Sermon series: "LET’S TALK ABOUT JESUS"

Subject: JESUS AND HIS CONFLICT WITH RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS LEADERS

Matthew 12:1-8
"At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn and to eat.
But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the sabbath day.
But he said unto them, Have ye not read what David did, when he was an hungred, and they that were with him;
How he entered into the house of God, and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests?
Or have ye not read in the law, how that on the sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are blameless?
But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater than the temple.
But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.
For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day."

Matthew 15:1-9
"Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees, which were of Jerusalem, saying,
Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.
But he answered and said unto them, Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?
For God commanded, saying, Honour thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death.
But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me;
And honour not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.
Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying,
This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.
But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men."

Matthew 23:13-15
"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.

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Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves."

I have selected the above Scripture texts to introduce our subject today. Frequently throughout the gospels, we find the scribes and Pharisees confronting Jesus, and ultimately assisting in planning His death.
Question! Who are these scribes and Pharisees and where did they come from and what did they stand for?
The Jews had a deep and lasting sense of the continuity of their religion; and we can see best what the Pharisees and scribes stood for by seeing where they came into the scheme of Jewish religion.
The Jews had a saying, "Moses received the Law and delivered it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders; and the elders to the prophets; and the prophets to the men of the Great Synagogue."
To study the Law became the greatest of all professions; and that study of the Law was committed to the men of the Great Synagogue.
In the Old Testament itself we find very few rules and regulations; what we do find are great, broad principles which a man must himself take and interpret under God’s guidance, and apply to the individual situations in life. In the Ten Commandments we find no rules and regulations at all; they are each one of them great principles out of which a man must find his own rules for life. To the later Jews these great principles did not seem enough. They held that the Law was divine, and that in it God had said His last word, and that therefore everything must be in it. If a thing was not in Law EXPLICITLY, it must be there IMPLICITLY. They therefore argued that out of the Law it must be possible to deduce a rule and a regulation for every possible situation in life.
So there arose a race of men called the Scribes who made it the business of their lives to reduce the great principles of the Law to literally thousands upon thousands of rules and regulations.
Let me give you a couple of examples, please. The Law lays it down that the Sabbath Day is to be kept holy, and that on it no work is to be done. That is the great principle.

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But the Jewish legalists had a passion for definition. So they asked: What is work? All kinds of things were classified as work. For instance, to carry a burden on the Sabbath Day is to work. But next a burden has to be defined. So the Scribal Law lays it down that a burden is "food equal in weight to a dried fig, enough wine for mixing in a goblet, milk enough for one swallow, honey enough to put upon a wound, oil enough to anoint a small member, water enough to moisten an eye-salve, paper enough to write a custom’s house notice upon, ink enough to write two letters of the alphabet, reed enough to make a pen"--and so on endlessly. So they spent endless hours arguing whether a man could or could not lift a lamp from one place to another on the Sabbath. This is why the religious leaders got so angry at Jesus for healing a man and telling him to take up his bed and go home. To carry his bed was an obvious violation of their Scribal Law! And for this, they wanted to kill Jesus! Just because He healed him and instructed him to carry his bed home on the Sabbath!
The Scribes were the men who worked out these rules and regulations. The Pharisees, whose name means THE SEPARATED ONES, were the men who had separated themselves from all the ordinary activities of life to keep all these rules and regulations.
We can see the length to which this went from the following facts. For many generations this Scribal Law was never written down; it was the oral law, and it was handed down in the memory of generations of Scribes. In the middle of the third century A.D. a summary of it was made and codified. That summary is known as the MISHNAH; it contains sixty-three tractates on various subjects of the Law, and in English makes a book of almost eight hundred pages! Later Jewish scholarship busied itself with making commentaries to explain the MISHNAH. These commentaries are known as the TALMUDS. Of the Jerusalem TALMUD there are twelve printed volumes; and of the Babylonian TALMUD there are sixty printed volumes.
Remember! God gave ten simple instructions for the living of a happy and prosperous life, but when man got finished with it, it expanded to more than fifty volumes of mass regulations and rules!
To the strict orthodox Jew, in the time of Jesus, religion, serving God, was a matter of keeping thousands of legalistic rules and regulations; they regarded these petty rules and regulations as literally matters of life and death and eternal destiny!

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Now concerning the Pharisees, let me give you some background and history.
The return of the people to Jerusalem and the first dedication of the Law took place about 450 B.C. But it is not till long after that that the Pharisees emerge. About 175 B.C. Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria made a deliberate attempt to stamp out the Jewish religion, and to introduce Greek religion and Greek customs and practices.
It was then that the Pharisees arose as a separate sect. In the face of the threat directed against Judaism, the Pharisees determined to spend their whole lives in one long observance of Judaism in its most elaborate and ceremonial and legal form. They were men who accepted the mass and the ever-increasing number of religious rules and regulations extracted from the Law.
There were never very many of them; at most there were not more than six thousand of them; for the plain fact is that, if a man was going to accept and carry out every little regulation and rule, he would have time for nothing else; he had to withdraw himself, to separate himself, from ordinary life in order to keep the Law!
The Pharisees then were two things. First, they were dedicated legalists; religion to them was the observance of every detail of the Scribal Law. But second--and this is never to be forgotten-they were men in desperate earnest about their religion, for no one would have accepted the impossibly demanding task of living a life like that unless they had been in the most deadly earnest!
The TALMUD distinguishes seven different kinds of Pharisees.
(1) There was the SHOULDER PHARISEE. He was meticulous in his observance of the Law; but he wore his good deeds upon his shoulder. He was out for a reputation for purity and goodness. True, he obeyed the Law, but he did it so in order to be seen of men.
(2) There was the WAIT-A-LITTLE PHARISEE. He was the Pharisee who could always produce an entirely valid excuse for putting off a good deed. He professed the creed of the strictest Pharisee but he could always find an excuse for allowing practice to lag behind creed. He spoke, but he did not do!
(3) There was the BRUISED OR BLEEDING PHARISEE. The TALMUD speaks of the plague of self-inflicting Pharisees. These Pharisees received their name for this reason. Women had a very low status in Palestine. No really strict, orthodox teacher could be

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seen talking to a woman in public, even if that woman was his own wife or sister. These Pharisees went even further; they would not even allow themselves to look at a woman on the street. In order to avoid doing so they would shut their eyes, and so bump into walls and buildings and obstructions, or fall over objects in the street. They thus bruised and wounded themselves, and their wounds and bruises gained them a special reputation for exceeding piety!
(4) There was the Pharisee who was variously described as the PESTLE AND MORTAR PHARISEE, or the HUMP-BACKED PHARISEE, OR THE TUMBLING PHARISEE. Such men walked in such an ostentatious humility that they were bent like a pestle in a mortar, or like a hunchback. They were so humble that they could not even lift their feet from the ground and so tripped over any obstruction they met. Their humility was in fact a self-advertising ostentation.
(5) There was the EVER-RECKONING or COMPOUNDING PHARISEE. This kind of Pharisee was for ever striking a balance sheet between himself and God, and he believed that every good deed he did put God a little further in debt to him. To him religion was always to be reckoned in terms of a profit and loss account.
(6) There was the TIMID or FEARING PHARISEE. He was always in dread of divine punishment. He was, therefore, always cleansing the outside of the cup and the platter, so that he might seem to be good. He saw religion in terms of judgment, and life in terms of a terror-stricken evasion of this judgment.
(7) Finally, there was the GOD-FEARING PHARISEE: he was the Pharisee who really and truly found delight in obedience to the Law of God, however difficult that Law might be.
That was the Jew’s own classification of the Pharisees; and it is to be noted that there were six bad types to one good one! There would be not a few listening to Jesus’ denunciation of the Pharisees who agreed with every word of it!
The Scribes and Pharisees had made religion a burden to be carried, and all their rules and regulations had stolen the joy and blessings of fellowship with Almighty God.
Now we can understand why Jesus was so harsh and condemnatory with the Pharisees!
Matthew 23 is filled with words of denunciation of the Pharisees. "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are enter

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ing to go in. (Matthew 23:13)
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves." (Matthew 23:15)
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like white-washed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness." (Matthew 23:27).
"Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me.
Why do you not understand My speech? Because you are not able to listen to My word. You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it." (John 8:42-44)
Jesus and the Pharisees were on a collision course!
The Pharisees made the main attack upon the life and character of Christ. There were the most religious people in Jerusalem. The Pharisees were the direct descendants of Ezra and Nehemiah, supposedly the religious reformers. They believed that Jesus was an imposter. As soon as Jesus commenced his public ministry, His popularity assumed Messianic proportions. The fact that Jesus had come from the ranks of the poor was a concept totally against their expectations. And the fact that Jesus had gathered around Him such a motley crew was unacceptable to their way of thinking. Jesus had gathered the riffraff of society as His followers! The sin of the Pharisees was the sin of scorn and pride. Blinded by this complacent sin, eaten up by their own self-righteousness; unable to see God when He came to them through ways not of their conceiving, they pronounced Jesus an imposter and planned to hurry Him out of the way!
Another element of conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was His attitude to the Scribal Law and their multitude of rules and regulations which were the product of men. The religion of the Pharisees was a religion of following man-made laws without any love of heart. It was cold legalism! When Jesus came, He challenged these religious leaders to rethink their concept of God, but their minds were closed to truth and to them, the teaching of Christ was rank heresy and blasphemy!

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Another thing that turned the Pharisees against Christ was His universalism.
As far as they were concerned, there was the Jew and the Gentile. The Gentile was created for fuel for the fires of hell...they taught, and the Jews were privileged people that God had chosen.
When Jesus showed that God loved everybody and all were included in His plan of salvation, the Pharisees totally rejected this inclusion of the world. This universalism struck at everything the exclusive Pharisee held sacred and most dear; it was dangerous doctrine, and the Man who proclaimed it must be silenced!
Jesus and religion did not mix! Jesus wanted a relationship with man, not some kind of religious expression of man’s self-righteousness. The Apostle Paul considered himself a very religious person. Listen to him explain his religious accomplishments: "If anyone else thinks he may have confidence in the flesh, I more so: circumcised the eighth day of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church; concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ." (Philippians 3:4-8)
I like the way the Amplified Bible reads: "But whatever former things I had that might have been gains to me, I have come to consider as one combined loss for Christ’s sake. Yes, furthermore, I count everything as loss compared to the possession of the priceless privilege, the overwhelming preciousness, the surpassing worth, and the supreme advantage of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord and of progressively becoming more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, of perceiving and recognizing and understanding Him more fully and clearly. For His sake, I have lost everything and consider it all to be mere rubbish in order that I may win (gain) Christ, the Anointed One."
Religion did not impress Christ and it surely did not satisfy Paul! He wanted to know and experience the personal relationship with the Triune God of the universe.
What is religion? According to Webster, religion is devotion, fidelity, conscientiousness, an awareness or conviction of the existence of a supreme being, which arouses reverence, love, gratitude, the will

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to obey and serve. True religion has God as the object of worship and love, not the fulfilling of some man-made rules. Paul writes: "If then you have died with Christ to material ways of looking at things and have escaped from the world’s crude and external notions and teachings of externalism, why do you live as if you still belong to the world? [Why do you submit to rules and regulations?--such as] Do not handle [this], Do not taste [that], Do not ever touch them, referring to things all of which perish with being used. To do this is to follow human precepts and doctrines.
Such [practices] have indeed the outward appearance [that popularly passes] for wisdom, in promoting self-imposed rigor of devotion and delight in self-humiliation and severity of discipline of the body, but they are of no value in checking the indulgence of the flesh (the lower nature), [Instead, they do not honor God but serve only to indulge the flesh.] (Colossians 2:20-23 Amplified)
Christianity is more than a religion, because every religion has one basic characteristic. Its followers are trying to reach God, find God, please God through their own efforts and its leaders seek to control the lives of their followers. Christianity is God reaching down to man, religion is man trying to reach up toward God with rules and regulations that are man-devised. Christianity claims that men have not found God, but that God has found them. To some this a crushing blow (such as the scribes and Pharisees), for they prefer religious effort and dealing with God on their own terms. This puts them in control. They felt good about being religious!
The truth that I am seeking to express in this lesson today is that Jesus came, not to create a religion, but to provide a personal relationship with God that is the result of our acceptance of Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. And at the heart of our Christian faith is the invitation to "love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind." To practice Christianity is to respond to what God has done for us in loving obedience and worship. Christianity is not a religious treadmill. With form, formalism, ritual, legalism, rules, systems and formulas we attempt to reduce Christianity is not a religion--a system of some kind where works are really substituted for faith and trust, where law takes precedence over grace.
"For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9)