S.O.T.M. Righteousness Exceeding the Scribes and Pharisees [Matthew 5:17-20]

We come again to the section in the sermon on the mount where Jesus addresses the OT and He is the fulfillment of them. This will be the last sermon on this section, verses 17-20, I would urge you if you haven’t heard all three sermons on this section to go listen to them on our Facebook page because we’ve have seen just how important this little section is in light of the whole sermon. This section sets up the rest of the sermon. The verse we’ll focus on today, verse 20, takes us into the rest of the text…let’s read out text again and dive in.

Stand for the reading of the word of God [Matthew 5:17-20]

When Jesus came onto the scene the world was turned upside down. Jesus came, not like the religious leaders of His day, but He came preaching repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And as Matthew’s gospel paints Jesus as the long awaited King of the Jews, the first sermon we hear from Jesus in the gospel is the manifesto of the king, the public declaration of the principles, policies, and intentions of the king and those in the kingdom. But as we’ve seen so far, it didn’t line up with the religious leaders of the day.

Jesus was unusual in that He didn’t belong to the order of the scribes and Pharisees, who were the official doctors and leaders and teachers of the day. Yet, Jesus stood before them as a Teacher. Not only that but He didn’t hesitate to criticize their teaching and point out it’s error. Furthermore, His conduct was strange compared to the leaders, instead of avoiding the company of sinners, He seemed to go out of His way to be in their company. Jesus was known as ‘the friend of sinners.’ There was also this element in His teaching where he emphasized grace, which differentiated Him from the scribes and Pharisees. So it’s understandable that there would have been some misunderstanding from people about Jesus’ message.

We’ve seen that, in this section, Jesus lays down two main principles. First, Jesus’ teaching is in complete harmony with that of the Old Testament and second, His teaching which is in such harmony with the Old Testament is in complete disharmony with the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees.

We have seen, too, that our attitude towards the law is important. Our Lord has not come to make it easier for us or to make it in any sense less stringent in its demands upon us. His purpose in coming was to enable us to keep the law by the power of the Holy Spirit in us, not to abolish it. So He emphasizes here that we must know what the law is, and then must keep it: ‘Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.’ Now we need not spend any time in considering what is meant by ‘the least’ and ‘greatest’ of the commandments. There is obviously a distinction in some sense between them. They are all the commandments of God, and, as He emphasizes here, even the least commandment is therefore of the most vital importance. Furthermore, as James reminds us, anyone who fails in one point of the law has failed in it all.

But all the same there is a kind of division of the law into two sections. The first section concerns our relationship to God; the second concerns our relationship to man. There is a relative difference in the importance therefore; our relationship to God is obviously of greater importance than our relationship to man. You remember when the scribe came to our Lord and asked Him which was the greatest commandment, our Lord did not turn to him and say, ‘You must not talk about greater and lesser, you must not talk about first and second.’ He said, ‘The first commandment is this; You shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. And the second is like, namely this, You shall love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Very well; as you read the law you can see there is a meaning in this distinction between the least and the greatest of the commandments. What our Lord says is that we must keep every part and portion of the law, that we must do and teach it all.

It is at that point that He turns our thoughts to the teaching of the Pharisees and scribes, because if the law is so vitally important to us, and if the whole purpose of the grace of God in Jesus Christ is to enable us to fulfil and to keep the righteousness of the law, then we must obviously be clear in our minds as to what the law is, and what it demands of us. We have seen that that is the biblical doctrine of righteousness. Righteousness is not an experience that we have; it means keeping and fulfilling the law of God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Experiences may help us to do that, but we cannot receive righteousness and sanctification as experiences. Righteousness is something we practise in our daily life through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the honouring and the keeping of the law, as the Son of God Himself kept it while He was here on earth. It is being like Him. That is righteousness. So you see it is intimately related to the law, and must always be thought of in terms of keeping the law.

It is at that point that the Pharisees and the scribes come in, because they appeared to be most holy people. But our Lord is able to show very clearly that they were lacking in righteousness and holiness. That was true of them very largely because of their tragic misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the law. In the verses which we are now considering, our Lord enforces His teaching, and the words in verse 20 must have come as a most surprising and almost shocking statement to the men and women to whom they were uttered. ‘Do not imagine’, says our Lord in effect, ‘that I have come to make things easier by reducing the demands of the law. Far from doing that, I am here to tell you that unless your righteousness shall exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, you have no hope of entering the kingdom of heaven at all, let alone being the least in it.’

So that leads us to ask some questions… first,

Who were the scribes and the Pharisees?

We must remember that the scribes and Pharisees were in many senses the most outstanding people of the Jewish nation. The scribes were men who spent their time in teaching and expounding the law; they were the great authorities on the law of God. They gave their whole life to the study and illustration of it. They, more than anyone else, could claim to be concerned about it. They were the men who made copies of it, exercising great care as they did so. The scribes could quote word for word entire books of the law because they had copied it so many times and took great care in doing so. Their whole life was lived with the law, and everyone looked up to them for that reason.

The Pharisees were men who were outstanding for practicing the law. The very word ‘Pharisee’ means ‘separatist’. They were people who set themselves apart, and they did so because they had formed a code of the ceremonial acts connected with the law which was more rigid than the law of Moses itself. They had drawn up rules and regulations for life and conduct which in their stringency went far beyond anything we find demanded in the Old Testament Scriptures. For example, in our Lord’s picture of the Pharisee and the tax collector, in Luke 18, who went up to the temple to pray, the Pharisee said that he fasted twice in the week. Now there is no demand in the Old Testament that men should fast twice in the week. Indeed the Old Testament asked for only one fast in the year. But gradually these men had elaborated the system and had actually brought it to the point at which they exhorted and commanded the people to fast twice in the week, instead of only once in the year.

It was in such ways that they formed their excessively stringent code of morals and behavior and, as a result of that, everybody thought of the scribes and Pharisees as patrons of virtue. The average man said to himself, ‘Ah, there is very little hope of my ever being as good as the scribes or the Pharisees. They were outstanding; they just live to be sanctified and holy. That was their profession; that was their whole aim and object in a religious, moral and spiritual sense.’ But here comes our Lord; and He announces to these people that unless their righteousness shall exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees they shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. So you can see how the people who heard this would have been shocked by such a statement. But I wonder, what about us?

What is our concept of true righteousness and sanctification? What is our idea of being religious? What is our concept of being Christian? So the Lord lays down this truth that the righteousness of the Christian, the very least Christian, must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. This should make us examine our own profession of the Christian faith, what does it mean to be Christian? It’s not just having a savior, it’s also having a Lord over your entire life. If you read the four gospels you can’t escape the amount of space given to our Lord dealing with these scribes and Pharisees. He criticized them and corrected them because He knew the people depended upon them and looked up to them. Our Lord was showing the shallowness of their teaching and pointing them to the truth contained in God’s word. We should be asking that of ourselves…is our faith genuine or do we have a shallow form of religion?

Let’s take a quick glance at the religion of the Pharisees so we can see the defects, and that we might see what is demanded of us from our Lord. One of the best ways to do that is to look at the picture our Lord painted for us in Luke 18 about the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector who came to the temple to pray. The Pharisee, you remember, stood forward in a very prominent place, and thanked God he was not as other men, especially not as that publican. Then he began to say certain things about himself: he was not an extortioner, not unjust, not an adulterer, and not as that publican. Now those statements were true. Our Lord accepted them; that was why He repeated them. These men had that kind of external righteousness. Not only that, they fasted twice in the week, as I have reminded you. They also gave a tithe, a tenth, of all they possessed to God and to His cause. They tithed everything they had even down to their herbs, the mint and anise and cummin. They were careful to keep every detail carefully.

Yet you can’t read the four gospels without seeing that nothing caused such wrath to come from our Lord than the very religion of these so called righteous men. In the 23 chapter of Matthew our Lord pronounced a series of woes upon the scribes and Pharisees condemning them as ungodly in their behavior and attitude. Yet here says, ‘unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees you shall not enter the kingdom of God???

We must realize that this is one of the most serious and important matters we can ever consider together. There is a real and terrible possibility of our deluding and fooling ourselves. The Pharisees and the scribes were denounced by our Lord as being hypocrites. Yes; but they were unconscious hypocrites. They did not realize it, they really thought all was well. You cannot read your Bible without constantly being reminded of that terrible danger. These men spent their entire lives devoted to the word of God, but there is the possibility of relying upon the wrong thing, of resting upon things that appertain to true worship rather than being in the position of true worship. And let me remind you tenderly, in passing, that it is something of which those of us who not only claim to be evangelical, but are proud to call ourselves such, may very easily be guilty. How?

What was the Lord’s analysis of their religion?

First, He said their religion was entirely external and formal instead of being a religion from the heart. He said to them in Luke 16:15, “You justify yourselves before men, but God’s knows your heart, that which is highly esteemed before men is abomination in the sight of God.” On another occasion the Pharisees were upset with Jesus’ disciples when they came and sat at the table to eat without first washing their hands. And that was a big deal to the Pharisees…the washing of the outside. Jesus said, you Pharisees are so careful about washing the outside but you neglect the inside. It is not that which goes into man which defiles him, but that which comes out. It is the heart that matters, for it is out of the heart that come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness and all these other things.

Our Lord called them, at one point, white sepulchres [tombs] the outside seems all right but look on the inside and it’s full of death. This is extremely important for us today. It is possible for us to be very regular in our attendance at the house of God and yet to be envious and spiteful and full of hate. That is the thing our Lord denounces in the Pharisees. And unless our righteousness exceeds these external religious demands we do not belong to the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is concerned about the heart; it is not my external actions, but what I am inside that is important.

A man once said that the best definition of religion was this: ‘Religion is that which a man does with his own solitude.’ In other words, if you want to know what you really are, you can find the answer when you are alone with your thoughts and desires and imaginations. It is what you say to yourself that matters. How careful we are in what we say to others, when we’re around other Christians we behave a certain way; but what do we say to ourselves when we are all alone? What a man does with his own solitude is what ultimately counts. The things that are within, which we hide from the outside world because we are ashamed of them, these proclaim finally what we really are.

The scribes and Pharisees religion was man-made rules not the true law of God and they were concerned about the external keeping of the ceremony and not the moral teaching of the word of God. This is still a great danger for us in the church today. How easy it is to say, “I’ve gone to the house of worship on Sunday morning, I fulfilled my duty, so it doesn’t matter what I do with the rest of the day. Or especially the rest of the week. Sunday, even in the church today, has gone from the Lord’s day, to the Lord’s hour or two and the rest of the day belongs to me. Friends the Pharisees were quite content with everything as long as they kept their external duty…how easy is it to be like the Pharisee? To do my duty of going to church but not really living a life of righteousness demanded by our Lord.

The scribes and Pharisees were concerned about themselves only and had a poor attitude towards others. We can see this goes against everything the word of God teaches us. The Pharisees were not concerned with glorifying God, only promoting themselves. Our Lord shows, in that picture of the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple, that the Pharisee did and said all without worshipping God at all. He said, ‘I thank thee, that I am not as other men are.’ It was an insult to God; there was no worship there. The man was full of his own activity, his own religious life and of what he was doing. Here’s the danger if you set out like that and you have your own standard, you select the things you think ought to be done. And as long as you conform to that particular list you are all right, you are satisfied. Now the Pharisees were self-satisfied and concentrated always upon their own achievements rather than on their relationship to God. I wonder whether we are not sometimes guilty of the same attitude?

Is it not one of the great sins of those of us who are called Evangelicals? We see other men obviously denying the faith and living godless lives. How easy it is to become self-satisfied because we are better than such people—‘I thank God I am not as other men and especially as that modernist.’ The trouble with us is that we seldom look at ourselves in the sight of God: we rarely remind ourselves of the character and the being and the nature of God. Our religion consists of a certain number of things we have decided to do; and having done them we think all is well. Self-satisfaction is far too common place among us.

One of the most tragic attitudes of the Pharisees was their poor outlook towards others. Luke 18:9, before Jesus told that parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, verse 9 gives us the back drop… ‘He spoke this parable to those who trusted in themselves and despised others.” That is the complete opposite of the law of God. How did Jesus sum up the entire law of God…in two commands. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength…and love your neighbor as yourself.” that’s the entire law of God in a nutshell…Love God, love your fellow man.

How are we doing? Are we loving God with all we are or do we give to God what we have left over? Are we loving our fellow man and serving him or to we despise others and treat them with contempt? This is a pretty good test to see if our righteousness is exceeding that of the scribes and Pharisees…or are we like them in our behavior?

So what is our Lord teaching us?

Is He teaching us salvation by works? Is he saying you have to live a better life than those Pharisees in order to get into heaven? Obviously no, because Romans tells us there is no one righteous..not even one. The law of God given to Moses condemned the whole world, every one of us is guilty before a holy God. Our Lord is teaching us here that living up to a standard is not what saves you because no one can keep that standard anyway. No we need a righteousness, not of our own, but a righteousness that comes from the only one who is righteous…Jesus Christ.

The imputed righteousness of Christ is ours through repentance and faith in Him. In the one who lived and died for you and for me. What our Lord is teaching us is, it’s not about us carrying out this or that aspect of the law…because we can’t…it’s about turning from our sin to the One who has fulfilled all the law and prophets…Jesus Christ. Who lived the perfect life, who died the death we deserved once for all, who rose from the grave conquering death and satisfying the laws demands. It’s about trusting in what Christ has done. This is amazing grace.

The proof we have received this grace of God in Christ Jesus is that we are living a righteous life by the power of the Holy Spirit which enables us to want to obey Christ. I shared a quote from Matt Chandler earlier this week which was spot on, he said, “God is awesome. He doesn’t need you to be awesome. He wants you to be obedient.” Friends, Jesus told his disciples, which still pertains to us, “if you love me you will obey my commands.” We don’t obey God to get His love, we obey God because He loves us and has saved us in Christ Jesus.

Friends, you don’t become a Christian by just refraining form some actions and doing others; the Christian is the person who is in a relationship with God and whose supreme desire is to know Him better, to love Him more, to glorify Him, and to worship Him. This is no part time job, this is not achieved just by being regular on Sunday morning…it demands all of my life, all of my time, all of who I am. It means Christ is dwelling in me, I have been born again of the spirit, and because of Christ in me and working through me my righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees only because of Christ in me!

Let us examine ourselves this morning. Can we say of ourselves that we are poor in spirit, meek, merciful, hungering and thirsting for righteousness? Is it my life’s desire to glorify and honor God? Do I love and show kindness to others around me? Or am I acting more like the scribes and Pharisees? Let every man examine himself this morning. Let’s repent and fall down before God.