Check Yourself - Matthew 23:13-22

The last several months we have been working our way through the last part of Jesus’ life and have seen Jesus repeatedly come up against the Pharisees and other religious leaders in Jerusalem. We’ve seen them try to trap Jesus with what were, in their minds, tricky theological questions, or to try to discredit him with implausible scenarios. In every circumstance Jesus showed them up, and they eventually gave up trying to make him look foolish because they realized they couldn’t.

Last week we saw Jesus begin to go on the offensive against these leaders. He condemned some of their self-centered actions and told his disciples not to fall into the same sinful pattern as the Pharisees and teachers of religious law. In our text this morning Jesus is even more direct in his condemnation of these religious leaders. For the next couple of weeks we will be looking at this section of Jesus’ ministry that is sometimes known as the “woes”, because in some translations each section begins with the words, “woe to you…” These are a series of significant charges Jesus levels against the Pharisees and teachers of religious law, and as we see Jesus condemn these behaviors so strongly, we ought to examine ourselves to make sure we are not making the same mistakes they did.

This morning we are going to look at the first 3 of the woes Jesus pronounces upon the religious leaders. Before we do that, it would be good for us to understand exactly what that phrase means. The New Living Translation renders the phrase “woe to you” as “what sorrow awaits you.” That’s a pretty good approximation of what Jesus was saying, but I think it still misses something. The term Jesus uses has both a condemning element to it as well as a mourning element to it. Jesus is essentially saying, “It pains me to say this, but you are cursed because of your actions.” Jesus is both sorrowful and angry as he pronounces these condemnations. It’s an interesting mix. With that understanding, let’s look at each of the first 3 woes.

Shutting the Door

The first woe is found in verse 13.

13“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces. You won’t go in yourselves, and you don’t let others enter either.

Here Jesus condemns the teachers of religious law and Pharisees because they shut the door to the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces. This seems like a strange charge, especially given the fact that most people viewed these men as the key to the Kingdom of Heaven.

So how were they shutting the door of Heaven? They were shutting the door because they rejected Jesus! Jesus was (and is) the only way to Heaven, but the Pharisees and religious leaders had turned their backs on Him and were instead relying on their own goodness and their own set of laws to earn Heaven for themselves. Ironically, Jesus points out that even though they were seen as the gatekeepers to God, not only were they keeping others from Him, they were missing out themselves!

This should serve as a stern warning to us. No matter how religious you are, no matter how many good things you think you do, no matter what your church attendance record is, none of those things will give you access to Heaven. A relationship with God is not found by adherence to religious rituals, but by trusting in Jesus Christ alone. If you think you are going to be in Heaven because you are a “good person” or because you go to church regularly, give a lot of money, do good things, or anything else, then Jesus would pronounce this same woe upon you. The only way we can inherit the Kingdom of Heaven is to trust in what Jesus Christ alone has done for us and to follow Him with our lives. If our confidence is in anything but Jesus, we are in the same boat as the Pharisees.

Making Children of Hell

The second woe is found in verse 15, but before we address that one, I want to take a quick detour to address a question many people have. If you use a modern translation of the Bible, you may notice that your Bible skips from verse 13 to verse 15. If you notice, there is actually a footnote that shows you what verse 14 says at the bottom of the page. When people see this, they often question why a verse would be taken out of the Bible. Some go so far as to believe there is some sort of conspiracy to remove certain verses from Scripture. But there’s nothing underhanded or devious going on here.

The Bible didn’t have verse numbers when it was originally written. Those numbers were added later. The King James Version of the Bible was produced over 400 years ago, and for most of that time, it was the primary English translation. So the verse structure in the King James Bible became the de facto standard. In the last 400 years, however, archaeologists have discovered many more manuscripts of the Bible from much earlier than the ones they used to produce the King James Bible. Scholars assume that older manuscripts are likely closer to what was originally written because there was less time for errors to creep in. It’s kind of like if you copied something down by hand multiple times. You would expect the first copy to be pretty good. After it had been copied down a few dozen times, you might not be surprised to find a small error or two in the later copies. The same thing is true with ancient documents like the Bible. So translators give greater weight to earlier copies of the Bible. As we’ve gotten earlier copies, we have found a handful of verses in the King James Bible that were probably not part of what was originally written. Modern Bible translators err on the side of caution and include only those verses they are confident were in the original manuscripts. Since verse 14 was not in the earliest copies we have, the translators have taken it out of the main text and included it in a footnote.

Even though Matthew probably didn’t record verse 14 in his gospel, both Mark and Luke included it in theirs. So these are words that Jesus certainly said, just probably not words Matthew recorded.

So, now that we’ve addressed the issue of why there’s no verse 14, let’s look at verse 15, which is the second woe that Matthew records.

15“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you cross land and sea to make one convert, and then you turn that person into twice the child of hell you yourselves are!

Once again Jesus condemns the Pharisees for leading people astray. He says they travel across land and sea in order to make a convert, but ultimately convert that person into a child of hell! In other words, the people are worse off than they were before. These words would have been jarring to the Pharisees for several reasons. First, they didn’t think of themselves as children of hell in the first place! Second, they didn’t think trying to convert people could possibly be a bad thing. They thought they were doing the Lord’s work! So why did Jesus condemn them?

The Jewish people at this time didn’t think about evangelism or missionary work in the same way Christians do today. The Jews basically viewed the world as having two groups of people: The Jews and the Pagans (non-Jews). The Jews did not believe in trying to convert pagans to Judaism, because they believed God had chosen them to be the only recipients of His favor. However, occasionally some of the pagan people would come to see that the Jewish God was real and they would begin seeking Him. They essentially became a third group in between the two. They weren’t full Jews, but they weren’t really pagans either. The Jews referred to these in-between people as “God-Fearers”. The Jews didn’t try to convert pagans, but they did try to convert the God-Fearers into full Jews.

As the Pharisees would travel to other towns to teach, they would also make a special effort to convince the God-Fearers there to convert to full-blooded Judaism. They would try to convince them that the only way they could truly please this God they worshiped was to follow all of His laws and rituals, including submitting to circumcision. They would indoctrinate them into all of their teachings so they knew exactly what they had to do in order to be accepted by God. The Pharisees were zealous in trying to convert these people, not only to Judaism, but to their own particular brand of Pharisaism!

This is what Jesus was condemning. Jesus was saying the Pharisees were putting all sorts of effort into something that was ultimately ineffective. They were zealously seeking to convert people, but they were trying to win them to the wrong things! Instead of pointing people to the One True God and to Jesus, they were trying to make carbon copies of themselves! As a result, they expended all this energy to convert people only to lead them down the same flawed pathway they themselves were on!

The Pharisees didn’t see this, but that was exactly Jesus’ point. We must be careful we don’t do the same thing today. Think about it. I hope you love the church you attend. I hope you believe this is a good place to come and learn about God and to serve Him. I hope you believe the men who preach are faithful in proclaiming God’s Word. I hope you believe this is a good church, and that it would be a good place for others to attend as well. With all of that said, I also hope when you reach out to people who aren’t Christians you aren’t trying to convince them to be Union Church members! I hope you are trying to convince them to become followers of Jesus. The two are not interchangeable.

It is possible to convince people to “join your team” without ever pointing them to Jesus, who can save them. It’s possible to make people feel good about your church, and maybe even come to your church regularly and yet never point them to the Lord. But we can do this with more than just our own church. We can elevate our own beliefs to be more important than the gospel itself.

There are many things we are sometimes more concerned about convincing people of than the message of the gospel.

A particular view of the end times

The importance of a particular Bible translation

A particular view about men and women or sexuality

The importance of certain forms of church government

The importance of baptizing people the “right” way

The importance of a particular political platform or issue

Sometimes we let our priorities get out of whack. We allow certain ancillary issues to become incredibly important to us, and in so doing, miss the main thing. We can expend all sorts of energy convincing people to think like us, but at the end of it all, they are no closer to Jesus. This is what the Pharisees were doing. They were making disciples; but they were making disciples of themselves rather than disciples of Jesus. We are to make disciples as well. Let’s make sure we are pointing people in the right direction, lest we make them into children of Hell.

Looking for Loopholes

The third woe Jesus pronounces on the religious leaders was that they were so focused on the minutiae of the law they had missed the big picture. We see this in verses 16-22.

16“Blind guides! What sorrow awaits you! For you say that it means nothing to swear ‘by God’s Temple,’ but that it is binding to swear ‘by the gold in the Temple.’ 17Blind fools! Which is more important—the gold or the Temple that makes the gold sacred? 18And you say that to swear ‘by the altar’ is not binding, but to swear ‘by the gifts on the altar’ is binding. 19How blind! For which is more important—the gift on the altar or the altar that makes the gift sacred? 20When you swear ‘by the altar,’ you are swearing by it and by everything on it. 21And when you swear ‘by the Temple,’ you are swearing by it and by God, who lives in it. 22And when you swear ‘by heaven,’ you are swearing by the throne of God and by God, who sits on the throne.

Jesus starts by calling them blind guides. This is an intentionally ironic description of them. Imagine having a blind person as your tour guide at some sort of national park. I’m not saying a blind person couldn’t give a tour, but it would seem somewhat strange to have them tell you to look to your right and take in the marvelous views of the Grand Canyon, when they themselves had never seen it! That’s what Jesus was saying here. These men were claiming to be able to help others see God’s truth, but they themselves had never actually seen it!

He uses the example of oaths to drive home his point. In order to make a promise stronger, people swear in the name of something greater than them. In today’s language someone might say, I swear on my mother’s grave, or on my children’s life to indicate that they are making a very serious commitment. The same thing happened in Jewish society in those days, but instead of invoking the life of a family member to indicate how serious they were, they would somehow invoke God to strengthen their promise.

But the Jews would never actually use God’s name in that way. They believed (rightly) that to use God’s name to make an arbitrary vow would be to disrespect Him. So they would swear by things related to God. They would swear by God’s temple, or by the altar in God’s temple, or something in that vein. The Pharisees had apparently constructed a system of rules to rank how serious a given vow was to be taken. If you swore by God’s temple, it wasn’t nearly as serious as to swear by the gold in God’s temple. Or if you swore by the altar in God’s temple, it was not nearly as binding as if you swore by the gifts on the altar. Jesus points out how ludicrous this thinking is.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus addressed this same thing and His conclusion was quite simple: “Let your yes be yes, and your no be no.” In other words, don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep. Trying to look for loopholes in terminology in order to make a vow you didn’t intend to keep was missing the point entirely. The Pharisees were so focused on which vows should be kept and which vows could be broken that they had missed the point—God wants us to be honest and truthful with one another. They had become so enmeshed in their own religious minutiae that they had completely missed what God had told them in the first place. Jesus rightly called them blind guides.

But don’t we sometimes do the same thing?

We rail against dishonest politicians while simultaneously “shading the truth” in order to get our way or to get ahead in business.

We lament the number of events being planned on Sundays while attending those same events.

We complain about the erosion of the institution of marriage, while simultaneously treating marriage like it’s expendable.

We spend time debating what the church building should look like while ignoring questions of what we should be doing as The Church.

We debate how much water should be used in baptism while failing to actually commit our own lives to Jesus.

We argue about how often we should celebrate the Lord’s Supper, yet never actually examine ourselves to ensure that we are dealing with the sin in our lives.

We point out all sorts of flaws in others but never turn that same searchlight on ourselves.

Jesus condemns such behavior. Instead of fixating on the details of religious ritual, we should be focused on ensuring our hearts are close to God. The Pharisees were so focused on finding loopholes for their vows—on finding ways to appear trustworthy while simultaneously lying through their teeth—that they had forgotten that God has told us to be truth-tellers. We must ensure we are keeping the big things in mind, even as we wrestle with the little things. We should never lose sight of the big picture.

Conclusion

Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees in these verses are some of the strongest words Jesus speaks during his earthly ministry. The irony of this is that the Pharisees were the conservative religious leaders of the day. They were the people everyone looked to as the example to follow. People were surely shocked by the fact that these were the people for whom Jesus reserved his most scathing rebuke. That should serve as a wake-up call for you and me.

Examine yourself. Check your motives. What is most important to you? Is it your happiness, your comfort, your popularity, your desires, a position of authority or power? Or is it to live in a way that honors God? What is the focus of your religious actions? Is it to draw close to God, or is it to make others think you are devoted? Are you keeping the big picture in mind or are you fixating on all the small things?

These are the kinds of questions we ought to be asking ourselves. They are questions the Pharisees didn’t ask. They became so focused on the external that they missed what was most important—their hearts.

I think Jesus pronounced these woes on the Pharisees for a couple of reasons. First, because he wanted to show people that just because someone looks good on the outside, it doesn’t mean they are really devoted to Him. But I think the second reason he pronounced these woes on them was because He desperately wanted them to wake up before it was too late.

There may be some of you here today who are in the same boat as the Pharisees. You have drifted along the river of religious devotion for so long that you have fallen asleep. Maybe you have lulled yourself into a false sense of devotion to God because you have done all the right religious things, but your heart is far from Him. I would encourage you, the same way Jesus encouraged the religious leaders, to wake up before it’s too late. Stop playing the game. Check your heart, check your motives, and make the changes you need to make. Turn away from your own selfish desires and turn to God because there’s too much at stake not to.