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I've heard it jokingly said, "I love everybody. It's people I
can't stand." The Pharisees acted out a similar phrase without
trying to be funny. Jesus said that the Pharisees prided themselves
in honoring and building memorials to the prophets. The irony is that
when they met a real one, they wanted to kill Him. Barclay says,
"The only prophets they admired were dead prophets; when they
met a living one they tried to kill Him. They honored the dead
prophets with tombs and memorials, but they dishonored the living
ones with persecution and death."
This is the point Jesus made in Luke 11:47-51
and in a parallel passage in Matthew 23 when He said, "Woe to
you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs
of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say,
'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been
partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.' Therefore you are
witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered
the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers' guilt"
(Matt. 23:29-32).
The Pharisees had fooled themselves. They
didn't think of themselves as prophet killers or Messiah killers.
They didn't realize that their empty religion actually made them
enemies of God. The flesh has always been at war with the Spirit.
Religion is powerless to restrain the self-centered, self-protective
obsessions of the flesh. It takes a living Christ to change the human
heart.
History repeats itself time after time when
people give themselves to religion rather than to Christ--just like
the religious people Jesus confronted. With their lips they honor God
and the Scriptures, but they deny Him with their lives.
There were about six thousand Pharisees at the
time of Christ. As we have noted, they had a reputation for holding
lengthy discussions on such "fine points" as whether it was
lawful to eat an egg that had been laid on the Sabbath.
Saul of Tarsus (later known as the apostle
Paul) inherited this religious tradition. He described himself as a
Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee (Acts 23:6). Before his
life-changing encounter with Christ (Acts 9), Saul believed that his
standing with God was determined by his relationship to the Law.
After his conversion, Paul defined his
standing with God in new terms. Now what counted was his relationship
to Christ. He became concerned about faith in Christ, showing the
love of Christ to others, and reminding fellow believers that all of
us will one day answer personally to Christ the Lord.
When it came to arguable issues of scriptural
application, Paul was no longer preoccupied with the legal rulings of
the scribes. Instead he pled with other members of the family of God
not to judge one another in questionable matters. In his letter to
the Romans he wrote, "Who are you to judge another's servant? .
. . So then each of us shall give account of himself to God.
Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather resolve
this, not to put a stumbling block or a cause to fall in our
brother's way (14:4,12-13).
Many of us need to learn from Paul's
"after Christ" point of view. In an attempt to protect
ourselves from compromise, we adopt his "pre-Christ"
perspective. Adopting the way of the Pharisees, we have developed our
own lists of what a follower of Christ will or will not do. The only
trouble is that someone could keep every point on some of our lists
and still be no closer to God. A person could "religiously"
refrain from alcohol, rock music, tobacco, gambling, and going to
movies and still be godless. A person could attend church, give
money, offer prayers, and read the Bible while still being angry,
critical, and mean.
What counts, however, is what comes from the
Spirit, not what comes from the flesh. Christlike attitudes of love
are so different from our natural inclinations that they drive us to
the Spirit of Christ for wisdom, enablement, and a fresh assurance of
forgiveness. It is better to let our struggle with unkeepable
principles drive us to Christ than to occupy ourselves with the
formalities of religion and miss Him altogether.
Curtis
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