Matthew's account, first of all,
Matthew 15 and verse 10. And he called the multitude and
said unto them, Hear and understand, not that which goes into the
mouth defiles the man, but that which comes out of the mouth,
that defiles the man. Then came his disciples and said
unto him, Knowest thou not that the Pharisees were offended after
they heard that saying? But he answered and said, Every
plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted
up. Let them alone. They be blind
leaders of the blind, and if the blind lead the blind, Both
shall fall into the ditch. Then answered Simon Peter and
said unto him, Declare unto us this parable. All right, in Luke
6 now and verse 39, we have a single verse here as well. And he spake
a parable unto them. Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into
the ditch? Now that puts an immediate picture
in our mind. We can see that with our mind's
eye. Now, it is amazing how many physical
maladies, that is disorders, diseases of the body, afflictions
in the fleshly body, are spiritualized and used to describe the impact
of sin upon the soul and the life of human beings. and so that these injuries to
the flesh are used by the gospel writer, the spiritual people
of God, to understand them. For example, as there is physical
death, so also there is a spiritual death, wherein some are dead
in trespasses and in sin by reason of our being an issue of Adam
and of Eve. Now, consider, if you will, a
very expressive description from the pen of Isaiah. And he's using a physical malady
to make a spiritual point, as we shall see. In Isaiah 1 and
verse 5 and verse 6, where the prophet compares there and likens
the spiritual condition of the people of God in that day to
a badly diseased body that seems hopelessly sick and diseased. And Isaiah said something like
this, the whole head is sick, the whole heart is faint, From
head to toe there is no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises
and sores and none of them treated or mollified or bound up. And you know, even the bodily
appetites of hunger and thirst have their counterparts in the
spiritual realm as well. As some, Matthew 5 and verse
6, are blessed in hungering and thirsting after righteousness. In Isaiah 55 verse 1 and 2, he
uses language like that. He that is a thirst, let him
come, let him drink without money and without price. But then again,
the physical traits of weary and of rested are also transposed
into the spiritual realm. For the weary find rest of soul
when they come to the Lord Jesus Christ. Sin is a weariness, and
living in sin is a weariness. But two of the physical members
that are most spiritualized are the eyes and the ear in the Word
of the Lord. Proverbs 20 and 12 said, The
seeing eye, the hearing ear, the Lord hath made even both
of them. These are senses by which things
are observed, are heard, and are learned. so that by hearing
and by seeing with what we call the natural senses, our ears
and our eyes, and come by nature to most who are born with the
ability to see and to hear as they enter into life. Then also
there are spiritual senses. These are only given by the sovereign
power of the Spirit of God's grace. The gift of hearing, that
is to recognize a divine truth as being the Word of God, and
to see, that is literally to know the things of God, Well,
the Lord pronounced a blessing upon his disciple when he said,
and I'd like to turn back to Matthew the 13th chapter and
just read verses 14 through 16 if I might, where here we see
that seeing and hearing are not only physical traits, but they
also are spiritual traits. And in verse 14, Matthew 13,
in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, which said, By hearing
ye shall hear, and shall not understand, and seeing ye shall
see, and shall not perceive. For this people's heart is waxed
gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, their eyes have they
closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and
hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart,
and should be converted, and I should heal them. And look
at verse 16. Blessed are your eyes, for they
see, and your ears for they hear." Now the Lord is not talking about
only the physical ear and the physical eye. Remember what Isaiah
said, the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the Lord hath made even
both of them. So blessed, truly blessed, are
those that have eyes to see and ears to hear and understand the
things of God. To be pitied are those with ears
that are deaf unto the truth of God and to eyes that are holden
and cannot see and cannot recognize Christ in the gospel and in the
word of God. Now we focus in this study upon
those words of the Lord concerning blind leaders of the blind and
the danger to which it poses both to the leader and to those
that are led. Now here is a question that we
might see the severity of this that the Lord is talking about
in this place. I have a question or two. First
of all, would you get on an airplane that was flown by a pilot that
was blind? Would you get on a bus or a taxi
and take a ride if the driver were blind and could not see? Would you get on the operating
table and have an operation from a doctor that was blind? Would
you ride on a speeding train with a blind engineer? Would
you sail on a boat on the ocean with a blind captain at the wheel? And yet multitudes today are
being led by blind spiritual leaders according to our Lord. And these leaders do not know
our Lord Jesus Christ. They do not know that He is the
Son of the God Most High. They cannot lead people in the
right direction. They cannot discern truth from
error. Yea, in fact, they are more apt
to espouse truth and take it to be right than they are truth
itself. In Luke 6 and verse 39, it is
called a parable, one of the shortest on record in our New
Testament. And it is in the form of a question
put under the people. Can the blind lead the blind? That is, Can blind be leaders
of others that are blind? Can a blind leader lead other
people that are blind like unto himself? Can they lead them safely
across or through a narrow bridge, or navigate the curves upon the
byway, or take the right exit and find where they are seeking
to go? Can they arrive at their destination? If the leader himself is blind,
and so are all of those that follow. Now, a second question
is raised. Shall not both of them fall into
the ditch? Shall the blind lead the blind?
Then the Lord follows up. Shall not both of them, that
is the leader and those that are following, or that our lead
shall fall into the ditch." Now the question is actually an affirmation. If the blind lead the blind,
then both of them shall fall into the ditch, will they not? This particular parable here,
though it is short, it paints for us a vivid picture in our
mind. It is very graphic. And the minute
that we hear it, we see it. We see a blind man trudging along. and several blind trudging along
behind him. Because the image is of a blind
lady, the blind in several societal vocations and religious setting. A leader of a home may lead their
children into a sinful and a ruinous way. A blind executive, and I
mean blind intellectually or mentally, may lead his company
into bankruptcy. A blind politician, corrupted,
may lead the country into collapse and chaos and captivity. And a blind religious leader
can lead the religiously blind only into the pits of hell and
not into the gates of light. Now, in the text that we have
here in the Gospel, those singled out by our Lord are blind leaders
of the blind. They are so, not in a physical
sense, but in a religious sense. And the Lord identifies them
in the text. They are scribes, Pharisees. They're the ones who sat in Moses'
seat. Matthew 23 and verse 2, that
is they had the seat of authority and of teaching. Moses was a
teacher of Israel and he brought the things of God and he taught
them. So, Matthew 23, the Lord calls
them, in verse 16, blind guides. In verse 17, ye fools and blind. In verse 19, again He refers
to them as fools and as blind. And in Matthew 15, when the disciples
told the Lord, how the Pharisees had taken offense at His teaching
and at His Word. What did the Lord say to them?
Verse 14, we'll go over there and try to straighten it out.
Go over there and try to explain it. Try to make them understand.
No, the Lord answered them, let them alone. They are blind leaders
of the blind, and if the blind lead the blind, both will fall
into the ditch. Now concerning spiritual blindness,
it seems that we can identify three different categories of
which merely a fall on the people in the world. And nearly all
people in the world will fall into one or the other of these
three categories. Number one, there is the blindness
of nature. We'll look at it in a moment.
Number two, there is the blindness in religion. And number three,
there is in the scripture, judicial blindness that comes from God. We'll look at that. Now concerning
the first, All are in this sense blind. All that are not regenerate,
who have not been enlightened, who have not had the new birth
worked in them by the Spirit of Grace, who have not had their
minds renewed in regeneration. These, as Benjamin Keech, an
old-time writer, said, have never been savingly Enlightened." Consider
Paul's description of practicing paganism. It's in Ephesians 4,
17 through 19, where he says that they walk, or literally
they live, in the vanity of their mind, their understanding darkened,
living apart from God because of the ignorance that is in them
because of the blindness of their heart. The margin has hardness. Being past feeling. Listen to what Paul said. Being
past feeling. Giving themselves over to lasciviousness. Living in all manner of sin. These are people with a lesser
degree of natural revelation, not under the influence of Christianity,
but worshipping false gods and in a false religion. Now, for
the time being, we want to skip the second sort of blindness,
come back to it later, and consider the third, which we call judicial
blindness. which is the result of a divine
judgment from Almighty God. Judicial blindness. God smites
them with a blindness. We find plenty of this evidence
in the scripture. He smites their eyes with spiritual
blindness so that they are blind unto spiritual things from which
they will never be delivered. and having several accounts of
this in the scripture regarding the Jews who rejected Christ. You'll see it in Romans 11 and
verse 7 through 10. Isaiah 6 and verse 9 made mention
of it, and that's mentioned in the New Testament. John 12, 39
through 41, Maybe we read that this morning.
And from Isaiah chapter 6, all of these places we see judicial
blindness as God smites them with a blindness for which they
cannot see. John Owen did write that judiciary
blindness is either immediate from God or by the devil through
God's permission. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4,
verse 3 and 4, that the God of this world hath blinded their
eye, lest the glorious light of the gospel of Christ should
shine in unto them. Now, I will tell you that this
is one of the severest judgments from God in the world, to be
judicially hardened and blinded. For it takes away any contrition
for sin, and all right discernment about religion is gone, and it
has no remedy. For such as God gives over to
judicial blindness, or as he calls it in Romans 1, reprobation. then sin reigns all but unchecked
in their lives from then on. But we want to return to the
second sort of blindness that we mentioned, which is blindness
in regard unto religion. even by such who claim to be
worshipping and serving the one true and living God. We have the scriptures in their
hand and are reading from them often and we will in our consideration
follow this order in looking at this. Number one, we'll look
at the situation with the Jews in the Lord's time and in the
Apostle's time. And secondly, we'll take a closer
look at home, the situation in Christendom as it has been for
some time. For in both cases, it is evident
that the blind are leading the blind. And as in the Lord's analogy,
they will, both of them, fall off into the ditch. That is,
they will go off of the way, they will go out of the right
way, they will suffer the consequences of being blind themselves and
following those who are blind leaders. Now in the physical
sense, they would both lose their way, blind leading blind, perhaps
suffer some injury, and perhaps never arrive at their destination. While in religion or church or
spiritual sense, they would lose their soul, they would fall into
the pit, They would end disastrously because blind are leading the
blind. Now, let's focus on Matthew 23
for a bit, whether you care to turn there or not is up to you,
because here in Matthew 23 we have some of the Lord's very
strongest censures against the blind leaders in Judaism. And we notice that he singles
out those teachers and leaders, the scribes and the Pharisee,
he singles out for 39 verbal lashes as it were, saying to
them, woe unto you scribes and Pharisee. You have that in verse
13, 14, 15, 23, and 25, all in Matthew chapter
23. We have already seen that our
Lord calls them, ye blind guides, ye fools, and blind. Scribe. Now what is a scribe?
What was a scribe in the Lord's time and in the Jewish religion? What was the function of a scribe? Now the word scribe, I think
most often time is that word grammatius and from gramma, a
writer, or a secretary, or a town clerk, One who kept the records
of the history and of events. And this word is translated town
clerk in Acts chapter 19 and verse 35. Now concerning scribes,
we see them in the Old Testament as well. You see them in the
book of Esther chapter 3 and verse 12. First Chronicles chapter
24 and verse 6. For example, Ezra, a book after
his name, Ezra was a scribe. Ezra 7 and verse 6, Nehemiah
8 and verse 1. Of all, a scribe was a person
who was trained in writing, literature and in writing skills, who would
make a written event of history and such like. During the Babylonian
exile of the Jew, they would copy God's Word by hand in order
to have a preserved copy of it. They would also teach it unto
the people, copying the Word of God ascribed. But what we
refer to as New Testament scribes, in New Testament time, there
had developed what one called a professional class of scribes
who did much of the teaching of the law of God to the people
in that time. They were mostly of the Pharisee
party, for they had mainly control of Judaism. So they sat in Moses'
seat. They were regarded as experts
in the field of interpretation and teaching and learning and
such like Matthew 23 and verse 4. Matthew 23 and verse 5, they
loved the praises of men. Boy, they lived to have men praise
them. for their skill at teaching. Matthew 23 and verse 6, they
love to be honored. Boy, when they came to a banquet,
they loved to be set right down on the front seat. where everyone
would notice them. In verse 7, they love special
greetings out in public and in the marketplace. When they met
with some of their pupils out in the public, they learn or
whether they love to be saluted as, Morning, Rabbi, how are you? Good day, Rabbi, how are you? word kind of means master, kind
of like some today who love to be called Reverend and Doctor
and Father and His Excellency and Monsignor and Professor and
such like. And in the Lord's day on earth,
the function of the scribe was to interpret and then teach the
law unto the people. And some say, that those that
were such were members of the Sanhedrin court. They belonged
to that powerful body, the Sanhedrin court. And under them, the interpretation
of life and religion and the word of God and the law became
very burdensome. And under their tenure, religion
was reduced to mere externals, not internals, not the work of
the heart, but to mere externals. Outward observances pleased them
well, and they cared not for the heart. And so they were given
over to legalism. and deformalism took deep root
among them. They exempted themselves from
what they imposed upon the people. They put heavy burdens upon the
shoulder of the people that the Lord said would not lift themselves
one finger. In other words, they did not
practice what they preached. They told others what to do,
but did not do it themselves. Now, in Matthew 23, verse 13
and following, there are eight woes, I think, eight woes pronounced
against the scribe and the Pharisee, and at least three times in those
eight, he calls them blind. blind leaders of the blind. So let's consider some of their
blindness effects upon not only themselves, but also upon the
people and the danger of having a leader among them who were
themselves blind. I'm turning to Matthew, the 23rd
chapter, and first I would like to read verse 13 of that chapter. Matthew 23, 13. Woe unto you,
scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, for you shut up the kingdom of
heaven against men. For you neither go in yourself,
neither suffer you them that are entering to go in. This is
a solemn charge against them, but it is what blind leaders
do. The scribe should instruct the
people in truth, in knowledge, in the right way. As in Malachi
chapter 2 and verse 7, the lips of the servant of the Lord should
preserve knowledge, and the people should seek truth from him. He is the messenger of the Lord
of hosts. But when he is blind himself
to the truth of God, what a situation we have. How can leaders shut
folks out of the kingdom, you might ask? The Lord said, you
don't go in yourself, you shut up the kingdom of heaven against
them that are going in. How can they keep others from
entering in? I think this must be answered
in its context in that day and in that situation. The mystery
seems answered in Luke chapter 11 and verse 52. They take away
the key of knowledge and withhold and
suppress messianic truth from the people, and they divert those
who seem disposed to believe on and follow the Lord Jesus
Christ. So do many today. divert their
followers to another Jesus rather than that one of the Scripture. But what's more, look at verse
14 of Matthew 23. They devour widows' houses by
making long sounding prayers in order that it might cover
up their greedy, covenous, ravenous intention. By praying on the
widows, They increase their damnation, taking advantage of the weak
or the vulnerable. How often have we heard in our
day and still do hear people or preachers asking people to
make their wills and to leave their estate to, quote, the ministry,
unquote, that they happen to be listening to. Furthermore,
in verse 15, They go to great lengths to make a proselyte. They were zealous winning others
over or across to Judaism. They thought it a good thing
to convert a heathen and mark him with circumcision, put him
then among those of Judaism. 2 Peter 2 and 19 said, of whom a man is overcome, of
the same is he brought into bondage. The Lord Jesus said, You compass
sea and earth to make a proselyte. When he's made, he's twofold
more the child of hell than you yourself. The NIV has it this
way, For a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him." That's
true all the way down the line. But then again in verse 16 through
22 of Matthew 23, they being blind leaders perverted the use
of oaths that were taken by the people. And as Spurgeon wrote
on these verses, quote, when men once quipped the plain teaching
of Christ, it is easy for them to go into all manner of absurdities
and heresies, unquote, and to bind the same upon their pupils
as well when the blind lead the blind. Many such like things
they did, and being blind leaders, All their gestures were nothing
but apostasy and leading men astray." Now, you talk about
the blind leading the blind. There is Nicodemus in the Scripture. Nicodemus was a ruler of the
Jew, a master of Israel, the Lord said, and yet was ignorant
of the new birth and of spiritual regeneration. ignorant of making
new, being born again, with the law and the psalm and the prophet
in his hand, and reading from it, and yet ignorant of those
things. He knew not of regeneration.
He too was a blind leader of the blind, at least when he came
to the Lord that night. You know, let me illustrate how
you can read the Word of God and not see the Word of God.
When I first was pastor, you always go through the Gospel
of John. Well, that's the outstanding gospel we need to study, the
Gospel of John. And I went all the way through
the Gospel of John, missed all the passages that have to do
with divine sovereignty, chapter 6, chapter 10, and all of those
things, missed it completely, just went right on by it. It
is clearly possible to do. What about the Jews in Romans
chapter 2? 17 through 20. They fancied themselves
knowledgeable in the law and the things of God, fancied that
they were able to instruct and to teach others and bring others
unto the truth, and yet they themselves were not grounded
in the truth and did not practice what they preach. Then, of course,
we are bound to confess that there are blind leaders in Judaism,
so an abundance of blind leaders are also in Christendom, as we
call it, marching under the banner of Christianity. Legion are they
who would lead others. yet being blind to the truth
as it is in Christ, not knowing the person of Christ, not having
themselves been regenerated and enlightened, they are but blind
leaders of the blind. If I may offer this observation,
There are distinct levels of blindness in what goes under
the title or the name of Christianity. Number one, there are those who
hardly even believe in God. I'm not talking about atheists,
I'm talking about those who are religious and would answer to
Christians. There are some who hardly even
believe in God and in Christ. I would name some, the Unitarians
for example, which is the ghost of old Aryanism of long ago. led by such heretics as Ralph
Waldo Emerson, who rejected the supernatural, and for the most
part, just humanism. That's all it is. Just plain
humanism and not Christian. But secondly, there is that section
that is strictly formalistic, going through the rituals, having
a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof. where the
ministry is strictly a vocation and is not a calling from God
at all in their eyes. Blind guides again. Thirdly, there is the largest
section of blind Christendom, Arminianism. putting heavy emphasis
upon Jesus and upon salvation, yet blind to the true character
of Christ and to the sovereignty of God and the truth as it is
in Christ Jesus, and for the most part, preaching another
Jesus, as Paul said in 2 Corinthians chapter 11. And then, consider,
fourthly, the major cults blind to the person of Jesus Christ,
but trolling in the waters of Christendom, or Christianity,
to make proselytes out of those who are not grounded in the faith
as it is in Christ, and then, like Jesus said, making them
twofold more the child of hell than their self. So we conclude
this evening by saying, they who are themselves blind, cannot
lead others out of their darkness, cannot lead others unto the light. And it's the height of folly
for a blind man to choose another blind man to lead his soul and
to be his spiritual guide, to follow such a one as do not know
the true and living God and His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, blind,
leading the blind, shall they not both fall into the ditch. Yes, that shall be their ultimate
end.