People have come all the way
from Jerusalem to harass the Lord Jesus. And it's extraordinary, isn't
it? We have in the Scriptures this amazing contrast between
the grace and mercy of our God and the nature of those who self-righteously
cling to their religious traditions. And as we've said so often, the
Pharisees can't rejoice. They can't rejoice. They have no compassion. They have no thankfulness to
God for the things they see going on around them. There's no sense
of wonder, there's no joy, and there's no faith. So in chapter
2 they meet a paralytic man and they have no compassion. All
they want to do is pick a fight with the Lord Jesus. They have
no compassion for the tax collectors in chapter 2, who are considered
sinners, but are drawn into the Lord's saving mercy. They have no compassion in chapter
2 for hungry disciples, most probably on their way to synagogue. They have no compassion in chapter
3 for a man with a withered hand. And finally in chapter 3, 22,
they accuse the Lord Jesus of being in league with Satan. But
here before us in these verses we have a clear picture given
to us by God the Holy Spirit of the religion of man and wonderfully
the grace of the Lord Jesus. J.C. Ryle said that there are
two ways a man may lose his own soul. He may lose his soul by
living and dying without any religion at all. He may live
and die like a beast, prayerless, godless, faithless, graceless. This is a sure way to go to hell. Secondly, he may lose his soul
by taking up some useless kind of religion. He may live and
die contenting himself with false Christianity, resting on a baseless
hope. This is the most common way to
hell there is. And so the Pharisees are set
before us as a serious, serious warning from God. And as we examine
their lives laid out before us here, we need to remember the
seriousness. Where have they spent this last
nearly 2,000 years? And we've already talked about
the stark contrast. But the question might be asked,
why is there such a volume of information in the Scriptures?
Whole chapters like Matthew 23 devoted to the Pharisees. Books
like Galatians and Philippians and Colossians devoted to the
teaching that continued after these particular Pharisees had
seen the Lord Jesus killed and risen again. And we might say
that the reason the Pharisees are such a big section in the
Scriptures, such prominence in the Scriptures, is that they
were responsible for killing the Lord Jesus. And in large
measure that was right. You might also say that they
represented the state of religion in Israel amongst the Jews at
that time. And yes, that's right, true.
But there are greater and deeper reasons, I believe, that the
Pharisees are so clearly portrayed and so often portrayed before
us. And one of them is that they
are still with us. The Pharisees, far from being
humbled by the wicked murder of the Lord Jesus, That dreadful
act only caused them to be more enraged in hatred toward God
and His people. The murder of Stephen only spurred
them on to more zealous hatred of the truth. Just read Paul's
testimony of his life. And the other reason is that
the Pharisee lives in our Adam flesh. All of us. are tainted with the religion
of the Pharisee in our flesh. And unless the God of grace comes
to our hearts and opens our hearts to see who He really is, and
in seeing Him, to see who He really is and who we really are,
We will be just prone to this sort of religious activity. It
has been just part of the life of people since Adam and Eve
left the garden. Which is why the Lord Jesus warns
again and again about the yeast of the Pharisees. Watch out for
the yeast of the Pharisees. Beware. A little bit of yeast
works through the whole batch of dough. In 1 Corinthians 5, we're encouraged
to get rid of the old yeast, that you may be a new batch without
yeast, as you really are. And the reason is because Christ,
our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. But the Lord Jesus here is not
just warning us to stop following the practices of the Pharisees
and the yeast, but also the yeast of their teaching. And these verses give us a clear
picture of the nature of their teaching. And the fact is that
where it's given place to grow, God says it will fill the whole
place. It'll fill all your heart. It'll
fill all the church. Nothing is more dangerous than
the enemy we cannot see clearly. And so God takes us again and
again in the Scriptures, and it's my responsibility, Lord
willing, to clearly and as unmistakably as possible to unmask these people
before us, as the Lord Jesus does. All false religion ultimately
comes from an unregenerate and unchanged heart. And that's the
nature of these Pharisees. In verse 2, the first indication
we have of the yeast of the Pharisees is that it involves looking at
external acts which are to be seen by men. And then these become
signs of true worship. They look and they saw. And really
what they're doing, and the Lord Jesus shows it to be the case,
is that in their looking and their seeing and their finding
fault, they are exposing their own self-righteousness. Because
they're always saying, I have done these things, look at the
things I have done, and then necessarily, where is your performance
of these same things? For God's people who have had
hearts that have been shaped and challenged and hearts of
flesh given by the Lord, they've come to receive grace, to know
that there's a well of grace, to know that there's a God whose
everlasting arms carry His people. And in the midst of this, our
sinful flesh struggles again and again and again. And Adam
rises up. And then God, the Holy Spirit,
comes and He drags God's children to see and confess that there
is just nothing in their flesh that pleases God. And they cry
out to the Lord, as Simon read earlier from Isaiah, Here I am,
Lord, weak and pathetic, fallen and always falling, and your
mighty grace draws me back into your arms. But these men had
never experienced that. They'd never experienced who
they really are. When Nathan came to David, he
said, you are the man. You really are the sinner. And
then we have those remarkable words of grace from God. But
the Lord has taken away your sin. So the Lord Jesus says in
John 4 that God is seeking those who will worship in spirit and
in truth. But these men worship God by
acts that they do and then use those acts that they do as a
means for condemning others. and they follow the traditions
of men. So they start, God starts with scripture, and then to scripture
is added tradition, and then tradition is equal to scripture,
and then all of a sudden all you have is just tradition. And that's where these guys have
gone. They have carefully washed their hands, and it wasn't for
sanitary reasons. If you read their pharisaic notion
of how they had to wash their hands, you had to be careful
that the water didn't run up here and you had to be careful
it didn't run up there, and it was just this complicated ritual
procedure. And John's Gospel gives you an
indication of how prominent it was in the lives of those people.
Those water jars outside that place in John's Gospel held 180
gallons, a lot of water. But the question is, and the
question always is in the scriptures, is that if that was their traditions,
what are the traditions that are around us? So many traditions
are caught up in our religious world. I can name some of them,
but you could probably name dozens, and if you look at them in terms
of the scriptures, it's horrifying, isn't it? The things that we've
actually concocted and made to be the traditions that we hold
on to. And people will devote so much
of their lives to it, baptising babies, the difference between
clergy and laity, the traditions we have of people who are only
being bible college trained and supervised by a missionary organisation
are fit to go out into the world and tell others about the Lord
Jesus. All of these things, all of these traditions, hundreds
more, stained glass windows, all sorts of creeds and confessions
and prayer books, a whole bunch of stuff. If you want to find
out how much of an idol it is in the lives of these people,
go and ask them to leave it. Go and tell them that it has
no use to them and all of a sudden you'll see that they cling on
to it like the Pharisees cling on to this. And all of these
things are showing that God's work is best achieved by the
zeal of men and traditions. But I think also there are more
dangerous traditions around us, and these are the traditions
of doctrine. Traditions of doctrine that have
built up over the years, they are held because large numbers of men,
influential men, learned men, esteemed men, zealous men, famous
men, hold on to these doctrines. And we know some of them well.
That God loves everyone. Jesus Christ died for everyone. God the Holy Spirit is seeking
the salvation of everyone. If those things are the case,
then the love of God is not the determining factor in salvation.
The death of the Lord Jesus on the cross is not what determines
salvation. The wonderful work of the Holy
Spirit is not what determines salvation. It's a cooperative
activity. Salvation is a cooperative activity
between God and man. And for those who aren't learned
enough to know that these are mysteries and they're things
that have to be held in tension, just leave it to we priests. We'll hold it. We can't explain
it to you properly, but just trust us and follow our traditions. The Gospel for them, for so many,
is good news, if and only if your faith and your works are
added to it. It sits there like this gorgeous
statue before all men, but it cannot move, it cannot act, unless
mighty man adds his powerful free will. And once they've been
saved by these religionists, they are then put back on a treadmill
of law works, or an understanding that their sanctification is
a progressive thing, that their Adam flesh can be polished and
polished and polished. The Pharisees acted with malice
to kill the Lord Jesus. The religion of the Pharisees
today seeks to murder the Lord Jesus afresh, to murder the wonders
of his saving work in the lives of his chosen ones, by turning
them subtly to consider that their own works merit some favour
with God. That's what they're doing today,
isn't it? The Pharisees of our day, as with Jesus' enemies,
always seek to find some fault in outward activities. Just look
at the way that person is behaving. No true Christian would ever
do that. Really what they're saying is that if you will just
do these such and such things that they esteem, then you will
be a Christian. The Bible paints A true picture,
as the Lord Jesus does with these Pharisees, it paints a true picture
of what it is to be a man in this Adam flesh. Can you think
of one sin that was not committed and recorded by God the Holy
Spirit, committed by God's chosen loved children? The list is endless. murder, adultery, theft, lying,
weakness in the face of danger, pathetic parenting, wicked behaviour
as a child, reckless and wicked leadership of God's people, leading
others to mock God by their public action, unbelief in many forms,
open persecution and murder of God's people. The list goes on
and on. God is not condoning any of these
things and he never does excuse any sin by anyone in scripture. But really what he's showing
us is that salvation is by grace. Salvation is by grace from beginning
to end. Salvation is a declaration of
God's finished work, the wonders of redeeming love, the wonders
of the finished work of the Lord Jesus. And that is all of our
salvation. When the Lord Jesus says to the
people, be you perfect, And he says in Hebrews 12, without holiness,
no one will see the Lord. God is reminding us that the
holiness that you need to see God is not the holiness of man's
activities. The holiness we need so that
we will see the Lord is the Lord Jesus himself. The most important
thing we need to remember is that God will only ever accept
from you things that are perfect. Only perfect things get into
heaven. Only perfect, holy activities are ever acceptable to God. That's
what Jesus is about. That's what the Gospel is about.
Everything that you need to go before God has been done by the
Lord Jesus. And that's why the Lord Jesus
speaks so harshly to these Pharisees. Because when they attack his
disciples, they are really attacking the completeness of his finished
work. The Pharisees come and they attack
the disciples. Your disciples, verse 5, do not
walk according to the tradition of the elders, but they eat their
bread with unpure hands. And the Lord Jesus turns on them
and turns on them swiftly and viciously. The Lord Jesus doesn't
say to the Pharisees, we need to sit down and discuss this.
Let's have a debate. Let's have a conference so we
can work these things through together. He says to them, rightly
did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites. And the word hypocrite is a word
that means to wear a mask. They wore a mask of self-righteousness,
but underneath the mask was just evil. The Lord Jesus turns on them
because of His love for His own, and He exposes them. He intends to offend them. He
knew what was going on. He knew the end result of all
this offence. They'd already, in chapter 3,
plotted to kill Him. The Lord Jesus gives them no
room to move, and He exposes their religion. He exposes a religion that's
based on men's tradition. It's a religion that is the false
religion that lives in this world so much today. It is just the
free will works religion that parades around the place all
over this world today. But the Lord Jesus exposes it.
Firstly, in verse 6, he exposes its hypocrisy. It just is a mask. All it is is a show. These people,
they honour me with their lips. These are not people who stand
outside of God's kingdom. These are people who are saying
that they are the leaders of it. And like yeast, in verse
9, these people led by experts, it grows and grows. In fact,
it had grown so much that in verse 3, all the Jews do not
eat unless they carefully wash their hands. And it grows, in
verse 13, many other things you do. It's about the work of man. And they set aside the commandment
of God to maintain their tradition. They set aside the commandment
of God. The commandment of God is that
you believe in the Lord Jesus. You trust the Lord to provide
everything that he's promised to provide. They set aside this
commandment to maintain their tradition. And Jesus gives us the example
of Corban, and Corban, as explained there, is a gift devoted to God. And so a greedy and neglectful
son could just go along to the priest and say, all of what I
had reserved for my parents is now a gift devoted to God. They
could actually hold on to it and use it for their own greedy
purposes and turn away from the responsibility that they had
to care for their parents. Moses says, honour your father
and your mother. And these men were actively leading
people to dishonour their mother and father. And all in the name
of religion. And the Lord makes it clear that
this is just one of many things that they did. They neglect,
in verse 8, They neglect, and then in verse 13, they invalidate. They actually take the Word of
God, and now it's been set aside, it's been neglected, and now
it's invalidated. And so the Word of God has been
taken away from these people altogether. It's extraordinary, isn't it,
that this nation Israel lived with the most amazing privileges
from God. They had seen God rescue them
in Noah's ark. They'd seen God take their father
Abraham out of the worship of the Babylonians and take him
into Canaan. They had seen God, as Simon's
been showing us, work through people like Joseph to save that
nation. They had seen God come into Egypt
and take them all out. And now they've turned all of
that into this, just the traditions of men that dishonours God. The end result of it is that
it's vain. In verse 7, just read it. But
in vain. To be in vain is to have no result. Their religion has no result. Their religion accomplishes nothing. Their religion will be thought
of as if it had never happened. All of this extraordinary devotion,
it is futile religion. futile, says God. And the cause of it is, is that
their heart is far away from me. Their heart had never been
moved to see who God really is and never been moved to see who
they really are. They knew the scriptures off
by heart that warned about this and yet their heart was so hardened
that they read those same scriptures and then thought that that didn't
apply to me. And then the Lord Jesus, the
good news of this passage is that the Lord Jesus shows how
he responds to these people. The first thing is that the disciples
are attacked and yet that's the last we hear from the disciples
in this passage. He defends every member of his
bride as a passionate husband. If the Lord Jesus' bride is attacked,
he will be enraged and he will stand up and be accounted. He answers for his disciples. The attack of the Pharisees is
really an attack upon the Lord Jesus. Only deep spiritual blindness
can explain their wickedness. Here they are, a self-righteous
brood, the makers of their own righteousness, coming before
the Lord God Almighty and presenting their filthy rags as the measure
for His judgement. For they really are, as I said
earlier, judging the work of the Lord Jesus. They're judging
His perfect work on behalf of His people as insufficient before
a holy God, denying His substitution, His atonement, His satisfaction,
and they're proclaiming their own righteousness as the basis
for condemning the Lord's Bride. And so the commandment of God
which they have set aside is to believe in the Lord Jesus,
trust the Saviour, and He takes them to Isaiah. We read some
of it a little while ago, and I would plead with you to go
home and read those passages in Isaiah. It's a wonderful description
of who God is and a wonderful description of the wickedness
of false religion that claims to be pious. He describes himself
in 28.5 as a diadem, a crown of glory and a diadem of beauty. That's what the Lord will be
to all of his people. They need no other crown. They
need no other reward. The Lord Jesus is our crown and
our reward. And he says to them in 28.12,
here is rest with which you may cause the
weary to rest. The Lord Jesus says, come to
me all you who are weary, weary of trying to establish your own
righteousness, weary of living in this world with sin afflicting
you in every way. Come and have rest. And in 28.16, there is a verse
that's often repeated in the New Testament. It's, Behold,
I lay in Zion a stone for a foundation, a tried stone, a precious cornerstone,
a sure foundation. And he who believes in it will
not be disturbed, will not act hastily, They'll rest because
their foundation's on the rock. And these beautiful verses about
who God is and what he's done for his people have become to
the others in 2813. So the word of the Lord to them
will be, Order on order, order on order, line on line, line
on line, a little here, a little there, that they may go and stumble
backward, be broken, snared and taken captive. They have actually
created in Isaiah their own religion. They actually call it a covenant
with death, that their doings on the basis of their security
this covenant they made, God is going to annul. And the whole
of God's revelation of how he saves his people and the beauty
of the Lord in 2911 has become like the words of a book that
is sealed. So the Lord Jesus takes his disciples
and takes this crowd back into Isaiah. He defends his disciples
by exposing the wolves in sheep's clothing who stand before them
with their accusations. And he does it with brutal honesty. He's passionate about his bride. He's passionate about his father's
honour. He's passionate about God's Word
being esteemed above men's traditions. And so in church, anything that
we do which doesn't clearly come from this book is something that
we need to be wary of. And we have no reason to practice
it, to teach it, to believe it, to promote it. God's Word is
what we have to stand on. And it doesn't matter about how
big the traditions of men grow around us. Let them have their
traditions. God's Word is clear to us. He says, come out from among
them. If you turn to Matthew 15, you
have the same account in Matthew. And the disciples come in verse
12. And they say, you've offended these Pharisees. And Jesus says,
every plant which my Heavenly Father has not planted will be
uprooted. And the instruction for God's
children is in verse 14. It's a sobering instruction.
Let them alone. Leave them alone. They are blind
leaders of the blind, and if the blind leads the blind, both
will fall into the ditch. It's a promise from God. He says,
leave them alone. But he also says to us to guard
our hearts. He reminds us that it's a heart
response that God is looking for and is acceptable. A broken
and contrite heart, Isaiah 57 says, you will never reject. David pleads with God in Psalm
139 to search his heart. But most of all, God's children,
because of the work of the Lord Jesus, have thankful and joyful
hearts. And may God grant us thankful
and joyful hearts because we've tried the foundation. We've tried
that stone. We've come back again and again
to that foundation that God has laid in Zion, the Lord Jesus
and his perfect accomplished work on behalf of his people.
And we find rest. We come back again and again
and we find that that stone, that rock, is unmovable. As Moses said to the nations
around him, and God says to people now, their rock is not like our
rock. May God test our hearts that
we might be found resting on a rock. a sure foundation, and
maybe protect us from the leavin' of the Pharisees, from the youth
of the Pharisees, that we might be found with hearts that love
the Lord Jesus, hearts that are devoted to Him, hearts that are
broken by Him, and hearts that are healed by Him, and just keep
running back to Him for the rest of our days until He takes us
into Heaven. Let's pray.