Jesus Condemns the Pharisees - Part 1

Open your Bible with me to Matthew chapter 23, and today we continue in this chapter with Jesus, condemnation of the Pharisees, we won't get through all 7/8 valves but we will come to understand the first at two or three. I hope depending on how far we get Matthew chapter 23 is where Jesus harshly, condemns the Pharisees. He totally rejects everything they stand for. He condemns their religious approach because they are responsible for leading the nation of Israel at that time to divine judgment. They are accountable for this. He condemns them because they opposed the kingdom of God, which He has come to offer. They reject Him as the Messiah. They believe in the kingdom of God, they believe there will be a coming Messiah, but they do not believe that Jesus is He or that He can bring in the kingdom, and therefore they prevent the people from either accepting him as Messiah or entering into the kingdom themselves. And the reason is that they have sold themselves into the bondage of religion. God hates religion as I have taught the last few weeks. Religion, though, must be understood properly, that religion is man doing the work and God blessing man, God validating man, whereas Christianity is God doing all of the work and man simply accepting it by faith.

And what we have seen in terms of our context is that in these five chapters just before Jesus is arrested and then taken to the cross we see that He is entered into Jerusalem, offering himself as the King. He is publicly presented to Israel as a messianic king in chapter 21 and then He is rejected by the nation, but not by all of the people. That is covered in the section from 21:1-17 through 22:46, and He is rejected by the nation, the religion, as exemplified in the religious leaders. They are the ones who represent the people—the Sadducees, the chief priests, the Pharisees, the scribes; these are the ones that reject Jesus claims as Messiah.

And now in chapter 23 we see that Jesus, in turn, because they have rejected him, rejects the nation and announces eight woes. The reason that there is a discrepancy there is because the textual problem as we will see with the second woe that's listed as second in the King James version, and that's covered in this particular chapter.

We look at the first part of this chapter where Jesus concludes by pointing out that the Pharisees are not motivated by humility, they're motivated by pride and arrogance. They want to set themselves forward. Included last time going through seven different types of Pharisees as defined by the Pharisees themselves and they recognize that six of the seven kinds were hypocrites they were critical. There was a lot of criticism of the Pharisees, both within their ranks, and from those outside of the Pharisee ranks at the time the Jesus was there. The seventh category, those who love God and it is from those God lovers, I'm sure, that you found people who were responsive to the gospel message, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.

But Jesus' conclusion here is that religion is grounded in arrogance and not humility, and I pointed this out a minute ago when I defined religion again as man doing the work, and God blesses and validates men. Man is always after human validation and divine validation. They think they are impressed with what they do, they are impressed with the ritual, they think that this somehow honors God but it does not, because it's not on God's terms, and arrogant man thinks that he has a good enough idea of God that God ought to be impressed with his sincerity, with his morality, with his ethics and his desire to please him. But he rejects God's revelation in the process, which says that God does all the work. That is grace; He provides everything for us.

We don't spend enough time individually, truly reflecting upon the grace of God. That should be the prime motivator in the spiritual life: understanding God's grace. We receive His work, His blessing for us, by faith, and with regard to salvation that is faith in Jesus Christ alone.

And so we come to this chapter 23, where after the first 12 verses of prelude Jesus then really lowers the boom on them. He is extremely harsh in his condemnation of the religious leaders of Israel and this is something that doesn't sit well with modern contemporary man. We have to think of this a certain way that God has a viewpoint that is expressed in Scripture, we refer to this as divine viewpoint, and divine viewpoint is how God created things and how He designed things and what He established in terms of moral and ethical in spiritual absolutes. Man comes along and rejects that and from his own arrogance he develops his own ideas about God and about eternity and about religion. That is human viewpoint.

Man also develops many different philosophies and we live in an era today where over the past 30 or 40 years we have developed certain standards within the culture that are not biblical standards but they clash with biblical standards and culture, especially American culture, which has a history of developing ideas of social sins that somehow replace and supplant the ethics of Scripture.

In the 19th century, if you go back to the 1820s and the 1830s, the worst sins that you could commit involved slavery, they involved not treating women right, not giving them equal rights. Also, child labor was another great social sin. This came out of at what gave birth to religious liberalism in the early to mid-1800s, and there were other social sin such as drinking, and that gave rise to the temperance movement. But sin was defined in the defined in these superficial social sins.

Now you get into the 20th century and that those superficial social sins change. And you get into the late 20th century and into the early 21st century and the social sins are defined as being politically incorrect, or being intolerant, or being too critical of somebody, saying anything that is negative. And one of the problems that surveys have surfaced in the millennial generation as they go to church, is they don't like hearing negative. They don't like hearing any kind of criticism.

The problem with that is that Jesus is harshly critical at times. So when you are reared in a human viewpoint culture that says harsh criticism or intolerance is the major sin, then when you read Matthew 23 you say Jesus was a sinner, Jesus is intolerant, Jesus is critical of the sincere religious leaders. And so we have a problem in our culture as Bible believing Christians trying to communicate truth to believe believers—untrained, untaught believers—and unbelievers who have a reversed polarity on their sense of right and wrong.

So we need to come to understand how to approach that so that we don't frontload their perception by their easily quickly dismissing us: Well, you're just critical and judgmental, so you're not worth listening to.

That is how the devil blinds people's minds to the truth, and it's part of spiritual warfare. So we need to be much more engaged in prayer, and we need to learn and develop our own skills at asking questions, and at thinking through how people respond to things that we say, and our own attitudes, so that we do not become an impediment to people's response to the gospel.

That's how people are, they like to use ad hominem arguments. So they'll reject the message because of the messenger. And so we need to make sure that we get ourselves out of the way and let God deal with the person, and make sure that if they are rejecting the gospel that they're rejecting the gospel because they reject the gospel, not because of some attitude or some other opinions that we might have that distract from the cross. This is why Paul said, "I came to know Christ crucified". That is the focus of the message; it's about the gospel. Our calling as believers is to be witnesses of the gospel that is our focus, and we need to make sure that we are well trained in that.

In a day when tolerance and avoidance of any kind of criticism is viewed as being unloving and uncaring and hostile, and even sinful, we need to think through how to talk about this. When you think about what Jesus is doing, Jesus is presenting the one and only way to God. He is giving people a life preserver in the midst of drowning, and for someone to come along and say well any life preserver will do when the others don't work is allowing that person to drown. So that would be a justified way.

Perhaps one way that we can engage conversation about this is to direct the conversation in a direction where we talk about Well, is it ever valid to be critical? Are you ever critical? Aren't you being critical of those who are critical? Aren't you being judgmental of those who you think are being judgmental? You know, trying to get them to think about and discover where there are these internal logic flaws with in their thinking.

Somebody sent me a video yesterday. I won't go through the video in detail, but it was interesting. It had to do with Second Amendment rights, and you had a guy and girl. They were dating in and she was liberal and he had a pistol. She discovered that he was pro-Second Amendment and goes through three or four little interchanges where he is pointing out certain logical facts. And then her head explodes and he is just covered in blood. The concluding thought is her head blew up because of logic.

This is what is happening a lot in our culture. Logic is rejected in mysticism. I've gone through how we know the truth so many times with his congregation, that in rationalism and empiricism logic is the methodology used to arrive at answers. Rationalism is the idea that reason is the way in which we can arrive at truth. Empiricism is the idea that it is through experience, the scientific method, observation that we can arrive at truth. Both are built on logic, but we live in an era when rationalism is perceived to not offer ultimate solutions, and it doesn't, not ultimate solutions. Empiricism has been rejected as not being able to provide ultimate solutions.

And so as we've seen once before in history, and that is at the time of Christ, there is a reaction to reason and logic, and in place of it is substituted mysticism and the means of getting to truth is not through logic and reason but through it through a rationalism, through feelings. We have shifted, as one author titled his book, "From Reason to Rationalism", and that is how we have ended up where we are today.

It's difficult to talk to people who from their presupposition or their assumption base say logic can't get you to truth, and so if you use logic their head is going to blow up.

I think that brings us back as believers to where we have to focus on the Bible, which means we have to know the Scripture and understand the Scripture.

So we have to recognize that there are people who are coming from a cultural human viewpoint background who would automatically say, "Well this can't be Jesus. In fact, there are liberal scholars, liberal, very liberal Bible scholars—there was a group in the 90s called the Jesus seminar and they came along and decided what in the Gospels, Jesus could have said, would have said, or could not have said, and would not have said, and they didn't think that any of Matthew 23 could have been said by Jesus.

See, they have a preconceived notion that being intolerant and judgmental is not godly. Therefore, Matthew 23 is intolerant and judgmental, so it can't be godly. Therefore Jesus could not have said it. See, that's how human viewpoint reason operates. So we have to understand from the Bible's perspective that God speaks truth and that there is only there is one who is the embodiment of truth and that is Jesus who made the extraordinary exclusive claim that I am the truth. And we have to think that through and what that means.

And you've heard me go through this argument that when Jesus says I am the way the truth and the life He is either telling the truth or He is telling a lie. Now we may have some people's heads explode from that logic at this point, but that's your option. He's either lying or is telling the truth. If he is lying, then He is either self-deceived or He is crazy. And there's no evidence from Scripture that He is self-deceived, there is no evidence that He is psychotic, that He truly believes what he is saying. So if He is not deceiving people intentionally, if He is not crazy, then he must be telling the truth.

That's the standard God, Lord, liar or lunatic argument, and so if He is telling the truth, then we should understand that if there's only one way to God then anyone who is taking somebody in another direction is dangerous and causing people to go through eternal punishment in the lake of fire.

Therefore, it is worthy to be critical and to condemn those who are leading people astray and leading them to eternal death, and that is what Jesus is doing here.

In Matthew 23:13 we find the first of, and for simplicity sake I am going to call it seven woes +1. We'll get into that when we look at the second woe that is in the King James and new King James versions. The first is, "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 entering to go in." He immediately lets us know that he has never read Carnegie's book on how to win friends and influence people. He is not a promulgator of the positive thinking doctrine of Norman Vincent Peale or possibility thinking doctrine of Robert Schuller.

In my first church, which was composed of about half the people who had grown up and come out of Bible churches in the Houston area and who wanted to know teaching, and the other half older, there was a gap between 35 and 55 because it had a split about 10 years earlier. The older people ran off all the younger ones, and so there was always this kind of undercurrent bubbling within the congregation. And I actually had once we little old lady. I mean she was really sweet. Every Friday morning she brought me one of those cakes take pan size trays of homemade sourdough biscuits to put in the refrigerator. Six weeks and 10 pounds later, I had to stop that. That was terrible, but she was just the sweetest thing, and one day she said—and this is my first church, I hadn't been a pastor before— pastor you know we would just like you to be more like Robert Schuller.

You know that's what a lot of people think. It's just this positive thinking, possibility thinking; never, never say a harsh word.

But Jesus isn't that way. That doesn't mean that we should necessarily emulate this by being nasty and judgmental and condemnatory of people. He's only this way with people who have locked down their volition into negative so there's no hope and no way back. Jesus knew that. By His condemnations He is not condemning every Pharisee. He's only condemning the six out of the seven basically because the seventh seem to be positive. In fact, we know from Acts that many among the Pharisees and the priests responded to the gospel after the resurrection.

He says to them, "But woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites." Now He picks on the scribes and Pharisees because they are the dominant party at this time and the most conservative Bible based, we would say, party. Now that doesn't mean they were truly biblical because we've seen that they were not, but they were the conservatives. The Sadducees didn't believe in the Bible at all, they didn't believe in anything but the first five books, and they rejected the doctrine of resurrection and of the existence of angels. And the chief priests and the Herodians were only concerned about either their religious power or their political power.

So the Pharisees were the ones that would look for religious truth, for knowledge about how to go to God in this late second temple period. What Jesus says to them are two words that are critical for understanding the framework for this condemnation. The first word is woe and the second word is hypocrite. What exactly does Jesus mean by these words?

You can see them in their original language up on the screen. The first word is woe, which is pronounced OI in the Greek. It doesn't quite look that look that way because you have four vowels pulled together, but it is a transliteration that is been brought over from the Hebrew, and that's the second line in the blue box. OI is the Hebrew word you find throughout the Old Testament. That's what you hear often today it comes down from Hebrew into Yiddish and so it's entered into various other languages and it is an onomatopoeic word. That means it's a word that that sounds like what it is saying and that is an exclamation that comes from out of somebody's mouth when something terrible or horrible takes place.

It represents a guttural outcry of anger and pain, or both. It expresses grief and despair, but the way it is used in the Bible is to express God's judgment, his discipline, his harsh discipline on a people or on a group he announces woes in the Old Testament against Israel for their idolatry and because they have rejected his word he announces. Jesus announces these woes against the Pharisees for these 7+1 reasons and there will be woes that come at the in the middle of the art in the second half of the Tribulation. The last three trumpet judgments, which are in the middle just before the midpoint. The last three are called woes, the three great woes. Two of them occurred just before the midpoint that last what was the seventh trumpet that opens up to become the seven seal judgments of the seal judgments in the second half that culminate in the campaign of Armageddon. That's the third woe.

So these are harsh judgments from God. Then they're called hypocrites from the Greek word HUPOKRITES, which refers to actors who put a mask on their face. That's the classical meaning. Sometimes we talk about somebody being two-faced and so they believe one thing and they do something else, and that would also apply to the Pharisees.

But Jesus is a little more pronounced in the way He is using this because they are hypocrites because they claim to believe in the kingdom of God and in a coming Messiah, but they have rejected both and they are preventing anyone who wants the kingdom of God or the Messiah from entering also. That is the essence of this condemnation. We will learn that this term HUPOKRITES, which is an important term in Matthew, is a term that identifies unbelievers. It is not a term for Christians, it is a term for unbelievers, and we see that He is talking to them as unbelievers by what he says at the end of this section in Matthew 23:33. So you may just scan down to the end of the woe section in Matthew 23:33. Addressing them He again shows that that He doesn't really understand human viewpoint ways to win friends and influence people. And He addresses them as John the Baptist in as a serpent's—"brood of vipers, how can you escape the condemnation of Gehenna, literally.

So he calls them serpents, a brood of vipers. Now the term "brood" is an English translation from a Greek word that means "the children". They are the descendents of vipers. The Old Testament usually relates that word to the concept of seed and, of course, a viper is a poisonous kind of serpent. But this imagery here takes us all the way back to Genesis chapter 3 after Eve and then Adam had sinned. They go off into the bushes to hide when they hear God come because they're afraid. They had tried to cover up the fact that they had sinned and that everything had changed by making clothes out of fig leaves, which didn't quite solve the problem.

God showed up and He doesn't jump on their case and judge them immediately. That's important to understand. What He did was He began to ask questions. He said, "Where are you?" God perfectly well knew where they were, but He wanted them to think through where they were and how they got there. He wants self-discovery here. That is important when were talking in any conversation in evangelism. I think sometimes the period of questioning or getting people to think things through may last couple of years in some cases. It's not going to happen in a 15-minute conversation at Starbucks. It can start there. But sometimes it takes time, especially when people are so programmed and indoctrinated by the human viewpoint culture that we have today, so he asked these questions and that brought them to a point of realizing that they had really messed up they had they had disobeyed him and they were in a worse position than they could ever imagine.

And then God really made it clear by announcing what the consequences for their sin were going to be and He addresses each of the principles in this temptation scenario. He addresses first, the serpent, who was used by Satan to tempt Eve, and so He addresses the serpent and the serpent's punishment.

In verse 15, which is called the first evangelistic statement, the first hint of how God would provide the good news. In Latin it is called the proto-evangelion. God said, "I will put enmity between you (that is, the serpent; He is talking to the snake) and the woman."

Now that isn't talking about a fear of snakes, it is talking about something that is much greater. He is talking about the seed of the woman eventually said between your seed. That is, those who follow you and her seed that is talking about the one who would come and solve the problem. And this idea of seed is a critical term that it is traced all through the Old Testament. That's why you have all the genealogies that you skip when you read the Bible. What God is saying here is that this is going to be a case of hostility, and an enemy status between the descendents of Satan and her seed, which is the Messiah.

So when Jesus calls them, and when John the Baptist earlier called them "this seed of serpents" they are making a very profound judgmental statement against the Pharisees. They are identifying them with Satan's descendents and Satan's seed, the term which would indicate they're not believers.

The term hypocrites is used several places in Matthew—in the sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:2, 5, 16 as well as in 7:5—and in each of those He is referring to the Pharisees and He is treating them as unbelievers. Matthew 15, though, makes this clearer. In a conversation with the Pharisees He calls them hypocrites. So Matthew 23 isn't His first time He calls them hypocrites. And then He quotes from Isaiah.

Matthew 15:7-9 ^NASB “You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS, BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME. ‘BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE PRECEPTS OF MEN.’"

They talk about how much they love God and how much they love His Word, and they can recite Scripture, and they live externally a very religious moral life. "They draw near to me with their mouth, and they honor me with their lips", but it's all talk, a lot like politicians. It's all talk. Then we elect them, and they go to Washington and we wonder what happened to their promises. That's the idea. They're all talk and no action. "They honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain they worship me". That means you can worship God and its just emptiness. That's what God says; it means nothing and that's what was it was, just a lot of action but no reality. "… teaching as doctrines the commandments of men". So it is very clear that HUPOKRITES refers to unbelievers. That is going to be important when we get into the end of Matthew 24 and in chapter 25, but I'm just laying the groundwork now for what we will come to.

Then in Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, let them alone. He's talking to His disciples now about the Pharisees. He says they are blind leaders of the blind. We are going to see that idea of blindness come up in Matthew chapter 23 several times. He will twice called them fools and blind, not exactly endearing language. Someone who is spiritually blind doesn't see any spiritual truth, so that again reinforces the meaning of these words as referring to unbelievers. They are blind leaders of the blind and both will fall into the deep into the ditch.

So the first condemnation is outlined here in Matthew 23:13, "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites." So judgment is coming, you are unsaved. Why is judgment coming? "… 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"—those who have what appears to be positive volition to go in, you are preventing them.

So there are two things going on here. First of all, they personally reject His messianic claims an offer of the kingdom, and then second, they are leading the nation to reject those claims as well. That's what defines a hypocrite here; they are preventing them now.

Observations here. First of all, this is the primary evil of every religious system. Every false religion and false philosophy seeks to prevent people from knowing the truth and from entering into eternal life. So that is critical. This is why the first woe is important.

Second, false religions always make a person feel good. They feel good about themselves, they feel good about what they've done, either their ritual or their morality. It may stimulate their minds. There are some religions that appeal to our intellectual capabilities, of cerebral skills, and so they think that they are impressing God by their by thinking.

There are religions that will calm their fears and anxieties and philosophies that make them feel good temporarily. It relaxes them or it gives them something they can hold on to rather than being depressed and upset.

Religions may give them moral standards, it may improve their family life, or it might improve their relationships with people. In a lot of religious systems by going to church or whatever passes as church they build a lot of social and business connections, and I've always been somewhat negatively impressed by people who go to first, second or third Methyl-Presby-Bapterian-Church because of who they meet there whom they can interact with in terms of business. It will give them certain standing and contacts and clients in their business. And if you go to church to pick a church and that has anything whatsoever to do with why you're going to that church, then you know it's the poison route that poisons the fruit of the tree. It is a bad motivation and it is not God-honoring.

So religion makes a person feel good and think highly of himself, but it does not bring them to heaven after death.

Third, like all religious leaders they pretend to know God, they pretend to know their Bible. They may even quote the Bible. Satan quoted the Bible to Jesus. He misquoted and misapplied it at times. But just because somebody goes to church regularly and quotes the Bible doesn't mean they understand it, or that they are going to heaven.

Religious leaders are energized by arrogance and self-absorption with their own ideas, are impressed with their own intellect and their own religious inventions. This is basically what Paul says. Notice the similarities between Paul in Romans two, and what Jesus has said. In Romans 2:17 Paul says, "But if you bear the name “Jew” and rely upon the Law and boast in God" – see they are relying upon the Law, the Torah, as what gets them to heaven, and they are able to boast about what they have. They boast in God, that they know His will, [18] "and know {His} will and approve the things that are essential, being instructed out of the Law. [19] and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness." Where do we learn that blind light darkness imagery? Jesus uses that Matthew 23. [20] "a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of the immature, having in the Law the embodiment of knowledge and of the truth."

Paul will later talk about unbelievers as those who hold to a form of godliness, that is, a form of spirituality, but deny the power thereof." That is religion.

In Romans 2:21 Paul says to these Jews, "you, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself? You who preach that one shall not steal, do you steal?" He is pointing out the hypocrisy, the inconsistency of their views.

Under a fourth point the Pharisees lived under the delusion that because they were God's chosen people—they were Israelites and Israelites were custodians of Scripture—that they would therefore automatically receive God's approval and go to heaven. That was their idea. If you were ethnically Jewish you were in like Flynn. That was it.

Fifth point. In contrast, Jesus is saying that He alone is the Messiah and He alone came to offer the kingdom and eternal life, and life comes only through Him. He says, "I am the way the truth and the life, No one—Pharisees, Sadducees, religious person—comes to the father except by me."

And six. This is why the greatest battle is not the battle between Republicans and Democrats, and not the battle between conservatives and liberals; the biggest battle is between those who hold to biblical truth and those who do not. The big battle is not against progressivism or socialism or social justice or humanism. It is against anything that will prevent people from learning the truth about how to get to heaven now.

Second woe is what I'm calling the other one. I wrestle with this a lot, trying to figure how to cover this because in the new King James version and the King James version, which is based on the Textus Receptus, there is an insertion of a verse, Matthew 23:14, a woe that reads: "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees for you devour widows, houses and for a pretense make long prayers. Therefore, you will receive greater condemnation."

Now we talked about this many times that there are textual problems in places in the Scripture. None of them affect any doctrine. This is a verse that is inserted that Jesus never said. It is stated very clearly in Mark 12:40 and also in Luke 20:47. They read almost identical, so I just put Mark 12:40 on the screen, "… who devour widows houses, and for a pretense make long prayers. These will receive greater condemnation." So it isn't that Jesus didn't say this. The issue is whether Jesus said it in the context of these woes in Matthew 23 or some later scribe decided, Well that's left out. I want to put it in there now, the majority of manuscripts that we have included this in Matthew 23.

I've looked at the evidence and I think that it's not totally clear in my mind, but I would default to including it. And because it is Scripture, and it is in the and parallel passages in Mark 12 and Luke 20, and clearly stated by Jesus, I want to still look at it and cover it.

Matthew though, in chapter 23, has the longest account of this condemnation of the Pharisees. It is virtually ignored by Luke and Mark, they just summarize it in two verses in Mark 12:39, 40 and Luke 20:46, 47. They say almost the same thing and it just a summary. They don't say anything else about what is included in Matthew 23, which as I pointed out a couple weeks ago is Jesus' last public sermon before he goes to the cross.

It's not his last instruction. That's Matthew 24, 25; that is private to his disciples. So it's the imagery here again of their failure to apply the meaning of the Law. It says, "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites for you devour widows houses, and for a pretense you make long prayers."

So what is contrasted here is, on the one hand, they are devouring widows houses, which is a very graphic image that indicates that a violent painful total destruction. Here you have an older woman who's incapable of providing for self-improvement, capable of working. She has a home but it is everything that she has, all of her possessions are destroyed and she is left destitute and forgotten. Historically were not sure exactly what that described, but in rabbinical literature, there are at least four different options. The first is, the temple authorities managed the property of widows, and they arranged that if their property would be dedicated to the temple in a way that would allow them to basically foreclose on them and take over the property. That is mentioned in some second temple period literature.

A second describes taking advantage of widows' hospitality, and abuse of that hospitality which led them to becoming broke, and that was a problem also in the second temple period.

Third the scribes took home pledges of debts they knew that could not be repaid. They would say okay we'll help you out, will give you a lone and then they would put an egregious interest on it, so it could not be repaid. Then they would foreclose.

And then a fourth possibility is they took fees for legal advice that were in contrast to the provisions of the Law. That is stated in some literature. The idea is that the scribes, in contrast, gave an appearance of being obedient to the Law. But Jesus said in Matthew 22:39 when He answered the question, What is the greatest commandment? said: The first is loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And second, it is loving your neighbor as yourself, which is stated in Leviticus 18:19. And this violates that. They are not loving their neighbor, the widow; they are destroying their neighbor, the widow. This shows their hypocrisy.

The third woe, which is the second woe in most translations, I will refer to it as the second. The one we just looked at is the other woe, the plus one.

The second woe comes up in verse 15. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves."

What we see here again is that they are doing one thing and creating a further problem. They are subverting the people through their system of converting Gentiles to Judaism. Now Judaism for the most part, whether it's the biblical worship of the Old Testament during that period, or what came to be passive. Judaism was not very interested in being proselytes. Remember Jonah? God sent him to Gentiles. But he didn't want Gentiles to be part of the Jews. So you see the attitude of in the Old Testament was that they weren't really evangelistic. But under this late temple they were almost militantly proselytizing.

There were two different kinds of proselytes. One was called a proselyte of the gate, and a proselyte of the gate was a Gentile who attended Shabbat services. They went to temple. They worship the true God, but they had not committed themselves to a full ritualistic Judaism. That would have been especially painful for men who would've had to undergo circumcision. So most proselytes like Cornelius that you read about in the in acts were proselytes of the gate. They were not proselytes of righteousness. That was one who would become completely religiously Jewish according to all ritual, including circumcision and they were in many cases, given Jewish names. But they were very much aggressive in making them proselytes to their pharisaical legalism, and the result is that Jesus said, "You make him twice as much a son of hell"—I don't like that, that is bad translation—"as yourself".

We've studied this. Again we'll hit it one more time in this chapter when I go in detail. Literally, it is the son of the Valley of Hinnom. In this map, we see that the Sonoma Valley was just to the south of the old city of David and the city of Jerusalem in Jesus time. It used 11 times in 10 verses in the New Testament. In the Old Testament what we learn is that this is the place where Judah sinned by committing child sacrifices and burning their sons and daughters alive in the fires of Moloch. Thus Gehenna symbolized the place of Israel's greatest idolatry and spiritual failure and disobedience to God for those sins of idolatry they were condemned and they were punished (In time, not eternity).

What you hear from a lot of people is Gehenna was a place with a burn trash and burned all the time just garbage dump and so pictures eternal lake of fire. That is dead wrong. It was always used in the Old Testament as a historical reference to God's temporal divine judgment on the nation Israel at that time.

And so in Jeremiah 19:6 Jeremiah predicted that as a punishment for their sins of idolatry and immolating their children in the fires of Moloch that that very same site would be used as a mass burial site for those that were slaughtered in the Babylonian destruction in 586 BC—not eternal judgment, temporal judgment. That is seen in Jeremiah 7:32.

And so the conclusion we reached in a detailed study earlier is at the Valley of Hinnom was not used in the Old Testament as a reference to eternal condemnation in the lake of fire, but as a place of divine discipline on the nation of Israel for their spiritual failure.

That's why Jesus is condemning the Pharisees. It is because you are bringing these Gentiles into be part of your toxic religious system and this is going to end up bringing the people into divine judgment.

It's the first statement of His foreshadowing of what's coming at the end of this message, talking about this because of pharisaical rejection of him, the nation will be judged in AD 70, the temple will be destroyed and the people will go out under the fifth cycle of discipline.

That's where this whole message goes in Matthew 23:33 serpents, the Britt of vipers, how can you escape the condemnation of the Valley of Gehenna— temporal judgment.

Now when we get to Matthew 23:33 I'll go back and redo the whole doctrine. So we get there, but what they're talking about here is that the Pharisees are making these converts sons of judgment, sons of the divine judgment of Gehenna. They are making them complicit in their spiritual crimes. Religion is deadly and it has to be condemned. It may make you feel good now, but the end result is eternal condemnation. That is why Jesus condemns the Pharisees. The grace of God does not impose a religious system. The grace of God says, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. I've done it all. Jesus paid it in full. All you have to do to be saved is to believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins.

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