Please remain standing for a moment. Take your Bible if you have it. And let’s turn together to Matthew’s Gospel. And we’ll be looking at chapter 23, verses 25 to 28 this morning. So chapter 23 of Matthew’s Gospel, verses 25 to 28.
Let’s hear the word of the Lord.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self -indulgence. You, blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness, so that you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. This is the word of the Lord. Amen. Please be seated.
Let’s pray together. Gracious God as we come before you, we remember that the sting of sin is death, but the sting of the Holy Spirit is life. And so we ask, Lord, that you would work within us through this word of the Lord, Jesus Christ, reminding us that he is the great judge of all the earth. And Father, it is his opinion that we have to be very careful to honor and delight in. And so, Lord, we pray that you would reveal to us all the ways that we are unfaithful to you and help us, Lord, to be faithful going forward, to be reminded of who we are. Lord, to look deeply within at the very roots of our own desires. Lord, sting us there and help us to grow by the work of your spirit through the blood of Christ applied to our lives. We pray in his name. Amen.
I think maybe one of the most despicable cultural sins, as it were, is what we call stolen valor. Maybe you’ve seen in our video age, you come across these there would be a moment where maybe a military man has returned home from a tour of duty and he’s walking through the airport and he sees another man there in his full dress uniform and he starts asking, he pulls out his cell phone and starts filming and asking him about this medal or this award and where he was and how it was awarded to him and gradually it starts to come out that he actually didn’t earn any of it. This is particularly on our minds I think today because a lot of politicians, they try to claim these awards for themselves to make their resumes look better.
Tim Walz recently has been accused of this and adding humor to the insult, I guess as they trotted out a man who claimed to have a bronze star and lied about that in order to defend Tim Walz’s lies about his own service. But this is a despicable act. What’s insidious about common valor is that men want to appear courageous so that they can receive the praise of men while never having endured the hardship that was required for it. And so they want to walk in public and have men come up to them and shake their hands and say thank you for your service which we ought to do but they never earned those praises.
It’s a truly despicable thing. In a religious sense this is the heart of hypocrisy. You pretend to be something that you’re not.
All men are hypocrites to varying degrees. We have to admit that about ourselves. Isn’t this one of the great accusations made by the non -believer about why they don’t, why don’t you go to church? Well the church is full of hypocrites. Well yeah, you’re right. It is. I freely admit that. You know that’s what Romans chapter 7 is all about. The things I want to do, I don’t do those things. The difference is that a lot of the people in the church are honest hypocrites while in the world they’re lying hypocrites. You and I have to be honest about ourselves in this sense that you long for people to praise you.
There is a deep a seated issue among sinful men is that we really, really want the praise of other men. We want people to pat us on the back that is one of the highest hurdles in the Christian life because the more you long for the praise of men, the less you will desire the praise of your Savior and it will corrupt and kill your soul.
You know what it takes to receive men’s praises. Score a touchdown. Kick a field goal at the right minute. Score, you know, make a basket.
Achieve a certain success in your lifestyle. Have a certain career. And men will praise you. They will look at you and they will admire you just for that position that you hold. While secretly and privately you may be a despicable man who has stolen valor. So because you long for men to praise you and you know what it takes to get men to praise you, you will do what you need to do to get that praise whether or not it accurately reflects who you are.
And because all men have a natural religious bent, most hypocrisy will come in a religious form. Most of it will. There’s not a man alive who doesn’t have a religious as it were intuition because he’s made in the image of God.
But oftentimes we satisfy that religious inclination through things like ritual. In fact, the more ritualistic a religious practice is today, more likely than not, it’s just feeding a sensual desire.
Truly, many of the biggest hypocrites are in churches. We ought to expect that. If you want to appear religious, then you have to be here. That’s unavoidable. You can’t stay at home on Sunday morning and hope that people are going to think you’re a religious person.
Because being here makes us feel holy. And so the main thing I think that Jesus points out to us in these couple of verses, these four verses is that the hypocrite uses ritual and righteous practice to appear pure but he neglects inner piety and true communion with Christ.
The hypocrite uses ritual and righteous practice to appear pure but neglects inner piety or holiness or godliness and true communion with Christ.
Just a reminder of what’s happening in this passage as we come to verses 25 to 28, indeed most of 23, Jesus is pronouncing this scathing judgment on the Pharisees. And remember, he’s removing the kingdom from Israel and he’s announcing that his kingdom is a universal kingdom. His kingdom covers the entire earth. The scope of his kingdom is from the smallest molecule to the greatest organism in all of the universe. His kingdom engulfs it all. Everything belongs to him from the angels to men. Everything is under his feet now and being subdued to his lordship. So he’s removing the kingdom from Israel and he’s giving this, there’s a covenantal transition to God’s universal movement. And so he issues this scathing, this scathing indictment of the Pharisees who were, and remember the reason for this is because in Israelite culture at this moment, if you wanted to appear like the best of the best, you would be a Pharisee. You’re not a liberal Sadducee, you’re not a progressive, you’re a religious conservative, you’re going to be a Pharisee. This is who you align yourself with. You’re a reformer.
The first thing that we notice is that the hypocrite uses ritual to appear pure. The hypocrite uses ritual to appear pure and we see this in verse 25.
Notice what Jesus says to him. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you clean the outside of the cup and the plate but inside they are full of greed and self -indulgence. So again, Jesus is doing things here to, he’s causing the crowds to laugh at the Pharisees, he’s making them look ridiculous. And so he’s not feeding in to their, this overwhelming desire for personal glory that they have. Instead, he’s actually showing that your pursuit of glory makes you look ridiculous in God’s eyes. God laughs at you, according to Psalm chapter 2. And so one of the things that they use is religious ritual to make themselves feel pure. That’s what they’re trying to do. I don’t know if you’ve ever this probably, this may never happen in any other home but I remember, you know, at times in my life, I’ll just grab a coffee cup out of the dishwasher and for some reason
grits, if you make instant grits in a coffee cup, there’s like this nuclear fusion that happens between the grits and the inside of a coffee cup. And so when it goes through the drying process in, in your dishwasher, it sometimes it seems like the paint will even separate from the coffee cup and cover the grits and they’re on there forever. They have everlasting life. And you don’t discover this until you’ve taken a couple of sips of coffee because coffee is the perfect temperature. Then the dishwasher couldn’t handle it, but the coffee is the perfect temperature to make the grits release and then just float to the top. And so you discover that the cup looked like it’s really clean and until you take that third sip and you’re like, what is happening in my life right now?
The Pharisees were like that.
Jesus is, and again, he’s not talking about something that they actually did. They didn’t, they didn’t go to their wives and say, honey, why did you wash the inside of the cups? I told you over and over I like the grits in there with my coffee. That’s not what’s happening. He’s, he’s making them look ridiculous because that’s what they are. He’s going to their shepherds and making them look he’s humiliating them in front of the people. That’s his objective. And he says, you wash the outside of the cup and the plate, but you leave the inside filthy. And so you see what you see the whole purpose of that is he’s actually saying the part that you touch you care if that part is clean, but the part that you use to eat and drink from you’re eating and drinking refuse. It’s actually rottenness is going down into the you. That’s the way, that’s what you practice. And so Jesus is using this ritual terminology. It takes us back to the old covenant where Jesus had given the people certain rituals to illustrate to them the ideas of clean and unclean. This is a ritual idea. It, it refers, it was to depict for the people what it meant to be pure. And it showed them that they had to do things to become pure. In other words, from every, everyone in your household needs to do something to become pure. You’re not pure. And so remember, this takes us back a little bit. In, in an Israelite camp there were three rings, as it were. There’s the inner ring where God’s temple or tabernacle was. And in the outer, that was the holy ring. In the outer ring was the people. They would camp around the tabernacle. And in order to be in the camp of Israel, you had to be clean,
or pure. If you weren’t pure, you had to live outside of that ring, out in the wilderness. Not in civilization. You’re not in the city of God. You’re on the outside. And so, in the life of an Israelite, there, everybody at some point in their life would go outside that ring. A woman on her cycle, a man in puberty, all these things would go outside the camp for a period of time to become pure. And God is using this, it’s kind of like with a child, you take them through a picture book, and you give them all these illustrations to help them understand. And that’s the function of these rituals. And so it’s, um, Jesus in the Gospel, part of His ministry, He would cleanse lepers. Notice He wouldn’t heal them, He would cleanse them. In other words, He was making it possible for these lepers, who’d spent their whole life maybe, outside the camp, to come into the camp. He took away their physical infirmity, or sickness, and He didn’t just restore their health, He restored their access to the covenant community. That’s what He’s doing. So this term, to cleanse something, is also translated as purify. Um, in Titus 2 .14, Jesus gave Himself for us to redeem us, and to purify a people, for Himself a people. Jesus, by His sacrifice, purified or cleansed a people for Himself. Jesus blood, according to Hebrews 9 .14, purifies our conscience from dead works. This is the whole idea. All of this purification represented the removal of sin. That’s what it represents. The removal of sin. The satisfaction of God’s wrath. And so the image is of a man who follows through, think of this, who follows through on the ritual,
but he fails to see its true meaning. So what Jesus is saying is there are lots of people who are bringing the sacrifices, especially these Pharisees, who are bringing the sacrifices, they’re washing their hands, but they never see the spiritual implication.
They don’t confess their sins. They don’t ask for God’s forgiveness. They don’t grieve of the way that their lives in unfaithfulness grieve God.
If I do away with the true meaning of the ritual, what happens? In other words, if I take away the forgiveness, if I don’t think about the wrath of God, if I don’t think about my own sin and what this is representing about me, then I can do the ritual in a way that makes me look good. In fact, you know what? I won’t just come to church on Sunday once. I’ll come three times.
Because this helps me boast. Look at me. Jesus says the reality of their lives is that they are full of robbery and self -indulgence. You look down in the Pharisees’ cup and there’s all kinds of refuse floating on the top of it. It’s full of sewage. It’s disgusting. Robbery and self -indulgence are two sides of the same coin. Robbery is to violate God’s law by taking what doesn’t belong to you. Envying at the prosperity of others. You extort things out of people. This is what the Pharisees are doing. It’s all a form of self -indulgence, isn’t it? This is a lack of self -control.
If you look at Daniel, oftentimes what you’ll find is that men who are unbelievers are depicted as beasts. Because what happens is if you lack self -control, which is produced by the Holy Spirit, and you become a man, you just indulge whatever is your whimsy. Whatever is your instinct. Whatever I want in the moment, that’s what I do. And if my mind changes in the moment, I go to the next thing. And all I do is I’m controlled just by this inner desire. Jude, he indicts the people who were teaching in the church in this way. He says in verse 8, but these people blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively. In other words, he’s saying, they’re not acting like spiritual beings, they’re acting like the only thing they have are the synapses of their brain, and they just do whatever that tells them to do in the moment. If I’m angry, I yell, right? If I’m lustful, I find something to have sex with. This is what they do. And he goes on in verse 12, and he says, these are hidden reefs at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds listening, feeding themselves. This is the old indictment. The Pharisees, do you see, these are not men who love God’s law and apply it too strictly.
They are wicked. They are false. They are corrupt. They are revolting. They are men who walk around with bronze stars on their chests and never went to battle.
And they do it so they can pat each other on the back. And the whole time they are robbing God’s people. Robbing God’s people of the word, of his mercy. The hypocrite uses ritual practice to appear pure, but he also,
Secondly, uses righteous practice to appear pure.
The first deals with the ceremonial law or the restorative law. The second deals with the moral law. Let’s see what Jesus says in verses 27 to 28. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like white washed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. And if we pause here just for a second, we have to remember that God always looks on the heart. And what that means is God is not judging a man by the fruits of his life. He is judging a man on the desire of the heart. And he calls on you and me not just to look at the fruits that our lives produce, but at the excrement that flows from our hearts. What do you want?
What do you want? What do you desire? That is where the corruption lies. Is my heart a stale pool that flies hover over?
Or is it producing the water of life by the work of the Holy Spirit? The hypocrite uses righteous practice to appear pure. This is, in other words, you’re using righteous practice to look like you’re holy or godly. The Pharisees were like whitewashed tombs. Now, around Passover, and remember, this is the Passover week, it’s like the whole Gospel just slows down to focus for many chapters on these final days in the life of our Savior. And in this Passover week, one of the things that they would do is they would go out and clean and whitewash tombs so that they were clearly visible. Because you couldn’t partake of the Passover meal if you were ritually unclean. And if you touched a dead body, you became unclean. So they wanted to make sure the tombs were visible. So they would clean them up. You walk into Israel, into Jerusalem, and you see these tombs that are bright and shiny and clean. Jesus literally said here that they shine beautifully. They shine beautifully. In other words, they are attractive. They actually possess, in a sense, a quality of the people of God’s kingdom. Remember that Jesus said that His people will shine in His kingdom. think that means that there will be some sort of physical light that comes from the people of God in the kingdom of Christ. We will reflect His glory.
But these men, they look beautiful morally, but inside they are, if you actually knew what was inside, you wouldn’t touch them. You see what Jesus is saying? In other words, you might say, you might call a Pharisee up and say, hey, my kids got Fridays and afternoons free, would you disciple them? And if you do that, what Jesus is telling you, He’s actually going to teach your child how to go to hell.
He looks great. They shine beautifully, but inwardly, He says, they are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. The hypocritical life is kind of ironic, isn’t it? Because on the one hand, they’re supposed to be masters of the law. That’s what they present themselves to be.
They’re not masters of the law. These are the scribes. In Luke’s Gospel, He calls them attorneys. They spend hours copying down the law of God. And yet, what does Jesus call them? Lawless.
They’re lawless.
This is the fundamental definition of an unbelieving man. In Romans 6, verse 19, He says this, I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, leading to sanctification. So they observe God’s law in a sense, but they also break it because it’s inconvenient for them to keep it at certain respects. But the whole reason that they would keep any command is for personal gain. They want men to think well of them. And what is Jesus saying? You’re not sons of God. I don’t know you. You’re not my brothers. You are sons of the devil, discipling men into hell. This is who the Pharisees are. And these are the cream of the crop of Israel.
Inwardly they are robbers, thieves, self -indulgent, hypocritical, and lawless men.
They use ritual to appear pure. They use righteous practice to appear pure. And they neglect inner piety. This is the third point. The hypocrite neglects inner piety. Verse 26, we’re going to jump back up to that. You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and the plate and the outside also may be clean. That’s an important point. You see what Jesus says? Clean the inside and the outside will be affected.
Elder Chris Bird has been going through James. This is one of the core messages of James. The man who is truly pure inside, he will produce righteous fruit. It will come. But it has to begin on the inside. If you first clean the inside of the cup, the outside will also be clean. In other words, inner godliness is always going to flow to the outside. The roots will always furnish the fruit. It will grow much fruit for the glory of God. The Pharisees practiced their righteousness to be seen by men. Go back up to verse 5. Another moment Jesus ridicules these men. Verse 5, and this is when Jesus is speaking to the crowd. The Pharisees and scribes do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. Did they actually make their phylacteries really broad? Maybe not. Jesus is satirizing these men. He’s ridiculing, making fun of them in public to make them a laughing stock. And the whole idea is the phylacteries were these boxes that they would put on their heads and the law of God was written on the inside and it was this literal idea of, you know, put the law on the frontlets of your head. The word is phylacteries there in Hebrew. And so they would do this. And Jesus is saying they make their they’re out to here. And the Pharisee can’t get through he has to put his head sideways to get through the door with his broad phylactery on. And the whole reason he does that is why? He wants you to see it. Wow, look at his phylactery. He probably has four copies of God’s law in there.
And Jesus is telling the people don’t let them near your kids.
Scripture on the other hand always emphasizes inner holiness.
In Deuteronomy chapter 10 verse 16 as the people are on the edges of the land and they’re getting ready to go in, Moses exhorted them, he said this circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart and be no longer stubborn.
In the verses before that he said to them and now Israel what does the Lord your God require of you but to fear the Lord your God walk in all his ways to love him to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and to keep the commandments and the statutes of the Lord which I am commanding you today for your good therefore circumcise the foreskins of your heart. You see it’s never intended to be some sort of outward ritualistic religion. Never, never. That was never intended. The rituals were given to Israel to remind them of God’s mercy and their sin and the laws of how to walk in a way that pleased God. The Pharisees they didn’t see any of the inner part of that. They neglected the inner heart part. They weren’t doing any of this for the love of God. They’re doing it all for the love of self. You see this is the great perversion that Satan teaches people to perform is do all this for your own gratification. People will pat you on the back. Oh you’re a deacon. Wow.
The Holy Spirit when he is truly in a man destroys sin at the root first.
You see the first change that a new believer experiences is that all of a sudden his desires change.
The new believer doesn’t run around trying to cut off the fruits. He’s like I just need to quit smoking. The first thing that is affected is his heart.
And he says man I am wicked. I can’t believe I love doing that. I can’t believe that I used to enjoy disobeying the Lord. Let me give you just a couple of applications here.
Be wary of your inclination to meaningless ritual.
Again God gave the rituals of the ceremonial law to the people as a picture book.
They still mean something. The core of what the ceremonies meant we still think about. But one of the realities of our day is because we are not exactly in the heyday of American spirituality or western spirituality. Spirituality today is a real ebb. And what happens in eras like ours is people because they want to feel spiritual they turn to all of these external ritualistic things. And you can think in the broadly evangelical church of turning the lights down low and now because sermons are so boring they have to play the piano behind it. Why is that? Why do you need that? Well all those things are intended to replace the Holy Spirit. If the Spirit is not in your worship you need all the lights and you need the cameras and you need the smells and you need the senses. Right? You’re trying to engage the senses to make people think that the Spirit is there and He isn’t. And so if you want to learn about real spirituality you go and you sit in a room with white walls and a piano and nothing and you find if you’re still engaged you’ll learn a lot about yourself. If you need all those things to make you feel spiritual you probably don’t have the Holy Spirit.
Our ritual now is simplicity of our emphasis on the Spirit’s work. And by the way ritual is a really easy way to manipulate people.
First, know your own inclination to hypocrisy.
Now think about all the ways that Jesus indicted the Pharisees. They wouldn’t eat with certain people.
If you wouldn’t attend a barbecue on the east side of town or if you wouldn’t invite somebody from the east side of town into your living room you are probably a hypocrite.
You help others as long as you can be seen doing it but rarely in private and for their sake. And Girl Scouts and Trail Life and Boy Scouts I think as well, I guess it’s not Boy Scouts anymore. You have to get community service hours. And the whole objective there you reward the boys because you’re hoping that they come into adulthood realizing or womanhood realizing I love to serve other people. That’s the objective. Even when I don’t get an award for it.
But you’re probably a hypocrite if you help others as long as you can be seen doing it or there’s some reward involved but rarely in private and for their sake.
A second way you are hypocritical is if you address offenses but not sins.
Another way to put this is you think a lot about what other people do wrong and very little about what you do.
You address offenses.
You made me mad. You left the toilet seat up. Why are there grits stuck in the coffee cup?
Why’d you look at me that way? Why’d you say that? Why’d you post that about me? And all you think about is offenses but you don’t ever address sins. In other words, you’ve never gone to a brother when he is in sin if it didn’t affect you in some way. Because see, when you address sin, you’re actually concerned about your brother, not yourself. When you address offenses, you’re concerned about yourself, not your brother. Does that make sense?
A third way that this Pharisees were hypocritical and you and I are too, is you modify God’s requirements to only what you’re capable of.
Nobody can do that. How does God expect us to keep that law? You see, the Pharisees said, well, you don’t have to honor your mother and father.
The fourth way that you are definitely a certified, 100% fresh hypocrite is if you heard all of those things I just said and say it, none of that applies to me.
The hypocrite uses ritual and righteous practice to appear pure, to convince himself he’s pure, but neglects inner piety and true communion with Christ. Jesus diagnosed the Pharisees’ hypocrisy in two areas, ritual cleanness and righteous practice. The heart of hypocrisy wants to appear religious to satisfy the flesh, but the Christian participates in religious practice. Why? Because he longs to commune with Christ. Is that what you long for?
The Holy Spirit longs for the exaltation of Jesus Christ, and when he dwells in a man, he aligns that man’s desire to the exaltation of Jesus Christ.
Let’s pray.
Gracious God and Father,
there’s not a person in this room who is not in varying degrees hypocritical. Lord, we’re either hypocritical non -believers convincing ourselves that because we participate in religious ceremony that we’re acceptable to you. Father, our heart is so far from you
that Pluto is closer.
Lord, grant us repentance in this area. Help us not to look to ritual as the way by which we are made comfortable.
Help us to move away from box checking to heart circumcising. And we confess, Lord, that we can’t do this apart from you. We are just like the Pharisees. We’re dead, corrupt, disgusting in your eyes apart from the work of your Holy Spirit. So give us that real baptism of the Spirit. I pray for myself and my brothers and sisters here. Cause our hearts to flame with passion for the glory of Jesus Christ. Work within us. Help us to acknowledge our own hypocrisy this morning and repent of it and be repenting of it. Be endeavoring to go to war with our flesh tomorrow. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
