Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Luke 11:37-54, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), no. 41
- Date: Sunday, November 30, 2025 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
Listen Online
Watch Online
Text
The Propaganda Village
There is a fascinating little village in North Korea that is just about a stone’s throw away from the border with South Korea. And I’m probably going to butcher the name of it, but it’s called something to the effect of Kijŏng-dong. And what’s so fascinating about this village is it’s unlike other villages in North Korea. It has concrete high-rise apartment blocks for the workers to live in.
Beautiful buildings from a distance. It has beautiful well-kept fields that the farmers and the collective farms, they go out and work. It has a kindergarten. It has a child care center.
It has a high school. It even has a hospital. It has electric lights, which not every rural village in North Korea has. It has people that go out every morning and sweep the streets.
It has speakers that broadcast, or they used to, broadcast messages and music all throughout the day. From a distance, it looks like a really good place to live, and that’s kind of the point. What makes Kijŏng-dong unique is that it’s what they call a propaganda village. It’s not real.
All these concrete high-rise apartment blocks are just empty concrete shelves. In the windows, there’s usually not glass in the windows. And from what I’ve read, some of the windows are actually just painted on the building to look like windows. They have people that go through each morning and sweep the streets and turn lights on in the different houses and turn lights on and off throughout the day, so it looks like people live there, but nobody actually lives there.
The people that work the fields, presumably, are from neighboring villages where conditions aren’t as good. The schools are empty. The hospital doesn’t actually function. It’s just a shell.
It’s there to put on a show, and it was built years ago to try to convince people who could see it from the South Korean side that things in North Korea aren’t as bad as the media portrays them to be. We have plenty of food. We have plenty of electricity. We have happy lives in spite of the oppressive government.
In some cases, I think the hope with them broadcasting the messages over the loudspeakers were to try to convince even some of the soldiers to defect to the other side. It was an entire village built to obscure the truth. It was an entire village built to look from the outside like everything is wonderful, life is perfect, everything’s great, when it’s just an empty shell hiding the deprivation and the oppression of people who live there. The message this morning is not about the evils of North Korea, but that story does reflect something that takes place or can take place in the human heart.
Where we can, we don’t build concrete structures, but we can put up a facade to make everything look like it’s great on the outside when it’s hiding what’s truly in the heart. And Jesus addressed that scenario over and over throughout his ministry. Over and over, he talked to his own followers about how God looks at the heart. Over and over, he called out the Pharisees and other religious leaders for putting out that facade of making things appear that everything’s wonderful when they were just hiding what was truly going on inside.
And we’re going to look at one of those stories today as we continue our journey through the book of Luke. We’ve come to Luke chapter 11. Last week, we looked at the sign of Jonah. And today we arrive at verse 37, where Jesus begins to turn his attention to the Pharisees and what was wrong in their hearts.
We talked last week about that sign of Jonah and how they were rejecting God’s truth. They were rejecting what they knew to be true because it wasn’t what they wanted to be true. And now Jesus turns in verse 37 and begins to talk about the condition of their hearts that would lead them to reject the truth. That what appeared to be good on the outside wasn’t as good on the inside.
That’s what we’re going to look at this morning. And We’re going to start in verse 37 and read this section that’s usually called the woes upon the Pharisees. Starting in verse 37, it says, Now when he had spoken, a Pharisee asked him to have lunch with him, and he went in and reclined at the table. When the Pharisee saw it, he was surprised that he had not first ceremonially washed before the meal.
Clean Outside, Corrupt Inside
But the Lord said to him, Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but inside of you you are full of robbery and wickedness. You foolish ones, did not he who made the outside make the inside also? But give that which is within as charity, and then all things are clean for you.
Worldly Priorities
But woe to you Pharisees, for you pay tithe of mint and rue and every kind of garden herb, and yet disregard justice and the love of God. But these are things you should have done without neglecting the others.
Pride and Recognition
Woe to you Pharisees, for you love the chief seats in the synagogues and the respectful greetings in the marketplaces.
Hidden Corruption
Woe to you, for you are like concealed tombs, and the people walk over them and are unaware of it. And I am puzzled by this next part. Somebody sitting there at the dinner, Here’s Jesus rebuked this Pharisee for challenging him about not going through the ceremonial washings and says, you know, I’d like my turn at this. Kind of like I tell my children, when one of them is getting in trouble, and the other one has to pipe up and put their two cents in about what the other one did wrong, and suddenly it’s turned at them, and they’re getting in trouble for something they’ve done and we’ve forgotten about.
My advice to them is, when somebody else is getting in trouble, just stay down. Just stay down. But this lawyer, this expert in the law, didn’t heed my advice.
And so he says, one of the lawyers, verse 45, said to him in reply, teacher, when you say this, you insult us too. And this man is just itching for a rebuke here. You insult us too.
Hypocrisy and Heavy Burdens
But he said, woe to you lawyers as well, for you weigh men down with burdens hard to bear, while you yourselves will not even touch the burdens with one of your fingers.
Hard Hearts Toward God’s Word
Woe to you, for you build the tombs of the prophets, and it was your fathers who killed them. So you are witnesses and approve the deeds of your fathers, because it was they who killed them, and you build their tombs. For this reason also the wisdom of God said, I will send to them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill, and some they will persecute, so that the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world may be charged against this generation from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the house of God. Yes, I tell you, it shall be charged against this generation.
Obstructing the Truth
Woe to you lawyers, for you have taken away the key of knowledge. You yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering.
Religion Without Repentance
When he left there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to be very hostile and to question him closely on many subjects, plotting against him to catch him in something he might say. There’s a lot that Luke doesn’t tell us about this dinner party because we don’t have to know, we don’t need to know, but there are some things I do wish I knew about how we got from this part of the conversation to this part of the conversation that Luke doesn’t record. To read it, it sounds like the Pharisee made an innocent remark, hey, I noticed you didn’t go through our ceremonial washings, and then Jesus launches into this rebuke. But we know that Jesus is gracious.
We know that Jesus is merciful. It tells me there was more to the story. Maybe the Pharisee invited Jesus there for the purpose of trying to entrap him, and Jesus was waiting for this the whole time, for this man to bring up something Jesus did wrong. Maybe there was other conversation before that.
We don’t need to know. I would like to know what got us from the remark about the hand-washing to, you know what’s wrong with you people? The one thing I know is that Jesus being Jesus was entirely reasonable in his response. He can’t be unreasonable.
But they come at him with this accusation, you did not wash your hands. And this is not an Old Testament law thing. This is their reinterpretation of Old Testament law. Jesus never broke the Old Testament law as God presented it through Moses.
They had built traditions around God’s commands. God would say, “You must do this,” and they would add another rule intended to protect the original command. That is not necessarily wrong until the human safeguard begins to be treated as though it were God’s law.
Suppose the speed limit outside is forty miles per hour, and I tell my wife that she should drive thirty-five to be safe. That may not be bad advice—although in Oklahoma, driving too slowly can be dangerous too. The problem begins when I decide that my personal standard has become the law and start making citizen’s arrests when people drive thirty-six.
That is what the Pharisees did with their ceremonial washings. They condemned Jesus for failing to conform to standards they had created. This was not a matter of hygiene.
They’re not talking… You should wash your hands. That’s good advice. With all the flu and everything else that have gone around my house this week, I have become very demanding about hand washing.
Did you wash your hands? Yes. Go do it again. Hand washing is not a bad thing, but that’s not why they were doing it.
They were doing it because it was this tradition they had that was to show how pure they were. You didn’t go through all the steps. You didn’t go through all the rituals, so you’re not as good as we do. I notice you didn’t do all the things that we do.
Why is that? And Jesus then begins to point out some of their problems. And as he’s talking to this Pharisee in verse 37, starting in verse 37, but really he begins to speak to him in verse 39, Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but inside of you you are full of robbery and wickedness. They’re still talking about the physical washings, the rituals that they go through.
And they had rituals around how you wash a cup, how you wash a platter. And there are right ways and wrong ways of doing that. I mentioned to you all a few weeks ago about this training program I have called How to Wash a Pan that we might need to go back through at the house. There are right ways and wrong ways to wash things, to make them clean, but that’s not what they’re talking about.
They’re talking about the ceremonial aspects of it. And the things you do just because it’s tradition. And that’s what they’re concerned about and Jesus moves from that into their inward condition he says you’re so concerned about how you clean the cup and how you clean the platter but look inside of you not even not even inside the cup and the platter look inside of you and see what’s there he tells him because inside of these people who were accusing him because he wasn’t living up to their standards and their traditions. He says, you are full of robbery and wickedness.
Not one of us would like to hear that, but that would have been hugely offensive to a Pharisee because their position is we’ve kept the law perfectly. We’re the ones that put all these traditions around the law to make sure we keep the law perfectly. And you’re telling me that I’m full of robbery and wickedness? It’s because their standard and God’s standard are different.
And they had all these high external standards, but they weren’t as high as the standard God had for the heart. And inside, you look at people like these Pharisees that Jesus calls out elsewhere in the Gospels because they were defrauding widows out of their homes and property. They were cheating people. And just because you don’t do it at knife point or gun point in our day doesn’t mean it’s any less robbery.
Just because you do it with the stroke of a pen and the authority of tradition doesn’t mean that you’re not stealing. He said, you Pharisees, you’re concerned about the outward appearance, but inside of you is full of robbery and wickedness, you foolish ones. See, this is what makes me think Jesus didn’t just go from zero to 60 here in a second. Something else happened, either that or Jesus knew going into this that they were already looking for things that they could use against him.
This was not as innocent a question as what it sounds like to us on the surface. When the man asks, why didn’t you wash? He says, you foolish ones, did not he who made the outside make the inside also? So he tells them, you’re making a big show of keeping tradition.
And looking good, and inwardly you’re eaten up by sin. When he says this in verse 40 about you foolish ones, did not he who made the outside make the inside also? He’s pointing out that God sees both. See, you’re concerned with the outward appearance and what man sees.
But God who made this outward world also made the inward, and he sees both. In other words, why are you not concerned with what God thinks? You’re so concerned with how you everybody else, but God sees the inside. And verse 41 seems to be kind of an ironic or sarcastic statement here, and sometimes that carries negative connotations.
I don’t mean it that way. He says, but give that which is within as charity, and all things are clean for you. Now, he’s not telling them, if you’ll just give more to charity, then you’ll be right with God. That’s not what he’s saying here.
I think what he’s saying here is if that’s your standard, If you think you can impress God by what you give or what you do, if you think all these external things are going to impress God, you’re going to have to do a lot more if you’re trying to impress God. It wouldn’t be in line with what he says elsewhere to say, just give more and you’ll be right with God. But he does elsewhere talk about holding them to their own standards. And if that’s what they think is going to impress God, this outward stuff, they’re going to have to do better than they’re doing. And so Jesus points out to them that God is far more concerned with the condition of the heart than the outward appearance.
Religious but Unrepentant
And then throughout this meal, or what’s left of it, because I think the meal is pretty much over at this point, Jesus pronounced God’s judgment on the Pharisees and on the lawyers because they were religious, but they weren’t repentant. And there’s a big difference. We can be religious without being repentant. Six times in this passage, he uses the word woe.
And it’s a word that’s used for sadness, but when it’s used in this way, it serves as a marker of judgment. Woe is something you can feel, but when Jesus is saying, woe on you for this reason, it’s pointing out God’s judgment. I think of this as the opposite of the Beatitudes. When he speaks God’s blessings over the people, blessed are you if you do these things.
This is the opposite. Woe to you. He’s pronouncing God’s judgment on them because of what they’ve already done. In the following verses, Jesus pronounces judgment on the Pharisees and their associates six times and for six reasons.
And the six things that he pronounces God’s judgment on them for instruct us today about things that we ought to avoid in ourselves, that we ought to avoid in others as well. Reasons why they were under God’s judgment. By the way, it says lawyers through here. This is not saying all lawyers are evil.
This is talking about these people who were experts in the law. Other passages call them scribes. These are people who… When you had the question about how many angels can fit on the head of a pen, these are the guys you went and talked to.
When you wanted to have the debate about how far can I walk and how can I find a loophole around doing what God tells me to do, what God wants me to do, and still technically be within the law, this is the guy you went and talked to. These are the experts in the Old Testament law and the Pharisees’ traditions. They were under judgment because these leaders were worldly. Look with me at verse 42.
Woe to you Pharisees, for you pay tithe of mint and rue and every kind of garden herb, and yet disregard justice and the love of God. But these are the things which you should have done without neglecting the others. They were focused on obeying God when it made them look good, but not when it counted most. It is easier to pay the tithe on every little thing you get than to change your behavior.
And that’s what he’s talking about. You tithe on mint and every other garden herb. He talks in other places about mint and dill and cumin. Every little thing you receive, you’re giving a tenth of to make sure that you’re right with God.
Why is that? Because it’s easier to hand a tenth of your spices over to the Lord than it is to act differently. He says, if you wanted to follow God, if you wanted to do what He designed you to do, what He’s called you to do, especially as leaders among His people, then what you would do is be merciful. What you would do is act justly.
You know, like, for example, not cheating widows and not putting unnecessary restrictions on people, you know, things like that. But it’s so much easier. It’s so much easier just to make sure, you know what? Somebody gifted me 10 Splenda packets that they had left over.
I’m going to make sure I give one to the temple. And so everybody can see I’m paying my tithe on everything, and then I can go out and live how I want to. That’s what these religious leaders were trying to do. They were living in worldly ways.
They weren’t concerned with the kinds of behaviors that God called them to do, the kinds of things that God called them to practice. If it became a challenge or it became an obstacle to the lifestyle they had chosen, they wanted the easy things that they could check off the list and then go out and live how they wanted. And God said, Jesus said, no, woe to you. Second reason why they were under judgment, the second reason why he says woe to them, we find in verse 43, is that they were prideful.
Woe to you Pharisees, for you love the chief seats in the synagogues and respectful greetings in the marketplaces. It’s not a sin to want good seats. It’s not a sin to stand in the aisle at Walmart and talk to people and be greeted in the marketplace. That’s not what he’s talking about.
Although it is a sin to block the aisle, I think. I don’t know. I’ll have to look that up. That’s not what he’s talking about.
He’s not talking about good seats so you can see when you go to an event. He’s not talking about having friends at the store. When he says chief seats in the synagogues, they were not seats so they could see. They were seats so they could be seen.
When he says greetings in the marketplace, they would go through these long ordeals when they would see each other and call each other by these grandiose titles. And they were doing all of this so everybody could know how religious they were, how dedicated they were, how involved they were at the synagogue, how important they were among the leadership of the synagogue. When they would come to service, It wasn’t about worshiping the Lord at the synagogue. It was about who could see me and who could be impressed by me.
In the marketplace, it was, I want everybody to know how wonderful I am. And they were obsessed with status and recognition more than they were for glorifying God. And that kind of pride will incur the judgment of God. These leaders were corrupt.
Verse 44 tells us. Woe to you for you are like concealed tombs and the people who walk over them are unaware of it. So sometimes there can be unmarked graves hidden and what’s inside those graves? Dead people.
Bones. And you can walk over it and not be aware. If people knew, in their culture, would they have avoided those spots? Yes.
What happened if you came in contact with a dead body? You were unclean. You were unclean. You were at least temporarily separated from the covenant people of Israel until you were clean again.
You could not go to worship. You could not participate in the things that they were doing. You were unclean. These leaders were corrupt.
He’s telling them when he says you’re like unmarked graves that people don’t realize are there. He’s telling them that they were spiritually dead and that they were filled with defiling influences. No matter how innocuous, how unthreatening they looked on the outside, no matter how good they looked on the outside, what was in them was defiling and would defile other people. And if other people recognized what was within them, they would run a mile.
They would steer clear of them. But they looked good on the outside. They were corrupt. And when Jesus says this to the Pharisee, that’s when this lawyer speaks up.
Hey, don’t forget me. I’m also in the room. And so Jesus turns to him and pronounces three woes now. The fourth thing that he calls God’s judgment on is that these leaders were hypocritical.
We see this in verse 46 he said woe to you lawyers as well for you weigh men down with burdens hard to bear while you yourselves will not even touch the burdens with one of your fingers he’s talking about these laws and these regulations that they put on people and these standards that they held people to that were not in line with god’s work and that that is key to understanding this. Okay, sometimes churches like ours that try and strive to stand on the authority of God’s Word, we will be called Pharisees. The Pharisees were not Pharisees because they were strict about interpreting God’s Word. The Pharisees were Pharisees because they were very loose about interpreting God’s Word, and they were determined to stand on the authority of anything but God’s Word.
It was about their traditions. Okay? So when we say, you know, the Pharisees were putting burdens and regulations on people, we are not talking about holding ourselves and others to the standard of God’s Word. We’re talking about some legalistic standard that we would have made up.
That’s what they were doing. They were adding these restrictions and these regulations on top of God’s Word. They were putting extra burdens on the people that God never intended the people to carry, and then they didn’t carry them themselves. This is the classic example of rules for thee and not for me.
And God looks at that kind of hypocrisy to say, no, no, you have to live up to this standard, but I don’t. And Jesus said, woe to you lawyers. Again, pronouncing God’s judgment because they were hypocritical. These leaders were hard-hearted.
We see this in verse 47, and this appears to me to maybe be the most important of the ones that he calls judgment on because he spends the most time talking about it. He spends three verses, three times as much space talking about this. Verse 47, woe to you for you build the tombs of the prophets, and it was your fathers who killed them. So they’re talking about building shrines, not to worship the prophets, but building tombs, places of remembrance to celebrate the prophets.
Oh, Jeremiah was wonderful. Oh, Isaiah, weren’t we fortunate to have such a man of God speaking his truth to our people? They were doing these things. They were trying to remember the prophets.
Jesus says that it was their fathers who killed the prophets. That did not make these leaders personally guilty of every act committed by earlier generations. The problem was that they were like their fathers. They approved the same spirit and continued the same kind of teaching that had led previous generations to persecute God’s messengers.
Jesus said that the wisdom of God had declared, “I will send to them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and some they will persecute.” Therefore, the blood of the prophets shed from the foundation of the world would be charged against that generation.
He describes the whole history from A to Z—from Abel to Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the house of God. Their response to Jesus showed that they stood in the same line as those who rejected God’s messengers before them.
What he’s saying here is there was a disconnect in their thinking. They celebrated these prophets, but they also celebrated those who came before them in their movement who had been responsible for persecuting the prophets. And it’s kind of like, well, if we had lived back then, we would have listened to the prophets. No, you wouldn’t.
How do we know they would have rejected the prophets? Because they were refusing to listen when the greatest revelation God had ever sent stood directly before them. Jesus was more than a prophet, yet they were determined to reject Him because He would not wash His hands according to their tradition.
Their response to Jesus revealed how they would have responded in every earlier generation. They would have thrown Jeremiah into the cistern, ignored Isaiah, stood with Cain against Abel, laughed at Noah, and placed themselves on the wrong side of God’s truth again and again.
That is why Jesus charged them with sharing the spirit of those who had shed the prophets’ blood. They were hard-hearted toward God’s revelation.
And listen, when we won’t listen to God’s word, when God can’t get our attention with his word, God is really good at getting our attention other ways. Sometimes I’ll tell my kids, now that they’ve gotten to an age where they’re responsible for their relationship with the Lord, and I’ll say, I can give you a consequence about this, but you really need to deal with the Lord about this, and you need to deal with it as He’s speaking softly to you and not wait till He takes off the belt. And He was pronouncing that kind of judgment on these people because they were being hard-hearted about what God was revealing. And finally, this morning, these leaders were obstructive.
Verse 52, it says, Woe to you lawyers, for you have taken away the key of knowledge, and you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering. So when the truth was right in front of them, staring them in the face, not only did they reject it, they began to twist it and make sure others rejected it as well. They were not content. They were not content with rejecting the truth.
They wanted to make sure nobody entered into the truth. And they would do that by twisting the word of God. Then we come to the final two verses of this passage. It says when he left there, because like I said, dinner’s over at this point.
There’s no more sitting down sharing pleasantries and sharing a meal. Dinner’s over. He gets done with the rebuke and he moves on. It says he left there and the scribes and the Pharisees began to be very hostile and to question him closely on many subjects, plotting against him to catch him in something he might say.
What we see here is they did not change. They did not repent. They continued with what they were doing before, and they even doubled down on it. When we are faced with a rebuke from God’s Word, when we’re faced with God pointing out what you’re doing is wrong, the direction you’re headed is not good, when we’re faced with that, we’re either going to be softened by it or we’re going to be hardened by it.
That rebuke would either break their hearts or harden them. Conviction moves us closer to God or farther away; it does not leave us standing still.
These leaders were not softened. They did not repent. They dug in more deeply, became more determined to defend their rules, and grew increasingly hostile toward the God who stood directly before them.
Jesus’ point was that no amount of religious activity could make them right with God apart from repentance. Human effort—even intense religious dedication—does not reconcile us to Him.
The only way to be right with God is through Jesus Christ: acknowledging that we are sinners who cannot repair our standing with God and believing that Jesus took responsibility for our sin and paid for it in full. If you are not already a believer, the takeaway is clear: you cannot make yourself right with God simply by trying harder.
The only way to be right with God is to come to Him through Jesus. Acknowledge that you’ve sinned. Acknowledge that we all stand under God’s judgment because in some way we’re all prideful or hypocritical or hard-hearted or any of the things that He pointed out. There’s something wrong with each of us that separates us from a holy God.
And Jesus came to be punished for that in our place. So that now you and I, all we have to do is ask for the forgiveness that he purchased at the cross. And we’ll have it. If you’re already a believer, then look at this as a cautionary tale.
We look at the things that he called down judgment on the Pharisees and the law experts for. And we don’t want to be like them. And if we see those tendencies in ourselves, we need to be soft-hearted about it and take it to the Lord and ask for His forgiveness. We need to avoid associating with people who live this way, who walk this way, because it will influence us.
And certainly, we don’t want to look to teachers who are like this. We don’t want to follow their example. We don’t want to follow their teachings, because it leads to hostility toward God. I didn’t say hostility from God. It will make us hostile toward God when His truth is right in front of us.
