Beautiful Tombs

Introduction:

Take a stroll through a graveyard and you will see all kinds of interesting things, especially an old graveyard. Most of you know that Bethlehem has been around for a long time - over 200 years. We’ve had the cemetery for most of that time, so there are a lot of old and interesting graves out there in the cemetery.

You will find on those graves engravings that will not only give the birth and death of a person telling us what era they lived through, but sometimes you will also find a phrase describing the person or their life.

You see some graves with little more than a headstone, or in the case of some of the oldest graves, no headstone at all. You see other graves with lots of coping and decorations.

Some graves have been neatly kept and are inviting, indicating that people go to the graveside regularly and others have not been visited by anyone but the groundskeeper just keeping the weeds at bay.

Now, this is not an indictment against anyone’s grave care, because at some point down the line, most of us are going to be forgotten and those who knew us will no longer be around to keep up our gravesite like it was when we first were laid to rest there.

It happens to the most famous of people.

Some of the most famous gravesites in the world are places like the Great Pyramids in Egypt or the Taj Mahal in India. But then you could be like this guy.

Show pic or King Richard III

This is a picture of King Richard III and guess where his tomb was located. They found him buried under a parking lot.

He was quite the controversial King and the last king of England in the Middle Ages, so I guess they must not have liked him too much to completely forget where they put him.

Anyways, all of this is to say that we can place a lot of importance on tombs and what they look like on the outside, but do you know what is common among them all?

They are full of death on the inside!

A lot of people can be like that as well. They can put a lot of effort into what their outside appearance looks like, but be spiritually dead on the inside.

This morning, we are going to look at two more woes Jesus gave before finishing up next week with the final woe.

Look with me in your Bibles to Matthew 23 this morning.

Matthew 23:25–28 ESV

25 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. 27 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. 28 So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Pray

Remember that Jesus is giving a complete denunciation of the religious leaders and their spiritually bankrupt hearts.

We’ve looked so far at several warnings that Jesus has given to them through the woes and His call for them to repent.

They Were Unbelievers

They Were Blind Guides Leading People Astray

They Failed to Keep Their Oaths to God

They Were Legalistic Failures

This morning we are going to see that they were Selfish and Greedy and they were Dead on the Inside.

1. Beware of Greed adn Self-Indulgence (vv. 25-26)

Matthew 23:25–26 ESV

25 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.

The Scribes and Pharisees followed meticulous rules and regulations about ceremonial cleanliness.

You may remember some time ago when they criticized Jesus’s Disciples of eating with unwashed hands that we looked at this practice.

It was not about physical cleanliness, but keeping ceremony. Josephus described these practices and we learn that one could even wash their hands in a vessel made of dung!

It was about the process and observing ritual rather than cleanliness. They focused on the sequences of pouring water over the hands with the fingers pointing upward first and then doing it again with the fingers pointing downward.

All of this was stuff that came from their rabbinic law and not from the Scriptures.

God is more concerned with the heart than the practice of keeping some kind of handwashing code.

There was a rabbinic debate that was going on between the Hillelites and the Shammaites, two parties of rabbis in Jesus’s day, over what constituted cleanliness of a vessel.

The Hillelites believed that you had to just clean the outside of the plate or vessel while the Shammaites believed that you had to clean both the inside and outside.

Again, Jesus is calling them out for missing the point entirely. They were worried about the outside, but inside their hearts were not clean.

Jesus said they were full of greed and self-indulgence.

They used the sacrificial system and the religious rituals to get rich off the people and indulge themselves. Their hearts were far from God.

Jesus told them that they should worry about cleaning the inside of the heart first and then the outward actions would follow.

Application

This is a condition that it is easy to find ourselves in if we are not careful.

We usually find that it begins gradually with a wandering heart.

We can start focusing on outward acts of religion rather than what they are intended to foster.

We can gorge ourselves in the name of Christian fellowship.

We can dote on ourselves making frivolous purchases saying that we deserve a reward.

We can insulate ourselves from the needs of the world rather than being salt and light.

There are a number of ways that we need to be on guard for selfishness and greed.

The solution Jesus gives to the problems is to clean the heart. That is something only God can do for us, but we must submit to Him and seek His cleansing.

2. Beware of Having a Dead Heart (vv. 27-28)

Matthew 23:27–28 ESV

27 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. 28 So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Here Jesus is basically calling the Pharisees a bunch of spiritually dead people.

One of the common Jewish practices that occurred around March of every year was to whitewash tombs.

They would do this not just for beauty, but for spiritual purposes.

They did is usually about a month before Passover and they would make white chalk markings around burials grounds so that they were publicly visible to all of the travelers coming to Jerusalem to the Feast of Passover.

The Process: (from Copilot)

The Mishnah (Shekalim 1:1) describes the practice: workers would pour or paint lime around or on tombs.

Lime produced a chalky, brilliant white coating that stood out against the landscape.

Winter rains often washed markings away, so they were renewed each spring before Passover.

Many of the tombs were cut out of the rock and this practice would make sure that no one accidentally stumbled upon the tomb or stepped on a grave and through contact made themselves ceremonially unclean.

When Jesus is having this conversation is when the tombs would have just been whitewashed, so everyone had this fresh on their minds.

Jesus was calling out that the outside of the tombs may have looked beautiful after the practice, but inside they were full of death.

Illustration

We are not too different in our day. As the Spring weather has come and the days have warmed up, people are getting outside, and one of the places they tend to go is to the cemetery to tend the graves of their loved ones.

They want the graveside to look nice, especially around Easter.

There is nothing wrong with this, in fact it is commendable. But we must make sure that while caring for graves, we are also attending our hearts.

Application

How often have you done some introspection and examined your heart to make sure your faith lies in Jesus Christ and not your religious works?

Some people are convinced that they are going to Heaven because they attend church faithfully or they give a lot of money away or they are really nice people.

These things are to be commended, but how often have you asked yourself what your faith is really in?

You might subtly be relying on your religious practices, like the Pharisees, instead of the finished work of Christ on the cross.

You might appear to people on the outside like you are a good Christian person, but inside you might be far away from the Lord.

Conclusion

Jesus is condemning the Pharisees for their spiritual hypocrisy, but remember that He is doing this out of love.

Jesus is speaking to them while they still had a chance to repent and get right with God. Most of them never would, but we know that a few of them did, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.

We have to hear the gospel message. It is not what must you do to be saved, but what has He done to save you.

Christ went to the cross to bear your sin and mine. He paid the penalty to bring us from death to life.

We must rest in that finished work and believe by faith in order to be saved. We must repent of our sins and turn to Christ.

We can’t do this without the work of the Holy Spirit on our hearts. It is like one of the deceased in these tombs trying to get up and clean their own tomb. They can’t do it because they are dead.

Neither can we clean up our own lives without the work of the Holy Spirit from within.

Remember that Lazarus had to have the Holy Spirit come in and revive his dead body as it lay in the tomb in order for Him to obey Jesus command to come out the tomb.

God does that in our hearts as well. He will give you faith, but at the same time, you must believe on Jesus Christ in order to be saved.

Will you believe this morning? If you are without Christ, will you travel from death to life by placing your confidence in what Jesus did for you.

You must believe in His death, burial, and resurrection for you.

You must call out in saving faith and he will bring you out of that grave.

But what about you, believer? What do you need to do with this?

You need to remember that Jesus paid it all. You didn’t pay a dime.

Be careful of considering yourself a self-made Christian.

Be careful of thinking more highly of yourself than you ought.

Don’t be stingy with the gospel but share it freely with others.

Live in the light of the gospel every day and clean the inside of your heart so that the outside might be clean as well.