Woe to the Hypocrites

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Transcript:

Well, if you would turn with me to Matthew 23 this morning. Matthew 23. And we’re going to look at a conversation that Jesus had with the nothing.

I thought I might get a laugh when I held up the happy face mask. And then when y’all laughed, I was going to hold the frowny face one up and say, what’s so funny? Now, it’s not just gag humor for gag humor’s sake.

It has to do with what we’re talking about this morning. We’re going to look at Matthew chapter 23 and one of many conversations that Jesus had with the Pharisees. And you may recognize these as my pitiful renditions of the Greek comedy and tragedy masks.

You’ve probably seen those, the two masks together. One has a happy face, one has a frowny face. It’s because the ancient Greek actors would oftentimes wear masks to indicate their parts, and these just kind of became well-known.

I guess you wore one when you were happy and one when you were sad, or supposed to be that on the stage. The Greek actors would wear these masks, and it would indicate what part they were trying to play. And I learned something this week as I was studying for this series, which, by the way, if you haven’t been with us, the series that we’re going through and have been going through for the last several weeks is about who needs the church.

And the thought behind it is the fact that so many people in our society look at the church and look at Christianity as being irrelevant. It’s not something they want anything to do with. And we could say shame on them, you know, and we could blame them for not wanting anything to do with the church.

Or we could look at what the reasons are and see if there’s anything we can do while remaining faithful to God’s word to correct that. And one of the things that I had written out, one of the objections that I had written out that I hear all the time, is that the church is full of hypocrites. You have probably heard that.

You will probably hear that at some point if you haven’t already. Do not do what I did years ago and tell somebody to their face, come on anyway, there’s always room for one more. Do not do that.

That did not work out well. And I will say that I said that before I was a pastor. Now I know better.

That’s not how we answer that objection. Now there are biblical things we can look at. And as I was studying the concept of hypocrisy, what the Bible says about being a hypocrite, and the world looks at us and says the church is full of hypocrites.

And I think if they got to know us one-on-one, it’s really not as full of hypocrites as they think, but the hypocrites do kind of stand out when you see them. The people who are doing what they’re supposed to do, they’re just doing what they’re supposed to do. They don’t always stand out.

The church is full of hypocrites. This word hypocrisy or the word hypocrite, when the Bible uses it, it used it in Greek because the New Testament was originally written in Greek. And I always tell you I’m not a Greek expert.

I don’t speak Greek. I’ve actually started taking a Greek class, and so now I feel like I know everything. I don’t.

But I at least know how to pronounce the words now, and I know how some of them fit together. But the Greek word is hypokrites. That’s the word for hypocrite.

And that word applied, I know you probably don’t care about the Greek word, but here’s where I find it interesting. The Greek word is also a word, the word Hippocrates, is also a word that they would apply to actors playing a part on the stage. Now, what is the connection between a hypocrite and Hippocrates?

It’s that they put on the mask and they pretend to be something that they’re not. That’s where the connection is. That’s why we took that Greek word and said, oh, that’s what we should call that person.

He’s a hypocrite. Came from that word, Hippocrates. The word Hippocrates describes an actor on stage.

It describes an actor on stage. If you’re following along with the blanks in your bulletin, that’s one of them. Describes an actor on stage, someone who’s playing a part, but it also applies to those who are merely acting in real life.

That’s a dangerous place to be, is acting in real life. And I think a lot of people in our world who have just said, I don’t care about the church. I don’t care about Christianity.

I don’t want anything to do with those people. I don’t think that all of those people are looking at us saying, I just wish they agreed with me on everything. I think some of them look at us and say, I just wish they’d be real people.

Because we do sometimes come in on Sundays and we want to put on this mask. Inside, this is going on, but we want to put on this happy face mask, this facade, and act like everything’s all right. A friend of mine in Texas wrote on Facebook last night, be careful asking me how I’m doing because you might get an answer other than fine.

I might tell you the truth. And I’ve heard people say that, you know, they just went on and told me their life story. Like, how dare they?

You asked them how they were doing. When did it become normal for us to put on this mask and pretend that everything is peachy in our lives when it’s not? That’s hypocrisy.

That’s playing a part. Now, we tend to think of hypocrite as being, we tend to think of hypocrites in the church as being the people who act Christian on Sunday and then act unchristian the other six days of the week. That’s part of it.

But as we look at what Jesus says and the way he applies the word hypocrite, it really applies beyond that to anybody who’s playing a religious part. And he applies it to the Pharisees, not because they necessarily, you know, it’s not that they were preaching, do the right thing, and then they were going out and they were having affairs and getting drunk and all this stuff. It’s because they were pretending to be self-righteous when inside themselves they knew they really weren’t as good as they proclaimed that they were.

See, this problem with hypocrisy, it’s not a matter of failing to live up to what we believe. It’s a matter of pretending that we are other than we are. And we’re going to look this morning at Matthew chapter 23 and see what he says to the Pharisees and calls them hypocrites.

And he uses the word woe here several times. And I looked up that word woe. And I’m not far enough in my Greek class to know how to pronounce it when it’s a string of vowels for a long.

I don’t know. But the word woe is something that they would say to express grief. You know, where something bad happens to us and we go, oh, man.

You know, they might say woe. Or it’s to denounce something that somebody else is doing. So when Jesus says woe to the Pharisees, when he says woe to the scribes, when he says woe to the hypocrites, he’s pointing out that they are going to go through the grief of undergoing God’s judgment because of what they’re doing.

Let’s look at Matthew chapter 23, starting in verse 13. It says, But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men, for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in. And I’m just going to talk about each verse as we go through instead of reading the whole thing to you and then coming back.

In this verse, verse 13, he points out one of the reasons that the Pharisees were hypocrites or one of the things that happened because they were being hypocrites is that they were leading people away from the gospel. Jesus had come to preach the message of salvation through him that we could not live up to the law and the law was just to show us how sinful we were and that we needed Jesus Christ. Well, the Pharisees weren’t having any of that. The Pharisees were trying to prevent people from trusting Christ as their Savior.

They’re coming along and attacking Jesus and they’re trying to add on extra laws and saying, if you could just be better, if you just do right, if you just do what we tell you, you could get into heaven. They were getting people all confused, and Jesus says they were shutting the doors to heaven. They were making it impossible for people to come to God through Jesus Christ. And those who did, those who did come to God through Jesus Christ, those who were trusting in Christ for their salvation, he says that they would suffer, you suffer, excuse me, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

He said, you don’t want anything to, you can’t even deal with those people. And so they were making it very difficult. They were making it very difficult for people to hear the gospel.

And hypocrites in the church can do the same thing. Now, I submit to you that when we look at something and we decide it’s true, if we decide it’s true, but we want nothing to do with it because of the other people who believe it, that’s on us, okay? People are going to believe what they are.

People are going to believe the gospel or not believe the gospel. They’re going to make the choice. And it’s not any less true because somebody does bad things.

We are fallen people. We are not perfect. The problem comes when we give them that extra excuse that they look at us and say, well, I want nothing to do with the gospel because of the hypocrites.

Odds are a lot of the people who say I want nothing to do with Christianity because of the hypocrites would find some other reason if it weren’t for the hypocrites. But we must not do anything that leads people away from the gospel. They don’t see Jesus Christ on earth anymore.

And the Bible says no man has seen God, meaning the Father, at any time. The only begotten Son hath declared him. Jesus came to make him known.

And then Jesus left us here as the light in the world. We are the visible representatives of him today. And I don’t say that, oh, this church, or I feel special, you know, because we’re God’s representatives.

Anybody who is a believer in Jesus Christ represents him to a watching world. And woe to us, woe to us, if we do anything that leads people away from the gospel, if we shut up the doors of heaven to them. So the Pharisees, because of their hypocrisy, they led people away from the gospel.

They pretended to be religious while they acted wickedly. Now, this is more in line with what we think about hypocrisy, but he says in verse 14, woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you devour the widow’s houses, and for a pretense make long prayer, therefore you shall receive the greater damnation. He says what you’re doing is that the Pharisees had this practice of they, I’m not going to get into all the mechanics of it, but they would swindle widows out of their homes and out of their livelihoods after their husbands had passed on, and so they were lining pockets by swindling these believers who could least afford it.

And all the while, while they’re doing these incredibly unreligious, ungodly things, they’re over here trying to pretend that they’re godly and religious by these long prayers and these flowing words. And Jesus says, as you’re devouring the widow’s houses and you’re making a pretense of these long prayers, he says, because you know that it’s wrong and you try to cover it up with this over here, tells me you know it’s and you’re doing it anyway, he says, you’re going to receive even greater judgment. So they pretended to be religious while acting wickedly.

Now, all of us have moments that we fall into sin. Bible says, if we say we have no sin, we lie and the truth is not in us. We all sin.

Unfortunately, I hate it. I hate it when I sin. I hate it when I let God down, but there’s the key.

There’s the key. He’s not talking about these momentary lapses. What he’s talking about is they, as a way of life, said, I’m going to do that which is against God, and I don’t care.

It doesn’t bother me enough to repent, and it doesn’t bother me enough to stop. I’m going to keep doing it because I think it’s okay for me, and then over here I’m going to pretend I’m something else. That’s the problem.

The problem is not when Christians fail. The problem is when Christians pretend. Verse 15, he says, Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, one convert.

And when he is made, you make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. There’s a lot of name calling in this passage, by the way. Oh, Christians should never point out when anybody does something wrong or teaching something wrong.

Jesus does a lot of name calling in this passage. I went through and highlighted some of it just so I could see. Child of hell?

I don’t think I’ve ever called anybody that. Calls him a brood of vipers, generation of vipers, you den of snakes, blind guides. I mean, they’re saying they’re totally blind.

There’s some name calling in here. Now, I don’t advocate for you to go out and name call everybody. I’m saying Jesus is pretty upset here, and rightly so, over people who were leading others astray because they wanted to play pretend.

So he says they’ll come to sea and land. They’ll go to the ends of the earth to try to make one convert. Now, not one convert to the truth, not one convert the gospel, but one convert to their way of living.

They would move heaven and earth, if it were possible for them, to bring one person in and make them like them, not because they loved them, not because they cared about them, not because they were worried about their eternity, but because they wanted to show everybody, look at my numbers, look at how many I’ve converted. I’m the best Pharisee there is. He said, but you’ll go through all this effort, and by the time you’re done with them, they’re even worse off than you are.

They’re even worse people than you are. Now his message here is not about not making converts. He told us to go and reach people with the gospel.

He told us to go to the ends of the earth, to preach the gospel to every creature, to every nation, tribe, and tongue. The problem is not compassing land and sea to go and lead people with the gospel. The problem is that they were not leading people to the gospel.

They were leading people to act as self-righteous and as hypocritically as they were. and they were not doing it out of love for anybody. They were doing it out of a puffed up sense of themselves and they were making people worse off for it.

There was one generation of arrogant little hypocrites who bred it into the next, I won’t say generation, but they went out and reached more people and they made them even more insufferable than they were. He said, don’t do that. Then we’re going to look at verse 16.

There’s several verses in here. I kind of divided it up by the times that he said, woe unto you. But verse 16 says, woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing.

But whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple is a debtor. They would say, if you swear by the temple, you don’t have to keep that vow. But if you swear by the gold of the temple, meaning what’s in the treasury, if you swear by the money, you better keep that.

Because the money was the important thing to them. Says verse 17, ye fools and blind, for whether is greater the gold or the temple that sanctifyeth the gold. He said, what’s more important, the money or the temple of God that the money is there to serve?

And whosoever, verse 18, shall swear by the altar, it is nothing. But whosoever sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty. The altar of God, they said, the Pharisees were saying, oh, you can swear by the altar of God.

And you don’t have to keep that vow. It’s not a big deal. But swear by the sacrifice that’s on the altar. And suddenly, I don’t think I could have kept all their little rules together if I even tried to be a Pharisee.

He says, verse 19, ye fools and blind, for whether is greater the gift or the altar that sanctifyeth the gift. He said, what is more important? What is more important?

The dead bull that’s laying out there or the altar of God that it lays on? Verse 20, whoso therefore shall swear by the altar, sweareth by it and all the things thereon. And whoso shall swear by the temple, sweareth by it and by him that dwelleth therein.

He says, if you’re swearing by these sacrifices, you’re swearing by the altar of God and everything on it. He says, if you swear by anything in the temple, you are swearing an oath on the one who dwells inside the temple. That’s God’s temple.

And he that shall swear by heaven sweareth by the throne of God and by him that sitteth thereon. And that’s one of the reasons Jesus said, don’t go out and make these oaths. And don’t swear by heaven and swear by earth.

He said, because you’re going to be required to keep the things that you vow that you’re going to do. And yet they would have their little rules. The Pharisees had all their little rules where they could make deals with people and they could sound like it’s a done deal and then they could just slither their way out of the deal on some technicality.

They had all these ridiculous little rules. Woe unto you, verse 23, woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin and have omitted the waiter, excuse me, the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith, these ought ye to have done and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides which strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

He said you’re so hung up on making sure you pay a tenth of everything down to the herbs you own that you come into possession of, and you’re basically counting every grain of salt you have to make sure that you tithe on it. And the things that the law was really intended to teach, you miss those. They’re so focused on the details of the law, which by the way, Jesus is not telling them they shouldn’t follow because at that point they were still under the law.

He’s not saying don’t for them not to do their tithe back then. He’s saying, but you’re so focused on these little tiny details of the law that you’ve entirely missed the point of what the law was there to teach you. The law was there to teach you about judgment and mercy and faith.

The point of the law is to teach us that we are sinful and we stand in danger of judgment of a holy God. It’s to warn us that we can never meet up to this standard of absolute perfection and we are doomed to the judgment of God as sinners. And yet that God also through the law shows mercy.

And God in fulfilling the law in Jesus Christ, Jesus came not to overthrow the law but to fulfill the law, And when he fulfilled all the demands of the law for us, that was God showing mercy and the need for faith, the need to simply believe, the need to simply put your trust in the God who could forgive sins. And stop trusting your own efforts. Stop trusting all these little details of the legalistic law and start trusting in God as the only one who could save you.

He said the whole point of the law is to teach you about judgment and mercy and faith, and you’ve missed it because you’re over there counting herb leaves. He said, you strain at gnats and swallow a camel. It makes no sense.

You choke on a little gnat that flies into your mouth and goes down your throat, but a camel, you just swallowed that right up. Jesus is saying it makes no sense. They focused on legalistic details while completely ignoring the spiritual truth behind the rules.

We say, shame on those Pharisees, but I’ve seen that in church my whole life. I’ve seen it from well-meaning people in church my whole life. Now, there are rules and there are standards and those things are important, especially if they come from God’s word.

But we can’t get so hung up on making sure, oh, you’ve got to dress the right way. You’ve got to use the right language. You’ve got to do this.

You’ve got to do that. You’ve got to be just the perfect little Christian that we miss the whole point of what God’s word is trying to teach us. Things like the judgment of God, the mercy of God, the importance of faith, the spiritual lessons that undergird this entire law.

They were missing it because they were so focused on the rules. They were so focused on the rules. I’ll give you an example.

I don’t think he’d mind me sharing it because it wasn’t about him and several of us last Sunday night, but Brother Phil was talking about a church that years ago would not pick up minority children on their bus ministry and had problems, and I’ve experienced this too, had problems with mixed race couples coming in and talked about the, I don’t understand that. I pastored a church one time where people said, oh, you know, that couple coming in, you know, he’s black and she’s white, you know, what the Bible says about mixed marriages. Okay, let’s talk about what it really says about mixed marriages, but by the way, so is mine, because I’m Indian, and she’s white, and I’m also white, but my parents, same way, my grandparents, same way, what’s the difference?

Anyway, they would go back to what the Bible says about mixed marriages, where Israel was told, don’t intermarry with the tribes around them. Okay, you’re so focused on that rule about what God told Israel about who to marry, and don’t marry, you completely forgot the and foreign. God was not saying, oh, countries and races should never mix.

God was saying Israel needed to keep itself separate from its pagan neighbors because God wanted to keep Israel a pure and holy country so that he could bring Jesus Christ into the world through Israel. We miss the spiritual point of everything because we’re so focused on the tiny little rule, okay? That’s just one example.

So verse 25, verse 25, woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you make clean the outside of the cup and the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. He says you’re washing the outside, but inside the cup and the platter are full of extortion and excess. There’s full of all kinds of corruption and wickedness in there.

Most of you in this room have had children. When they eat or drink out of a vessel, out of a dish, you don’t just wash the outside, do you? No.

Because you don’t know how long that milk sat there. You don’t know what, I don’t want to make everybody sick, but you don’t want backwashed in that cup. You don’t just wash the outside of the cup and then leave the inside to fester.

Because children are gross. We all were when we were little. It’s just part of parenting is teaching them how to not be that way.

Okay. We’ll talk later. So you wash the inside of the vessel.

And he said for them to focus on the external, For them to focus on the outward appearance of righteousness more than on actual inward righteousness made as much sense as for them to wash only the outside of their dishes. He said they were hypocrites because they were focused on looking righteous more than being righteous. Do you realize it probably takes just as much work, if not more, to look like you’re doing the right thing than to just do the right thing?

Instead of pretending, just do it. Just do what God told you to do. Verse 27.

Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like unto whited sepulchers. Now, what that means is whitewashed tombs, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness. So they would go and they would take lime and they would whitewash the outsides of the tombs so they would just gleam and they would be beautiful.

But inside, they’re still full of dead people. And Jesus said, that’s exactly where you are, Pharisees. He said, you look good on the outside, but inside you’re full of dead men’s bones all kinds of rottenness.

And because of the Pharisees’ hypocrisy, they ignore their own spiritual deadness. They thought they were the most spiritual people in the whole country. And Jesus said, you’re just dead inside.

There’s no spiritualness about you. You’re just dead inside. And then we’re going to look at verse 29.

Woe unto you, you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you build the tombs of the prophets and garnish the sepulchers of the righteous, and say, if we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. He said, you’ll go to the prophets’ graves, and you’ll honor them, and you’ll take flowers, and you’ll build monuments to the prophets. And you look back and you say, oh, these men spoke for God, and if we had been around in their day, we wouldn’t have turned against them the way our ancestors did.

Because many times when God would send a prophet, even to the people of Israel, they didn’t want to hear it. Many times they hated the prophets because they got in the way of what they were wanting to do. They got in the way of what made them feel good.

They got in the way of national pride in Jeremiah’s case. They got in the way. And so the people would turn on them.

Sometimes they would even kill the prophets. And the Pharisees were saying, well, we had been there. We wouldn’t have been like our ancestors.

We wouldn’t have turned against the prophets. And Jesus said, verse 31, Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. He says, you’re admitting that you are descendants of those who killed the prophets.

The reason why that matters is because the Pharisees were very tied up, and part of their importance being because of who they were descended from. And he said in verse 32, Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers, ye serpents. He calls them snakes.

Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? What he’s saying there is you say, oh, we wouldn’t have killed the prophets. And he said, you have exactly the same kinds of beliefs and attitudes that your ancestors had when they killed the prophets.

And he said, you are just like your fathers, just like your ancestors. Fill ye up in the measure of your fathers. And how do we know this for a fact, other than the fact that Jesus said it?

But their ancestors turned against men like Jeremiah. They turned against all the prophets that God sent. And now the two prophets that came around during the Pharisees’ time, John the Baptist and Jesus himself, they didn’t like them.

And they were always looking for ways to destroy them. Always looking for ways to attack them. So he says, you claim on the outside that, oh, you’re better than them.

But you’re just like your ancestors who fought against God’s truth. And part of their hypocrisy was that they professed a commitment to godliness while rejecting God’s truth whenever they heard it. So he goes through this whole passage.

And my goodness, I feel like if I had been on the receiving end of this from Jesus, I would have just melted into the floor. But it just hardened their hearts even more. And hopefully we’ll take that.

I’m not preaching this to you because, oh, you’re a bunch of hypocrites. I’m sharing this with you because the world thinks we’re a bunch of hypocrites. And we need to be extra careful to not be what they think they’re going to see and let them see something else.

And this is what Jesus says actual hypocrites were. These are the things that we need to avoid like they are the plague. These are the things that we need to stay away from.

These are the kind of behaviors and attitudes that we need to stay away from. And what we need to realize, first of all, about these, if we’re going to do that, is to realize that hypocrisy is a heart problem, not a behavioral problem. Hypocrisy is a heart problem, not a behavioral problem.

In many cases, now I’m not talking about the, obviously the devouring the widow’s houses was wrong, that sort of thing. There were a lot of things that the Pharisees did that were not necessarily evil. The problem wasn’t in all cases what they were doing.

The problem was the condition of their hearts behind it. I feel like I say that about every week, about everything we’re talking about, ever since I went through the Sermon on the Mount at the beginning of last year. If you want to understand what the Sermon on the Mount is about, interpret everything as about the condition of the heart.

That’s the key to it. And for this, he gets on them constantly about what’s on the inside, about what’s on the inside of them. That’s why he got on to them about cleaning the outside of the cup and leaving the inside filthy.

Because if we were to say, oh, we don’t want to be hypocrites, so we just need to act better, that’s putting on a part, or that’s taking on a part, playing a part. I’m trying to think of the terminology here. That’s playing a part.

That’s borderline hypocrisy. We just, oh, we don’t want to look like hypocrites, so let’s just act better so we don’t look like hypocrites. Hypocrisy is a heart condition.

And we’ve got to get right and realize that we need to be on the inside and cultivate on the inside the attitudes that God would have us to have before the behavior follows. Does that make sense? Does us no good just to fix what we’re doing on the outside.

If we’re finding ourselves playing a part, if we’re finding ourselves pretending to be Christians that we’re not. That’s something we need to deal with God about in the heart rather than just change the behavior. If we change the heart, the behavior will follow.

It’s true of anything. That’s why the gospel isn’t clean up your life and come to Jesus Christ. The gospel is get on the same page with God about your sin, meaning repent, change your mind about your sin, and let God change your heart from the inside out. Trust Jesus Christ as your Savior.

He will change you from the inside out. The heart changes before God and the behavior follows. God will clean up your life.

So hypocrisy is a heart problem, not a behavioral problem. Second of all, hypocrisy stems from self-righteousness. Here’s the problem.

Because again, at the beginning of this message, I said, we tend to think of hypocrisy meaning, well, I act really good on Sundays and then I go live like the world Monday through Saturday. Okay, that’s part of it. But the hypocrisy that he’s really getting after here is is playing the part, them thinking or them acting like they were such good people.

And they didn’t act like such good people just on Sundays. They acted like they were such good people every day. They were the most spiritual. They were the most godly.

They were the most righteous. They were the most law-abiding. They were all these things.

And inside, they were anything but. That’s why he