What Kind of Pharisee are You?
Matthew 23:1–2
Matthew Lesson #144
November 13, 2016
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Father, we’re thankful that we can come together to worship You this morning to remember Your grace towards us through the incredible tremendous gift of salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ who died on our behalf.

“Father, we’re thankful that we can come together to be reminded of this, to learn more about it, and to understand what You have revealed to us. We pray that we can concentrate this morning as we think about what our Lord is teaching and what has been revealed to us in Matthew 23.

“Father, we pray that as we think about these things that God the Holy Spirit would help us to see how the principles that we cover applies to each of our lives, and that we will be responsive to what we need to do in terms of clarifying, clearing up, and focusing our lives upon You and upon Your Word.

“And we pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”

Slide 2

This morning we’re continuing our study in Matthew 23, and I have titled this lesson, “What Kind of Pharisee are You?”

Every one of us has a sin nature. And that sin nature trends in one of two directions and often in both directions. Sometimes it trends in the direction of licentiousness and antinomianism, which is a big word for lawlessness. If you want to understand lawlessness to some degree, turn on the news and find out what people are doing, as they are demonstrating across the country. That’s lawlessness.

I think it’s interesting. It happens to everybody. Every group has their legalisms and their lawlessness. And even though it may seem somewhat ironic, those who have various legalistic standards, when theirs’ are violated, frequently react in lawlessness.

That happens personally as well. We have strict standards and codes of conduct, but sometimes when we get into rebellion against God, we shift gears and swing all the way in the opposite direction into lawlessness.

There are elements of that that we see in the Pharisees. And that’s our focus in Matthew 23 as Jesus lowers the boom and announces serious condemnation on the Pharisees of that generation.

They are condemned because of their legalism. And what are they going to do in reaction? Lawlessness! What are they going to do? They are going to condemn a perfectly innocent man and have Him brought before pagan justice in order to be condemned to death. And He does not deserve it.

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

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

Slide 3

Now in this part of Matthew, just as we’re reminded of the context from Matthew 21 through Matthew 25, this is the last week in Jesus’ earthly life before the Cross, the entry into Jerusalem in Matthew 21.

His royal entry is followed by the next day as He comes back into Jerusalem.

It’s followed by a series of confrontations with the religious leaders in Jerusalem. And they’re challenging Jesus’ authority, and they are challenging everything about who He is.

So He’s publicly presented to Israel as her Messianic King, and then He is rejected by the nation, but not by all of the people.

Then when we get to this chapter, Jesus is rejecting the nation, the national leaders, and He announces eight or seven woes—there’s a textual issue with one of them as we’ll see—on the religious leaders. This is covered in Matthew 23.

Slide 4

I think it’s helpful sometimes to begin with the end in mind. In the first part of this, the first 12 verses which I’m focusing on this morning, it ends with a statement by Jesus, “Whoever exalts Himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles Himself will be exalted.”

What happens as a result of His obedience to go to the Cross, humbling Himself by being obedient, is that God the Father will exalt Him above every name; and everyone eventually will bow before Jesus, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

The contrast is with the grace basis for our relationship with God that we find in the New Testament—in contrast to all the legalisms that we find in religion. Last time I talked about the danger of religion, and that religion is the devil’s tool. Religion is not biblical Christianity.

I constantly find myself having to talk about not just Christianity, but biblical Christianity, Bible-based Christianity, because we live in a world today when there are so many flavors of Christianity that are not Bible based. They are just different aspects of mostly legalistic religion.

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

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

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

As we get into this particular section dealing with the Pharisees, the basic problem with Pharisaism, as Jesus is going to make clear in the second part of this chapter, is a hypocrisy.

Now I think many of you think you understand what hypocrisy is, but we are going to need to clarify that term a little bit. A lot of people think that hypocrisy means that you say one thing, and you do something else.

If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, or gee, if you’re a parent, you say one thing and you do something else, right? I remember my parents saying “don’t do as I do, do as I say.” Okay, that’s one kind of hypocrisy.

But the kind of hypocrisy that the Pharisees are guilty of isn’t necessarily that because they believe, at a theological level, a lot of what Jesus is talking about. Jesus came offering the Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Messiah. He was claiming to be the Messiah. And Jesus explained to the people how to enter the Kingdom.

For example, when He is talking to the Pharisee Nicodemus in John 3—(if you’re not familiar with that chapter, you should read that). Nicodemus, whose name really means a leader of the people, and may have been more of a title than it was his personal name, came to Jesus at night. Now I know I’ve heard different reasons for why he came at night. I think he came at night because he was busy. That’s a time when most of you can come to Bible classes at night because you work during the day. Nicodemus had a day job.

Pharisees usually did. A lot of them were blue-collar workers; craftsmen and tradesmen. The Sadducees were the aristocracy.

So Nicodemus was busy during the day, and came to Jesus at night, and says, “No one can do the miracles that You do unless you come from God.” And Jesus understood what his real question was, and so He answered the real question.

He said, “To him most assuredly I say to you, unless you are born again, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.” And so Jesus is coming along, and He’s proclaiming the presence of the kingdom of God, and He is telling people how they can enter the kingdom of God.

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

The hypocrisy here is that they were spiritual leaders of the people who were trying to find the Kingdom of God and looking for the Messiah, who is bringing the Kingdom of God. But they refused to believe the Messiah when He came. And they were dissuading others from following this Messiah who came and offered the Kingdom.

So their hypocrisy is that they believed one thing, that the Messiah would come, and He would bring in the Kingdom. But when the Messiah came, they were dissuading those who would follow Him from following Him. They refused to believe Jesus was the Messiah. They refused to enter the Kingdom.

Not only did they reject their Messiah and refused to enter the Kingdom, they were working hard to prevent others.

For example, in Matthew 23:13, Jesus said, “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.”

So in the context of Matthew, hypocrisy is not simply saying or teaching one thing and doing something else. It is much more serious than that, and it has to do with teaching people not to accept Jesus as Messiah. Now that is partially necessary to understand that as we get into the beginning of this particular section.

Slide 5

In Matthew 23:1 we’re told, “Then”—this is a follow on to the confrontation that Jesus had with the Pharisees and Sadducees and other religious leaders in the previous chapter, in Matthew 22. So following that, which means Jesus is in the Temple, He’s in the courtyard of the Temple, and there is a crowd that has been gathering to listen to this confrontation between the Pharisees and Jesus. And now He turns to the multitudes and His disciples.

The Pharisees are probably still within earshot and can hear what He is going to say. He says to them, “The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat.” Now, what exactly does that mean?

In understanding this, we have to understand something about what was going on in rabbinical Judaism in the second Temple period. What you see on the slide is a picture of the seat of Moses that was discovered at the synagogue of Chorazin.

This was a feature in every synagogue at that time. There was one seat, and in many cases, it would be like this one. It would be carved from stone. It would be somewhat ornate and significant. It was not sat in by just any rabbi or any teacher. It was used only on special occasions. It was near the front of the synagogue.

In those days if you were the rabbi or you were going to adjudicate certain circumstances based on the Torah, then you would sit somewhere. You would sit on the bema, or you would sit in the seat of Moses if you were teaching.

The rabbi sat. Everybody else stood up for two or three hours. And this is true even in the early church for the first two or three centuries. And still true in Eastern Orthodox churches. You go and the people stand. I wonder how long y’all would last?

I think about when people get older, and it is really hard for them to stand for long. So what allowance did they make for that? All kinds of questions like that come up, but that was what people would do. They would stand for two or three hours.

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

Slide 6

And then He says, “Therefore”—whenever they’re sitting in Moses’ seat—“whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do, but do not do according to their works, for they say, and they do not do.”

Now this has really raised a lot of problems for expositors of the Scripture because it seems like Jesus is contradicting Himself. When He says “observe,” He uses a Greek word that means to keep or to guard something. So He’s basically saying, “Whatever they tell you to keep, whatever law they tell you to keep, that observe or keep and do.”

But in what sense, because the Pharisees told the people many things to keep which were contrary to the spirit of the law, and in some cases, contrary to specifics of the Torah. Jesus was constantly violating their traditions. So in what sense did He mean this?

Slide 7

Here’s one example in Matthew 15:1, “The scribes and Pharisees who were from Jerusalem came to Jesus saying, ‘Why do your disciples transgress the traditions of the elders?’ ”

Now the traditions of the elders refers to what’s called the Halakhah from the word meaning to walk. You have the written law, the Torah, then there was the oral law referred to as the Halakhah, which was basically an oral tradition of how to apply the written law.

So the question was, “Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders?”—that is the oral law—“For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.”

Jesus answered them—and notice how Jesus uses question and answer, and He throws the issue back on them and says—“Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition?”

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

Well, I think the best understanding of this is to see what it was that they did when they sat in Moses’ seat. This wasn’t just any teaching of the Torah. This wasn’t just any reading of the Torah or exposition or explanation of it, but that it had to do with dealing with specific issues.

To sit at Moses’ seat had to do with the application of case law in the Torah. So if two people had a problem, and it was related to the case law, then it would be like going to a justice of the peace or a local municipal court in order to have some sort of conflict resolved, and understand how the civil law part of the Torah was to be applied.

They were coming to the Pharisee, the one who sat in Moses’ seat in order to get a resolution to a matter of law. So if they ruled one way or the other, Jesus is saying do what they say to do in those circumstances. He’s not saying across the board that they are to do whatever the Pharisees say to do in terms of all these multiple traditions that they had developed over the previous 1,400 years.

Slide 8

Then in Matthew 23:4, He goes on to explain this, and He says, “For they bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.”

Now that first word tells you that it’s explaining something. It’s the word “for,” and in the Greek, this expresses an explanation of the previous statement. In the previous statement He is talking about the fact that they are to listen to them but not do as they say because they bind heavy burdens, they put a load on people, and they laid these on men’s shoulders.

The picture here goes back to the picture of a yoke, and that was a common term that was used among the Pharisees in relationship to the law. You actually had two different yokes.

A yoke was something that you would use to join two work animals together so that they would work in tandem and not work against each other. For example, you would take two oxen and yoke them together. So a yoke was designed in order to give people, or to give work animals, structure and discipline. And so that term is used in relationship to the law.

Slide 9

In Second Temple Judaism, there were two yokes that they talked about in rabbinical language: The yoke of the Kingdom and the yoke of the Law.

Slide 10

The yoke of the Kingdom was pretty much for everyone, for children, for women, and they were to follow the basics related to the Shema, “O Israel, the Lord our God is one God,” and obeying the law. It was defined as the acceptance of the rule of God in the whole of your life as in the Shema. This was the yoke that was given to children and, to some extent, women. And that was all they had to obey. It was very simple and fairly easy to follow.

But once a male reached the age of Bar Mitzvah at 13—Bar Mitzvah means son of the covenant—once he enters into that, he is joining with all of the commands of Torah, the Mosaic Covenant.

At that point, the male takes on this additional heavy load because their interpretation wasn’t just that of the written Torah—it was the oral, the Halakha, all of those other traditions that came along.

Slide 11

The Yoke of the Law is the yoke of all the commandments and the exception and obligation to fulfill all the commandments, which was interpreted to include all of the oral law, the traditions of the Fathers.

Slide 12

We’ve studied this before. This was what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 11:29–30, a verse that is often related to salvation. “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

This is actually a statement that is condemning the interpretation of the yoke of the Law, what was emphasized by the Pharisees.

Our Lord’s yoke is a yoke of grace, and grace dominated in the Old Testament. So many people think that because we sometimes talk about the Church Age as the age of grace, that we believe in grace, that in the Old Testament, it was law.

But there’s grace in the law. One of the things that they would do, for example, had to do with Sabbath observance.

Slide 13

I just want to put this on the screen so we can understand exactly what the Scripture says about Sabbath observance.

In Exodus 20:8–11, part of the Decalogue, we read, “Remember Shabbat, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work”—notice there is a relationship here between labor and work—“you shall do no work: you, nor your son or your daughter, nor your male servant, or your female servant, or your cattle”—got to give your cattle the day off—“nor the stranger who is within your gates.”

Now a stranger would be someone who’s not an Israelite, somebody who is not necessarily under the Mosaic Law, a Gentile that’s living in the land. So they were not to work either. You couldn’t work the Gentile so you could get some work or make some money that day because your slave was working for you. So everybody took the day off.

“For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath Day and hallowed it.”

In other words, you can’t understand the Sabbath if you don’t understand a literal six, 24-hour, consecutive-day creation.

A somewhat Orthodox Jewish friend of mine and I got into a discussion about creation, and he said, “I have trouble taking that literally.”

I said, “Well, how do you explain the pattern? If those aren’t six literal 24-hour days, then why do you work and apply it as if they are six 24-hour days based on this?” He said, “I don’t have an answer.”

So this is what the commandment said. Now it doesn’t answer a lot of questions. It doesn’t say, “Well, if I spill something, can I clean it up?” “If I just didn’t quite finish my work, could I finish it?”

What do you mean by work? How are we going to define work? And some people take this to mean “ordinary work,” so you can do some other things that may involve exertion or effort, for example, a hobby or something like that, on your day off. So how do you apply this?

What happened is around 200 BC, the pharisaical movement actually developed after the return of the Jews from Babylon. That happened in 538 BC. They rebuilt the temple in 516 BC, and as they went through a couple of centuries of development, they became more and more rigorous in their application of the Law, because they believed that the reason that God judged them and destroyed Jerusalem and the first Temple was because of idolatry.

So they needed to obey the Law, every letter of the Law, and they began to answer all of these kinds of questions with the idea that if you have all of the 613 commandments in the Law, that if you build a fence around them with other laws to prevent you from getting to those 613 laws in the middle or 513 laws in the middle, then what would happen is that you would protect yourself from violating any of those core laws.

So around 200 BC, you had a group of scholars, rabbinical scholars, I believe they were called the Tannites, the Tanakhim (sp?), and what they did was to try to define further regulation. They came up with a list of 38 things that you could not do on the Sabbath, and, of course, each of those then required a little further definition.

For example, they said you can’t harvest on the Sabbath. You can’t do work on the Sabbath, so you can’t harvest, but then questions came up, “Well, what exactly does it mean to harvest?”

So they came up with an additional 20 or 30 regulations defining what it meant to harvest. Part of that would be that if you’re walking through a field, and a grain stalk has fallen on the ground, and you kick it, and the grain comes off the stalk, you’ve harvested it. So you have all these regulations.

If God worked in the seven days of creation, and He created light, then doing anything that generates light would be labor.

So what you’ll see on the Sabbath if you go to Israel is when you go into at a hotel, you can’t push a button on the elevator to go from floor to floor because when you press a button on an elevator, it illuminates, so you created a light.

So what they have is a Shabbat elevator that is programmed to stop at every floor all the way up, and then every floor all the way down. So if you’re in a 23- or 24-floor hotel, you want to make sure that you don’t accidentally get on the Shabbat elevator. Everybody does that once or twice. But that’s the idea. You can’t turn your computer on, you can’t turn your cell phone on, you can’t do anything that would that would create life.

So they just generated hundreds and hundreds of these laws in order to prevent people from violating the basic law of Shabbat. But somehow when Moses wrote this and the Holy Spirit revealed it, I’m not sure that He meant you can’t turn your cell phone on or press an elevator button to go up to your floor, but they got down into the minutia.

This involved dietary laws and food and all kinds of other things, down to very fine detail. So the Lord, really giving a broad command, leaves a lot of room for application and freedom within the application of that law. But the Pharisees were legislating everything down to the smallest detail.

One other application of this, or problem, would be if it’s raining, and it’s Shabbat, and you’re going to synagogue for services, you can carry an umbrella. So you carry the umbrella to synagogue. But then it stops raining, so you can’t carry the umbrella home. You have to leave it at the synagogue.

A lot of these rules were real problems. And that’s why Jesus is saying that they are putting heavy burdens upon people.

Slide 14

Then in verse five, He goes on to say, “But all their works they do to be seen by men.”

Now look at verse three again, which says, “Therefore, whatever they tell you to do observe, that observe and do, but do not do according to their works.”

He defines those works here in verse five, “all their works they do to be seen by men.” They were motivated by approbation lust. They wanted to get God’s approval, and they thought if they got the approval of men and recognition of men because of what they did, then that was great and would have value for eternity. So they did these things in order to be seen. In order to be recognized. It appeals to the lust patterns of their sin nature.

One of the ways that they would apply this is, He said, “They make their phylacteries broad and enlarge the borders of their garments.”

There are two things that are going on there:

One is the phylacteries. I have a picture up here, and you can see the three men in the picture, each of whom are wearing their phylacteries or their tefillin. The box on the head is also on the wrist. You see in this next slide a picture of the tefillin and the wristbands that would be worn along the forearm of the individual. You can see how they are wrapped here and here, along those forearms, and there’s a very specific way in which they are wrapped.

Inside those little boxes there are scrolls, parchment scrolls, of Scripture: Deuteronomy 6:4–9, Deuteronomy 11:13–21, Exodus 13:1–10. Exodus 13:11-16.

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

Slide 15

I’ll just show you a couple of these verses. Deuteronomy 6:8, “You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.”

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

Slide 16

Deuteronomy 11:18 says, “Therefore you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul”—that’s the main command. It’s not the physical, literal binding—“you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.”

What they were doing is a visual to make everybody know that this is what they were doing. This shows that they’re basically focused on their own glory, that they are self-seeking, and they are self-righteous. That’s their motivation for obeying the Law.

Slide 17

The second thing that the passage says is that they’re enlarging the borders of their garments. In Numbers 15:38 they were told, “Speak to the children of Israel. Tell them to make tassels on the corners of their garments.”

What that meant was that they were to leave the threads at the bottom of their robes. They wore long robes. Leave those threads loose, and just tie them up, and that would be a reminder, verse 39,—“And you shall have the tassel, that you may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them.” So this is a reminder.

What happened towards the time of Jesus is that they took the phylacteries and they were made bigger and bigger.

I’ve looked for a picture I have somewhere. I saw a display down in the Western Wall Tunnels that since has been moved, and the phylacteries were, the boxes were, two to three times larger than what they wear today. It was all about show. And what was going on with the hems on the garments as they were letting these get longer and longer, and all of this would be a sign of spirituality.

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

I found an example of this in the Babylonian Talmud. The Talmud is a commentary on the Mishnah. The Mishnah was a collection of the teachings of the rabbis from about 200 BC until AD 200.

In AD 200, a man by the name of Judah the Prince, Judah Hanasi, in Hebrew Yehuda HaNasi, organized and systematized all of this oral tradition. That became the Mishnah.

After that, the rabbis wrote commentaries on the Mishnah that became known as the Talmud.

So there are two Talmud traditions; there’s the Babylonian Talmud and there’s a Jerusalem Talmud.

This is from the Babylonian Talmud in the Tractate Sotah 22a, where it reads, “Our rabbis taught: Who is an ’Am ha-arez?”

That is Hebrew for “who is a person of the land,” but that’s a very pejorative insult because a person of the land was—we would call him a secular Jew— a non-observant Jew. This is someone who had no religious inclinations whatsoever. This is a bad thing. So they’re going to describe what it means to be “’Am ha-arez”, or a person of the land.

A person of the land is someone who “doesn’t recite the Shema morning and evening with its accompanying benedictions.” To be really holy, and not a secular Jew scumbag, you need to recite the Shema twice a day along with all the blessings.

This is what Rabbi Meir said. The sages say, “Whoever does not put on the phylacteries.”

So that’s the emphasis on the phylacteries. If you don’t put on your phylacteries, then you’re just worthless spiritually.

Ben Azzai says: “Whoever has not the fringe upon his garment.”

Rabbi Jonathan ben Joseph says, “Whoever has sons and does not rear them to study Torah.”

Others say—notice this—“Even if he learned Scripture and Mishnah but did not attend upon rabbinical scholars, he’s an ’Am ha-arez.”

The reason I put that in is because Jesus didn’t go to rabbinical school, so He would have been considered a spiritual scumbag, a nonobservant Jew because He had, in their view, no authority, can’t say anything because He would be in an ’Am ha-arez.

They are emphasizing this. I pointed this out because they emphasize wearing the phylacteries, wearing the fringes.

Slide 19

Now also, they were into making sure everybody noticed them. “They love the best places at feasts, the best seats in the synagogues.”

They wanted to be seen. They wanted to come in, they wanted to sit on the right front row, they wanted to wear all the right clothes—there’s a little bit of a picture of this at the end of James 1 and beginning in James 2—and then they were focused on impressive titles.

This passage is often misunderstood and misapplied by a lot of Christians because they don’t understand the context, and the historical context, and what was actually going on in Judaism at that time.

Slide 20

It says, “They enjoyed the greetings in the marketplace, and to be called by men, ‘Rabbi Rabbi.’ ”

Literally the meaning of Rabbi, the root there, is “the great one.” So whenever you say “Rabbi,” literally you’re saying “my great one”, but it came to refer to “my teacher.”

Then Jesus said, “But you, do not be called ‘Rabbi;’ for One is your Teacher, the Christ, and you are all brethren.”

Now a lot of people have taken this and said, “Well, that means you shouldn’t call a pastor a teacher.” The problem with that is that Paul clearly makes a distinction when he talks about the spiritual gifts, and he says some are given the gift of teaching. You’ve got to understand what’s going on here.

What is happening here is that the Rabbi is not just in love with this title, but that it gives him a special spiritual authority. Whatever he says is it. He is the absolute authority with no question.

Now we don’t do that in the church today. There may be some Christian traditions that do something similar to that, but when we go to seminary, we refer to professors as “Doctor” because it’s a term of respect, and they earned it, but it doesn’t mean that they have this level of authority. You call a pastor “Pastor,” sometimes “Reverend”, referring to some of his teaching. That’s not what Jesus is talking about.

When we look at the ninth verse there, “Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven,” you have to understand that they wouldn’t even call a living rabbi a father. A father was somebody who had absolute authority. Like Shammai or Hillel, they’re dead, but their pronouncements would have been given the status of divine revelation.

In the church, as the Church Age developed, the generation following the disciples was often called the apostolic fathers. They’d come close to trying to give those early church fathers in the second century that same level of authority. But if you read them, they were really confused and messed up on a lot of doctrine.

So this isn’t saying that you shouldn’t call a pastor, “teacher” or “pastor,” or something like that because it doesn’t carry the same weight that it did in Judaism. You’re basically elevating them to a level of an adjudicator of divine revelation, someone who was giving divine revelation. It was an absolutist type position.

The other thing, this goes back to the title “What Kind of Rabbi are You?” and I’m going to run through this very quickly. According to this same Tractate Sotah, a little further on, says:

“There are seven different types of Pharisees: the shikmi, the nikpi, the kizai, the ‘pestle’ [the Pharisee who constantly exclaims] ‘What is my duty that I may perform it?’, and the Pharisee who is motivated by the love [of God], and the Pharisee who is motivated by the love of fear.”

The one who is motivated by the love of God is the good Pharisee, like Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea. But the Pharisees—I’ve pointed this out because the Pharisees—recognize there were a lot of Pharisees who were wrong, who were operating on a lot of wrong things.

Slide 22

I’ll just run through this quickly.

The shikmi from the word “Shechem” goes back to Genesis 34 when you had (I believe) a Levite and one of the other brothers forcefully circumcise all the men of Shechem because Shechem had raped their sister. So that has no spiritual value. It is just a surface thing. That came to be known as the idea of external obedience, but no internal reality. The Jerusalem Talmud said that this was somebody who carried his religious duties on his shoulder; that is, he had good external actions, but it was just all show.

Slide 23

The nikpi Pharisee is the one who would knock his feet together, and this is somebody who walked with exaggerated humility, so that everybody would know that he was obeying Scripture. It’s also called the “wait a little” Pharisees who always found excuses for putting off a good deed. That’s another explanation.

The top part of these slides comes from the Talmud itself; the bottom part, which I’ve run across a lot of different explanations of this that are all basically saying the same thing, and that’s their interpretation of this, comes from both Christian and Jewish sources.

Slide 24

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

Slide 25

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

Slide 26

The fifth kind is the Pharisee who says, “What is my duty that I may perform it?” “But that’s a virtue,” they say. “No! What he says is what further duty is for me that I may perform it, as though he had fulfilled every obligation.” Again, it’s a form of hypocrisy. He is always, as is explained later, the one who’s always weighing his good deeds against the bad, “I’ve done three mitzvahs today so I can get away with three sins.” He’s always balancing things out.

Slide 27

Six and seven talk about, and I usually combine the Pharisee from love and the Pharisee from fear—so I’ll just skip that slide.

Slide 28

The fearful Pharisees are those who are motivated by fear. They’re afraid they’re going to do the wrong thing, and God’s going to punish them.

Slide 29

But it’s the seventh one who’s the only one who’s properly focused. He’s the Pharisee who really loves God in his heart and takes delight in the Law.

So six of them are wrong. These are the ones Jesus is really condemning. There were some Pharisees, not just Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who responded to Jesus as the Messiah, but most of them did not. They all fit into those other six categories. This is why Jesus concludes by focusing the issue on humility. Six of the seven are operating in arrogance. They have no humility whatsoever.

Slide 30

And Jesus said, “He who is greatest among you shall be your servant.”

In six of those, they’re all looking to be served by others, and to have people honor them with the titles and with the names, and sitting up in the front of the synagogue, and always being publicly recognized.

Jesus said, “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

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

Closing Prayer

“Father, thank You for this opportunity to study these things, to be reminded of the dangers and the evil of religion and religiosity, the dangers of superficiality, and the horrible danger of those who sought to prevent people from following Jesus, from responding to Him as Messiah or accepting His offer of the Kingdom. These are the true hypocrites.

“Father, we pray for each one here that we may evaluate our own lives in light of Your Word, that we might not succumb to superficiality, simply external obedience, but that we might see a true transformation from the inside out, that we may be grace oriented and humble under Your mighty hand, focusing on who You are and what You have provided for us.

“Father we pray that if there is anyone listening this morning, listening to this lesson, that they would understand that there is nothing we can do to gain Your recognition or to please You. Scripture says all of our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. The only way that we can have righteousnesses is for it to be given to us, and as Isaiah 53:10 says, that what the Messiah came to do is to justify the many, to make righteous the many, and as Abraham was justified by faith alone, that he believed God, and it was accounted to him as righteousness. So this is how we gain righteousness—by believing the gospel, and we are credited with the righteousness of Jesus Christ. So if you have never responded to the gospel or heard the gospel before, the good news is that salvation and eternal life for you, is simply by believing that Jesus died for your sins.

“Father, we pray that You’ll challenge us with what we’ve learned this morning. In Christ’s name, amen.”