What Kind of Pharisee Are You? Matthew 23:1-12

This morning we are continuing our study in Matthew chapter 23 and I have titled this lesson, What kind of Pharisee are you? Every one of us has a sin nature, and that sin nature trends in one of two directions, and often in both directions. Sometimes the trend is in the direction of licentiousness and antinomianism, which is a big word for lawlessness. To understand lawlessness to some degree, turn on the news and find out what people are doing you say are demonstrating across the country. That's lawlessness.

I think it's interesting. It happens to everybody, every group has its legalism and its lawlessness. And even though it may seem somewhat ironic those who have various legalistic standards, when they are violated, they frequently react in lawlessness. That happens personally as well. We have strict standards and codes of conduct, but sometimes when we get into rebellion against God we shift gears and we swing all the way in the opposite direction into lawlessness. And there are elements of that that we see in the Pharisees, and that's our focus in Matthew chapter 23 as Jesus lowers the boom and announces serious condemnation on the Pharisees of that generation. They are condemned because of their legalism. And what are they going to do in reaction? Lawlessness. What are they going do? They are going to condemn a perfectly innocent man and have him brought before pagan justice in order to be condemned to death, and He does not deserve it.

So we see that. And understanding that principle will help you a lot in watching human behavior, watching some of the things are going on today, as well as maybe being a little helpful for you who are parents in understanding the behavior of your children.

So what kind of Pharisee are you? We will approach that is we go through this study.

Now in this part of Matthew, just so we are reminded of the context from Matthew 21 through Matthew 25, this is the last week in Jesus' earthly life before the cross. This is the entry into Jerusalem in Matthew 21. His royal entry is followed by the next day, as he comes back into Jerusalem, a series of confrontations with the religious leaders in Jerusalem and they are challenging Jesus' authority, and they are challenging everything about who He is.

So He is publicly presented to Israel as her messianic King and then He is rejected by the nation but not by all of the people. Then when we get here to this chapter, Jesus is rejecting the nation, the national leaders, and He announces eight or seven woes (there is a textual issue with one of them, as we will see) on the religious leaders, and this is covered in this chapter, chapter 23.

I think it's helpful sometimes to begin with the end in mind, and in the first part of this, the first 12 verses which I'm focusing on this morning, it ends with a statement by Jesus: "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted". And the ultimate example of that goes to a passage we will study this coming Thursday night in Philippians 2:5-10 where it talks about how Jesus humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of the cross. And what happens as a result of His obedience to go to the cross, humbling Himself by being obedient, is that God the Father will exalt Him above every name, and every one eventually will bow before Jesus, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

The contrast is with the grace basis for our relationship with God that we find in the New Testament. In contrast to all the legalism that we find in religion and last time I talked about the danger of the danger of religion and that religion is the devil's tool. Religion is not biblical Christianity. I constantly find myself having to talk about, not just Christianity, but biblical Christianity, Bible-based Christianity, because we live in a world today when there are so many flavors of Christianity that are not Bible based; they are just different aspects of mostly legalistic religion.

Religion means that man does whatever he thinks is right before God so that God will bless him, God will validate him, God will approve of what he is doing, and he will be blessed by God because he is sincere, because he has gone through certain rituals, because he is moral. Those are usually the basic categories.

But Christianity is a relationship. It's a relationship based on God doing everything for us, that we don't do anything because we can't, because the root is poison, and everything is the result of this poison root. We cannot produce that which is righteous because we are corrupt.

And so God sent His son, the eternal second person of the Trinity to die on the cross in our place. He paid the penalty for us so that He who was without sin, Scripture says, became sin for us. Christianity is a relationship based on believing what God did for us, and not focusing on what we have done.

As we get into this particular section dealing with the Pharisees. The basic problem with Pharisaism, as Jesus is going to make clear in the second part of this chapter, is hypocrisy. Many of you think you understand what hypocrisy is but were going to need to clarify that term a little bit. A lot of people think that hypocrisy means that you say one thing and you do something else. If you are a parent, you say one thing and you do something else. Right? I remember my parents, and don't do as I do, do as I say. Okay, that's one kind of hypocrisy, but the kind of hypocrisy that the Pharisees are guilty of isn't necessarily that, it is that because they believe at a theological level a lot of what Jesus is talking about.

Jesus came offering the kingdom, the kingdom of the Messiah. He was claiming to be the Messiah. And Jesus explained to the people how to enter the kingdom. For example, when he is talking to the Pharisee Nicodemus in John chapter 3. In John chapter 3 Nicodemus, whose name really means a leader of the people, and may have been more of a title than it was his personal name, came to Jesus at night.

Now I know I've heard different reasons for why he came at night. I think he came at night because he was busy. That's a time when most of you can come to Bible classes at night because you work during the day. Nicodemus had a day job. Pharisees usually did. A lot of them were what we would call blue-collar workers, craftsmen and tradesmen. The Sadducees were the aristocracy. So Nicodemus was busy during the day came to Jesus at night and he said: "No one can do the miracles that you do unless God is with him", and Jesus understood what his real question was, and so he answered the real question. He said to him, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you are born again, you cannot enter the kingdom of God". And so Jesus is coming along and He is proclaiming the presence of the kingdom of God and He is telling people how they can enter the kingdom of God.

The Pharisees believed in a coming Messiah. They believed the Old Testament taught a coming Messiah. The Sadducees kind of waffled on that. The Pharisees believed in a messianic kingdom and they believed in a coming kingdom. In fact, many of them would have believed that this might be around the corner but they did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah.

The hypocrisy here is that they were spiritual leaders of the people who were trying to find the kingdom of God and looking for the Messiah, who is bringing the kingdom of God, but they refused to believe the Messiah when He came, and then they were dissuading others from following this Messiah who came and offered the kingdom. So their hypocrisy was they believed one thing, that is, that the Messiah would come and He would bring in the kingdom, but when the Messiah came, they dissuaded those who would follow him from following him. They refused to believe Jesus was the Messiah. They refused to enter the kingdom and not only did they reject their Messiah and refused to enter the kingdom, they were working hard to prevent others.

For example, Matthew 23:13 ^NASB "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in." So in the context of Matthew hypocrisy is not simply saying or teaching one thing and doing something else, it is much more serious than that, and it has to do with teaching people not to accept Jesus as Messiah.

Now that is partially necessary to understand that as we get into the beginning of this particular section. Matthew 23:1 is a follow on to the confrontation that Jesus had with the Pharisees and Sadducees and other religious leaders in the previous chapter, chapter 22. Following that, which means Jesus is in the temple, He is in the courtyard of the temple, and there is a crowd that has been gathering to listen to this confrontation between the Pharisees and Jesus, He now turns to the multitudes and His disciples. The Pharisees are probably still within earshot and can hear what He is going to say.

He says to them, "The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses."

Now, what exactly does that mean? In understanding this we have to understand something about what was going on in rabbinical Judaism in the second temple period. What you see on the slide is a picture of the seat of Moses that was discovered at the synagogue of Chorizin. It was a feature in every synagogue at that time that there was one seat, and in many cases it would be like this and it would be carved from stone. It would be somewhat ornate and significant. It was not sat in by just any rabbi or any teacher. It was used only on special occasions. It was near the front of the synagogue. In those days if you were the rabbi or you were going to adjudicate certain circumstances based on the Torah then you would sit somewhere. You would sit on the bema or you would sit in the seat of Moses.

If he was teaching the rabbi sat everybody else stood up for two or three hours. And this was true even in the early church for the first two or three centuries, and still true in Eastern Orthodox Church. You go and the people stand. They would stand for two or three hours.

So it talks about the fact that on some occasions the scribes and Pharisees would sit in Moses seat, and we have to understand just exactly what that means.

Matthew 23:3 ^NASB "therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say {things} and do not do {them.}"

Now this is really raised a lot of problems for expositors of the Scripture because it seems like Jesus is contradicting Himself. When He says observe He uses a Greek word that means to keep or to guard something. So is basically saying whatever they tell you to keep, whatever law they tell you to keep, that observe or keep and do. But in what sense? The Pharisees told the people many things to keep, which were contrary to the spirit of the law and in some cases, contrary to specifics of the Torah. Jesus was constantly violating their traditions, so in what sense did He mean that? Here's one example in Matthew 15:1, 2 ^NASB "Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, 'Why do Your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread'.”

The scribes and Pharisees were from Jerusalem came to Jesus saying why do your disciples transgress the traditions of the elders. You have the written Law, the Torah. Then there was the oral law, which was basically an oral tradition of how to apply the written Law. And so the question was: "Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders?" That is, the oral law, "for they do not wash their hands when they eat bread." Jesus answered them, and notice how Jesus uses Question and Answer. He throws the issue back on them and says: "Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition?"

Jesus doesn't do what the Pharisees say to do. So, why is He telling His disciples here 'Whatever they tell you to keep, that keep and do'. Seems like a contradiction.

I think the best understanding of this is to see what it was that they did when they sat in Moses seat. This wasn't just any teaching of the Torah. This wasn't just any reading of the Torah or exposition or explanation of it, but it had to do with dealing with specific issues. To sit at Moses' seat had to do with the application of case law in the Torah. So if two people had a problem and it was related to the case law then it would be like going to a justice of the peace or a local municipal court in order to have some sort of conflict resolved and understand how the civil law part of the Torah was to be was to be applied.

So they were coming to the Pharisee, the one who sat in Moses' seat, in order to get a resolution to a matter of law. And so if they ruled one way or the other, Jesus is saying do what they say to do in those circumstances. He's not saying across the board that they are to do whatever the Pharisee say to do in terms of all these multiple traditions that they had developed over the previous 1400 years.

And then in Matthew 23:4 He goes on to explain this, and He says, "For they bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers." That first word tells you that it's explaining something. It's the word "for" and in the Greek this expresses an explanation of the previous statement. And in the previous statement He is talking about the fact that that they are to listen to them but not do as they say, because they bind heavy burdens. They put a load on people and they laid these on men's shoulders.

Now the picture here goes back to the picture of a yoke, and that was a common term that was used among the Pharisees in relationship to the law. There were actually two different yokes. A yoke was something that you would use to join two and work animals together so that they would work in tandem and not work against each other. For example, you take two oxen and yoke them together. A yoke was designed in order to give people or to give a work animal structure and discipline, and so that term is used in relationship to the Law and in second temple Judaism.

There were two yokes that they talked about in rabbinical language, the yoke of the kingdom and the yoke of the Law. The yoke of the kingdom was pretty much for everyone—for children, for women, and they followed the basics related to the Shema. "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one God," and obeying the law. And it was defined as the acceptance of the rule of God in the whole of your life, as in the Shema. This was the yoke that was given to children, and to some extent, women, and that was all that they had to obey. It was very simple and fairly easy to follow.

Once a male reached the age of bar mitzvah at 13—bar mitzvah means son of the covenant—he was joining with all of the commands of Torah, the Mosaic covenant, and at that point the male takes on this additional heavy load, because in their interpretation it wasn't just that the written Torah, it was the oral Law—all of those other traditions that came along. The yoke of the Law is the yoke of all the commandments and the exception and obligation to fulfill all the commandments, which was interpreted to include all of the oral law, the traditions of the fathers.

This was what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 11:29, 30, a verse that is often related to salvation. "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." This is actually a statement that is condemning the interpretation of the yoke of the Law that was emphasized by the by the Pharisees. Our Lord's yoke is a yoke of grace, and grace dominated in the Old Testament.

So many people think that because we sometimes talk about the church age as the age of grace, that we believe in grace but in the Old Testament it was Law. But there's grace in the Law and one of the things that they would do, for example, had to do with Sabbath observance.

I just want to put this on the screen so we understand exactly what the Scripture says about Sabbath observance. In Exodus 20:8-11, part of the Decalogue, we read: "Remember Shabbat to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work." Notice there is a relationship here between labor and work. "…You shall do no work, you nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor the stranger who is within your gates".

A stranger would be someone who's not an Israelite, somebody who is not necessarily under the Mosaic Law, a Gentile that's living in the land. They were not to work either. You couldn't work the Gentile so that you didn't you could get some work or make some money that day because your slave was working for you. So everybody took the day off. "For in six days the Lord made heavens and the earth the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it." In other words, you can't understand the Sabbath if you don't understand literal six, 24-hour consecutive days of creation.

I've asked a somewhat Orthodox Jewish friend of mine. We got into creation. He said I have trouble taking that literally. I said well how do you explain the pattern. If those aren't six literal 24-hour days, then why do you work and apply it as if they are six little 24 hour days based on this? He said: "I don't have an answer."

So this is this is what the commandment said. Now it doesn't tell you. It doesn't answer a lot of questions. It doesn't say, well, if I spill something, can I clean it up? If I if I just didn't quite finish my work, could I clean up? What you mean by work? How are we going to define work? When is it? And some people take this to mean ordinary work, so you can do some other things that may involve exertion or effort. For example, a hobby or something like that on your on your day off. So how do you apply this? And what happened is around 200 BC the pharisaical movement actually developed after the return of the of the Jews from Babylon. That happened in 538. They rebuilt the temple 516 and as they went through a couple of centuries of development they became more and more rigorous in their application of the Law because they believed that the reason that God judged them and destroyed Jerusalem and the first Temple was because of idolatry. They needed obey the law, every letter of the law, and so they began to answer all of these kinds of questions with the idea that if you have the all of the 613 Commandments in the Law, that if you build a fence around them with other laws to prevent you from getting to those 513 laws in the middle, then what would happen is that you would protect yourself from violating any of those core laws.

So around 200 you had a group of rabbinical scholars and what they did was try to define further regulation. They came up the list of 38 things that you could not do on the Sabbath. Each of those then required a little further definition.

For example, they said you can't harvest on the on the Sabbath. You can't do work on the Sabbath, so you can't harvest. But then questions came up. What was exactly does it mean to harvest? And so they came up with an additional 20 or 30 regulations defining what it meant to harvest, and part of that would be that if you're walking through a field and a grain stalk has fallen on the ground, and you kick it and the grain comes off the stock, you've harvested. So you have all these regulations.

If God worked in the seven days of creation and He created light, then doing anything that generates light would be labor. So what you'll see if you go to Israel is when you go into at a hotel you can't push a button on the elevator to go from floor to floor because when you press a button on an elevator it illuminates, so you created a light. So what they have is a Shabbat elevator and that is programmed to just stop at every floor all the way up and then every floor all the way down, and if you're in a 23 or 24-floor hotel and you just want to make sure that you don't accidentally get on the Shabbat elevator.

And so they just generated hundreds and hundreds of these laws in order to prevent people from violating the basic law of Shabbat, but somehow when Moses wrote this and the Holy Spirit revealed this I'm not sure that he met you can't turn your cell phone on, or press in elevator button to go up to your floor, but they got down into the minutia, and this involved dietary laws and food and all kinds of other things down to very fine detail. So the Lord really in giving a broad command leaves a lot of room for application and freedom within the application of that Law. But the Pharisees were legislating everything down to the smallest detail.

One other application of this her problem would be that if it's raining and it's Shabbat, you're going to synagogue for services. You can carry an umbrella if it's raining. So you carry the umbrella, it's raining and you go to synagogue. But then it's stops raining but you can't cancel if it's not raining. You can't carry the umbrella home you have to leave it at the synagogue.

So a lot of these rules were real problems and that's why Jesus is saying that they are putting heavy burdens upon people. And then in verse five He goes on to say, "But all their works they do to be seen by men".

Now look at verse three again, which says, "Therefore whatever they tell you to do observe, but do not do according to their works". Now He defines those works here in verse five—"All their works they do to be seen by men". They were motivated by approbation lust. They wanted to get God's approval and they thought if they got the approval of men, recognition of men, because of what they did, then that was great and that would have value for eternity. They did these things in order to be seen, to be recognized. "It appealed to the lust patterns of their of their sin nature.

One of the ways that they would apply this is "they make their phylacteries broad and enlarge the borders of their garments". So there are two things that are going on there. One is the phylacteries and I have a picture up there and you can see the three men in the picture, each of whom are wearing their phylacteries, the box on the head is also on the on the wrist. A picture of the the wristbands that would be worn all along the along the forearm of the individual. You can see how they are wrapped here and here all along those forearms and there's a very specific way in which they are wrapped. And inside those little boxes there are scrolls, parchment scrolls of Scripture: Deuteronomy 6:4-8; 11-13-21; Exodus 13:1-10, 11-16.

Now, you would say, why don't you say 13:1-16? That's because in everything I read, it broke those into two sections even though it's one continuous thing of Scripture. And that would be how they broke that according to their tradition.

I'll just show your couple these verses. Deuteronomy 6:8 ^NASB "You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead."

What is interesting is that they're taking this in a hyper-literal sense in their application of that. But Jesus doesn't say you shouldn't wear the things at all. What He is dealing with is the fact that they think that because they have done the external action they've done it spiritually; that the external symbol that they have bound the Word of God to their head, meaning their brain, means that they've actually done that internally.

Deuteronomy 11:18 ^NASB "You shall therefore impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul …" That's the main command. It's not the physical literal binding you lay up these words of mine in your heart and your soul. "… and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontals on your forehead."

What they were doing is a visual to make everybody know that this is what they were doing, and so this shows that there basically focused on their own their own glory. And so they are self-seeking and they are self-righteous and that's their motivation for obeying the law.

The second thing that the passage says is that they're enlarging the borders of their garments. In Numbers 15:38 they were told: "Speak to the sons of Israel, and tell them that they shall make for themselves tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and that they shall put on the tassel of each corner a cord of blue."

What that meant was that they were to leave the threads at the bottom of their robes. They wore a long robe. Leave those threads loose and just tie them up, and that would be a reminder, verse 39, "It shall be a tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the LORD, so as to do them and not follow after your own heart and your own eyes, after which you played the harlot." So this is a reminder.

What happened towards the time of Jesus is that they took the phylacteries and they were made bigger and bigger. It was all about show and what happened was going on with the hems on the garments was they were letting these get longer and longer, and all of this would be a sign of spirituality.

Sometimes you might see this with people walking into church with a really big Bible or certain kind of Bible, something that draws attention to the Bible or their notebook. It is just sort of an ostentatious display.

I found an example of this in the Babylonian Talmud. Now the Talmud is a commentary on the Mishnah. The Mishnah was a collection of the teachings of the rabbis from about 200 BC until 200 AD. And 200 in AD a man by the name of Judah the Prince, Yehuda Hon Ossie in Hebrew, that organized and systematized all of this oral tradition, and that became the Mishnah. After that, the rabbis wrote commentaries on the Mishnah. That became known as the Talmud. So there are two Talmuds: the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud.

This is from the Babylonian Talmud in where it reads, "Our rabbis taught who is a perfect person of the land". But that's a very pejorative insult because a person of the land was what we would call a secular Jew—a nonobservant Jew, based on this someone who had no religious inclinations whatsoever. So this is a bad thing. So they're going to describe what it means to be a person of the land. A person of the land is someone who doesn't recite the Shema morning and evening with its accompanying benedictions. To be really holy and not a secular Jew scumbag then you need to recite the Shema twice a day along with all the blessings.

This is what Rabbi Meir said. "The sages say whoever does not put on the phylacteries". So that's the emphasis on the phylacteries. "You don't put on your phylacteries and you're just as Ben Azzai says, "Whoever has not the fringe upon his garment". Rabbi Johnathan Joseph says, "Whoever has sons and does not rear them to study Torah." Others say, notice this: "Even if he learnt Scripture and Mishnah but did not attend upon Rabbinical scholars, he is an 'Am ha-arez'.”

The reason I put that in is because Jesus didn't go to rabbinical school. So He would have been considered a spiritual scumbag, a nonobservance Jew because their view, He has no authority, He can't say anything because He would be in their view an 'Am ha-arez'.” And so they are emphasizing this.

Also, they were into making sure everybody noticed them. They loved the best places at feasts, the best seats in the synagogues, and so they wanted to be seen. They want to come in. They want to sit on the right front row. They wanted to wear all the right clothes, and there is a little bit of a picture of this in end of James chapter 1 and beginning of James chapter 2.

And then they were focused on impressive titles. Now this passage is often misunderstood and misapplied by a lot of Christians because they don't understand the context and the historical context and what was actually going on in Judaism at that time. They enjoyed the greetings in the marketplace, and to be called by men, Rabbi, Rabbi. Now literally the meaning of Rabbi, the root there, is "the great one".

So whenever you say Rabbi, literally you're saying "my great one". But it came to refer to "my teacher". And then Jesus said but you, do not be called Rabbi for one is your teacher, the Christ, and you are all brethren." Now a lot of people have taken this and said, well, that means you shouldn't call a pastor a teacher. The problem with that is that Paul clearly makes a distinction when he talks about the spiritual gifts. He says some are given the gift of teaching.

You have to understand what's going on here, and what is happening here is that the Rabbi is not just in love with this title, but it gives him a special spiritual authority where whatever he says is it. He is at the absolute authority with no question.

Now we don't do that in the church today. There may be some Christian traditions that do something similar to that. But when we go to seminary we refer to professors as Dr. because it's a term of respect, and they've earned it. But it doesn't mean that they have this level of authority. You call a Pastor, Pastor sometimes Reverend, and refer to some as teacher. That's not what Jesus is talking about.

When we look at the ninth verse.

"Therefore do not call anyone on earth your father for one is your father who is in heaven." You have to understand that that they wouldn't even call a living Rabbi a father. A father was somebody who had absolute authority and his pronouncements would have been given the status of divine revelation.

In the early church as the church age develop the generation following the disciples was often called the apostolic fathers. That comes close to trying to give those early church fathers in the second century that same level of authority. But if you read them, they were really confused and messed up on a lot of doctrine. So this isn't saying that you shouldn't call a pastor, teacher or pastor or something like that because it doesn't carry the same weight that it did in Judaism. You're basically elevating them to a level of an adjudicator of divine revelation, someone who was giving divine revelation. It was an absolutist type position.

The other thing, and this goes back to the title, what kind of rabbi are you. According to this same tractate Sotah a little further on there were seven different types of rabbis: the shikmi Pharisee, the nikpi Pharisee, the kizai Pharisee, the ‘pestle’ Pharisee, the Pharisee [who constantly exclaims] ‘What is my duty that I may perform it?’, the Pharisee from love [of God] and the Pharisee from fear.”

Now the one who is motivated by the love of God is the good Pharisee like Nicodemus urges our Joseph of Arimathea, but the Pharisees recognized there were a lot of Pharisees who were wrong, who were operating on a lot of wrong things. I'll just run through this quickly. The shikmi me from the word skim or Shechem goes back to Genesis 34 when you had Levi and one of the other brothers forcefully circumcise all the men of Shechem because Shechem had raped their sister. So that has no spiritual value, it is just a surface thing, so that came to be known as the idea of external obedience but no internal reality.

The Jerusalem Talmud but said that this was somebody who carried his religious duties on his shoulder. That is, he had good external actions, but there but it was just all show. The nikpi Pharisee is the one who would knock his feet together, and this is somebody who walked with exaggerated humility so that everybody would know that he was obeying Scripture. It's also called the wait-a-little Pharisees who always found excuses for putting off a good deed.

That's another explanation. The top part of the slides comes from the helmet itself. I have run across a lot of different explanations of this that are all basically saying the same thing, and that is their interpretation of this. This comes from both Christian and Jewish sources.

The kizai Pharisee was one of makes his blood to flow against the walls. They had a great sense of humor when they wrote these. They understood that this is a guy who is so self-righteous he is so afraid he's going to look at a beautiful woman and lust, that he that he looks the other way and runs in the walls. So he is bruised and bleeding all the time because he just can't bear to possibly look on a woman, so he's the one who's too busy avoiding the possibility of sin.

The pestle Pharisee is one who always walks around with his head bowed and hunched over in a superficial show of humility.

The fifth kind is the Pharisee who is always saying what is my duty that I may perform it. But that's a virtue, they say. No, what he says is further duty is for me that I may perform it, as though he had fulfilled every obligation. Again, it's a form of hypocrisy. He is the one who's always weighing his good deeds against the bad. He's always balancing things out. Six and seven are usually combined, the Pharisee from love and the Pharisee from fear. The fearful Pharisees are those who are motivated by fear. They are afraid they're going to do the wrong thing and God is going to punish them.

But it's the seventh one who is the only one who is properly focused. He is the Pharisee who really loves God in his heart and takes delight in the Law. So six of them are wrong. These are the ones Jesus is really condemning. There were some Pharisees, not just Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who responded to Jesus as the Messiah, but most of them did not. They fit all fit into those other six categories.

This is why Jesus concludes by focusing the issue on humility. Six of the seven are operating in arrogance. They have no humility whatsoever. And Jesus said, he who is greatest among you shall be your servant in six of those.

They're all looking to be served by others and to have people honor them with the titles and with the names and sitting up in the front of the synagogue and always being a publicly recognized. And Jesus said: "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted".

How do you humble yourself? By being obedient to the Lord, humbling yourself under the mighty hand of God, and God will exalt you.

Slides