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Hearing Jesus pronounce all of these “woes” against the
Pharisees can make it easy to believe that He’d lost His temper with them and
was really angry, but my commentary said, “His attitude was one of painful
sorrow that the Pharisees were blinded
to God’s truth and to their own sin.”
Their concepts of righteousness, ministry, and greatness were all messed
up. Somewhere along the line “they had
seated themselves in Moses’ seat, but there is no record in the Scriptures that
God assigned any authority to this
group.”
In trying to make themselves great, they were in effect
putting on a show of their alleged holiness, trying to show everyone that they
knew all the rules and followed them to the nth degree. Jesus’ most repeated condemnation of them was
that they were blind fools.
Jesus told them that the really important teachings of the
Law were justice, mercy, and being loyal, and these were the very things they were missing out on.
They focused on externals
– what others could see about
them. Yet their hearts were so far from
God that Jesus called them children of the devil
– and they were supposedly the religious leaders
of the time!
Father, let everything I teach point people to a relationship with You and never to
ritual. Convict me when my heart isn’t clean. I want to draw people to You and Your
Son. Stop me if I’m every doing anything
else.
Your Brother In Christ,
Gary Ford
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