because they don't have within them the power of God to restrain the flesh and promote righteousness. They can't stop evil and generate goodness. Because that only can occur in a regenerated heart.

So no matter how ethically and morally acceptable it looks on the outside, on the inside like a tomb it is full of dead men's bones. And so our Lord is saying, don't pattern your life after theirs. They say things that they do not do. And so when you want a note whether a person is a false spiritual leader, look first of all as to whether they speak the word of God and only the word of God. And if they embellish it with some self-appointed authority and some tradition and truth beyond Scripture, they have usurped a place of authority that God did not give them.

And secondly, look at their life and if their life doesn't mark them out as one who is consistent with his message in his living then write them off as false. Because no matter how good the morality they preach, if they themselves are unrestrained in their own hearts and unable to produce the very good that they call other men to abide by, they're false spiritual leaders.

Thirdly, we said last week that they lacked sympathy, verse 4. "They bind heavy burdens and grievous to be born and lay them on men's shoulders and they themselves will not remove them with one of their fingers." Now, of course, the Pharisees and the scribes were legalistic to the corp. They had developed this very sophisticated and elaborate system of rules and regulations and ceremonies and rituals and laws and they imposed those on the people, heavy, heavy burdens. And the people were told that if you do enough good things, they'll outweigh your bad things and you'll make it to heaven. If the bad things outweigh the good things, you're going to go to hell.

And they never elevated the burden. They just piled it higher and higher and higher and the burden of rules was compounded by the burden of guilt, which was imposed upon them by their inability to keep the burden of rules. And so there was a double burden and never a message of mercy and never a message of pity and never a message of grace and never a word of forgiveness and never was there any gospel that sin is removed. It was always there and it was always piling up and always accumulating and it might damn you some day unless your good deeds had a higher pile than your bad ones.

And this was an intolerable burden. They lacked sympathy. There was no sense of kindness. There was no sense of graciousness. Quite in contrast to the Lord who came and said, "my yoke is easy and my burden is light." Quite in contrast say to the apostle Paul who in writing to the Thessalonians says, "when we came to you we were gentle among you as a nursing mother nurses her baby, cherishes her child." Cherishes means to warm with body heat and Paul says in the intimacy of that marvelous imagery of a nursing baby, that's how we were with you. That's how tender we were. That's how caring we were with you. That marvelous tenderness that marks the true shepherd, that mark the Savior and those who followed Him. Very different from the unsympathetic legalism and bondage of the false spiritual leader who abuses people, who uses people, who piles and crushes them under rules and regulations which they pretend to fulfill, but don't. They were without sympathy.

Now there are two more that I want to talk about today that are most fascinating. The fourth, they lacked spirituality. They lacked spirituality. Now by this I mean a very simple point. Everything was for the outside, not the heart. All of their religion was for show. All of it was for fleshly gratification. They got ego satisfaction out of their religious parading and piosity and pompousness and ostentation. They wanted to show on the outside how pious they were so they could get the homage and reverence of the people.

They sought a physical gratification. It wasn't an issue of character with them, it was an issue of show. As it says at the end of Galatians, the Jews were into making a fair show in the flesh. Verse 5, "But all their works they do," for what reason, what does it say? "To be seen by men." To be seen by men. That was the whole thing. The whole thing was right there and that is why in Matthew Chapter 6, the Lord so directs that part of the Sermon on the Mount to false religion. He says in verse 1, "Take heed that you do not your alms," that is your giving, "before men to be seen by them." That's what they were after. And then He goes on to say, when you do your alms, don't sound a trumpet before you.

Can you imagine when the Pharisees would come into the courtyard of the women which had receptacles all on the walls where you put your offering for various things and as they came to give, they would have a guy blow a fanfare on a trumpet to announce that they had arrived. So everyone could watch them give and see how pious and how holy and how devout they were. That was the whole thing was all on the outside. It was all for show.

And then He says when you pray don't be like the hypocrites. They love to pray standing in the middle of the synagogue and in the crossroads of the streets. Here they would pray their daily prayers right in the middle of everybody, where everyone could see them and remark how holy and how virtuous and how pious they are. They would find the most public place that they could do that. And later on in verses 16 to 18 it says when you fast, don't do it like the hypocrites with a sad face. They disfigure their faces. They would put ashes on their face and make it pale and white and they would go around, I'm fasting. I'm fasting. I'm so devout. See?

It was all externalism. Jude in verse 19 of that marvelous epistle that deals so much with false spiritual leaders says this, these are they who separate themselves. What a remarkable statement. They separate themselves. They want to be considered a spiritual elite. They want to dress differently. They want to appear very pious. Sometimes they may wear a backwards collar or a fancy robe or a funny hat or all kinds of stuff all over them. And they want to appear different than other people. They want to make a display of their piosity. They want to separate themselves. They want to be creating some kind of separated identification as if they are greater than just normal folks.

By the way, the word Pharisee may come from a word that means separated. Generally, they thought of themselves as better than everybody else. Someone to be revered and looked up to and honored. They were in it for the whole objective of being seen by men. And Jesus says in Matthew 6, "They have their reward." What is it? They're seen by men, period. God will not reward them at all. In fact, He'll punish them. Then Jude 19 says, they not only separate themselves, but then this dramatic word, they are sensual.

They are psuchikos, the soul. It has to do with the soul. It has to do with the physical part of life. It has to do with our human life as opposed to the spiritual dimension in the sense of being sensitive to God. They're not spiritual in the sense of being tuned to God. They're not spiritual in the sense of considering things that are the deepest part of a man's being. They're soulish. And the word is used of the life that's in a tree or the life that's in an animal. It's just that everything is for the human dimension. Everything is for the physical world. Nothing belongs to the pneuma, the spirit which knows God.

They are soulish. They are psuchikos, but void of pneuma, void of any spiritual sense. In fact, it says in the same verse 19, "they separate themselves, they are sensual, they have not the spirit." They don't possess the spirit. Devoid of the spirit. Oh they have breadth, but not the spirit of God. These elite fleshly frauds without the Holy Spirit who parade and masquerade as if they were representatives of God are followed by millions of people. They head religious organizations. They have seminaries and colleges. They even pastor churches and teach all in the flesh, all for the gratification of their earthly appetites. And so they are characterized as those who are desirous of being seen by men. That's the whole business.

The gratification that comes when you think people think you're something very pious and very devout. It's an ego trip. Now, notice verse 5, and the Lord identifies a couple of ways in which they desired to be seen of men. He says, "They make broad their phylacteries and enlarged the borders of their garment." Everything is on the outside. The whole religious game with them is what is visible to people. Contrary to the heart. If you read 1 Corinthians Chapter 4, you will find that everyone of us who serves Christ will ultimately be judged as to the heart, as to the motives of the heart, as to the intense of the heart, as to the purposes and drives and thoughts and desires of the heart.

That's the true standard. Not so with these people. They're called in Scripture whited tombs, whited walls, graves concealed by grass, broken pots covered with silver dross. They're called wolves in sheep's clothing. They're called wells without water. Cloaks covering sin. They're even identified as hired weepers who cry for a price if the price is high enough. Everything they did is motivated by the desire for honor from men. And Jesus exposes that right here.

And they're all standing there and they've all got large phylacteries and they've got enlarged garments and they're standing there while He's rebuking them here. It's a dramatic scene in the temple court. Now what does it mean they make large their phylacteries? I'm going to tell you a little background so you'll understand. Fascinating.

In Deuteronomy, two places; in Exodus, two places; it's in Exodus 13:9, Exodus 13:16, Deuteronomy 6:8, Deuteronomy 11:18. Four places in total, two in Exodus and two Deuteronomy. The Old Testament says that the commandments of God, now listen carefully, "the commandments of God are to be upon the hand and between the eyes of God's people." All four of those verses say that. "The commandments of God are to be upon the hand and between the eyes of God's people." Now what is the significance of that?

Well, the ancient Jews had absolutely no problem with that all. They understood the significance of it. It was symbolic of saying, that the commandments of God are to be the controlling factor in what we think and what we do. Very simple, in what we think and what we do. Between the eyes, speaks of the thought processes. On the hand, of the action, the activity of life. So when you think, think thinking through the commandments of God. When you act, act acting through the commandments of God. In other words, that's the grid for all of thinking and all living.

Nobody had a problem with that. The Jews accepted that as symbolic statement, a spiritual command that they were to give attention to God's word in their thoughts and in their actions. But as the centuries passed and the Jews began to develop an external, legalistic, outward approach to religion, that which was originally understood for the heart somehow crawled outside, left the heart and became a way that you sort of parade your supposed piosity. And so they became concerned to literally put the law of God on their hand and to put the law of God on their head between their eyes on the outside.

They were following the letter of religion when their hearts were far from God, but they thought God would be pleased by their mechanical, external legalism. By the way, there is no record of phylacteries until 400 B.C. which puts it in the intertestimental period. We found some relics of them in the Qumran community down by the Dead Sea. So this is not something that the Jews always did. This didn't come until later when a system of external religion was developed. You say well, what are phylacteries?

The word basically means "a means of protection." It has to do with a means of protection. Another way to simply understand is a charm or if you like an amulet. The idea was that the Egyptians and the pagans around Israel wore charms to ward off evil spirits. The Egyptians were really into this. And as the Jews drifted away from God and more toward pagan expressions of religion, they wanted charms also. They wanted things that would ward off evil spirits and ward off demons and be means of protection. And so they developed these phylacteries as charms, as little magical boxes to ward off demons, which shows how far their religion had deteriorated.

They made them square and covered them with black leather from a clean animal, ceremonially clean animal. And then they connected to them with 12 stitches each, one stitch for each of the 12 tribes of Israel, leather straps by which they could tie one on their forehead and another on their hand. They did they left hand because they said it was closer to the heart. Now in the box they put four sections of the mosaic law. Exodus 13:1-10, Exodus 13:11-16, Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and Deuteronomy 11:13-21. In one of the boxes they put all of those on one piece of parchment. In other box, they put each one separately on a different piece of parchment.

They rolled up all these little pieces of paper and stuck them in these little boxes and strapped them on their head and strapped them on their arm. This shows you the extent to which this whole magical approach had gone. And they said that the phylacteries were more sacred than the gold plate on the forehead of the high priest which had the name of God on it, because inside the little box was God's name 23 times. So they were 23 times as sacred. By the way, they taught that God Himself wore them all the time. And if you follow Phariseeism you will find that they thought God was nothing more than a glorified rabbi who studied the law three hours a day to keep up on it.

Now another interesting thing, on the little box there is a shin. Sheen is the s-h sound letter in the Hebrew language and they put that on the little box. When they tied the straps of the box on the head in the back, they made a knot in the form of a dalet, which is the D sound letter in Hebrew. And then when they strapped the one on their hand, they had seven times around the arm and three times around the hand. And I watched one do this in a synagogue in Cairo one time. I watched the whole process through the fingers and all around and the whole objective is that when you're done, you create there a yod, which is another Hebrew letter.

So you've got shin, dalet, yod, which are the letters that form the term Shaddai, which is the name Almighty. And so they were creating a magical charm with God's name to thwart off any demons. Very pagan. Magic is what they believed in. A boy of 13 today still who's raised in an orthodox family gets his set of phylacteries when he's 13 years old. And every time he goes to prayer and the times of prayer designated in the day particularly in the morning, he puts that on when he prays. In those days men only, and still wear them, they wore them at the time of prayer, but mark this, the Pharisees wore them all the time.

So as you in your minds eye see them marching through the history of the New Testament, all the time, they have little boxes on their heads and little boxes on their left arms. One story is told in rabbinic literature of a rabbi who went to see a king. And of course, in the Jewish tradition, rabbis were superior to kings. And so the rabbi went to see the king and after seeing the king he turned to walk away and he turned his back to the king and walked out. Well, you don't do that with a king. In ancient history when you go out, you go out backwards like this bowing and bowing and bowing until you're out of his sight. You don't turn your back on him. The king was so irate he called his soldiers to attack the man and kill him for his effrontery and as they moved toward the rabbi the straps of his phylacteries began to blaze with fire. And they dared not touch him.

Strange fairytale that gives you some idea of how they thought this provided protection. Now it wasn't that they just wore them, which would have been bad enough, but verse 5 says, they made them large. The bigger the box, the more pious you were. You see? It's really remarkable. Bigger boxes and wider straps demonstrate greater devotion to God. You see, it's all outside, just to be seen of men. And even today you see them do that especially when you go to Israel. In very public places, it's a parade of supposed devotion utterly devoid of heart.

And then it says in verse 5, "they enlarged the borders of their garments." The garments is probably implied. It just says they enlarged the borders, but it means their garments. You see back in Numbers 15, verses 37-41, God did give them a very interesting principle. He said, look when you make your clothing, put on your clothing, little tassel, taleth, the phylacteries are called tethalyn. The fringe is talethso they were to...they were into the talethand the tethalyn. Now the talethwas just a little hem or a little fringe on a Jew's garment to mark him out as set apart unto God. And it was an actual outward mark. Jesus wore them on His garment according to Matthew 9:20. It was a common thing.

But the Pharisees made theirs bigger and bigger and bigger to parade some kind of devotion to God. By the way, they were on the outer garment in the time of Christ. A little later in Jewish history they went to the inner garment and today since the orthodox Jews were black suits, they're on that prayer shawl. Have you ever seen a prayer shawl that an orthodox Jew pulls down over his head and has a blue line in it and some blue fringe on it? Well, that's what's...that's the remnant of the talethto mark them out as Jews.

So here they came parading with the little boxes on their heads and the big fringes hanging off their garments as if they were utterly devoted to God. All that for show. All that to parade supposed spirituality. Truth is they lacked it. They lacked spirituality altogether. A final lack comes in verse 6, they lacked humility. Not only authority, integrity, sympathy, and spirituality, but they lacked humility. It says, "they loved the uppermost places at feasts." What does that mean? They want to sit at the speaker's table.

They want to sit up by the host. You see the seat on the right and the left hand of the host was the seat you wanted. That was the seat of honor. That was the seat of dignity. But they wanted to be in the chief place where they could be thought of as the great people. They loved it. James and John fell into that didn't they? Said to their mother can we sit on the right and the left hand of the Messiah in His kingdom? You see they were used to that in their culture. Those were the seats of prominence. They loved that. They loved to be welcomed as if they were some great person.

And when there was a feast, they wanted to be recognized as the supreme guests of honor. And then it says in verse 6, "they loved the chief sits in the synagogues." They wanted to sit on the platform. There was a raised platform in the front like there is in this place and they wanted to sit up here where everyone was facing them and looking and seeing them. And they wanted to come in with their little boxes on and their enlarged garments and they wanted...in fact, it wasn't a bad idea to come in late when everyone could see and you would come up and take your place with the dignitaries who prayed and the dignitaries who read the Scripture. Parade ostentatiously, proudly and boastfully your supposed pioty before everybody.

I guess that's why I have such an aversion to sitting on the platform. That's why I always sit down there. People ask me why do you sit down here? Why do you sit down here? I just don't want to...I don't want to be related to that kind of stuff. I mean, I'm just one of you and I just happen to have a gift to teach and God's called me to teach. So when it's time to teach I'll come up and do that. When it's time to pray, I'll come up and do that. But I'm not going to elevate myself above you as if I'm some one more devout or pious than you are because that's not true and I seek not to be lifted up in any way.

But they were in to religion for show, see. I mean, that was the whole ballgame, prestige and fleshly gratification. Honor from men. That's a sad thing and you know, the church has really kind of muffed this up. I go into some churches and the chairs you see on the platform look like thrones. They really do. Makes me very nervous to sit in those things. But we get into that just like they did.

And I'm not saying that everyone who does that has wrong motives. The issue here is the heart, isn't it? I mean, they sought that. They lived for that. I mean sometimes you do that because that's tradition or that's the way people have always done it or you're their guests and you've got to do it, you know. I mean, I sit at my share of speaker's tables and my share of church thrones and I hope my heart doesn't get corrupted by it, but I don't like it. I don't like that personally.

And another thing they liked in verse 7, "they liked formal salutations in the marketplace." In other words, when they were walking through the marketplace, they wanted to be recognized for they were and properly saluted with the dignity that their office deserved. In fact, one heathen governor or Caesarea is portrayed in the rabbi's writings as saying that he considered their faces as if they were the faces of angels. They really had a very lofty opinion of themselves. They give in their writings very elaborate directions about how you're supposed to treat them in their office and their rank and their...if you don't treat them that way you're in a lot of trouble. There's even lists of things that you...to do to people who don't treat rabbis the way they ought to be treated.

They like formal titles. They wanted to be called by titles. They wanted to be acknowledged as great ones. In fact, one rabbi wrote that he was supposed to be buried in white because he wanted the whole world to know how worthy he was to appear in the presence of God. And Jewish writings, I read this week, one thing that said that was a debate in heaven and an argument ensued between the group of rabbis and God. And they had to go get another rabbi to solve the dispute. Mishnah says, Jewish codification of law says, "It is more punishable to act against the words of the scribes than against the words of the Scripture."

So when they went through the market, and Jesus is saying this, and they're there listening to this, they love to be called by men rabbi, rabbi. Now that doesn't mean a lot in our culture, because rabbi is not a word that we're accustomed to. What it means is teacher, teacher. But more than that, because teacher isn't even the right word in our culture because a teacher is so broad, there are so many things in a culture like ours that's not religious, but to say teacher in a Jewish culture is to say supreme one, superior one, your excellency, most knowledgeable one, great one. The Latin equivalent, this is painful, is doctor, docura.

This is doctor. Yes, doctor so and so. They love those titles that push them up, see. That elevated them above everybody else. You just...if you just say hey I want you to meet Joe. Hey Joe, nice to meet you. As soon as they say this is Dr. Joseph So and So, oh Dr. So and So. I mean, that's very intimidating. People say to me, well, people call you John. Why don't they call you Doctor? I say, look I'm not even a nurse let alone a doctor.

But some people like...some people like the elevation that comes. It feeds the ego, you know. Dr. So and So, as if that means you're some great, great one. They wanted to be called that. They demanded to be called that. And another thing they demanded to be called is down in verse 10, master, master. Interesting word. It's hard to just be very dogmatic in nailing down the meaning of ekakothetas. The best thing you could do to identify it is leader. They love to be called leader, see.

They wanted to be called doctor, knowledge, leader, authority. And another word they love to be called is in verse 9, father. They wanted to be called rabbi or teacher or doctor because that spoke of the fact that they were the source of knowledge. They wanted to be called master because that indicated that they were the source of direction in guiding. By the way some equivalate...give equivalent meaning to the word professor and the word master or leader ekakothetas. But the third one was father, and they loved that because that spoke of the fact that they were the source of spiritual life. They were the father of spiritual life. They gave spiritual life.

So they wanted to be called teacher, source of knowledge. They wanted to be called master as it were or leader, source of all direction. They wanted to be called father, source of spiritual life. You know something? All of that was what they sought. I have a real problem with that. I don't want to be called any of that. I just don't want to corrupt my own soul unnecessarily with those kinds of things and have my ego react and respond to those.

And I'm not saying that everybody who is called doctor somebody or who has a Master's Degree in something or is a professor of somewhere is necessarily corrupt. I just think we not to seek those things. That's what our Lord says here. But they love that. Oh that's exactly what they wanted. Now, the word father is interesting. That's found its way into religion hasn't it? Primarily in the Roman Catholic church and the Anglican Episcopal church. If you were in the church of England today and you're a bishop, your proper title is Right Reverend Father in God.

Can you imagine introducing me to someone and saying this is our pastor Right Reverend Father in God John MacArthur? Mercy. I mean if...listen, if...it'd be one thing if I was the teacher, but I'm not. It'd be one thing if I was the leader, but I'm not. It'd be one thing if I was spiritual father, but I'm not. I'm not any of those things; not any of those things. By the way, the word abbot in the Roman Catholic church comes from Abba Father. The word Pope even comes from a form of the word Father and the word Father obviously comes from Father. And...it's just a little linguistic insight.

But that's characteristic of a false spiritual leadership viewpoint. Now look at verse 8 and watch what happens in the midst of this. The Lord turns to His disciples I believe at this point and He says, "be not ye called teacher." Don't you be called rabbi. Why? "For one is your teacher." Who? Christ. That's why I said, I'm not your teacher. I'm not your teacher. Listen, I have no corner on truth. I have no special in with God that I get the truth from Him independent of the word of God. Christ is the teacher. I just tell you what He said, right? So don't pat me on the back and call me doctor. I didn't event this information. If I invented it, don't believe it. It's not true.

I'm not the teacher. So don't stick on person up above another person as if that person is the source of truth. And the leveler comes in verse 8 at the end of the verse, "you are all," what, "brothers." Nobody's a great one. Nobody's a superior. He just puts all the same level. We're all brothers. You have one teacher and that's Christ. He is the didaskalos. He taught us the truth which we pass on. Well, we really lose sight of this in the church.

And there is a place for honoring those that God has given us to pass on the truth. There is a place for respect. There's a place for admiring, for giving respect, rendering the due honor to those who are over us as Paul says to the Thessalonians, as the writer of Hebrews says in Chapter 13. There's a place for that, but there's no place to seek that, to desire that, to clamor for that. It's better to have no titles and no degrees and no anything than to play an ego-centered game which endeavors to push you up and keep other people in their place. So the reverend, doctor, bishop, professor, abbot, pope, father, so forth and so on is artificial. We're all brothers. And if we ever teach truth, it's because the master teacher taught us.

And in verse 9, don't call anybody father, "don't call anybody father upon this earth." There's not a soul on this earth that gave you spiritual life, right? Nobody. Nobody here gave you spiritual life. The Sanhedrin members like to be called father as if they were the source of spiritual life. And men in the ministry of some churches today want to be called father as if they are the source of spiritual life. They are not. Verse 9 says "one is your Father," and He is where? "He is in heaven." The source of spiritual life is the heavenly father, not some human person.

To call a man father or a higher ranked priest holy father is unacceptable, a violation of Scripture. It just isn't right, because none of us is the teacher and none of us is the leader and none of us is the Father. That brings us to the last word leader, verse 10. "Neither be ye called master or leader for one is your leader again Christ." Christ is the teacher. Christ is the guide. And Christ is the source of life. So don't be called master. We have so many problems. We just love that. We want to get a bachelor's degree and a master's degree and a doctor's degree and then we want to keep going up just putting these barriers between ourselves and the common folks.

I can understand it happening in the world, but it shouldn't happen among those who are all brothers in Christ. None of us is any great one. None of us is the depository of all truth. None of us the leader among leaders who has all insights. None of us is the spiritual life source of anybody. So he says to the people. You stay away from these false leaders. Now you disciples, you be true leaders and you avoid the things that they got into and don't be like them. How should we be?

Verse 11, "He that is greatest among you shall be your," what, "your servant." Your servant, servant leadership. You're not going to have a title if you're a servant. You're not holy reverend doctor bishop slave. You're not right reverend father master guide professor foot washer. You see, greatness consists in self-giving. Greatness consists in humble outpouring of life for others. It's the servant leader. If you want to be great the serve, that's all. Jesus was just Jesus in terms of His earthly name. And He served and He washed feet and He gave His life. And He said "The son of man has not come to be ministered unto, but to," what, "to minister." Or serve, give his life. That's the point.

So he that is greatest isn't the one with the most degrees and the most titles and the highest rank, but whoever is the lowest servant. Whoever's the best server, whoever's the most selfless. Whoever gives and gives and gives. And then verse 12 is that paradoxical divine statement that we have become familiar with in our study of Scripture. "Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be brought low and he that shall humble himself shall be lifted up."

Just a reverse of the world. You want to be up, push yourself up. Push yourself. The Lord says, push yourself down, He'll lift you up. Push yourself up, He'll put you down. No, you can take your choice. You want to be useful to the Lord, put yourself down. Down in the role of a servant, down in the role of a sinner who has no right except a God-given right, who has no knowledge except God-given knowledge, who has no wisdom except God-given wisdom, who is not one who gives spiritual life except God-given spiritual life. When you see yourself as simply a servant, that's what helps you to understand where God wants you.

And then in God's own time and God's own purpose He'll lift you up. That's what Peter had in mind, didn't he, when he was writing Chapter 5 of 1 Peter. He said, "You are to feed the flock of God. Take the oversight," verse 2, "not by constraint, but willingly. Not for money, but of a ready mind, eager mind. Neither as being lords over the charge allotted to you." Not like you're dominating it or being lord over it, but as examples. And then he says, "Be subject one to another, clothed with humility for God resists the proud and," what, "gives grace to the humble." Self exaltation is no place in those who represent Christ.

Andrew Bernarr was a dear man of God years back. He once said he could always tell when a Christian was growing and the way he could tell when a Christian was growing is the Christian would always talk more and more of Christ and less and less of himself. And he said it was like the Christian seeing himself get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until like the morning start he gave way to the rising sun. False spiritual leaders, no authority, no integrity, no sympathy, no spirituality, no humility.

So what is a true spiritual leader? What is a true spiritual leader? Divine authority where does that come from? Word of God. Integrity, his life matches his message. Sympathy, he's filled with grace and mercy and pity and care. Spirituality, it's the heart he's concerned about not the outside, not the show. Humility, instead of lacking humility he manifests the heart of a servant who seeks to be humble and let God lift him up. Let's bow in prayer.

Lord God, we acknowledge You as our teacher. We acknowledge You as our Father. We acknowledge You as our leader. And if any of us teach, if any of us bring the message of spiritual life, if any of us act to lead to Your people, it is only in Your behalf. It is only with delegated authority, delegated power, delegated responsibility. So we seek no names, no titles, no honors, but the honor of service. We seek not to be lifted up but humbled. Give us that perspective oh Lord. And protect this people from the false. Help us to look carefully at those who come as leaders and mark them out. Do they speak with the authority of God in the word? Do they live with the integrity of a life that matches the message? Do they demonstrate the sympathy of one who's yoke is easy and who's burden is light? Do they show true spirituality? That is a greater concern for the heart than the exterior and is there a meekness and humility in them as opposed to a proud self-serving, egoistic, ostentatiousness?

Help us Lord to examine those things that we might be alert and that we might help others not to be drawn in and be made twice the child of destruction. We do Lord know that the kingdom goes forward, but not without its enemies. Help us to be alert to that.

The Condemnation of False Spiritual Leaders, Part 1

Let's open our Bibles together to the 23rdChapter of Matthew's gospel. We are involved in a study of false spiritual leaders; false spiritual leaders. I hear a lot today about the threat of communism. I hear a lot today about threat of humanism and many evangelical Christians are in great concern about these issues. I hear about the threat of secularism. The pressure of an immoral society and how we've got to battle on all of these fronts. But communism and secularism and humanism and immorality and all of that put together does not pose as great a threat to Christianity as to false spiritual leaders.

Without question, this is the most significant issue facing the church, and it always has been in God's redemptive history. And that's why our Lord saves His most blistering words, His most strong condemnation for false spiritual leaders. And we're going to see as we look at Chapter 23, verse 13 and following why this is so. Why it is that the threat of false religion is so much more severe than any other threat that could possibly face Christianity in the world or face the world itself.

Let me begin by reminding you that Isaiah said, "and it shall be as with the people so with the priests. In other words, people follow their spiritual leader. However it is with the priests, that's how it's going to be with the people. Jeremiah put it this way. "The prophets prophesy falsely and the priests rule by doing what they prophesy and my people love to have it so." Give them lying prophets and lying leaders and they'll love it. And God condemns the false leaders of Jeremiah's time when he says, "many shepherds have destroyed my portion underfoot. They have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness."

In other words, they have trampled down, as it were, the garden of God. You see people follow their leaders. And false spiritual leaders have followers. And many of their followers are those who are seeking spiritual answers. Those who are seeking religious answers. And they have been turned away from the truth to a lie. A severe threat. Now in this text, the Lord Jesus confronts and reveals the true nature of the false spiritual leaders of Israel, the scribes, and the Pharisees.

They were the religious leaders. Jesus attacks them head on directly beginning in verse 13. He has already warned the people about them in verses 1-12 along with warning the disciples not to be like them. In the first seven verses He said, you are to be warned about them. And then in verse 8 to the disciples, you're not to be like them. You be true spiritual leaders manifesting the true attitude and the true heart of one who really serves God. And then beginning in verse 13 He turns from the crowd which He was warning and the disciples which He was exhorting, to those false religious leaders. And He is in the temple court, you remember, a couple of days before His death. The crowd is there swelled by the Passover season. The leaders are there and He confronts the leaders in the face of the whole crowd so that everyone hears exactly what He calls them.

This is His last public sermon. And His last public sermon dealt with the most important subject. He calls those false spiritual leaders what they are and warns the people to stay away from them, because He knows that they must avoid the error if they're to follow the truth. This great final sermon of Jesus is not a sermon on salvation. It is not a sermon on the power of God in the life of a believer. It is not a sermon on His resurrection. It is a sermon against false teachers.

It's a very important issue. It isn't the first time He has condemned them. He condemned them quite often. Back in Chapter 7 in the first sermon in Matthew's gospel, He told the people to beware of the false prophets who come as wolves dressed like shepherds and they don't spare the flock. So His first sermon was a warning about them, and His last sermon is a warning about them. And we need to be reminded today that our society needs to be warned not only about communism and humanism and secularism and immorality and all the other things that we hear so much about, but we need to warned continually about false spiritual leaders. And for some reason even evangelical Christianity seems a little bit hesitant to deal with this. More hesitant by the way than the Lord Jesus Himself.

Who told the people that they were false because they lacked authority, they lacked integrity, they lacked sympathy, they lacked spirituality, and they lacked humility. Told them that in the first seven verses of this chapter. And now He turns to them and tells them exactly what He thinks of them and what is true of them and what is about to come to pass on them. And this is a warning not only to that day and that people, but to us today, because we have false spiritual leaders just as they did. They've always been around. It seems today that they flourish in a way that's beyond anything we've ever known in the past in our society.

And it seems as though the further we move away from our Christian foundations, the greater the flourishing of false religious systems becomes. And not only here, but all around the world and we have to be warned. That's why Paul said, "night and day for the space of three years, I cease not to warn you." And he said that in Acts 20 to the Ephesian elders and what was he warning them about? He was warning them about grievous wolves who would enter in not sparing the flock and perverse men from among you rising up; false spiritual leaders.

The Lord in the last sermon then is calling the people away from the scribes and Pharisees and to those who manifest the truth in life and message. His own apostles being obviously the object He wanted to draw His people to. He knew He was going away and He wanted to be sure these people moved away from the influence of these evil men to hear the message of His apostles. And so we must be warned today that we must follow true spiritual leaders who seek not to be served, but to serve. Who seek not to fleece the flock, but feed the flock. Who seek not the highest honors, but no honor at all. Who do not scatter the flock, but gather the flock. And who like David know that it is the goodness of God that has made them great and like Jesus "do not break a bruised reed and do not quench smoking flax."

We must follow true spiritual leaders who know that the sheep are God's not their own for their own purposes and their own ends. So having warned the people, he turns to these leaders and from verse 13-33 he gives them seven woes; seven curses. Now if you have in your text eight, it's because they've included verse 14. And the older manuscripts of the New Testament do not include verse 14, which is to say that if in the early manuscripts you don't have this verse and it shows up in the later manuscripts, it's usually evidence that it was added later. That it wasn't in the original. What is said in verse 14 is true about the Pharisees and scribes. In fact, it looks like a scribe took it out of Mark Chapter 12 and also Luke Chapter 20. Both of those Chapters mention the same kind of things. And probably a well meaning scribe thought that it fit in so well he just took it from Mark and Luke and put it here.

But when we get into the older manuscripts it doesn't appear, so we've chosen to set it aside for this particular study and we'll get to it in the day when we get to Mark and Luke, probably in heaven. And so with verse 14 being added later on to the original text that leaves us with seven curses; seven woes. And folks, I can only tell you that it's a volatile scene. It is an unbelievable passage. And if you could only have reconstructed on your mind the drama of the moment, because this in front of the whole crowd at the Passover season is an absolute devastation and condemnation of all the religious leaders to their faces in front of the whole crowd.

Now this kind of confrontation seems to be foreign to us today. We seem to be resistant to that. It seems as though if you speak against any false system or any false religious leader or spiritual leader people pounce on you as if you don't know the meaning of graciousness and love and kindness and all of that. But that is a very warped perspective. And this text ought to show you why it is so.

This is the Lord Jesus. Liberal theologians have decided that He wouldn't say these things, so they would just eliminate them. The Jesus that they liked wouldn't say this. So they just say it isn't so. He didn't say it, but He did. And out of His mouth comes the most fearful, the most terrible profusion of words that He ever uttered on this earth. They fly from His lips, someone said, like claps of thunder and spears of lightening. The rejection of Him by these leaders with their hearts that has led astray the people is cause for divine judgment, and this is it. Pronounced upon them.

It's a serious passage. I mean it is very serious. It's seriousness can be seen, the tone of it can be revealed by the terms that He uses. Verse 13, hypocrites. Verse 15, hypocrites. Verse 15, He calls them children of hell. Verse 17, fools and blind. Hypocrites in verse 23, 25, 27, 29, and then in verse 33, He calls them snakes and vipers set for the damnation of hell. Very strong language. He is definitely not tickling their ears. He is not saying what they wish to hear. And He says it with a deadly calm and a crushing power.

And yet there is mingled in it a certain sense of sorrow. It is not just a scathing rebuke of judgment apart from any emotion. It is filled with a certain melancholy, a certain pathos that ultimately breaks forth in verse 37 as Jesus says, "oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them who are sinned unto thee how oft I would have gathered thy children together even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings and you would not." There's pathos in that.

And Luke tells us that on the day in which He rode into the city and knew of it's coming judgment, when He came near He beheld the city it says and He wept over it. So there was pain involved with this judgment. It is not just a dispassioned cry, it is a very passionate, sorrowful cry. And so we must see a balance. We see on the one hand the fiery righteousness of God. And we see on the other hand, the sympathetic love as He sees the curse coming. He knows it's inevitable, gives it as it must come and yet His heart is aching because of the doom of the people.

There are two key words that'll help you with this section. The first is the word woe, which appears seven times and identifies each of the distinctive thoughts. The word woe in the Greek is a most interest word. It's this word, lie, which doesn't even sound like a word. It sounds more like a painful guttural cry. Lie, that's what it is. It's an onomatopoetic word. That is it sounds like its meaning. It is a word that just utters similar to the Hebrew word to howl, which is the word hoi. It's a word used, for example, in the Septuagint to express grief, despair, sorrow, dissatisfaction, pain, and the threat of losing your life. It's used in the New Testament to speak of sorrow, to speak of judgment. It's the mingling of punishment and pity, cursing and compassion.

You could almost translate with the word alas; alas. And that's the word you find in Revelation talking about Babylon in Chapter 18; alas. It's as if to say inevitable judgment is coming, but oh how sad is that inevitable judgment. Judgment then is mingled with pity in the word woe. And there's another word that dominates the text and that's the word hypocrite. And that is the word hupokrites. It originally came from a term which mean actor. Someone who played a part on a stage. Someone who pretended to be something he wasn't.

And it was a good word that I guess entomologically in its origination, but it came to be a very bad word and finally it came to mean deceiver; deceiver. One who pretends in an evil sense, who acts evilly. In fact, William Barclay says it basically could be seen to describe someone who manifests what he calls "theatrical goodness who parades an outward goodness but inwardly is evil. Who wants people to see him give." Such as Jesus condemned in Matthew 6. "Who wants people to see him pray and to see him fast and his motto is to me be the glory." It is the man who is the deceiver, the actor who plays outwardly as if he is pious and inwardly is not.

So here you have a rather pitiful pronunciation of doom on spiritual phonies who masquerade as if they are spiritual leaders when, in fact, they are not at all spiritual leaders. Now I want to add another thought. When Jesus says woe, woe, woe all these times, this is not a wish, this is the statement of a fact. His condemnations here are factual, not wishful. It isn't like people today might say well damn you which seems to be a rather popular phrase. It is not just a wish that you be damned, it is a fact. It is a statement of absolute fact. Divine judgment is set in motion when Jesus says you're cursed. That's not a wish, that's a fact.

And so this is indeed a curse that worked its way out in reality and the death and eternal damnation of these false religious leaders. Now as we look at it, I want us to see not only its historic import, but I want us to see it's contemporary significance, because it is equally true today that false spiritual leaders are condemned by God in the same way and we need to deal with them in the same way and we need to be warned about them in the same way with the same kind of strong language and the same kind of confrontiveness that Jesus confronted them and warned the people, so do we need to confront them and warn the people today.

Now the woes can be divided up, and I give you a little outline. I'm just going to cover two of them this morning and because I want you to see them because they're so powerful. The first one is false spiritual leaders are cursed for exclusion. They are cursed for exclusion. What do I mean by that word? They keep people out of the kingdom. Now just think about that folks, they keep people out of the kingdom. That is a definition of false religion. That is a definition of false spiritual leadership. It does not help anybody. We can't say oh they're nice folks and they're doing what they think is best and they're helping some folks over their trouble and they're giving them some moral standards to live by, blah, blah, and so forth and so on.

False spiritual leaders keep people out of God's kingdom. Very strong. Look at verse 13. "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees," He goes right at them. Names them hypocrites. "For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. For you neither go in yourselves, neither allow them who are entering to go in." We'll stop at that point. What a statement. He starts out by telling them they keep people out of God's kingdom. Now, of course, they believe that they were the ones who were...who operated the door, see. They believed they were ones who let people in. They believed they had the keys to the kingdom. They knew the way in.

He says, you keep people out. It's very much like the words of the apostle Paul in Romans Chapter 2 when in condemning the Jews he says, "you call yourself a Jew. You rest in the law. You make your boast of God that you know His will, that you approve what is excellent. That you're instructed out of the law. You're confident that you're a guide of the blind and a light to those that are in darkness. And an instructor of the foolish and a teacher of babes. You have a form of knowledge and the truth in the law." And he goes on to say and you don't have any of that stuff and "you make God's name blasphemed among Gentiles."

See they lived under the idea that they could keep...they could let people into the kingdom, they knew the truth, they knew the law, they knew the entrance, they were the light in the darkness, they were the guides of the blind. They had it all and the truth was they kept people out. They never let them in. Now the kingdom here, did you notice it says "you shut up the kingdom of heaven?" The kingdom of heaven is this sphere of salvation. The place where God rules and God rules His redeemed. God rules those who belong to Him, who enter by grace through faith. And so they shut up salvation. They keep people from getting saved. That's what it says.

There's a little phrase there, you'll notice in verse 13, "against men." That's an important phrase. It's very vivid because it's literally before men. So that it says you shut the doors of the kingdom of heaven before men. The picture is that men are moving in that direction and right in their faces you slam the door, very vivid. And it also is supported by the fact that the end of the verse says neither permit them that are answering to go in or that are endeavoring or continuing to enter.

The idea is here are people going that way, entering in, even continuing to enter in, and right before them, you shut the door. These aren't people running away. These are people coming in that direction. To put it in its historical context, Jesus came into the world to announce the kingdom, right? To bring the kingdom. to bring salvation. But before Jesus came, He had a forerunner who's name was John the Baptist. And John came to prepare the way of the Lord. And his message was repent. In other words, turn from your sin for the kingdom is at hand. The king is coming. Get ready for the kingdom. And all Israel went out to the Jordan River, it says, and they were there being baptized. They were there confessing their sins. They were there getting their hearts ready for the Messiah.

In other words, this mass of people in Israel were moving toward the kingdom. They were starting to make steps toward the kingdom. Repenting of their sin and trying to get their lives right and listening to the preaching of this prophet who confronted their evil lives and called them to obedience. In fact, it says in Chapter 3 of Matthew verse 5, "Then went out to him Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region round about the Jordan and they were baptized by him in the Jordan confessing their sins."

And right then the Pharisees showed up and the Sadducees and he said "oh generation of snakes," you snakes, "who warned you to flee from the wrath to come. Bring forth the fruit of repentance." That's pretty confrontive stuff. But He knew why they were there. Here were all these people getting ready to move toward the kingdom and here came the very guys who would slam the door in their face. The false religious leaders. So the picture is one of movement of flow toward the kingdom and these people slammed the door in the faces.

This is the pursuit of the person who's looking for religious answers, who's searching for God, who's searching for some spiritual reality. And they shut up the kingdom. How'd they do that? By denying the word of God, misinterpreting the word of God, denying that Jesus was the Messiah. Denying His deity. Denying salvation by grace. Denying the need for repentance. They shut it in the faces of the people with a works righteousness system that had no place for Jesus Christ.

Now the point that its making here is that false spiritual leaders damn peoples' souls to hell. So you don't deal with this lightly. Very severe. And if I don't get too excited about fighting humanism on the one hand and fighting secularism on the other hand and fighting immorality on this side and fighting certain political battles over here on the other side, you can understand that I think there's a more important battle. And the battle that I see that must be fought is the battle for the clear and popular articulation of the truth as over against the error that's out there.

That's why the human cry of my heart is to get men of God and the people of God to know what they believe and articulate it loudly and clearly and confront error with boldness and courage. That's what we need. That's what the church needs. The church needs to know the word of God and it needs to take its stand on the truth against false religious leaders. They damn men's souls. Paul writes to Timothy and says they propagate damnable heresies and doctrines of demons.

There's a most interesting statement in Luke 11:52. It says...I think it's in verse 52. Yes, it says "Woe unto you scribes," or lawyers or scribes, "for you have taken away the key of knowledge and you entered not in yourselves and them that were entering in you hindered." False religious leaders keep people from being saved, folks. That's what I'm trying to tell you. That's what Jesus said. And we can't treat that lightly. We can't treat with some kind of indifference. We can't say well, we don't want to say anything. We want to express love. We want to be kind. That's what the liberals condemned Jesus for doing. If Jesus did it, we have a mandate from Him to act as He acted.

And the difference comes in Matthew 16 where Jesus says to Peter, "I give you the keys to the kingdom." You see the true teaches, Peter, the apostles, and all who follow in their doctrine, we have the keys. We open the door and let folks in. These people shut the door in their faces by their lies and false religion. I talked not long ago to a religious leader and I said, "Doesn't it bother you that you never give people the saving gospel of Jesus Christ that can save them from eternal hell? Doesn't that bother you?" Well, he was very angry with me. But I was sort of angry with him.

In fact, that kind of thing raises my righteous blood temperature very high. You see men's souls are at stake. And these people work for hell, the scribes and the Pharisees did. This is no small issue. No small issue. Let me just show you how you can characterize them. Go to the 9thChapter of John's gospel and a very familiar account of a blind mind who was born blind for the glory of God's sake. And this blind man was healed by Jesus in a wonderful expression of divine power and compassion. And having been healed by Jesus he then became a very interesting topic of discussion for the religious leaders who needed some way to explain how this guy was healed. He went the...the religious leaders went to the parents and the parents didn't want to get in trouble so they said asked him. He's a big boy. Verse 21, he's of age, ask him, he'll tell you.

So these words spoke his parents because they feared the Jews. They were afraid. They knew the Jews hated Jesus, the Jewish leaders. That's what the Jews refers to. And by the way, the phrase the Jews most often in the gospel refers to the Jewish leaders. "For they had agreed already," verse 22 of John 9, "they had agreed already if any many did confess that he was Christ he should be thrown out of the synagogue." I mean, it didn't matter who it was. If somebody shows up and say they're the Messiah, throw them out.

Hmmm, unsynagogued. In other words, they had no room in their theology for the Messiah. They had already made up their minds. So in verse 24, they said to the blind man, look you better praise God for what happened to you and not this man. We know this man is a, what, sinner. They called Jesus a sinner. And in verse 34 they really rebuked the blind man when he tries to explain who Jesus must be. They said, "you were born in sin. Do you teach us?" Well, the implication of that is that we weren't. Are you saying you weren't born...you were born in sin. Are you teaching us and they threw him out. See they don't want to be confused of the facts.

They're in the business of sending people to hell. They're in the business of damning the souls of people and they will damn their souls by a denial of the Messiahship of Christ, the deity of Christ, the power of Christ, the work of Christ, the gospel of grace. Whatever it takes to damn men's souls, that's exactly what they want to do, false spiritual leaders.

In Acts 4:17 when the church began to move with power and healing and preaching the gospel, the Sanhedrin got together and they had to stop the message. They said what are we going to do with these men, verse 16. "For indeed a notable miracle has been done by them as manifest to all those who dwell in Jerusalem and we can't deny the miracle." What are we going to do? But that it spread no further among the people. In other words, it had nothing to do with truth. They didn't care if it was true or real or whatever. Just stop it, that's all. "Let us threaten them that they speak henceforth to man in this name." That is the name of Christ. "They called him and commanded them not to speak...called them and commanded them not to speak at all or teach in the name of Jesus."

Wow, see they didn't want anything to do with Jesus. They just slammed the door. Look at 1 Thessalonians 2 for a moment there's several verses here that you might overlook and I think they tie in so very, very well. He's talking here about the Jews who persecuted the church in verse 14. The churches of God in Judea are in Christ Jesus and have suffered from their own countrymen and so forth, even the Jews. And then verse 15, he talks about the Jews and he says "who both killed the Lord Jesus and their own prophets." Listen, when people want to say they didn't kill the Lord, you can't say that. The Scripture says they did. I mean, that was their pattern all along, they killed their prophets. They didn't want to hear the truth.

"They killed the Lord Jesus and their own prophets and they persecute us," Paul says, "and they please not God and they're contrary to all men." In other words, they're not helping people. They're not helping people at all. They forbid us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved. They're trying to keep people from getting saved is what they're doing. Now when you look at the cults, that's what they're trying to do.

I'll never forget being in my office and I got a call from a guy who said, "I'm leaving your church. I'm going to be a Mormon." He was a young fellow and I knew him. And I said, "what are you saying?" He said, "well, I've been learning from Mormonism and I'm going to be going to that movement. In fact, there are some coming over now to teach me." So I ended the conversation and got in my car and beat them to his house. Right over here. And I knocked on the door and when I came in, he was just as white as he could be. And I said, "I just want to confront them. I just have some things to say to them." And I told him they were going to damn his soul if he didn't know Jesus Christ. They would tie him up. I said, "I don't know whether you're a Christian or not, but if you're not, they're going to damn your soul." And I gave him the strongest speech as I could. And I was irate.

And then those two arrived and it was a very interesting conversation. Because I was in the Spirit of Matthew 23 at the time. And I was in absolutely no mood to discuss any doctrine or any theology or to do anything but pronounce curses upon them based on the word of God, which I proceeded to do as fast and furiously as I possibly could and unloaded everything I could think to say about evil soul damning people who deny Christ and His saving gospel and so forth and so forth and so forth.

Well, I haven't had too many occasions like that in my life, but I wish to God that all of us as Christians had more courage. I don't know how those two reacted ultimately to that. I doubt that they'll ever forget it. It was one of those kind of things. And maybe sometime the Lord can use what was said, but I do know this that we become so...oh we become so victimized by the sympathetic people who don't want us to cause any struggles or trouble and don't want to offend anybody and so we allow them so often to go their merry way sending people eternally to hell. And that's just inconceivable.

Works righteousness systems, false religious systems spawned by false religious leaders always will be the strongest opponents of the gospel of grace. And we have them today absolutely every place. They're everywhere. I mean, you can't even...you can't even deal with them all. It's an absolutely traumatic experience for me to read the Saturday religious page of the L.A. Times. I can't stand to look at it. Because all you see are proliferation of the spiritual phonies every place. And you take a person who's trying to find comfort or is trying to find answers or trying to find some spiritual help and they wind up going in a direction like that and the door is slammed in their face to salvation.

Absolutely tragic, tragic. Damning teachers and they come in Protestantism. They come in liberal Protestantism as much as they come in Roman Catholicism or Mormonism or Christian science or Jehovah's Witnessess or World Wide Church of God or Unification Church or Unity or Unitarianism or whatever religion, false religion in the world. And we can't be tolerant of those things that damn men's souls.

Now just briefly, let me give you the second one in verse 15. Verse 14 we noted it's not in the early manuscripts so we looked to verse 15. False spiritual leaders are cursed not only for exclusion, but perversion; perversion. They corrupt people who come into their religion. They not only keep them out of the true religion, but they corrupt them in the false religion. It's just two sides of the same thing really. They pursue converts and make them perverts. Verse 15, "Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites for you compass sea and land to make one proselyte and when he is made, you make him twice more the son of hell than yourselves." Boy what a statement. You not only shut him out of the true kingdom, but you turn him into a child of hell.

Now apparently during the life of our Lord according to Jewish history there was a great effort being made to proselytize Gentiles, that is to bring them in. The word proselyte comes originally from the term it means a stranger. To take these strangers and bring them in. It's used only here and three times in the book of Acts. It has to do with converting over. And apparently proselytizing was aggressively being done around the time of our Lord and that's as it should be historically. In other words, in the Old Testament, God mandated Israel to go out and reach people. Israel wasn't to be anything more than a channel to reach the world. God revealed Himself through Israel to the world, not just to Israel.

You remember the reluctance of Jonah, don't you, to do that? And when the Gentile city of Nineveh repented he wanted to do because he couldn't stand Gentiles getting in on the covenant. So they had become very preventual in their thinking. But during the time of our Lord it seemed as though there was a little bit more aggression in that area. And they were reaching out and trying to bring converts in. In fact, we know historically that many of the synagogues were attended by pagans who had turned from their pagan worship and were now coming to the true God and they were going to the synagogues. They were converts to Judaism.

And so the Lord looks at these Pharisees and scribes and says you're busy at this. You're compassing sea and land. You're going everywhere. You're just surrounding the whole part of the world you live for one convert, for one proselyte, which is to say they were busy trying to add to their numbers. You know when you're in a false system it helps if other people join. It sort of gives you a feeling that you must be right, because look at the folks that are joining.

I really believe that people flourish sometimes in the cults for no other reason than they think it must be right because of all the people who are in it. And so the Pharisees in order to sort of stoke the fires of their own doubt turn it into some kind of confidence, were adding people to their movement. Now you need to know two things about the proselyte. One is there were two kinds of proselytes. One is there was what was called the proselyte of the gate to the proselyte of righteousness. Now the proselyte of the gate was a Gentile who just attended the synagogue. He just barely got in the gate. That's the way they referred to him. He just came in the gate. He stopped worshipping his pagan deities. He started worshiping the true God. He showed up at the synagogue. He is called, for example, two things in the book of Acts. He is called in some places in the book of Acts a worshiper of God, Acts 16:14 and Acts 18:7.

He's also called just plain worshiper, Acts 13:50 and Acts 17:4 and 17. So he was called a worshiper of God or just a worshiper. He came to worship God. The true God as opposed to his pagan idols. But he never got into the full blown swing of things. He was not a proselyte any more than just inside the gate. So he became known as a proselyte of the gate. Now there were many of them, there were many of those. But the other proselyte was the proselyte of righteousness. This was the guy who took the whole thing hook, line, and sinker. He bought it all. He became a self-righteous, legalistic, tradition keeping, law keeping, circumcised proselyte. This is what the Pharisees were after.

Now there were many who became proselytes of the gate. Very, very few proselytes of righteousness. And that's why it says you zealously go everywhere you can go making a great effort to get one convert to Phariseeism. To get one proselyte of righteousness. To get one guy who joins your movement. One convert. And by the way when a game came all the way to that proselyte of righteousness point, they even gave him a new Jewish name to cut off everything from his past. It was the whole thing, circumcision, purification, full ceremony, adherence to the mosaic tradition law and all that. It was not very usual that it happened, but now and then it did and so you go to all that effort just to get one in your movement.

And look what happens when that one comes. You have made him two times more a child of hell than yourselves. Have you ever noticed that a convert to a cult is more zealous and aggressive for the cult than somebody raised in it? That's pretty much routine. That's almost true of anything. That can be said of Christianity. Very frequently people saved out of the world and brought into Christ from an ungodly, un-Christlike background are more zealous for their newfound faith than people that are raised up in it.

There's something about that tremendous transition that is made. That euphoria of coming into the movement that gives you a great amount of zeal. And so here this new convert is filled with more fanatical zeal for his newfound system than even the ones that brought him in. And naturally there's a euphoria about having discovered what he thinks is the truth and the newness and he's not been in long enough to find out all the problems with it. And he becomes a double son of hell in the sense that he is perverted even beyond his teachers. And more zealous even than they are. And so they make a spiritual convert who turns out to be perverted instead of finding God, instead of finding heaven, he becomes a son of hell.

What a statement? Twice as hypocritical, twice as damnable. You see when false religions convert people, they're making them double children of hell. Now what does it mean to be a child of hell? It's a genitive, which means it refers to character and deeds which mark one out as belonging to hell. A hellish person, one who ought to go there because that's his character. A double child of hell would be doubly worthy of hell. Doubly worthy of damnation, very strong language.

Now what is the word hell? It's the word in the Greek, it's Gehenna. Now Gehenna's an interesting word. It really kind of is a shortened form of Gebenhenna. But it comes from a term having to do with a valley. There was a valley near Jerusalem called the valley of Hinnom. And in that valley in the Old Testament time the worshipers of the god Molech burned their children alive. In other words, part of the sacrificial system of the worship of Molech was to burn children. You can read it in 2 Chronicles Chapter 28, verse 3. I think Jeremiah talks about it in Chapter 2 and also in Chapter 7, verse 31. That the offering of children to the god Molech in the fire.

That valley then became identified with the worst kind of paganism, with the burning of human flesh of infants. And later on Josiah in 2 Kings 23:10 declared it unclean. He declared it an unclean place. And so it became a dump. It became, in fact, the dump, Jeremiah 7:32. And all the garbage and refuse and trash and filth of the city would go into that place and it would be constantly burning, constantly burning, constantly burning. The valley of Hinnom, Gehenna. And so that became the symbol of eternal burning where the flesh of children had burned that was desecrated by idol worship, the city dump, the place of constant fire. It became synonymous as it were with what hell is like as a place of continual burning of those who are desecrated, the waste of humanity, the God and Christ rejecters.

And so he says when you make one of your perverts, you make him twice the son of Gehenna. Twice hellish person than you yourselves are. And the comparative does speak of degrees of hellishness and degrees of the manifestation of hellish character as well as degrees of the manifestation of a hellish punishment. And I have to say that today it's no different. You see these systems which are the real threat to the eternal souls of men must be confronted as what they are, hellish systems.

People searching for religion, searching for God, searching for answers in life, the kingdom is shut to them and they're herded in to a damning system. I trust you have the right perspective on these systems and these leaders who keep people out of heaven on the one hand and usher them into hell on the other hand. Oh my. To stand before God having done that is inconceivable to feel the wrath of His fury. Now let me close with just two things. One is this and we're going to save the rest of the pastors next week and we'll share some of it with them, because I want them to preach this message too to their people. But two things I want to comment on. One is this, listen, if you're a Christian first thing is this, you ought to be thankful that somewhere along the way in your life you met somebody who was a door opener, not a door closer, right?

Because you're not where you are because of anything you deserve or anything you merit. You're where you are because of the grace of God and so am I and I can tell you right now, I thank God that I was raised in a Christian home with Christian parents who taught me the truth. And that I have sat under men of God who taught me the truth and that I have not had the kingdom door slammed in my face and been ushered into hell by some false religious leader. And I think all of us ought to have that perspective. And sometimes when you get a little uptight about the church because, you know, you didn't get the seat you wanted at the banquet or you couldn't find a place to park your car or you quival because you don't like the wallpaper in the ladies room or the men's room or whatever. Or you didn't particularly care about the solo or the pastor wasn't very good that day. Get things in perspective will you?

The one thing you can bless the name of God for is that at this place you're hearing the truth and you have heard the saving truth. And it may have been not here, but somewhere else that someone gave you the saving truth. And you have a tremendous responsibility to offer your praise and thanks to God for the place you are where the truth is preached and taught and lived and believed. And I hope you're grateful for that. With all of the imperfections.

Secondly, dear friends, if you're a Christian, you are a kingdom door opener. Do you understand that? Then you've got to be out there calling people away from the closed doors to the open one. In other words, we have the keys to the kingdom. We know how people are to come in. We understand the truth of the gospel. And it's our tremendous responsibility to open that door to folks and to call them out of those damning systems. Don't be pussyfooting around that stuff. Call it what it is.

Sometimes if you just say what it is to people, you'll plant a thought in their mind they can't get away from. I've done that on several occasions at the doorbell ringers that come and want to teach about some cult and just give them a fast list of the things that Jesus called these people. You are a, blah, blah, blah, and just go down the line and say and I'm not interested in talking to you. I will be happy to open the door to the kingdom and share with you the truth. I will not listen to your damning lies and let them go away with that in their mind for a while. Instead of going away thinking they've defeated you in a debate. There needs to be a confrontation. And you have to be sensitive to the Spirit of God as to how you should do that, but we need to be calling people away. As Jude talks, we need to be snatching brands from the burning. Well, let's pray.

Father, these are such strong things that our Lord said and we are anxious that we should carry His same spirit and yet not without the balance that He demonstrated of sympathetic love, but Lord we seem easier able to handle that side than the courage of bold confrontation. So help us Lord to find that balance. And Lord save this generation from false spiritual leaders. Lord save Your church from the encroachment and corruption of those who deny the faith and are within the church. Save us from damnable heresies, hellish doctrines. Save us from the hypocrites who have theatrical goodness who appear to be men of God and inwardly are ravening wolves seeking only to devour the souls of men in eternal perdition.

Save us Lord from these who would deny me Your kingdom and usher them to hell. And Lord make us thankful, thankful that You have brought us the truth and thankful that we can call others to the truth. That we can open the door for them, because we know the saving gospel. We anticipate Lord that You'll give us opportunity to apply these things we've learned this day. In Christ's name, Amen.

The Condemnation of False Spiritual Leaders, Part 2

Let's open our Bible together to Matthew Chapter 23. In the word of God, no one is so honored, no one is so respected, no one is so dignified as to the true and faithful man of God. In other words, the genuine spiritual leader who rightly represents God is the single most celebrated individual Scripture apart from God Himself. God lifts up faithful, true servants of His name. And throughout the pages of Scripture we read of the wonderful testimony of these individuals and God calls us to give them honor and give them respect. The apostle Paul went so far as to say that people treated him as though he were an angel or even as Christ Himself, he said in Galatians 4:14.

And speaking of his dear and beloved companion in service, Epaphroditus, he called upon the Philippians in Chapter 2 to give him great respect, to hold him in great reputation because for the sake of the service of Jesus Christ the man was near unto death. And Paul writing to the Thessalonians says those who are over you in the Lord are to be esteemed very highly in love for their work sake. And it tells us in 1 Timothy 5:17 that those who rule well, who feed our souls well are to be worthy of double honor. And in Hebrews Chapter 13, we are told that we are to follow the faith of those who are over us in the Lord. We are to submit to them as those that must give an account so that they may do their work with joy and not with grief. Scripture extols the blessedness of those who are faithful. It speaks of the reward of those who are true spiritual leaders. And on the other hand, no one is so severely condemned, no one is so consummately damned as false spiritual leaders are.

The most furious, vengeful words of judgment, condemnation and wrath are reserved for those who parade themselves as if they are true spiritual leaders, who represent God, but in fact are liars and deceivers and hypocrites. Scripture repeatedly warns about teachers who are void of the knowledge of God. They say they offer to others. Who are strangers to the salvation they claim to proclaim. Who are starving while supposedly offering true bread. Who are warning men of a hell that they themselves will populate.

Richard Baxter, who preached in the 1600's, wrote "many a tailor goes in rags that maketh costly clothes for others and many a cook scarcely licks his fingers when he has dressed for others the most costly dishes." Such false leaders who were supposedly clothing others with righteousness and feeding others the sustenance of God, but in fact, themselves were naked and starving and had no clothes to offer and no food to feed are the scribes and the Pharisees of our Lord's time. And in Matthew Chapter 23, Jesus rebukes them as perishing in the midst of plenty. Starving with the bread of life in their grasp and leading others to the same damning destiny.

Matthew Chapter 23 stands as a peak above all other peaks in Scripture insofar as its condemning terms. Its unmitigated condemnation extends right down through verse 36. And to be honest with you, it's not easy to preach the passage because of its relentlessness in condemning these false leaders. But we must because its here and because it stands as a warning. But the scribes and the Pharisees while they stand alone and should be condemned alone and were condemned alone and suffer alone for their misappropriation of truth, for their misconceptions, for their misleading heresy, nonetheless stand as models of all other false spiritual leaders that existed before them and since them. And consequently, we find ourselves instructed for our own day by learning what it was about them that was condemned.

And so as we look back in history relative to this passage and as we are brought to understand what it was that Jesus condemned in them, may we somehow transport that message to the contemporary setting and make some application to the false spiritual leaders of our own time. And I'm going to leave that application to you. I'm not here to name names. I'm not here to name religions or denominations or movements or whatever, but to give you the criteria out of the word of God so that you can make those kinds of judgments on your own. But you need to be discerning. You need to give respect and honor to those who are true spiritual leaders as Scripture leads you to do and you need to condemn and avoid those who are false as Scripture enjoins you to do as well.

Now you'll remember the setting want you? It is Wednesday of Passion week, two days from the crucifixion. The mounting hostility to Jesus Christ has reached a fever pitch. Jesus rode into Jerusalem and was hailed as the Messiah and the religious leaders panicked instantly. They despised Him. They hated Him, because He taught so contrary to their own doctrine. And because He lived a life they couldn't live and because He had a popularity they couldn't attain and because He could do things they couldn't do and say things they couldn't say and didn't know.

He intimidated them every way possible and they wanted to eliminate Him and then when the whole city seemed to be swept up in the fact that He might be the Messiah, their anger was even raised beyond what it had been before. And then when He came in on Tuesday and cleansed the temple, it became a rage. And then when He came back on Wednesday, this day where we find Him in Matthew 23 and pronounced three judgment parables against the religious leaders and told them they would be shut out of the kingdom and somebody put in their place, and then when He shut their mouths with divine answers to stupid human questions. They were at the point of frenzy. And we can understand why it's only two days before they have Him hanging on a cross.

But to cap off the Wednesday dialogue with them, He gives the sermon in Chapter 23. Chapter 22 ends with the thought that they no longer asked Him any questions. He had made them look like fools every time they did, so they silenced themselves. And that leaves Him free on this Wednesday to preach a final sermon. It is the final public sermon our Lord ever preached. And its subject is false spiritual leaders and it is a warning to the people to stay away from them, that's verse 1-12 and then it is a condemnation of them themselves from verse 13 on and ends with a lament over the consequence of the unbelief of Jerusalem, which unbelief was the product of false spiritual leadership.

And so this is a blistering rebuke. In the first 12 verses He warned the people to stay away from them. He showed them that they lacked authority. They lacked integrity. They lacked sympathy. They lacked spirituality and they lacked humility. And having warned the people then, He turns to the leaders, all of whom are gathered around He and His disciples in the temple court at Passover season and face to face in a confrontation He pronounces doom upon them.

Seven times He uses the word woe. Why, which is a very guttural cry in the Greek that's almost impossible to translate. It's nothing more than a onomatopoetic sound uttered from deep within in a moment of pain and grief. He pronounces this kind of curse on them and it is not wishful thinking. It is a divine teat. He isn't saying damn you or curse you the way we might say it to someone we're angry with in our civilization. It is not a wish. It is a divine judgment. And He pronounces the final judgment on the religious leaders of Israel who have rejected Him and led the people in an equal rejection.

Now the seven curses that come upon them are specifically identified down through verse 33 and we're going to look at them. Follow very closely. Let me remind you that verse 14 does not appear in all of the old manuscripts and so we believe that it was added in at a later time by a well-meaning scribe who borrowed its thoughts from Mark Chapter 12, verse 40 and Luke Chapter 20, verse 47. The statements of verse 14 are indeed true and come from those other texts, but do not appear in the original texts of Matthew.

And so we're left with seven curses. First of all, false spiritual leaders are cursed for exclusion, for keeping people out of the kingdom, verse 13. "For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men for you neither go in yourselves, neither permit them who are entering to go in." What does He mean by the phrase "them who are entering?" It has the idea of people who are continually endeavoring to enter. John the Baptist had come and prepared a population of people for the arrival of Messiah.

All of Jerusalem and Judea was going out to John and they were confessing their sins and repenting of their sins and being baptized as an outward symbol of an inward desire to be pure, to be ready when the Messiah arrived. And here were these people ready to move, as it were into the kingdom and along came the scribes and Pharisees and shut the door in their faces. False spiritual leaders are not to caudled. They are not to be thought of as nice people who are leading people into moral kinds of behavior and consideration. They are those who shut the kingdom of heaven in the face of people.

Theirs is a damning heresy. And they must be treated in a manner consistent with the damage they do. We considered that one in detail last week. Secondly, verse 15, false spiritual leaders are cursed not only for exclusion, that is excluding people from the kingdom, but perversion. They pervert the people who come into their influence. They not only shut them out of heaven, they usher them into hell. Here come along some people seeking religion, here come people seeking some kind of moral change in their life, people with some kinds of emotional, psychological need, some kind of spiritual desires, and they not only shut them out of heaven, but they pervert them into children of hell. Verse 15 says, "Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you compass sea and land to make one proselyte." That word originally meant and immigrant who came into the land of Palestine to live with the Jews, later came to mean a Gentile who embraced Jewish religion.

You go everywhere you can go to make some convert, not just a proselyte of the "gate," which was a Gentile who just kind of got in the gate. He just took on a few of the elements of Judaism, but a proselyte of righteousness. What William Hendrickson calls a full fledge, legalistic, ritualistic, hair-splitting Pharisee filled with fanatical zeal. You want to make him every bitwhat you are and you'll go every where just to make one of them and when you've done it, you've made him a double son of hell beyond yourself.

The convert to the cult, the convert to the false religion, the duped disciple of the false spiritual leader is more fanatical than the one who brought him in. And the result is a double child of hell. We don't tolerate false spiritual leaders of any kind. They are not to be tolerated. They shut people out of heaven and usher them into hell. Now we spent last week just covering those two points because of the magnitude of their import.

Now I want to take you from there through the rest of these things. The third one, and I want to confess to you folks that I...there's not much I can add to this text. There's not much that needs to be added. You can't guild the lily. And the words of the Lord Jesus Christ are so powerful and so precise and so poignant and so dramatic that anything I say can only detract rather than add to the power of this text.

Thirdly, false spiritual leaders are cursed for subversion, not just exclusion and perversion, but subversion. They subvert truth. They have developed reasoning that undermines truth. It is a mark of one who is in any sense possessing the life of God that truth is important. God is a God of truth. The God who cannot, what? Lie says Paul. God is a God of truth. God says I hate lying in every false way. God is a God who speaks truth. And so any false system is a lying system.

In John 8 our Lord talks about the fact that the devil is a liar and the father of it. False systems are filled with lies, untruths, broken promises and that's exactly what the Pharisees and scribes had developed, a system evade the truth. A system to undermine integrity to subvert truth. Notice how they did it in verse 16. "Woe unto you," and instead of calling them hupokrites, phonies, deceivers, hypocrites, He calls them blind guides, because they lived under the illusion that they were the guides of the blind. Romans 2 says, "You Jews think you're guides of the blind, light to those in darkness, instructors of babes, you giving wisdom to those that are foolish and you don't know the truth. You're nothing but blind guides. That's what our Lord is saying here. In fact, earlier in Matthew 15:14, He said, "the blind are leaders of the blind and if the blind lead the blind, both are going to fall in a ditch."

So here were the people blind, here were their leaders blind, and the blind leaders trying to guide the blind people; you blind guides. That's a very blistering statement because they prided themselves on their spiritual sight and ability to guide people. "You say whosoever shall swear by the temple it is nothing, but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple he is the debtor." Now what is this? Well, they were liars to start with and all spiritual...all false spiritual leaders are liars, because only one who possessed the life of God can be utterly true. Only God can break down the lying tendencies of fallenness and replace it with truth. And that is a redemptive work, a sanctifying work, a work of regeneration.

So ungodly people and false spiritual leaders are liars. I mean, that's just part of it all. They lie. But in order to cover their tracks and to appear pious, they had developed a system by which they could lie with impunity. And they would promise this and promise that. They would vow this to God, vow a covenant to some person and then in order to affirm that because people didn't trust anybody then any better than they trust people now. They want a contract, maybe they want to seal it in blood. Every culture has its own way of sort of tying you into your word. In that day, you swore by something. It had come to the point where people lied constantly and there was no way that you could protect yourself unless you design some means of making a person verbally bound to keep their word.

And the fact of this is indicated in Matthew Chapter 5, you remember where our Lord says to them, you have been told by those of old that you can perform your vows, keep your word. But you've developed a system whereby you swear by this, you swear by that, you swear by the other and He goes on to talk about all their swearing. I swear I'll keep my word. I swear this. I swear that by this, by that, the other thing. And the Lord says to them, you ought to swear not at all, right, but let your communication be what? Yes, no. In other words, such a person of integrity, such a person of truth that if I say to God yes, God, then that's exactly what I mean. And if I say no, that's exactly what I mean and I don't have to say I swear on a stack of Bibles. And you know, cross my fingers, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye, whatever.

And we've had our little deals too, haven't we. We used to say when we were kids, ha, I don't have to keep my word, I had my fingers crossed. Same thing. A system whereby you could lie, whereby your word meant nothing and they would make vows to God and then they would decide that the money they wanted to give to God originally in a moment of piosity, for example, they would stand up in front of a group of people and say I want to give all my money to God. I'm so pious. And later on they'd find they wanted something else and they'd say oh well, I only swore by such and such and by such and such doesn't count.

That's how they work the system. So they said in verse 16, if you swear by the temple, it's nothing. So they say, I'm going to do this. I vow to do this before God and all of you people. I will keep my word. I will pray eight hours a day, blah, blah, blah. I swear by the temple. And then didn't do it and said, oh swearing by the temple is nothing. If you swear by the gold in the temple that's something. That's what they said. Ridiculous. Just a way of lying. They know what the Old Testament said. The Old Testament said pay your vows. Pay your vows. Pay your vows.

What does that mean? Keep your promise. Keep your promise. Keep your word. God hates lying. So many Old Testament texts in the Psalms particularly. Let me just call your attention to several just as a point of contact. In Psalm 50, verse 14, "Offer unto God thanksgiving and pay thy vows unto the Most High." Don't make promises you can't keep. Promise to God, keep your promise. Psalm 56:12, "Thy vows are upon me oh God, I will render praises unto thee. I'm bound by my promises to you oh God. I won't break my word." Psalm 61, verse 8 and these are just samples, "So will I sing praise to thy name forever, that I may daily perform my vows." Psalm 66:13, "I will go into the house with burnt offerings. I will pay thee my vows." Psalm 76:11, "Vow and pay unto the Lord your God." And it goes on like that a lot of places in the Old Testament. Keep your word to God. Keep your word to men.

This is illustrated in Ananias and Sapphira said we're going to give all we receive from the sell of this property to God. Boy it sounded so religious, so pious, so dedicated, so spiritual. They got a lot of money and they looked at it and said we made a mistake. Look at all this. The church budget doesn't even need it. They won't know what to do with it. I'm not sure we can trust them down there. We can't give all this to them. We'll keep part of it. And you know what God did? Killed them in front of the whole congregation. They dropped dead.

I imagine it had a rather great effect on next weeks offering. But the point is they had developed a system where they could lie. And so verse 19, He doesn't even deal with the immorality of it here. He deals with the stupidity of it. It's obvious to everybody that God advocates truth and not lying. He just deals with the stupidity of it. You morons, He says, moroi. You morons and blind. That's what He says.

What's greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold? In other words, the only reason the gold could be thought of sacred is because it's in the temple which is sacred because it's where God dwells. What a ridiculous method of cheating and violating your word. And then verse 18, they had another little deal. "Whosoever shall swear by the altar it is nothing." So if you promise by the altar it's nothing, but whatever the gift is on the altar, whoever swears by the gift that's on it, he's bound. You morons, He says, and blind. Which is greater the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift? What's the gift if it isn't on the altar?

I mean, it's ridiculous. It's illogical. It doesn't make sense. The gift standing alone is nothing. It's only when it's on an altar offered to God that it becomes something. The gold standing alone is nothing. It's only when it's in the temple where God dwells that it's anything. In other words, if you think by doing that you're touching something that's not connected to God, you're wrong. You're wrong. It was just a silly way to evade having to keep your word. And you see false spiritual leaders need that because they lie all the time. So they have to cover themselves in a pure pious and develop some kind of system where they can make their pious promises of what they're going to do and still change their mind conveniently.

So He says, in verse 20, "Whosoever therefore shall swear by the altar, swears by it and all things on it. Whosoever shall swear by the temple, swears by it and him that dwelleth in it. And he that shall swear by heaven, swears by the throne of God and Him who sits on it." I mean, everything you touch eventually is going back to God, right? You swear by anything that represents God, a gift, an altar, the gold of the temple, the temple, the heaven of heavens, the throne of God and you're going to touch the God who fills it all.

In other words, have you forgotten that God is everywhere, as creator of all and Lord of all. You better tell the truth. They subverted the truth. They developed reasoning that undermine truth. False spiritual leaders don't tell the truth folks, but they parade piosity. Try to cover up for their lying pretense. We need to be careful of that. They subvert whole houses. They by their great covetousness, says Peter, use feigned words to make merchandise out of you. They lie. They say they need money when they don't need money. They say God told them something, when He never told them anything. They say Jesus led them into something, when He never led them into anything. They lie. Beware of those liars who are false spiritual leaders.

Fourthly, false spiritual leaders are cursed for inversion. Not only subversion, that is undermining truth, but inversion. That is reversing values, reversing divine priorities. This in verse 23 is most fascinating. "Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees," hupokrites, spiritual phonies, "for you pay tithe," that's ten percent, "of mint and anise cumin." You say what is that? Well, you know what mint is. The Greek word is sweet smelling. It's a little leaf, little mint leaf. And do you know what anise is? Well, actually it's dill, used like with dill pickles. Cumin was a little tiny herb used in the kitchen. All three of these are kitchen items, mint, anise, cumin; mint, dill, and this little herb all used for flavoring food.

Now the Old Testament law, God instructed His people to give one-tenth of all their crops and all their products to the treasury in Israel. In other words, the government was supported by taxation and one of the forms of taxation was ten percent tax on all the product of the land. So every year when you got your crop, ten percent of it went to the government. That's how the priests were supported because the government was a theocracy run by priests. So their sustenance came from the part that you put into the government. There also was another tenth paid and there also was a third tenth paid every third year for welfare, for strangers and so forth. The second tenth was for ceremonies and national festivals and so forth. So you were giving usually about 23 percent a year that you put in, not far off our tax base today.

So they were used to that. And the Old Testament text said in Leviticus 27:30 and Deuteronomy 14:22, that this included "all the increase of thy seed;" all the increase of thy seed. Now what that meant was, you plant your seed and whatever you get of the increase, you tithe that. But these wooden literalists had taken that to the absolute ridiculous extreme. And in the little kitchen pots, they would grow mint and they would grow dill and they would have these little herbs called cumin and that was just a kitchen deal. And when it came time to sort that out, they'd go here's ten little tiny herbs, one for God, nine for me. One for...I mean, it was ridiculous. Absurd. God wasn't saying that when He said the increase of your seed. He meant you tithe the grain and the wine and oil product.

But they were down to this minuscule...you say why were they doing that? Because it made them feel so pious, so righteous, trivia, minutia. They were real good at that, real good at counting out seeds. But they were bad at, and you'll see in the rest of the verse. "You have omitted the weightier elements of the divine law," implied divine, "justice, mercy, and faith." Oh is this amazing? You're real good at counting mint leaves, great fooling around with dill, but bad when it came to justice, mercy, and faith.

False religious leaders get wrapped up in inconsequential minutia and have no capacity to deal with the weightier matters. And the weightier, that word is a rabbinical word. Jesus borrows it from the tradition of the rabbis who believe there were light elements to the law and weighty elements and here He says the weighty elements are justice, mercy, and faith. Spiritual realties, not feeds. By the way, this is a direct parallel from Micah. Our Lord here is not just grabbing three things out of the air, justice, mercy, and faith. The Jews had been taught in Micah 6:8, "He hath shown thee oh man what is good and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God." That's faith. The walk with God in faith.

To do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly. Listen the Pharisees and the scribes didn't do justly, they were inequitable. They were unfair, unjust. And they were merciful, brutal, unforgiving, unkind, ungenerous. They abuse the people. Piling, as it says in verse 4 of this chapter, heavy burdens on them, grievous to be born and not even moving one finger to help lighten the load. And they had no faith. They walked by sight. They walked by works. They walked by law. They walked by their own efforts. And so He says you're real great at counting out kitchen seeds used to flavor food and you've missed the whole point of what is really important, justice, mercy, and faith.

Spiritual matters you've lost. False religious leaders, listen, can get all wrapped up in the minutia of their system. It's just the real spiritual stuff they don't have. At the end of verse of 23 He says, "these ought you to have done and not to leave the other undone." In other words, "these ought you to have done," justice, mercy, and faith. And I'm not saying that you should leave the other commands undone. And I don't think He means you should keep counting your seeds. He means you should take care to attend to the matter of the tithe as well. It isn't that I want everything to be concentrated on justice, mercy, and faith so that you fail to obey those other commands. I don't think He's saying necessarily you have to count out all the seeds and the herbs. He's saying, you should have kept these weightier matters and also give attention to the matters of tithe; the proper matters of tithe.

Tithe does have its proper place still in Judaism in the gospel time. The Jewish people are still a duly constituted people. They were still under the ceremonial instruction of God's law. They were still under the obligation to obey the commandments relative to their national identity and to the funding of the priesthood. That had not been set aside yet until the church was born. And so He says you should do that. You should do that. By the way, the tithe is mentioned six times in the New Testament. Three times in the gospels and each time it is mention in the text condemning the abuse of it by the scribes and the Pharisees. Three times in the book of Hebrews when it simply reaches back and describes its historical reality in the history of Israel. At no time is it ever mentioned in the New Testament as binding on the church. It had to do with taxation of the national government of Israel.

So He says do that, just make sure you do this as well. I'm always amazed at how false religious systems have so much minutia and so little reality. I think about that, for example, sometimes when you see "holy wars." Or you see great groups of nations of people who are so religious, maybe they're Islamic people or maybe they're "Christians and Catholics in Ireland." I don't know what, but they sure have all the nuts and bolts of their little religious deal, but the fact of the matter is they operate as people who have no internal spiritual commitment at all, right?

Without massacring each other in the name of "their religions." And there are many ways to illustrate this. I thought of this the other day as I watched a man giving prophetic charts and all the little dits and dots of all the little prophetic things and you know where this is going to go and who's coming here and what's up here and here's the beast and how many heads and horns and he's got every little deal all along and he's living in adultery. And you want to say to the guy burn your chart man and stop your sin. I mean, get your perspective right. False spiritual leaders deal with minutia.

Verse 24 describes them in a very graphic way. "You blind guides, you strain out," it should be, "you strain out a gnat and swallow a camel." You say what in the world is this? Well, you have to understand something about this. The word strain means to filter, diulizo, filter. In the Old Testament, the smallest unclean animal was a gnat. Leviticus 11:42, it's considered unclean. It's an insect, not an animal. But the smallest unclean creature was a gnat. The largest unclean creature that was forbidden to a Jew was a camel, Leviticus 11:4.

So the Jew didn't want to get involved with an unclean gnat or an unclean camel. So He says to them, do you know what you're doing? You're straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. You know what they did? This is what happened. They make wine and as they're making, crushing the grapes, a little gnat is flying around, he lands in the grapes, he gets gobbled up in the grapes, winds up in the wine or maybe he just flies in the wine and lands there. So the fastidious Pharisee drank his wine like this. Then he picked the gnat off his teeth, see.

In fact, he didn't even enjoy the stuff. Sucking out the gnats so they wouldn't be defiled and then swallowing a camel, the biggest unclean animal of all. Ceremonial fastidious sucking through your clinched teeth to filter out a gnat and then swallowing a camel. In other words, you are all confused. You're whole priority system is inverted. You're just fooling around with stuff that doesn't matter. And blind to the enormous evil that you're consuming. You're afraid to eat the tenth mint leaf and then you're allowing into your life hypocrisy, dishonesty, cruelty, greed, self-worship; incredible.

It's amazing how fastidious religious people can be and so far from the reality of what God seeks. So many false spiritual leaders reverse divine priorities, substitute insignificant forms and outward acts of religion for essential realities of the heart. You see, that's the point. So the false spiritual leaders are condemned for exclusion, perversion, subversion, inversion, how about extortion for a fifth; extortion.

"Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, you clean the outside of the cup and the platter," and platter is an interesting Greek word. It has to do with a plate used to serve delicacies. You clean the outside of the cup and the platter and within they're full of extortion and excess. You're real big at extortion. You have a ministry that looks pious, but the whole thing is based on taking advantage of other people. You use people. You make merchandise out of people.

The idea is this, here comes a guy with...who's going to offer you a lovely meal. He's got a plate, on it are all the lovely delicacies. It's got a cup and in it is the fruit of the vine and he offers it to you and the plate and the cup have been clean ceremonial, they've been ceremonially prepared. All the ritual, all the whole deal is prepared. Only problem is the food on the plate and the wine in the cup were stolen; stolen. Very...oh we've ceremoniously prepared the platter. We've ceremoniously prepared the cup. It all is so religious and everything in it and on it was gained by extortion. How many false religious leaders are there from one end of this world who are offering people their religious plate and in that plate is nothing but the stuff they've stolen from those very people. Milked them for every dime they could get out of them; extortionists.

Extortion, by the way, is the word harpage. It means to plunder or rape; they are rapists. That's why I get so angry with false spiritual leaders, because I see them raping people, don't you? You see them just plundering people. Just making merchandise out of people for their own gain. And they...it says they are full of extortion, and notice this word, excess. That means unrestrained desire for gain; acarsia. And unrestrained desire for gain; a lack of self-control. So the Lord is saying they appear so scrupulous. They appear so religiously meticulous. They appear so pious in their system and everything they serve you was gained with their filthy desires. Gained by the abusive people. They are greedy rapists and robbers who steal and plunder the souls and the money and the hearts and the minds and the goods of everybody they can touch.

So He says in verse 26, "You blind Pharisee," He personalizes it, "cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter that the outside of them may be clean also." You better have more than your form. You better be sure that what's on your plate is as clean as your plate. And no dish is clean, which holds unclean food gained dishonestly. So prevalent today, the false spiritual leaders become rich, they become fat, they become wealthy with their paraded piosity and they have the heart of a thief.

Sixthly, false spiritual leaders are cursed for deception. This is unbelievable. Deception and we're going to cover these very quickly as we close. Deception, "Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees," verse 27 says, "hypocrites, for you're like whited sepulchers which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead bones and all uncleanness." Now follow this. He says you are guilty of deception. You contaminate people. You aren't what you claim. You look like oh every time I see this guy, Sung Yun Moon, who's supposed to be the Messiah to lead everyone to God and people flocking around him and you see him with his arms open and all these people. And everybody touches that man is contaminated.

He offers himself as one who will purify the impure and he contaminates everyone he touches. And that's the way it is with false spiritual leaders. And he pictures it so vividly. On the 15thavadar, which is the month of March in Israel in the time of our Lord, there was a very unusual custom. It was right after the spring rains and the rains that came washed away many things. One of the things they washed away was white-wash. You say where was white-wash used? It was on walls, it was on houses sometimes, but most specifically the Jews used to white-wash the tombs. They would white-wash those limestone caves and limestone tombs where people were buried, the more prominent people were buried that way. And the reason they did that was because in preparation of Passover, along the roads and the hillsides where people would be traversing, they feared that people might inadvertently touch a tomb and thus be defiled. And because of the ceremonial cleansing process necessary, they could void out certain activities in the Passover season.

And so to accommodate the Passover visitors who might not know where the tombs were and also just to keep the rest of the people clear of them, they went around the city of Jerusalem with white-wash. In some cases, they white-washed the entire tomb, historians tell us. In other cases, they just painted white-washed bones on the outside so that people wouldn't touch them lest according to Numbers 19:16, they'd be ceremonially defiled.

And so as you came into Jerusalem, you'd see these beautiful clean white tombs everywhere dazzling in the sun. But they weren't what they appeared to be. They were so beautiful and so pure and so white, but they were tombs. And anybody who touched them would be contaminated and Jesus says that's what you are, verse 27. You're whited tombs. The word taffos, it means graves. Which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and omnomia, lawlessness. Disregard for the law of God. And anybody who touches you, you look so white and so pure, is contaminated, is defiled. So you pollute, so you contaminate everybody who touches you.

Then the last one. The last one, false spiritual leaders are cursed for pretension. For pretending to be so much better than everybody else. Verse 29, "Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites," may I inject here? Nothing God hates worst than pride. "You build the," the memorials literally, "you build the mnemeion, from the verb to remember. "You build the memorials of the prophets and you decorate the tombs of the righteous." You're really in to memorializing the saints. You're really big on lifting up the heroes of the past. Oh we honor saint this guy. Oh we honor saint that guy. Oh we remember this man of God, this great prophet, this great worker of miracles of the past. God's great man of this era and that era. You lift them up, you exalt them with your memorials and your monuments.

And then you say, verse 30, "If we had been in the days of our fathers we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets." Why we would never have killed the prophets as our fathers have done. Oh we wouldn't have thought of it. We're so much better than they are. You see, we're so much holier than they. We're so far beyond them. This is the ugly pretense of spiritual pride. Great at building monuments, great at honoring men of the past and claiming to be better than their fathers.

Jesus had told them that in the parable earlier in Chapter 21 about how they had...the people of Israel had kill all of the prophets and the messengers from God and the parable of the vineyard and the landowner and the servants and the son. But they claim, oh we would never have done that. And Jesus answered in verse 31 as a direct hit. "Wherefore you are witnesses," right now on the spot, "you give testimony against yourselves that you are the sons of them that killed the prophets." They say oh we would never do that. We wouldn't do that. Oh we raised memorials to the prophets. We would never do what our fathers have done. We're so much more holy than they.

And Jesus says, you are a witness to the fact that you indeed are a son of those who killed the prophets. Why? Why does He say that? Well, what were they right there, right then plotting to do? What? Kill Him. Kill Him. Kill Him. I mean, they were so consumed with their own lying deceit that they didn't even see the reality of the fact that they were killing one greater than the prophets, the son of God. Verse 32, "Fill up then the measure of your fathers." What does He mean? Do it. Go ahead. You're scheming to kill the greatest prophet of all. That'll fill up the full measure of the murderous attitude of your people against God's messengers. Do it.

You ought to underline verse 32. That's Jesus resigning Himself overtly to the fact that they were going to take His life. Do it. Do it. Fill it up. No, they weren't any better. They were worse if anything. And then He pronounces a curse. "You snakes, you generation of vipers. How can you escape the damnation of hell?" What's the answer to that? What's the answer? No way. He damns them to hell. Snakes, vipers, let me conclude this with these words.

Listen, these false spiritual leaders, listen carefully, were guilty of these things and I want you to listen because I'm going to turn the table on it a little bit. They kept people out of heaven. What does a true spiritual leader do? What? Brings them into heaven. They did all they could to send people to hell. To make them as evil as possible, double sons of hell. What does a true spiritual leader do? He is used by God to make men not hellish, but what? Righteous. They subverted the truth. What does a true spiritual leader do? Leads people into truth. They appeared pious, but only used people for their own gain. What does a true spiritual leader do? He serves people, meets their needs. They contaminate everybody they touch. What does a true spiritual leader do? He makes holy anyone he touches. And they proudly thought themselves to be better than everybody else. What does a true spiritual leader say? I am the least of all the chief of sinners. God help us to be true spiritual leaders and to avoid these false leaders. People beware would you? Beware. Be thankful God's given you true leaders.

Father, we do come to You with thankful hearts this morning as we think about all these false religious systems around the world and false spiritual leaders every place. We'd have to say thank You, thank You for the great grace that redeemed us and brought us into the knowledge of the Savior, brought us under true spiritual leaders who could feed us the bread of life. Through rather than leading us to hell have led us to heaven. Who rather than making our character hellish have been used that we might be righteous. Who rather than undermining truth have lead us to truth, rather than reversing divine values have taught us God's priorities. Who rather than using us for their own gain have served us for our own needs. Who rather than contaminate us have made us to be holy and who rather than exercise pride have shown us humility.

Thank You oh God that we have so been influenced by Your choice servants. And Lord God we pray that any in this congregation today who are under the influence of false spiritual leaders will be delivered from that for Your glory and their eternal blessing. While your heads are bowed in a closing moment, if you don't know the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior, we would offer to you that same Savior. And if the Spirit of God is prompting and pulling at your heart and revealing to you the need for Christ and the reality of who He is, then open your heart to him. Follow not the lying prophets. Come to the truth of Christ.

If you're a believer and you have been less than thankful and less than reflective on the good grace of God, which has bestowed salvation upon you and kept you from the influence of these evil ones, may your heart be filled this day with a new thanksgiving. And if you desire to be a part of the family of God, desire to be one who hears the truth, desires too out of thanksgiving and gratitude serve God with all your heart, I trust you'll make those kinds of commitments in your heart today.

Jesus' Last Words to Israel, Part 1

Open your Bible with me to Matthew Chapter 23. And this morning we're going to continue in our look at this very, very provocative chapter, very important chapter. In Matthew 23, we are examining a sad and pathetic scene in Scripture. In fact, one of the very saddest of all scenes. Because it is the pronouncement of doom on the nation of Israel. They stand in imminent judgment. They are condemned in this chapter because they have rejected the Lord Jesus Christ. They have rejected in rejecting Him, God Himself and His word.

And the ones who led the nation in their rejection were false spiritual leaders called scribes and Pharisees. And so this chapter comes forth predominantly as a vengeful attack and cursing of the false spiritual leaders of Israel. For centuries, the Jews had awaited for the arrival of their Messiah. The hope and the heart of the Jew was that the day would come when the Messiah would arrive and establish His kingdom and blessedness for every Jew would come with that kingdom.

And as the centuries went on every Jewish mother would have wished herself to be the mother of that Messiah. Every Jewish man would have wished himself to rise in that kingdom of Messiah to a place of prominence and honor and service. It was the great and abiding hope and anticipation in the heart of every Jew. And yet when the Messiah came instead of believing, instead of receiving, they rejected, they hated, they despised Him, and ultimately they had Him executed.

And along with Him they sought to kill all those who represented Him. It is a sad and tragic twist in the history of Israel called out by God's love, called out by God's grace given promises and covenants and hope and yet when all of that is to come to fruition and the arrival of the Messiah, they have gone so far the other direction that rather than believe they execute their own Messiah. And so this Chapter pronounces judgment. This is the climax of the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ to Israel. He has come to them. He has preached to them. He has articulated the gospel to them. He has given the opportunity to repent and to believe in Him and they have not.

In fact, their rejection now is final. There's really little more to be said and this is a confirmation of the fact that Israel has finally rejected Jesus Christ. Now that rejection is led by the scribes and the Pharisees. The false spiritual leaders who had captured the hearts and minds of the people and turned them away from Jesus Christ. It is also the last sermon Jesus ever preached publicly. It is His final public statement. And it is not a warm inviting and loving statement. It is just the opposite. It is a statement of damnation and cursing against these false spiritual leaders who have lead the people astray.

Now you'll remember that the first 12 verses are a warning to the people to stay away from these leaders. There is some hope in that, because when Jesus is crucified and rises from the dead and ascends back into heaven, there will be preachers of the gospel who will go through Jerusalem and the land of Israel. The message of salvation will still be preached and if the people will listen to those preachers and not the scribes and the Pharisees, there is still hope for individuals, if not, for the whole nation.

In other words, while this is a damnation of the nation as it were, there is still hope for individual Jews if they will turn their ears away from these false spiritual leaders and listen to the true apostles of the Messiah. So the first 12 verses constitute a warning that the people should not listen to the false spiritual leaders. Then beginning in verse 13 and running through verse 33, the warning turns to a cursing. And Jesus, who has been talking to the great mob gathered in the temple court at the Passover on Wednesday of passion week, He has been talking to this great crowd and warning them, now turns to the Pharisees and the scribes who are standing with the crowd and face to face confronts them with a series of seven curses called woes.

This is a very bold, very confrontive, very dramatic act. Jesus confronts them and curses them in front of the whole crowd. Pulls no punches, holds back nothing. We've looked at that condemnation. We've gone through those seven woes, seven curses. Let me just remind you of the elements of our Lord's curse. First He cursed the false spiritual leaders for exclusion, keeping people out of heaven. Secondly, He cursed them for perversion. Turning people in their influence into children of hell. Then He cursed them for subversion. That is undermining truth and substituting for it a system of lies. Then He cursed them for inversion. That is the reversing of all right moral perspectives. Putting justice and mercy and faith low on the list and ritual high on the list. Inverting the divine order.

The He cursed them for extortion. For cleaning the outside of their act, but stealing and robbing from the people at every chance they had. Then He cursed them for deception. Appearing to be models of virtue, but actually being contaminating graves where people were defiled as if they touched the grave of a dead person. And finally he cursed them for pretension. Pretending to be pious and holy and better than all of those who preceded them when, in fact, they weren't better at all. They were the same and if anything, they were worse.

So these self-righteous, legalistic, hypocritical haters of the righteous thirsted not for righteousness, but for the blood of the righteous and Jesus condemns them. And the sad fact is that they were the spiritual leaders of Israel whom the people followed and had great guilt for having led those people astray. Now in climaxing this section to these false leaders our Lord says in verse 32, "fill up then the measure of your fathers." Now, I want to go a little more into detail as to what this means. Fill up then, the measure of your fathers. Fill up is a term used often in Scripture in connection with sin and judgment and wrath.

Very frequently in the Scripture the image of a cup being filled to the brim is used in connection with God's divine wrath. The book of Revelation talks about the cup of God's wrath or the cup of His fury. Isaiah talked about it. Jeremiah talked about it. Hosea talks about it. It is even indicated in Matthew later on when Jesus, in the garden, says "let this cup pass from me," and sees it as the cup of divine judgment, the cup of fury. The picture is that judgment and wrath and sin are like that which fills up a cup. Sometimes in Scripture it is the cup of sin. Sometimes it's the cup of wrath. Sometimes it's the cup of judgment. And we shouldn't be distressed by that because they're all related. Sin brings the wrath of God, which brings His divine judgment. So you fill up a cup of sin, you could be said to be filling up a cup of wrath. You fill up a cup of wrath. You could be said to be filling up a cup of judgment.

It's as if God allows only so much and then the cup is filled up and judgment strikes. God has reached His limit. Sin has reached its limit and the cup is poured out, as it were, in judgment. And so our Lord, in a command, amazingly says to them fill it up, finish it off, do the rest of the evil that has to be done. It's amazing to think that the Lord Jesus Christ as pure and holy as He is as God could command anyone to do evil. But He does, in effect, say fill it up. It is a similar thing to the fact that He said to Judas in John 13:27, "What thou doest, do," what, "quickly." Go do it. Go do it.

It isn't that Jesus desired that evil be done. It is only that since evil was to be done Jesus said get it over with. Get it over with. And that is the essence of what He's saying when He commands them to fill it up. Get it over with. Finish it off. You are going to top off the accumulated cup of sin of the nation Israel, of the people whom God revealed His truth to. You're going to fill it up. Get it over with. Get it done. That judgment may come. Now notice what He calls this cup. He calls it the measure of your fathers; the measure of your fathers.

Fill it up, the same cup your fathers were filling. It's as if the history of Israel has been a history of filling up a cup with sin. Filling up a cup of sin is filling up a cup of wrath is filling up a cup of inevitable judgment, and they've been doing that. Successive generations of the Jewish nation, successive generations of Israel have been sinning and sinning and sinning and sinning and sinning and just filling and filling and filling the cup until finally judgment comes.

It's accumulative thing that He speaks of. The wickedness of each succeeding generation contributes them to the final result. And the Lord is saying the limit of Israel's evil is almost reached. God's tolerance has its limits. You have it back in Genesis where God says in Chapter 6, "my Spirit will not always strive with men." And what does He do? He destroys the whole world in a flood leaving only eight souls. And what God was saying is it's full. The cup of man's wickedness is filled up. That's it. There's no more room for anything else. And He comes in judgment.

You have in the book of Revelation. In the great terrors of the tribulation and the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ in final judgment when He destroys the wicked of all the earth and the final judgment is held and souls are sent into hell forever, that too is called the filling up of the cup of wrath. In other words, God takes no more sin in the cup. That's it. And there's a limit to what God will allow. There is only so much wickedness before judgment comes. And that is true in this case in the nation Israel.

And so He says to these scribes and Pharisees finish off the cup that judgment may come. They are working by the way with the same murderous sins of their fathers. Back in verse 30, they said if we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. We wouldn't have killed the prophets like our fathers did. We wouldn't have slaughtered the righteous like our fathers did. And Jesus says, "wherefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are the sons of them who killed the prophets." Why? Because He looked into their hearts and they were plotting His death.

They would have given anything to kill Him on the spot. And He says to them, who are you kidding, you are the sons of your fathers who killed the prophets for you yourself would kill this prophet who is the supreme of all prophets, the Messiah. You're not fooling anybody. You may claim that you're better than your fathers, but you're not. You are doing nothing more than filling up the same cup full of murderous sins which your fathers filled up. Terrible climax to the history of Israel. It's not only the history of Israel. It sweeps even further back than that. Ever since there have been righteous men, there have been killers of righteous men. Righteous men act as a rebuke to any society. And when that society is given the latitude to do it, it will kill righteous men. Some of you saw last night that the society of John Huss did it to him.

And they will always do it, because a righteous man is a rebuke to a society and if that society has latitude for the execution of righteous men, that society will do it unless that society has turned to God. And so He says you are simply filling up what began a long time ago with your fathers. He characterizes them in verse 33 then. He says, "you snakes," ophis, just the general word for snakes. You brude of ekidna. Very interesting word, ekidna. It means a small poisonous snake. "You snakes," He says generally. "You brude of poisonous snakes." And they are very small little snake that live down in the desert area of Israel that looked like a stick. They would be sitting somewhere still. They would look like a small twig or a broken branch or a small stick and maybe in gathering sticks for a fire, you would collect one in your hands and the next thing you knew those teeth would plunge their way into your arm or your hand they would not be able to be torn loose. Such has happened to the apostle Paul in the book of Acts. And God spared him miraculously.

This is a poisoned snake that is impossible to detect in some situations, deceitful and deadly. This is what He calls them. "You deadly poisonous snakes," but we shouldn't be surprised that He called them that because that's exactly what John the Baptist called them back in Chapter 3 of Matthew when he said "Oh you brude of vipers, you snakes." They came out to him and he said the same thing. Here we are several years later and they're no different. The ministry of John the Baptist had no effect on them and the ministry of Jesus Christ had no positive effect on them, only hardened them all the more and they are the same poisonous, deadly, deceitful snakes they were when He first arrived.

By the way, the word ekidnahas to do with this poisonous snake, and in fact, the word became such a connotation for evil, for subtle wickedness, that ekidnaeventually in classic Greek mythology became the name of a monster that was half snake and half woman. So the ekidnawas known as a wicked, subtle, poisonous, deadly, deceitful creature. There was no compliment to be called an ekidna. And when Jesus called them that, everyone knew what He was saying.

So the Chapter begins with a warning, followed with a cursing. And the cursing is climaxed as He says to them fill it up. Fill the cup that your fathers started filling with their murderous acts against the righteous. You go ahead and fill it up you deceitful, deadly, poisonous snakes. And then He says in verse 33, "How can you escape the damnation of Gehenna?" Gehenna is the word that is the symbol of hell, the constantly burning trash pile and dump in the valley of Hinnom out of the city of Jerusalem, which became the identifying symbol for eternal hell. How can you escape it? And the answer is, they can't. No way.

By the way, this fits the imagery. Hell is seen as fire. And in a field in those days that was cut to stubble, the farmer would go back to that field and burn the stubble off. And also in that period of time in that place as even today as in California, they were used to brush fires. And when a brush fire would come across the land or when a farmer would burn the stubble in his field, these little snakes, these ekidnawould come up out of their holes and they would swiggle as fast as they could racing ahead of the first to escape it, but they never were fast enough to escape the fire. And that's as it should be. That's what John meant when he said to them the first time they came, "you snakes scurrying, do you think you'll escape the wrath to come?" And the same thing here. "You vipers, do you think you'll escape the damnation of hell? Do you think you can outrun the fire of God?" Not a chance, not a chance.

So this is a severe condemnation. Absolutely said, absolutely tragic that this people called by God, that these leaders given responsibility to take God's holy word and God's covenant and truth and dispense it to the people instead of doing that and being blessed in time and eternity and perverted that and perverted themselves and perverted the people to the point where even holding in their hands the true word of God and the true law of God they were nothing more than snakes who deceived and poisoned the nation of people and could never themselves escape the damnation of hell.

He is not talking about criminals here. He is not talking about the worst of men in society. He's talking about their spiritual leaders. So that's how He climaxes the curses against them. Now the Chapter closes with two brief sections, really three I guess. And I want us to look at these three final points today and next time. First, we'll say eminent condemnation and the intimate, compassion, and then insured conversion. This is the climax of His sermon.

His first point was a warning to the crowd against these leaders. His second was a cursing of the leaders themselves, and now comes a word of condemnation. And the condemnation is eminent, having given all these curses and all these warnings; He says, there's a judgment coming and it's coming fast. Notice verse 34. "Wherefore," or therefore, or literally because of this, because of this, because of who you are, a brude of poisonous deceivers, hypocrites, blind fools, blind guides, sons of hell, because of who you are, because of what you've done, because you've rejected the truth of God, rejected the righteous spokesman of God, rejected even the Son of God, because of that "I," that's emphatic in the Greek, Christ is the one who is sending, "I am sending unto you." Stop there for a minute.

This is the consequence. I'm sending unto you. Because of this, because you fill up the cup of iniquity, I am sending unto you and you'd think He'd say judgment, wrath, vengeance. But look what He says, "prophets and wise men and scribes." Well, why does He say that? What is He talking about? Well, those are all Jewish terms. Those are titles that would be consistent with Jewish vocabulary; prophets, wise men, scribes. Why is He sending more messengers? Prophets would be preachers. Wise men would be teachers. Scribes would be writers. I'm sending your preachers and teachers and writers. He's saying I'm not through. You may have made a final rejection, but I am not through with you.

Now listen very carefully to this, because this is a very difficult thing to understand. But the Lord says, I am sending you these people, not so that you might have another chance to believe. But that you might have continued chances to reject so that you will pile upon yourself a greater weight of guilt which deserves a severer judgment. It's a fearful thought, but that's what He's saying. "Because when I send you these prophets and these wise men and these scribes some of them you will kill and crucify and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute them from city to city so that upon you will come all the righteous blood." I'm going to stop at that point. Do you see the point?

It's a heavy passage. And He's saying, I want you who are so guilty to be more guilty yet and to bear the full weight of your sin. And the reason He talks about prophets, wise men, and scribes is because of the unique Jewishness of Matthew's gospel and He uses Jewish terms and titles and it gives us that solidarity with the Old Testament murderers and persecutors of the righteous. But the point is simple. I'm going to send you these people and I know what you're going to do. You're not going to believe them as a nation as a whole, you leaders. You're not going to believe it. Oh there would be a few who would, yes.

There would be some who would be converted, yes. There were 3,000 on the day of Pentecost weren't there? And many, many thousand more after that. But as a whole, you leaders and as a whole this nation will not receive them, but rather will kill them and persecute them and therefore, you will pile more guilt upon your head and be worthy of greater judgment. Listen friends, that's God talking in the person of Jesus Christ. God is a God of judgment and vengeance and we must not forget that.

The purpose of sending the preachers is not for grace, it's for judgment. And may I suggest this to you, that when you hear the message of Jesus Christ and you hear the gospel of Jesus Christ, it is a message unto salvation or it is a message unto judgment. And the more you hear it the more it comes to you as a message of grace and the more you reject it, the more it piles upon you the guilt of judgment. For the more you have, the more you're responsible for. To whom much is given, what? Much is required. Better off only to have heard once than to have heard a multiplicity of times and continue to reject, you just pile on greater guilt. And ultimately that's what the Lord is saying here.

Look at 2 Corinthians Chapter 2, verse 14. In 2 Corinthians 2:14, he says "Thanks be unto God." And this is a most unusual passage for which to be thankful by the way. But he says, "Thanks be unto God who always causes us to triumph in Christ and makes manifest the smell of His knowledge by us in every place." Now I want you to listen to this. Paul says I'm thankful that no matter I do, no matter where I preach, no matter what the response is, we triumph. Every time a preacher preaches the gospel he's victorious. Every time the word goes forth it accomplishes the purpose to which it was sent and listen to me, the purpose is not always salvation. The purpose sometimes is compounded guilt. Do you understand that?

The purpose sometimes is to bring the grace of salvation to the heart and God is glorified through His grace. The purpose other times is to compound guilt to bring judgment and God is equally glorified through His judgment, because God is as much a God of judgment as He is a God of grace. I don't know that we have understood that properly. And so verse 15 says, "For," here's why we can thank God that we always triumph, "For we are unto God a sweet taste of Christ in them that are saved and in them that perish." Why? You say you mean it's a sweet taste in God's mouth when people perish? It's a sweet smell to God when people perish? It's hard for us to understand that. But God is as much revealed in His glory in the devastation of judgment as He is in the expression of grace and salvation.

God is not lopsided. He's not all love and grace and kindness and mercy. He's a God of holiness and a God of justice and a God of judgment and a God of wrath and a God of vengeance against evil. And if men choose that, He will be glorified in their condemnation as much as He is glorified in the conversion of those who believe. God will be glorified either way. And so it is a sweet smell to them that are saved and them that perish. To the ones who are saved, it is a smell, says verse 16, "of life unto life." To the ones who perish, it is a smell of death unto death.

What a statement. What a statement. So He says we don't corrupt the word of God in verse 17. We don't alter the message. We give it as straight as it can be given and we know that we triumphed every time we give it, because God is glorified when some believe He's glorified in His great grace, when some reject His glorified in His holy judgment against their rejection and their sin. Do you see the point? And God has to be glorified as much in this end as He is in this end, else He is not revealing Himself fully as God.

Perhaps Revelation 22:11 might help. In Revelation 22:11, at the conclusion of all that God could possibly say at the last Chapter in the Bible, the message is all given. This is the last word, "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still. He that is filthy, let him be filthy still. He that is righteous, let him be righteous still. He that is holy, let him be holy still." In other words, as it is at the end so it'll be forever. And if you are unjust and filthy, then let it be so forever. God will be glorified even in that act of judgment against your ungodliness. If you are righteous and godly, let it be that forever. God will be glorified through that as well.

Go back to Romans Chapter 9 for a moment. I want to show you two other verses. We studied these recently. And here the apostle Paul in Romans 9 is saying God has a right to do what He wants. And he says in verse 21, "If God is the potter and He desires to make a vessel unto dishonor, that's His privilege." The potter can do that. He can make one vessel to honor and another unto dishonor. That's the potter's choice. And so he says and it's an interesting way he says it, it's almost like verse 22 is so "What if God willing to show His wrath and make His power implied against sin known endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction." What that verse is saying is look, if God wants to display his wrath and his power against sin on vessels of wrath fitted for destruction, so what. Doesn't He have a right to do that? He's God. He's God.

And on the other hand, He will show the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy as well. God has to be seen in His wholeness and God is as much glorified in His wrath against ungodliness as He is in His grace towards those who believe. Now you can go back to Matthew Chapter 23. So God will send preachers and God will send teachers and God's going to send writers. Jesus says you're going to have them all. But it isn't that you may be saved. It is that you will kill them and you will scourge and you will persecute them and as a result of that, you will bring on yourselves the filling up of the cup of wrath and the blood of all the righteous. And then God will judge you with severity.

And this way, the religious leaders would fill up the accumulated guilt from the history of the death of the righteous. Now notice in verse 34, He says, "some of them you will kill and crucify." Kill probably refers to the Jewish method. Crucify to the Roman method. Kill, stone them. Crucify, the Roman method of nailing them to a cross and certainly they did that. They crucified Jesus using the Romans as the executioners. They stoned Stephen did they not, and many others. Many others we don't know we could count them all. History doesn't reveal all of them to us. And then the ones they didn't kill they brought very near to death. Scourging, they did that to Paul didn't they?

How many times was he beaten with rods and whips by the Jews? And who else beyond Paul suffered the same thing? And the ones they didn't scourge, they pursued from city to city to city to city. We see that with the apostle Paul. The pursuing, the chasing them everywhere. They pursued Christians to punish them, to persecute them at Antioch, Pisidian, at Iconium, at Lystra, at Thessalonica, at Berea, at Corinth, at Jerusalem, at Caesarea. It was a way of life for the early church, always running from the persecution of these false spiritual leaders of Israel who sought to stamp out the gospel of Christ.

So the final answer of the religious leaders of Israel which represents the mass of people is we reject Jesus Christ. And we refuse His message. And He says, all right, fill it up. Fill it up. And just to be sure you do, I'm going to send more preachers and more teachers and more writers and you're going to fill it up by killing them and the ones you can't kill you're going to persecute. And then you're going to fill that cup up so much that upon you verse 35 says, "is going to come all the righteous blood shed on the earth." The whole thing is going to come apart. The dam is going to take only so much and it's going to break on you. The cup of wrath will be filled.

The word hopos, hopos, the beginning of verse 35. Hoposmeans purpose, "for the purpose that upon you may come the righteous blood shed." God's purpose is to let this generation fill up the final act of atrocity against the righteous by massacring the Savior Himself and His followers and then God's judgment will pour itself out. It isn't that God wills that men be lost. God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. It is, however, that when men reject the Lord Jesus Christ and refuse to come to Him, it is when they do that, they bring upon themselves an outpouring of God's wrath. And listen carefully to me, the longer they have rejected and the more information they have that they have rejected and the more lessons given them from which they have not learned the greater the guilt. Do you understand that?

So that the people in Jesus' time have greater guilt than anyone that ever lived before them. You say well their forefathers had the law of God. Yes, but they had the law of God and the Messiah. They had the teaching of the Old Testament prophets and John the Baptist and Jesus and His apostles. And not only that, they should have learned of God's judgment on past apostates and past murderers of the righteous. They should have learned from them not to do that. So they had accumulated revelation and they had accumulated lessons from history, all of which they rejected. Therefore, their accumulative guilt is surpassing that of any generation prior to them.

And so it all breaks on their heads. How can one generation be held responsible for all the righteous blood? Because of its constant rejection of full light, constant rejection of all the lessons of history. I mean, we can see it in this covenant people clearly. I hope we can see it as clearly in our own nation, because we are in the very process right now of filling up the cup of God's wrath. And we've been doing it steadily and this generation alive today is more guilty of doing it than any in the past, because we have the accumulated testimony of God's truth in this culture and we also have the accumulated lessons of why we should not act against a holy God. And the more we accumulate that data, the more guilty we become and when it breaks, it'll break on the generation that finally fills the cup to the brim. That's where they were.

And one generation which duplicates the sins of past generations and rejects the lessons of past history and rejects the revelation of God that it has, brings upon itself a more profound judgment. So judgment is cumulative. And He says this to them, verse 35, this is a fascinating verse. "It's going to break on you all the righteous blood," that is all the blood shed when righteous people were killed. When they persecuted righteous people and took their life, which, of course, is the greatest indicator of the rejection of God's truth. I mean, when you kill the righteous, you've gone the limit, right? That's the worst you can do.

So all of the worst of your evil manifested in the killing of righteous people, shedding their blood, it's all going to come to fill the cup and break on you. "And you're going to be suffering the just punishment of all that blood from righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah's son of Barachiah whom you slew between the temple and the altar." From A to Z, from the beginning of the Old Testament, Genesis Chapter 4, the first murder of a righteous man, who killed who? Cain killed. Why did he kill Abel? Because he couldn't stand a righteous man, right? He couldn't stand him.

I said it earlier and I'll say it again, if a society has the latitude to kill righteous people, it'll do it, because it can't tolerate that. And Cain could not tolerate the purity of Abel, so he murdered him. And that was the first murder of a righteous man. And he sweeps them all the way through their history, because they were out of the loins of the Adamic family. All the way through to the conclusion of the Old Testament era and the last Old Testament martyr, Zechariah, son of Barachiah. And they murdered him between the temple and the altar. Now there's a lot of discussion about who this last guy is. We don't have any problem with Abel. We know who he was.

But they say Zechariah, son of Barachiah, seems to be a mistake because if you go back to 2 Chronicles, don't do it now just write it down somewhere, if you go back to 2 Chronicles 24, I think it's around verse 20-22 or 23, 2 Chronicles 24, you will find there a man named Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada. And Zechariah the son of Jehoiada was alive during the time of King Joash. That's about 800 B.C. That's a long time before the end of the Old Testament era. Now this guy, Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, was stoned to death in the temple court. He was stoned to death by his countrymen, the Jews in the temple court. The reason was because Joash the king told them to stone him to death because he didn't like the fact that he was rebuking idolatry.

So there's another illustration. Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, around 800 B.C. spoken against the idolatry of Israel. The king didn't like it, so he told the people to stone him to death. They stoned him to death in the temple. So many people have said well, you see, that's who Jesus has in mind. Zechariah, son of Barachiah. Only Jesus muffed up his father's name. And it's really Zechariah, son of Jehoiada. And critics want to use this passage to indicate to us that not only can we not always trust the Bible, but we can't even always trust Jesus who may be prone to era from time to time.

Is that the case? I think not. You say who is Zechariah, son of Barachiah? Well, if this Barachiah was nobody, if this was a name pulled out of the air, if we didn't know Zechariah, son of Barachiah, well, maybe would say or a little more prone to say that he made a mistake. But there is in the Bible a Zechariah, son of Barachiah. Do you know who it is? It's the Zechariah that wrote the prophecy Zechariah. And in case you're startled by that, there are 27 Zechariahs in the Bible. And if there were 27 Zechariahs named in the Bible, God only knows how many thousands of Zechariahs there must have been.

So it shouldn't be too startling to us that in 800 B.C. Zechariah, son of Jehoiada was murdered for being righteous and later on another man who happened to have the same name, Zechariah, son of Barachiah, was also murdered for righteousness. When Jesus says in this passage that all through history you've been killing the righteous. If Zechariah is a common name, why does that bother us? I mean, they continually killed the messengers of God. Jesus pointed that out in the parable, you remember, about the man who sent back his servants to the vineyard and they kept killing his servants? Sure, this is a way of life for them. They probably killed a lot of Zechariahs.

So we aren't startled by that. I believe this to be Zechariah the son of Barachiah, none other than the prophet Zechariah. Who lived, by the way, way down to the end of the Old Testament era in 580 to 570, right at the end of the era. And what He is saying the first martyr of righteous in that Old Testament era Abel and the last martyr of righteous in that Old Testament era was Zechariah, son of Barachiah. We didn't know this until Jesus said it, but they killed him between the temple and the altar. It seemed to be that in the temple was a familiar place for them to murder people.

Don't be shocked, they tried to killed Paul there. Read Acts 21. That may have been a place where they killed a lot of righteous people, because that's where the focus came clear you see. You have unrighteous people running the place and you have a righteous person who confronts them. That would be the place where they might kill. Think of the life of Christ. How many times did He go into the temple when they would have wanted to kill Him if they could have. So we're not surprised by that. So I don't believe Jesus made a mistake. I don't believe He could.

Now, I'm not going to second-guess Him. I believe this takes us from Abel to Zechariah, the son of Barachiah, and Jesus is telling us that He too died a martyr like so many others because He spoke the truth of God. You slew him. Would you notice that when He says, "whom you slew," some of them would have said wait a minute we weren't there. We didn't do that, but He sees the nation as one guilty nation. Cumulatively filling up the cup through many generations and the guilt of rejection and rebellion is increased by that accumulation of previous warnings that accumulation of previous messages and preachings from the prophets and writings from the scribes. They had so much information, they had so much knowledge, they were filling up the same cup to its brim.

So the bloody flow of murdered martyrs from Abel to Zechariah, He says you're guilty of it all. And I see you as one with your whole nation. You are guilty as guilty as Cain. You are guilty as guilty as those who slew Zechariah and everybody in between those two. You've accumulated all that guilt. What's going to happen? Verse 36, we'll stop with this verse. "Truly I say to you all these things shall come upon this generation." All these things. All what things? All this guilt. All this guilt for righteous blood is going to break on your heads.

It's like in Revelation 17 when John sees the vision of the final world false church, you know the harlot and mystery Babylon, the great prostitute, the false religious system of the tribulation time? And John says "She was drunk with the blood of all the martyrs. It's as if that false system too accumulates the guilt of all the slaying of the righteous there. So he says you're guilty of it all and because you are guilty of it all, the guilt is going to come down on top of you. It's all going to break on you. This generation. What's He mean? I think He meant the people right there. This generation. This Jewish group of people. This nation at this time and this place in history, you fill the cup up when you killed the Savior and His apostles. You've filled it up, that's it.

And God says, through Christ it's going to break on you. And it did by the way, it did. The Lord was crucified as we shall see a few days later. And it wasn't but a few years after that in 70 A.D. that the judgment of God came and that judgment physically that came in 70 A.D. against the nation Israel was only a symbol of the eternal damnation that came against those Christ rejecters. Oh there was some who believed in the midst, but as a whole, the nation rejected. And that judgment that fell on them in 70 A.D. is still being meted out against them and will be until the day comes when they turn and see the Messiah for who He is and we'll get into that next week.

But the judgment came and 70 A.D. and it was a holocaust to end all holocausts. It is called by Luke, in Chapter 21:22, "the days of vengeance." If Christ was crucified in 33 A.D. in 66 A.D. the revolution broke out against Rome. They took as much as they could take of Roman oppression. The Zealots had been running around. Zealots were a political party that were aggressively anti-Roman. They went around with daggers in their cloaks and they would stab Roman soldiers. They were the terrorists of the time. If there were bombs, they would have been the ones setting the off. But they ran around assassinating and fomenting problems and came out of the hills in little raids and so forth, the Zealots. And finally and around 66 A.D. the thing flourished and broke into open revolt. In fact, it was about May of 66. And Rome struck back and they started a bloody battle in Galilee and started slaughtering the Jews in the north in Galilee. And finally Titus came down to the city of Jerusalem with an army in excess of 80,000 men.

By the way, Josephus, the great Jewish historian was there and has written the full record of it so we know what happened. And Josephus fills in all kinds of information for us. The 80,000 men came in, they got all around the city, the Jews laughed at them, mocked them, refused to surrender and the siege broke out and the war broke out. It's beyond description. Absolutely beyond description to tell what happened. The Romans who were outside the city had the Jews captive in the city. Any Jew outside was immediately killed. In fact, they put crosses up all around the city so Jews could look out of the city and see crucified Jews everywhere. When they caught a Jew, they crucified him outside the city.

They built a mount outside the city so that the Jews could not escape and that's a very common Roman technique. In fact, you were with us in Masadaearlier at the end of last year, we stood on the top of Masada, we could see the Roman mound that was put around that so that it would be a place that soldiers could entrench themselves and people could not escape in living the city. They denuded all the hillsides of the trees to make war machines and they had these create siege machines that would catapult 600 pound boulders over the walls and crush the buildings and the people inside. The built battering rams. They built weapons out of the woods and...out of the wood, and what the Jews did was set all that on fire. And so every time the Jews burned that up they took more trees and built more weapons.

And so for months they were stripping the forest as they built the sheaves and the Jews burned them up because they were made of wood. And inside the city there was all kinds of problems going on. In fact, there was even an eternal revolution among the Jews and they were killing each other. The Romans sealed off the city eventually and starvation and famine began to work its terrible work. And unbearable stench began to rise from which in the city because of the death. And they threw out at least 100,000 bodies according to Josephus, they threw 100,000 bodies out over the wall just to get rid of the decay and the stink. And so the outer part of Jerusalem was just covered with dead bodies decaying. It's an unbelievable thing.

Finally, the temple was destroyed fire and in August of 70 A.D. the Roman soldiers went into the temple location and lifted their own banners in the very holy place and sacrificed to their false Gods. Caesar then ordered that the whole city of Jerusalem be raised to the ground and it was completely leveled. All that was left was a small part of the western wall. There were, according to Josephus, 1,100,000 dead Jews, 100,000 Jews or 97,000 I guess he says were taken into prison as prisoners. Out of one city gate, they hauled over 115,000 corpses of Jews, out of one city gate. They obliterated them.

God said the cup is full, that's it. God's spirit does not always strive with man. And so the word of judgment was imminent condemnation and it came and it came fast. That's how God feels about sin. That's how God feels about the rejection of His truth and His Son. That's not the end of the story. There's hope in the last three verses, but that's for next time. Let's bow in prayer.

Oh Father what a fearful thing it is to fall into the hands of an angry God, as the writer of Hebrews has said. Lord God, may we learn the lesson. May we not be those who go on compounding the sins of the past. May no one here be ignorant of the revelation of grace and of the history of judgment. May everyone of us be drawn to the Savior, who alone can save from sin the Christ, the Lord Jesus, and believe in Him, confessing Him as Lord. Lord we know that this is not that which is Your desire for You are not pleased in the death of the wicked. You have no pleasure in that. Though it reveals Your great glory and holy justice, You have no pleasure in it. You are not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Lord we pray today that everyone here would come to repent us. Turn from sin to Christ. Father, we pray that You would do your work in every heart for Jesus' sake. Amen.

Jesus' Last Words to Israel, Part 2

Let's open our Bibles this morning together and we do so with great joy to study God's word and to learn His truth, what a privilege. Let's open to Matthew 23. This morning we come to the last few verses of this very, very powerful Chapter. We're going to look at verses 37-39. But I want you to just kind of hold your place there for a moment and I want to set up if I may in your thinking a scene that will help you grasp the very great significance of this passage. Let me begin by saying no one could possibly have a greater love or a greater compassion for the nation Israel than a truly committed Christian. And that's the way I feel.

I find myself almost inordinately favoring Jewish people. And I guess it has to do with the fact that all the favorite people in my life are Jewish, Jesus, Paul, Peter, Moses, Abraham, and a few folks here at Grace Church, many in fact. And I have such a great heart for Jewish people. I...because they're God's special people. And a great sense of compassion over the plight of Jewish people. I feel in my own heart the pain of their unbelief, the pain of their persecution. The tremendous distress of a people who down deep inside believe they have a covenant with God and can't understand why it never turns to blessing. But why it always seems that they're under a curse. A people who believe themselves to be unique who believe themselves to humanitarianly sensitive and yet seem always to be oppressed, always beleaguered, massacred, persecuted, harassed and asking themselves why. Why?

I had the privilege a few months ago of being in the land of Israel and everywhere you go in that land you are overwhelmed with the fact that those people have known centuries and centuries and centuries of difficulty. You can see the remnants of the devastation of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. when you look at the western wall, which is all that was left after the city was raised to the ground at the order of the Roman emperor. And here and there across that country, you see the remnants of their wars and their terrible slaughters, remnants that run from ancient times to very modern times. All the way from rubble of a city to tanks overturned and sitting in the desert, reminders that the battles are still raging in that part of the world.

This people has suffered like no other nation in history. And it seems so strange that all through these centuries God has preserved them. They're never exterminated. They're never wiped out. They're never even lost in the process of inner-marriage. They just keep perpetuating themselves, and yet it is a perpetuation and punishment. It is a continual existence in chastening and you can see it written all over them all the time. Why? Why? They cry out to a heaven that never answers. Why? If indeed we are the covenant people, if indeed we are the chosen, if indeed it is us to whom they oracles of God are committed. If we are the people of the adoption and the promises and the covenants and the law and the services and of whom even the Messiah came or is to come, why? Why have we suffered so?

Let me give you a little bit of background. The contemporary picture of the Jews in suffering really begins with the destruction of Jerusalem. In 70 A.D., Titus Vespasian came the Roman General, sieged the city and before it was over, over a million Jews were killed according to Josephus. Two years before that in 68 A.D. the Gentiles of Caesarea had slain 20,000 Jews and captured thousands more and sold them into slavery. And that really began the 2,000 years of holocaust that the Jews have suffered.

For example, around that period of time in one single day, the inhabitance of Damascus slit the throats of 10,000 Jews. It wasn't long after that, a couple of centuries, that a man came into power by the name of Theodosius. And Theodosius, under his reign, developed a legal code. And that legal code has inherent in it anti-Semitic viewpoints which state the inferiority of the Jews and unfortunately Theodosius legal code penetrated all of western law so that there was built in from that fourth century period and anti-Jewish feeling underlying much of western culture. The sad history really took on unbelievable proportions in the crusades. The first crusade occurred in 1096 and I'll just give you a brief background. You can remember your history course. The crusades were basically supposed to be holy pilgrimages on the part of the western European Christians. And I used the word Christians loosely because they were not Christians in the true sense, but only in the name of religion. And they decided to march to the holy land to recapture the holy land from the pagan Turks who possessed it.

The holy land had fallen into the control of the Turks and they thought that was a desecration of the Christian holy places. Now the fear that they had was that as they went back and laid claim to that the Jews would then make demands on them. And the Jews would want also to lay claim to the land. And so to prevent the Jews from exercising any of that, they just went across Europe and massacred all the Jews they found. So here they are in the name of Christ massacring Jews across Europe.

Now that might give you a little idea why the Jews have a distaste in their mouth for Christianity. Secondly, why the very word crusade conjures up all kinds of evil things to a Jew. So the crusades were a very disastrous event. Let me tell you what they did basically. They would go into a town, they would find a Jewish settlement. They would find a small group of Jews or a large group in a town. They would give them very often two choices. Choice number one convert to Christianity and be publicly baptized. Choice number two, die. What happened was many Jews who didn't want to do that died. Many others falsely converted to Christianity to save their lives. Some of the Jewish leaders tried to prevent false conversions and so they told the people you're better off dead and in many towns and villages, the people committed suicide as families when they knew the crusaders were approaching their village.

They were guilty of no crime, they were victims of unbelievable persecution. In one particular case that I read about this week in one village, at least, some of the women and young girls decided that they would rather die than go through what would happen in the crusades and many of them didn't have the option of being baptized. It was just a question of being killed. And so they loaded rocks on these young girls tying them in their garments and dropping them in the river so that they would drown rather than be in any way humiliated by the crusaders.

They were accused of crucifying Christian children. They were accused of drinking then the blood in the Passover of Christian children which they executed. All kinds of unbelievable horrors. In the city of Vernslater famous because of Martin Luther. The Jews refused to be baptized, so they were murdered by the mob and their corpses were dragged from one end of the city to the other to desecrate their bodies. In 1236 still in the time of the crusades, there were several of them, they went into two villages, the crusaders did Anjou and Poitou and they trampled 3,000 Jews under their horses hooves, and the worst was yet to come.

In England, there came to be a king by the name of Edward the I and under him the Jews were somewhat safe. They by now had scattered all over Europe and the dispossession of Jerusalem and their land. And they found their way into England and they had a modicum of safety there for a while until a Dominican monk, in the Roman system, the Dominicans were a very well-known and proud group, a Dominican monk decided to study the Hebrew Scriptures in order to convert to Roman Catholicism. In the process, he became converted to Judaism and was circumcised. The result of that was that the Roman Catholic Church was irate, the Dominicans felt that they had been betrayed and disgraced and so they sought to take vengeance on the Jews and they did.

They expelled them from Cambridge, laws were passed against them. They were charged with counterfeiting coins. They were hanged. They were exiled. They were made, those who weren't hanged or exiled to wear a badge saying, in effect, I'm a Jew. A badge of inferiority. In London, they took Jews and they tied horses to their extremities and sent the horses in opposite directions ripping their bodies in half and then hanging the remnants of their bodies on the gallows for all the town to see. Finally, around 1290 the king made a decree that if any Jews were left they were to be expelled. The fled, the went further into Europe into France, which already had expelled Jews under the reign of Louis the XI, but by now had released a little bit of its animosity and so the Jews could find at least a place to stay in France where they could live. They too had to put either a red felt or a yellow cloth badge on indicating they were Jews so everyone would know they were inferior.

That didn't last very long. Within about 15 years after that, Philip the Fair expelled over 100,000 Jews from France. Some of them managed to hang around and stay and when the terrible black death came in the 14thCentury, the plague that went all across Europe and tens of thousands of people were killed with that terrible plague, the Jews were blamed. And it was said that the Jews had poisoned the wells in France and caused the black death. And so they began again to kill the Jews. One entire congregation was together meeting and they burned them all in that one place.

As a result of this they fled further and this time they fled to Poland and to Russia. And in our contemporary time today we know about Polish Jews and Russian Jews, very commonly. They were chased there. Poland really became a homeland for them. It was in Poland that they established Talmudic schools. It was in Poland that they built seminaries that they did much of their work and so forth. They then came into great conflict with the Roman Catholic Church in Poland and there was tremendous persecution there. They pitted themselves on one occasion against the Cossacks in a war which the Cossacks won and therefore, the Cossacks took out their vengeance on the Jews and massacred them.

Some of them managed to flee to Spain, but historians tell us that Spain could be "the hell of the Jews," and the two people who heap the most hatred and horror on the Jews were a king and queen by the name Ferdinand and Isabella, who were the same two in power commissioning Columbus to sail, who later found the western hemisphere. So while they were giving the world the benefit of the western hemisphere, they were doing all they could to massacre the Jews in their own country.

One of the things they did in Spain that's inconceivable is they found the names of proselytes who had converted to Judaism under the influence of the Jews and if they were dead, they dug up their graves, desecrated their bodies and confiscated all the property of their heirs to make sure no one every proselyted to Judaism. This was the mark of being a Jew. All across Europe Jews became known as maranaused, swine. A mark had to be warn in Spain by every Jew compose of a series of flaming crosses. Finally in 1492, when Columbus was sent west, the Jews were sent east out of Spain. The ones that wound their way to Russia to this day have been persecuted. And we've all read about the terrible, terrible plight of Soviet Jews, haven't we? I mean, folks, it's been 2,000 years like that for these people. You can back up a little bit in the middle of the 17thCentury, the first persecution broke out in Poland. That had had some safety there for a couple hundred years and then it all of a sudden changed.

Germany began to massacre Jews. Periodically through the centuries Germany had done that. Accusing them again, also of using Christian children's blood for their Passover. And the German Catholic Church said that they took knives, the Jews did, and pierced the host in the mass until blood poured forth. In other words, they excused them of stabbing the body of Christ. Persecuted and massacred them for that. So the anti-Semitism just flowed through western civilization finally in a contemporary setting reaching somewhat of an apex in the terrible Dryfus affair in France when Dryfus who was an officer in the army was put out of the army and humiliated as a traitor simply and only because he was Jewish. An unjust accusation of treason meant to get all Jews out of the high ranks of officers in the French army.

Now in spite of all of this, the marvel of it all is this. You have all these centuries of endeavors to exterminate the Jews; and by the time you come to World War II there are 16.5 million Jews in Europe. So while God is allowing all of this, God is not allowing it to exterminate this people. So they are perpetuated in punishment. And then, of course, Hitler came and then the unbelievable, indescribable Holocaust exterminated nearly six million Jews. Only this time there was a difference.

This time it wasn't hatred based on religion. It was hatred based on race and that was a whole new thing. It had always been religious until Hitler or most always. Now it was based on race and secular society picked up the legacy of religious anti-Semitism and gave the world racial anti-Semitism. And these people still suffer from it even today. It's tragic. Now all of that to say this, why? Why? And that is the question on the lips of Jews throughout their history. Why? Why is it this way with us? Why so long do we suffer?

The answer is in our passage. Look at verse 37. "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them who are sent unto thee how often would I have gathered thy children together even as a hen gathereth her chicken under her wings and you would not. Behold your house is left unto you desolate." Stop there at that point. What do you mean your house is left unto you desolate? The Lord Jesus is saying Jerusalem, nobody is going to plow your ground anymore. Nobody is going to cultivate your field. No one is going to plant the crop. No one is going to concerned about noble vine. No one is going to water you. No one is going to prune you. No one is going to build a hedge around you. No one is going to protect you. You are on your own left to the elements.

It's very similar to Isaiah Chapter 5 where Isaiah said to Israel just before the Babylonian captivity, a holocaust of another kind. Earlier in their history, Isaiah says God made you all that you could be. God planted you a noble vine in a very fertile hill. He put a mote around you. He protected you. He did all He could to preserve you to cause you to bring forth grapes and you brought forth sour berries and the judgment of the Isaiah was and now God's going to take away your hedge and no rain's going to rain on you and you're going to be left to the elements and whatever's going to happen is going to happen.

For 2,000 years nearly the nation Israel has had to live its life without God and without His protection, that's the difference. Why is it the way it is? Because God has removed His protecting hand. He has preserved them as a people. He has left them unprotected from all the holocausts that the world could bring to bear. Why? Because of what it says in verse 37. Jesus came and said I wanted to gather you. I wanted to protect you. I wanted to bring you under my wings and you would not. That's the issue right there. Why? Because they refused their Messiah. That's right, because they refused their Messiah. You want to hear something very, very important historically? If the Jews had received Jesus Christ, the kingdom would have come; therefore, in rejecting Him, they have gotten what they have gotten. Jesus said He came to bring the kingdom. They refused the king, they forfeited the kingdom, they got what they got.

Instead of entering into the blessing of God, God took His hand of blessing off and left to the fate of an evil world. They have suffered immeasurably. Another way to say it is in the words of 1 Corinthians 16:22 where Paul says "If any man love not the Lord, let him be Anathema. If any man love not the Lord, he's cursed. He is cursed. If any man love not the Lord, he is cursed. Privilege was given to Israel unequal to any privilege ever given to any nation, unbelievable privilege. And with it came tremendous responsibility. Now we have gone through 23 chapters of the gospel of Matthew, 23 chapters of the coming of Messiah. His birth, His ministry, His message, His miracles, His call and His cry to Israel; 23chapters, and the sum of it is this. When it's all said and done and the Messiah has come in human flesh and He has taught and He has healed and He has preached and He has loved and He's demonstrated all that God is, they reject it totally, totally. And He says that's it. You are desolate.

Now this passage closes the sermon of Chapter 23. It is a sermon, its one sermon this Chapter, and it's the final sermon the Lord ever gave publicly. And it is a sermon against false spiritual leaders who have lead the nation to this point of rejection. Who have led the nation in their sin. It doesn't mean that the people weren't as guilty. They were for following, but nonetheless the leaders led them there. And so the chapter is against those leaders. It is a furious diatribe against those leaders. But it ends with this pathos. It ends with this grief. It ends with this lament, because though God is going to judge that nation by removing protection and letting Satan go full blast at them.

And may I suggest to you something very important here. You say God has His hand of protection off a lot of nations, that's probably right. You say why is it worse with Israel? Because Satan wants to exterminate Israel more than other nation, because they are the nation in the plan of God which Satan wants to thwart. Therefore, for God to remove His protection from Israel is to expose them to the worst furies that Satan could ever bring upon any nation, because he desires to eliminate them so that Christ can never inherit them and fulfill the promise of God to them, you see.

So these false leaders have led the people in a rejection of their Messiah. And God has removed His blessing. But the heart of God is grieved as ours ought to be. We don't gloat over that. God says I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked. In Jeremiah Chapter 13 God speaks through Jeremiah the prophet and calls for the people to glorify Him and to obey Him and then says and if you don't mine eye will run down with tears. You see? This does not make God happy. This grieves Him. Now last week we looked at verses 34 to 36 and we saw there the imminent condemnation.

We saw there that God says because you have rejected the Messiah, because you have filled up the cup of sin and guilt, because you've not only rejected the Messiah, but all the prophets of the past, you have cumulatively rejected all of God's revelation. You have all the Old Testament in front of you. You have all the preaching of John the Baptist. You have all the ministry of Jesus Christ. You've rejected it all. You've filled the cup in verse 32. That's the image there. You have filled the cup of wrath to the brim. This is it. And the cup that it took centuries to fill is going to take centuries equally to pour back out.

They filled it up with centuries of sin. It's being poured out with centuries of chastening. You say well, how could this group of people be guilty of the sins of the past? Because they knew the sins of the past and didn't learn from them, they inherited their guilt. Because they not only didn't listen to Jesus and the apostles, they didn't listen to John before Jesus and the prophets before John. They accumulated the guilt of all of it because they followed in the sins of their fathers never learning lessons their fathers pain and deprivation and punishment should have taught them. So they had a cumulative guilt.

They had rejected full light, full revelation. They had come so far as...in the words of Hebrews 6 to be exposed to the whole of the gospel, tasting the heavenly gift. Being partakers of the Holy Spirit's power and of the things of the age to come. In other words, they had a full revelation of Christ and they rejected and said He was from Satan, He was from hell, He was from the pit. And they, therefore, became the apostates of all apostates rejecting the accumulation of all revelation to them, which are summarized, epitomized, and maximized in the coming of Jesus Christ.

So He says because of this, verse 36, all these things are going to come on this generation. This is the most guilty generation in the history of Israel, because it rejected the light that had accumulated through thousands of years of divine revelation. And it's all going to come on you. You have filled up the cup and now it's going to poured out. And it started in 70 A.D. in that terrible destruction of Jerusalem and it's still going on right now. Still going on right now.

And you want to hear something else, folks? It will get worse. That's right. The persecution of Israel isn't over. The hand of God is off and Satan's doing his thing. And you want to know something? There's a time described in the Bible as the tribulation, the great tribulation. It's also called the time of Jacob's what? Trouble. We're going to learn more about when we get into Chapter 24, but that is going to be a holocaust like no other holocaust Israel has ever seen. The worst is yet to come. The cup is still being poured out.

Now may I say as footnote here, that doesn't mean that because that nation as a nation is going through this with the hand of blessing off and Satan doing all he can to destroy them to thwart the plan of God. That doesn't mean that individual Jews can't come to Christ. They can and they do and they will. Because always God has His, what? His remnant, always, always. There are some true Jews who see the Messiah, but for the whole, for the nation, for the greater part, terrible time of judgment.

Now we said verse 34 to 36 could be called imminent condemnation. Imminent in the sense that it's coming immediately and it didn't. In 30 some years it started. But the second thing, and what I want you to look at today is intense compassion, verse 37 and 38. From imminent condemnation to intense compassion, and this is an outpouring of grief equal to the outpouring of wrath. It is the climax of great emotion and compassion. It provides for us an essential balance and an essential understanding of the character of God and Christ. We have heard furious words of judgment. And now we're going to hear words of grief. God never rejoices in punishment in the sense that He gloats over the doom of the people.

No, He is grieved and so we read in verse 37, "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem," and there is pathos in the repetition isn't there? Those words are filled with sorrow. And if you parallel that passage, for example with the Luke 19 passage where it says "And when He was come near He beheld the city and wept over it saying if thou hast known even thou at least in this thy day the things which belong to thy peace, but now they're hidden from thine eyes." He wrote in that day of triumphal entry, that Monday of the passion week and He saw the city and began to weep and weep and weep and say oh if you only knew. If you'd only known who was here, who was visiting you, but you didn't know and now you can't see. Your eyes are blind.

So He sorrowed, He wept tears and it may well be that He wept here again on Wednesday as He had on Monday when He cried "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem." The tears of lament over a people about to have the hand of God's protection removed from them, to be turned over to Satan who more than other people would want them to be destroyed. Just the idea of the repetition is interesting. Very often in Scripture repetition like that is an indication of great emotion. For example, "Martha, Martha," in Luke Chapter 10, verse 41 or in Luke 22:3, "Simon, Simon," says the Lord. Or in Acts 9 from the voice out of heaven we hear "Saul, Saul why are you persecuting me." Or perhaps best 2 Samuel, the cry of anguish and the heart of David over his son. He says, "Oh my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, if only I had died for you oh Absalom, my son, my son."

And so that repetition is the repetition of grief, the repetition of emotion. And so He says, "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem." And He characterizes the city not as the city of peace, not as the holy city. He characterizes the city with present participles. "You who are killing the prophets and you who are stoning them who are sent to you, that's the city you are. You are the city that kills prophets and stones messengers." What a characterization of the holy city.

People who prided themselves on being the city of God, the city of purity, the city of peace, the city of God it's called the city of killers. In fact, later on later on in the book of Revelation God calls Jerusalem Sodom and Egypt. Sodom, perversion, Egypt pagan. So Jerusalem is the Sodom, the Egypt, the murderous city. It's not the holy city. It's not the city of peace. It's not the city of God. It's not beautiful for habitation. It's not lovely among all the cities of the earth. It's not Jerusalem the golden. It's Jerusalem the killer, Jerusalem the murderer. And the present participles are most interesting who are killing the prophets. They were about to kill Him and He was the supreme prophet. Who are stoning those who were sent to you, they would also very soon after they killed him, kill Stephen and they would stone him to death. They weren't through doing it.

They were still doing it. They were definitely the sons of their fathers in terms of where we see earlier in the Chapter verse 29 to 31, they deny that they would kill the prophets and yet they're doing it. They think they're better than their fathers who did that, but they're not. If you remember their fathers had wanted Jeremiah dead. They hated Jeremiah because he spoke the truth. They wanted to get rid of him. Justin Martyr in Dialogues of Trifo says they sawed Isaiah in half with a wooden sword, the prophet of God. Apparently, they murdered Zechariah the prophet between the temple and the altar. I mean, they killed the prophets rather than hear their message. And so they are characterized as a city of murderers and indeed they were because they were about to murder the Son of God.

Earlier in a parable back in Chapter 21 the Lord had said you're like a group of tenant farmers who've come into a vineyard that someone else owns and when the owner sends back his servants to give you a message, you kill the servants. And finally after you've killed all the servants, the owner sends the Son, you kill Him too. That's the kind of people they were. They were killers of those who spoke the truth and represented God. Unbelievable. Murderers of the righteous. Now you ask the question, why has Israel suffered so long? This is why. Because for so long they rejected God. For so long they killed His messengers. For so long they stoned those that were sent. Finally, they filled the cup up when they executed their own Messiah. And God says, that's it, you are desolate. I take my hand of blessing off and all hell will break loose on you. Culminating in the tribulation time when Revelation tells us the mouth of the pit is open and the demons that for centuries have been bound are released to run ramped across the earth.

And you have not only the persecution of men, but the persecution of hellish supernatural demons, culminating this terrible time of Jerusalem's chastening. By the way, it's important to note that Jerusalem here is a symbol for the whole nation as it was very often in the ministry of the prophets. When He says, "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem," He gathers up in Jerusalem's symbolic use the whole of the people and the nation. And then you see the heart of the Savior. Look what He says.

"How often would I have gathered thy children together?" I wanted to bring you into safety. Like we read in Psalm 36 this morning, I wanted you to come unto the shelter of my wings. I wanted you to be protected. I didn't want to take my hand of blessing off. I didn't want to expose you to the elements. I didn't want to leave you unprotected. But often I wanted to gather you. Does He mean just when He visited Jerusalem? No, John...the gospel of John records His several visits to Jerusalem, but He isn't only referring to that. He's saying how often? In other words, it's a way of saying so many, many times I wanted to gather you. In fact, all the time of His ministry, He wanted to gather them. He wanted to gather them. He wanted to call them to Himself. "Come unto me all ye that labored heavy laden, I'll give you rest."

Even as He dies on the cross, He gathers a thief into His arms who is willing to believe. I mean, that's the way it was until they silenced His voice in death. He was always wanting to gather them and gather them into protection, into safety from judgment. And then He gives a beautiful analogy of that, "even as a hen," and the word in the Greek is actually a bird, "gathers her chickens or little birds under her wings." It's kind of like a little farmyard maybe and little hen and some little chicks. And the hen looks up and sees a chicken hawk flying across, gathers those little ones into protection in a private corner where she can't be seen and they can't run around unprotected and unwitting to be consumed by that preying bird.

Or maybe a storm is approaching and a crash of thundering and lightening, she gathers those little ones in the warmth of safety. The Lord would have done that. There's a beautiful intimacy here. There's a tenderness here. It isn't just some theological thing of which He speaks. It's something very personal, very intimate, very warm. He wanted to give them security and the key to the whole deal, underline it in your Bible, the last part of verse 37, "and ye would not." That's the key. You wouldn't do it.

Let me just say to those of you who tend to be hard-line Calvinists, I find no absolute determinism in this verse. I find no fate here. I find no predetermined destiny here without thought for a response. I find here that God would, but you wouldn't. That's what I find here. And somewhere in the midst of that incredible apparent paradox of sovereignty and volition, we've got to see this passage. "I would," He says. "How often I would have gathered, but you would not." And every soul that spends eternity outside the protection of God, every soul that spends eternity in hell is there because they would not, they would not.

The gospel gives no place for absolute determinism. Go back to the parable of Chapter 22, verse 3. The king sent forth servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding and they would not come. And again He characterizes the time in which He lived in the people of Israel. You got called, you got invited, but you wouldn't come. You refused to come. You find it in the parable of Luke 14. A certain man gave a great supper and called many. "Come for all things are ready," and they all with one consent began to make excuses. I have bought a piece of ground. I have to go see it. I pray have me excused. Another said, I have yoke of oxen, I have to prove them. Have me excused. Another said I've married a wife, I can't come. So the servant came and showed his lord these things and the master of the house said all right. Then go in the streets and lanes of the city and bring the poor and the maimed and the lame and the blind. In other words, if the ones that were supposed to come don't want to come, we'll just go take anybody that will. They wouldn't come.

There's no determinism there. I would, but you would not. Man's choice, don't ever forget it theologically, man's choice is as much a part of salvation as is God's choice. You would not. You would not. And anyone who goes to hell goes there because they would not, they would not. In this sense, grace is resistible and every person responsible. And so we see the heart of Christ. Look at verse 38, "Because you would not," He says, "behold," and that's an exclamation which involves surprise and shock, "your house," oh that's important. He before had called it "My Father's house," hadn't He? Now He says it's your house. It's been so desecrated now and He's talking probably about the temple which was the House of God and that was where He was right then. Your house is deserted. God just left.

To put it in Old Testament terms, Ichabad, the glory hath departed, you're on your own. You're a desert, your house. And in speaking of the temple that way, He included the city and the whole nation. God's protection is gone. In fact, in this age, God has a new house. The church is the house of God, 1 Timothy 3:15. The rest is desolate He says for you. Some time ready Deuteronomy 28. I wish I had time to do that. Deuteronomy 28:15-68, and there you will find that very early in the Pentateuch when God first established His relation with His people, He said if you turn from me, here's what'll happen. And they did it and that's exactly what happened. You read Deuteronomy 28 and you'll see it fulfilled in the history of Israel.

So here Christ rejected Israel because Israel rejected Him. Now may I add again as I said earlier, the gospel is still opened to individual Jews. On the day of Pentecost 3,000 Jews were saved. Later on, many thousands more were saved. Jews have been saved throughout all history. They're still be saved today. There are still many of them whose hearts are opened to the gospel of Jesus Christ. God will always have remnant. Individual Jews can come, but as a nation, God has removed His hand of blessing, and they're exposed.

And just what Jesus said would happen, happened. In Luke 19, verse 43, Jesus said to them, "The day shall come upon you that your enemies shall cast a trench about you and compass you around and keep you on every side...keep you in on every side." He was talking about the seize of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. And they'll lay even with you...lay you even with the ground that has flattened you. Your children within you, they'll not leave in you one stone upon another, because you knew not the time of your visitation, you didn't know when God came in the form of Jesus Christ, because you didn't know that, your city's going to be devastated.

And Josephus says the city was raised to the ground. Nothing was left but one prominent tower and a part of the western wall and the city was so flattened and so leveled not one was thrown upon another that a visitor coming to the area would not know that it was ever inhabited. It happened and it set in motion the centuries of Israel's unprotected devastation. It's a divine payoff folks for rejecting Christ and cumulative sin of a nation killing prophets, stoning the messengers of God. So sad, so heartbreaking. You say, is that end? Bless God it isn't the end.

Imminent condemnation, verse 34 to 36. Intense compassion, verse 37 and 38, and finally, insured conversion, verse 39. It's not the end. Insured conversion. Oh what a great verse. "I say unto you, you shall not see me anymore." Stop at that point. Jesus says, I'm gone. This is the end. Farewell from your Messiah. Your rejection is final and it was proven final because when the apostles came and preached after Christ was gone, they wanted them dead too. Nothing changed. It's the end of the call for Israel. They refused the grace of salvation when it was offered to them. His mission to them as Savior as a nation has ended. You want see me anymore, I'm gone.

That's the end. You say wait a minute. That's the end? Is that the end of Israel? You shall not see me anymore. Period, paragraph. Is there where the verse ends? It doesn't end there. If it ended there, it would dramatically change all of our doctrine, all of our theology. It'd be over with. I'll tell you something else it would do. It would make us doubt that we could ever trust God again. Because if He said to that nation, you will never see me again, then He's just broken some pretty strong, some pretty strong promises.

My Bible tells me in the Old Testament that He promised them that He would regather them. That ultimately he would be their Savior. That ultimately He would be their king. That ultimately they would come into a relationship with Him. That ultimately all the promises and covenants would come to fruition. If my Bible ended at the word henceforth or anymore, and there's nothing more for Israel, I've got to rethink the whole Old Testament and the character of God who made promises He's now not going to keep, but it doesn't end there.

It says this, what's the next word after henceforth or no more? Until, not unless, but until. "You're not going to see me anymore until," now there's hope in that. Just put a little circle around the word until. There's hope in that. You say you mean there's going to be an until? You mean there's going to be a time when something happens? That's right. "Until you shall say blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord." You say what does that mean? Well, what does that mean?

Well, back in Matthew 21:9 when Jesus rode into the city in His triumphal entry and they were hailing Him as the Messiah, they were crying verse 9, "Hosanna to the Son of David," and they said this, from Psalm 118:26, "Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord." That was a cry meant to identify the Messiah. Messiah was the coming one. That's the Greek text. The coming one, coming in the Lord's name or in the Lord's behalf or representing the Lord. Blessed is a perfect, always blessed, blessed in the past, and continually blessed. The always blessed coming one who comes in the name of the Lord. In other words, you're not going to see me ever again until you recognize me as your what? Messiah. That's what He's saying.

Until you recognize me as your Messiah. You say are they going to do that? Yeah, they're going to do that. They sure are going to do that. Go back to Zechariah, next to the last book in the Old Testament and watch these profound promises. Zechariah 12:9, Israel's history, now listen folks, Israel's history is going to get worse and worse and more tragic and more tragic in the future. You can read about it in Daniel. You can read about it in Revelation. You can read about it in Matthew 24 as we will very soon. It's going to get worse and the world is going to be massed against that people.

But all of a sudden Zechariah promises, verse 9, Zechariah 12, "It shall come to pass in that day that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem." Oh what a reversal. Now all of a sudden Israel's invincible. "And I," verse 10, here's the key, "I will pour upon the house of David and upon the inhabitance of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and of supplication," grace and blessings, responding to their great need. "And they shall look upon me whom they have pierced and mourn for Him as one mourneth for his only son and shall be in bitterness for Him as one that is bitterness for his firstborn."

You know what's going to happen? When they have...when the cup is empty and the wrath is fully poured out, God is going to turn the tables and God is going to destroy the nations that come against Jerusalem. And on Jerusalem pour out the spirit of grace. And the scales are going to come off their eyes and they're going to look again at the one they pierced. Who's that? Christ. And they're going to mourn as for an only son. Is He an only son? Yes, because there was only one Messiah and they're going to say oh, oh, oh, now we see. Now we understand why our history's been like this. Now we understand it all. We mourn for we have killed the only son, the firstborn, the Messiah. And it's unbelievable what'll happen. The bitterness, verse 10 says, the mourning, verse 11, more great mourning in Jerusalem and other places all down through verse 14. All over the land and the families there's mourning. Oh all these years of all this because of what we did. And the grief is overwhelming. And the sense of sin totally consuming.

Israel's going to come to that place. You say how do that come to that place? Because God pours out on them on the spirit of grace and supplication. God gives them grace to cry out to Him for blessing and mercy. And in that day verse 1 of Chapter 13, Chapter 13, verse 1, "In that day, there shall be a fountain open to the house of David and to the inhabitance of Jerusalem for sin and for cleansing." God's going to wash them. Going to wash the whole nation, clean them.

"In that day," verse 2 says, "all the names of idols are cut out of the land." Never remember again. All the false prophets and unclean spirits are going to go. God's going to save His people. Glorious, marvelous. The end verse 9, when it's all said and done, "a third part will come through the fire, refine them as silver is refined, test them as gold is tested, they'll call on my name, I'll hear them. I'll say he is my people. And they'll say He, the Lord, is my God."

Listen, you know what happens when that happens? When they look on the one they've pierced and they see Him for who He is and they say blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord, that's our Messiah. That's our Messiah. Jesus said in Matthew 23:39, "Then you'll see me." You won't see me until you say that. When you say that, then you'll see me. They say that in Chapter 13 of Zechariah. Look what happens in Chapter 14, verse 3, "Then shall the Lord go forth." When they have said it, He comes. "And His feet stand," verse 4, "on the Mount of Olives before Jerusalem on the east and the Mount of Olives shall cleave in its midst towards the east and toward the west" and so forth.

Where's He going to come when He comes back? Where's He going to come? The Mount of Olives, Jerusalem. It's going to be right after they say, blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord. As soon as they recognize the Messiah, they're going to see Him. You say well, is that really going to happen, John? One final passage, Romans 11. It has to happen. It has to happen. There is no question about it. Romans 11:11, "I say then," Paul says, "has Israel," he's talking about Israel here, "stumbled that they should fall?" In other words, have they stumbled that they should fall permanently? God forbid. Listen, they haven't stumbled to fall permanently. God forbid. No.

Further on, verse 23, the end of the verse talking of Israel, "God is able to graft them in again." It's as if they're a branch cut off. They can be grafted in again. They're not fallen permanently. They can be grafted in again. Will they be? Verse 26, "So all Israel shall be saved." Verse 27, "For this is my covenant unto them when I shall take away their sins." Not if but what? When. So the time is coming of insured conversion. Oh what great hope, great, great hope. So the Lord ends this sermon with hope. You say but John, that's all a big national lesson.

What does it have to do with me? Just this, listen to me. If God has chastened and punished and cursed by abandoning His own beloved people Israel, what do you think is going to happen to you if you reject Jesus Christ? Do you think you'll fair any better who are not His people? Don't be proud. This lesson of a nation in history can be reduced to a lesson for a man and a woman in this moment of time. For it must be said to you as well, if you love not the Lord you are cursed. The principle is the same whether a nation or an individual. You make a choice. The Lord seeks to gather you into the safety of His love and salvation. Will you or won't you allow that to happen? He would, but in so many cases you would not. And bring upon yourself the same abandonment you're left to Satan's devices. Let's bow in a closing of prayer.

Someone put it in perspective in writing a poem about Christ. It says, "He wept alone and men passed on. The men whose sins He bore, they saw the man of sorrow's weep. They'd seen Him weep before. They ask not whom these tears were for, they asked not whence they flowed. Those tears were for rebellious men, their source the heart of God. They fell upon this desert earth like drops from heaven on high, struck from an ocean tide of love that fills eternity. With love and tenderness divine those crystal cells or flow, tis God that weeps through human eyes for human guilt and woe. The eye of God is downward bent still ranging to and fro, where ere in this wide wilderness there roams a child of woe. And if the rebel chooses wrath, God mourns his tragic lot. Deep breathings from the heart of God, I would, but you would not."

Father, we pray that there's no one here in hearing this message that says I would not. I will not to believe, not to receive Christ. I turn my back, oh God, what a cursed place to be. May hearts turn to the Savior and receive what He offers the blessed salvation. While your heads are bowed before we close, if you don't know the Savior, open your heart to Him.