The Gospel of Matthew #21: Jesus vs. The Pharisees

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The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.

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Is religion hard or easy? It’s funny, but if you listen to Jesus on one occasion, he seems to say that it was hard. On another occasion, he said it was easy. Is religion complicated or is it simple? Now, if you listen to some teachers, you would think there was nothing to it at all. All you have to do is give your hand to the preacher and your heart to the Lord, and it’s a done deal. After that, just go to church from time to time, and the rest doesn’t matter very much. But most of us, most of us know intuitively that there’s something wrong with that picture. It just doesn’t feel right. Surely there’s got to be more to it than that. Surely we can’t just go back and live our life like we’ve always lived it after we’ve gotten saved. That’s not going to wash. Really. On the other hand, there are those who make religion nearly impossible. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were a case in point. They had a terrible, long list of do’s and don’ts, things you had to do, things you couldn’t do. I mean, it wasn’t a list as long as your arm. It was a list as long as from here to Los Angeles. They had a lot of things you had to think about. In fact, they had taken a day, the Sabbath day, that God had intended to be liberating, to set man free. They had turned it into a burden. Now, Matthew, in his gospel, connects one of Jesus’ great promises to this. He sets it alongside a conflict with the Pharisees on just this point, and it kind of helps us maybe a little bit with this question of whether religion is hard or easy. Jesus said in Matthew 11 and verse 28, “‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'” You know, you think about it. That’s what Sabbath day is all about. For six days out of the week, you’re wandering around under a heavy load. You’re carrying a burden. You’re dragging things behind you. He says, come to me, you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you will find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Now, just so you understand what he’s talking about here, a yoke is a thing that you put across the shoulders of a couple of oxen with lines going back to something you’re going to draw along behind you. So he speaks of that yoke, which is easy. It doesn’t hurt your shoulders. It’s not going to be hard. He says, my burden, that which you’re going to carry under a yoke or behind a yoke is light. Now, he is trying to say to people at this time that his teachings, in contrast with those of those Pharisees whom they had known, were not going to be as strict, not going to be as harsh, not going to be as burdensome. And he begins to illustrate it. Actually, Matthew, in this sense, chooses to illustrate it by an incident that took place in Jesus’ ministry. Beginning in Matthew 12, verse 1, He tells us this, At that time Jesus went on the Sabbath day through the corn. And his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck the ears of corn and to eat. A simple enough thing. As you walk by, you sort of grab a head of grain. You pull it off the stalk. You rub it between your hands and pop it into your mouth and munch as you go on down the row. Now, when the Pharisees saw what they were doing, they said to him, Look, your disciples are doing that which is not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day. You’re not allowed to do that. I don’t know about you, but that’s going a bit far. I mean, here we are. We’re walking through a field. There is some grain there. I just pick some and eat it as I walk through. What’s the difference between that and sitting at a breakfast table with a bowl of grain in front of me and having a spoonful and taking it to my mouth and eating it? There’s no more work involved in the one than in the other. Now, being the common sense kind of person that you and I are, we can search that Bible from one end to the other, and we’ll never find a commandment that says, you can’t pull off a head of grain and munch it as you go down the row. Not at all. The only commandment we will find says this, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. That is to set it apart. Six days shall you labor and get all your work done. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work. You nor your son, your daughter, your manservant, maidservant, cattle, or stranger that’s within your gates. You’re not going to do any work, and you’re not going to require any work of anybody. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and everything that is in them, and he rested the seventh day. Wherefore, the Lord blessed the seventh day, the Sabbath day, and set it apart. So we’re supposed to set it apart with him. Now, if we’re going to split hairs as the Pharisees were prone to do, we would wonder, as I asked you earlier, what’s the difference between lifting a spoonful of grain to our lips from a bowl and lifting a handful of grain to the mouth in the field? Give me a break. I mean, what’s going on here? Well, the Pharisee would probably come back and say, if you would pluck one handful of grain, would you pluck two? and being the innocent, naive person that you are, you’d say, well, yeah. And he would then respond, well, if you’d pluck two, why not three? And you would probably say, well, why not? Well, if three, why not the whole field? You’re harvesting, no matter how small, and you should not be harvesting grain on the Sabbath day. He’d probably send you wandering away, muttering to yourself. Now, there is no one so block-headed as a righteous person. So Jesus set out to explain and to demonstrate what was wrong with their thinking. He said to them, Question mark. Now, his listeners knew exactly what he was talking about. You may not. In the Old Testament law, there was a provision made for fresh baked bread to be put on a table outside of the Holy of Holies every day. The bread was considered holy, and only people who were holy were supposed to eat of it. And specifically, that meant the priests. Now, there came an occasion where David and his men were fleeing from Saul, and they had been on a long march across hot, dry land. There was nothing to eat, and they were pretty well faint by the time they got to the tabernacle. And David asked the priest who was in attendance, is there any food here? And he said, well, no, there isn’t. The only thing that’s here is the bread that’s prepared, the holy bread before God that’s for the priests. But I suppose that if your young men have kept themselves apart for a few days so that they’re holy, maybe it would be all right. And David said, well, yeah, we have. And they together reasoned together that they thought it would really be okay. And so they went ahead and ate it. Now, what’s interesting about this is that Jesus considers this exception that David and this local priest agreed upon to be an exception. And he says they ate the showbread, which was not lawful for him to eat. They broke the law. No question, no argument, no nothing. What they did was contrary to the law, but according to Jesus, it was not wrong. It was acceptable. It was an exception. Now, what Jesus then is arguing is a law of exceptions. Sometimes, in extreme cases, the law can be broken without penalty. Impunity means no one will punish you. Now, exceptions to the law make the Pharisaical types grind their teeth. The reason is because they feel a complete loss of control once you start making exceptions. Well, if you can make an exception on this, why not that? And if on that, why not this? And they just think that it’s the slippery slope to oblivion, that once you start making exceptions to the law of God, well, there’s no way to draw any lines on it. Well, when you think about it, though, the only person that really needs to be drawing the line is the person who made the exception himself. And he knows why he did it. And he knows whether he honors God or not. And he knows whether it was an exception or whether he just didn’t care about the law anymore. But the truth is the people who care about the law and who see that an exception to the law can be made in certain places are honoring the law in the exception. They’re saying, I know it’s the law of God, but I feel this particular case is an exception, and when the exception is passed, I’m back to obeying the law of God just as I have before. Now, Jesus went on to explain. He said, haven’t you read in the law how that on the Sabbath day, the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are blameless? Well, I’ll say, you know, he didn’t say that they didn’t profane the law. He said they did. But he said, having profaned the law of the Sabbath day, they are still without blame. How can that be? Now, this is not an exception in an extreme case. This is a regular weekly exception. Every Sabbath day, week in, week out, throughout the year, they made that exception. Now, why did they do it? Well, it happens because two laws have come into conflict. The one says you have to keep the Sabbath. No work may be done. The other says the priests have to kill and sacrifice animals on the Sabbath day. Well, now, you and I know God should never have put together a legal system that allowed two laws to come into conflict. That should never have happened. Well, it did. Now, logically, when this happens, we would expect the greater law to take precedence over the lesser law, right? Right. And the Ten Commandments being the moral law are greater than the sacrificial system, right? Oh, yeah, well, right. Well, then this conflict should be settled in favor of the Ten Commandments, right? Wrong. Wrong. The conflict was settled in favor of the sacrificial law, which almost implies that the sacrificial law was greater than the Ten Commandments. But how could that be? Well, I’ll let you think about it, and we’ll talk some more about it in just a moment.

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So we have two laws that are in conflict with one another. We have the fourth commandment, which says on the Sabbath day you’re not to do any work. And then we have a law that commands the priest to make certain specific offerings of animals on the Sabbath day, which meant they had to kill the animal, they had to take his blood and sprinkle it, had to cut him up, had to burn parts of it. That’s hard, sweaty work in the summertime. and they had to do it. Not only that, Jesus said that what they were doing actually did profane, I should say, the Sabbath, and they’re blameless in the doing of it. Now, what are we to make of all this? Because it seems that it makes the sacrificial law more important than the Ten Commandments. Is the temple and its service greater than the law? Yes, exactly, and the reason why it is so may surprise you. The temple and its altar and its courts were a stage upon which the plan of salvation was acted out regularly by the priests. They had a calendar that they followed, a liturgical calendar, and on certain days of the year and certain occasions of the year, specific things had to be done. And God being – I don’t know what the word I want to use in this case, but there’s a passage of Scripture that says that it is the honor of God – or rather the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the honor of kings to search it out. The fact is that many aspects of the plan of God are concealed. They’re not obvious. They’re not something that you can look at. And so I see why they’re just plain to you. You have to study them, think about them, pray about them, and grow to understand them. One of the reasons for that, I think, is not so much that God is being obscure. as an acknowledgment that what he’s trying to explain to us is not that easy, and we’re going to have to work some if we’re going to understand it. But regularly, on the stage of the temple, the plan of salvation was acted out. Everything about the temple service had to do with approaching God, with acknowledging God, with being forgiven, of being reconciled with God, and of learning about what God is doing, and what may even be more important, why He was doing it. What could be more important in the plan of God than reconciling the sinner to God? Well, nothing. Because, in fact, man is the object of God’s creation. Man is the reason why he put all this thing together down here. Man is the reason why Christ came and gave his life as a sacrifice for sin. The salvation of man, the reconciling of man to himself, is what God is all about, and nothing is more important to God than that. Much more. We might even find a way of arguing that all of the temple service prefigured the work of Jesus Christ, who is a high priest in his own right. And so it is only fit and proper that the service of the temple should be greater than the law. And that the sacrifices that were offered by the priests, which involved the shedding of blood without which there is no remission of sin, and which shedding of blood pictured and looked forward to the shedding of the blood of the righteous Son of God, Jesus Christ, it’s only right and proper that that work should supersede the law. All the law does is just define right from wrong. All the law does is just tell us, well, this is sin and this is not. And once we’re guilty of sin, the law is helpless. There’s not a thing the law can do to help us, save us, rescue us, or pull us out of it in any way. The only thing that can help us then is Jesus Christ, who died for us and sits at the right hand of the Father, ready always to make intercession for us. So the temple and its service were greater than the law. Now listen to what Jesus has to say beyond that. Quote, But I say unto you that in this place is one greater than the temple. What a statement to make to those men at that time. Because what Jesus is saying is that he, standing in that place at that time, was greater than the temple. Because you see, as great as the temple and its services were, all they were was a shadow, an image of the work of the great high priest Jesus Christ. That everything that happened there was a prefiguring of Jesus Christ and his work. Everything about the temple pointed to, looked toward, hoped for Jesus Christ and his sacrifice. Although in old times they had no idea what his name would be. Although in a way, maybe they did, because Jesus’ name, which is Joshua in Hebrew, means Savior. And Christ, or Messiah, was a word well-known and well-understood. So Jesus says the temple is nothing but a stage upon which His work was carried out, or rather acted out. It was Jesus Himself who would reconcile sinners to God, not the law, not the temple. It was only a play in several acts. Jesus and His work his death and his suffering. These are the reality. Jesus went on to say to these men, You know, fellows, if you had known what this means, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless. For although these fellows broke your rules, they’re not guilty before God. And then he makes a truly astonishing statement. He said, He would not have condemned the guiltless, for the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath day. And he claims lordship over the Sabbath. He has claimed to be greater than the temple, and the temple is greater than the law, which of course makes Jesus greater than the law. And so in his mercy, he chose not to condemn David for eating the showbread. In his mercy, he chooses not to hold the priest blamed for killing animals on the Sabbath day. And so on it goes. Now, I think it’s fair to say that by this time, the Pharisees had lost sight of what the law was all about. They had placed the law above everything. Man was supposed to be subservient to the law. Instead of the law being made for man and man’s benefit, man was made and put down here on the earth to bow down, scrape and before and to serve the law. And that’s not what God had in mind. Now, I don’t think it’s surprising the Pharisees had lost sight of it, because I think many Christians today have lost sight of what the law is about as well. They fall into two camps, actually, the antinomians, or the anti-law group, and the legalists. The one group say, oh, no, the law was done away with. We don’t have to pay any attention at all to that. And the legalists, well, they’re not very far from the Pharisaical position. They feel that you’ve got to obey certain kinds of laws, and if you don’t, you can’t be saved. And, you know, I understand that God expects us to be obedient to him, But the law doesn’t save. Paul said, By grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It’s the gift of God, lest any man should boast. Now, does that do away with the law? Oh, my, no, of course not, because the law still defines right from wrong. If there’s no law, you’re never a sinner, and you don’t need any grace in the first place. I don’t know why that is so hard to understand, but people still miss it. But consider what Jesus said about this matter of law. He said that mercy allows exceptions. The Pharisees simply didn’t. Well, they did too. They had their exceptions and their way of going. But, well, we’ll come to them in a moment. Mercy will let the sinner off. But the Pharisees, no, no, they wanted to exact their pound of flesh. You know, a part of this, and lying down in the root of it somewhere, is the idea that the sinner deserves to be sick. The guy who’s sick out here, the guy who’s blind, the guy who’s lame, well, this has happened to him because he’s a dirty, rotten sinner. And, okay, we can heal him, but not on a Sabbath day. I mean, mercy is not what’s at question here. The law is more important than mercy. And Jesus, while he knows that sin is in the world and that illness and sickness and disease are in the world because of sin, does not feel that the man who is sitting in the synagogue with a withered arm is worse than the people sitting in the synagogue who are whole. That’s one of the big differences in his line of thinking from that of the Pharisees. Now, there’s one other very important point to make out of this passage, and I’ll tell you what that is after these words.

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I don’t know if you caught the significance of the last phrase of Jesus’ statement. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath day. What I feel necessary to point out to you about this is that he was not talking about Sunday. People tend to think that Sunday is the Sabbath. In fact, you may be able to go to church on Sunday morning and hear one of the deacons or somebody close or open in prayer and say, Thank you, Lord, for this glorious Sabbath day. But it’s not. If you’ll ask almost any pastor of a church or teacher or theologian, they will tell you, no, no, Sunday’s not the Sabbath day. Saturday is the Sabbath day, and Sunday is the Lord’s day. The church worships on Sunday, not because it’s the Sabbath, but because it’s the day of the resurrection and it’s the Lord’s day. Well, he’s half right. Notice, though, what Jesus said, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath day. So if we’re looking at the day of the week, it’s going to be the Lord’s day. Jesus said right here in this place that the Lord’s day is the Sabbath day, the seventh day Sabbath, Saturday. Sorry about that, but I thought you ought to know. If you plan to keep the Ten Commandments, you oughtn’t to forget the fourth one. But Jesus isn’t through challenging the Pharisees on the Sabbath day or about the Sabbath day. But his next challenge is not going to be so much in the way of argument. He’s just going to do something that illustrates and underlines his point. It says in verse 9 of Matthew 12, When he left that place, he went into their synagogue. And look, there was a man there that had his hand withered. And they ask him, saying, Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day? And they ask him this so they could accuse him. They knew what he was going to say. They knew precisely that Jesus believed that healing on the Sabbath day was right, and they did not believe it was right. Now, I’ll tell you, that’s very hard to understand. The only thing that actually puts any light on it at all is the conviction, not fairly widely held, I think, probably at the time, and maybe even to this day, that if you are sick, if you are diseased, God’s afflicting you because you have done something wrong. So here’s this poor guy with a withered arm sitting in a synagogue. And they say, well, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day? And he said to them, Well, what man shall there be among you that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it and lift it out? He looked around at the group listening to him. Well, I would. Not only do you have the matter of economic loss, you leave that sheep in there and it dies, you’ve lost some money. I wouldn’t like that to happen. But not only that, I feel sorry for the sheep. I wouldn’t want the animal to suffer. Now, I would gather from the question and answer that this point is one upon which Jesus and the Pharisees would have agreed. Otherwise, it makes no sense to bring it in. They would go out there and get the sheep out. What does this tell us? Well, it tells us that the Pharisees did allow for exceptions to the Sabbath law. No, right? They allowed an exception for a sheep. Jesus then goes on to say in verse 12, Well, how much better is a man than a sheep? Give me a break. Are you going to tell me you’d go out and get a sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath day, and here’s a man standing before me, and I have the power to make his withered hand whole, and you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t do this? He said to the man, Stretch out your hand. And he stretched it forth, and it was restored whole like the other. Jesus said, it’s lawful to do well on the Sabbath day. Now this doesn’t sound like very much work to me. If I had been able to do it, I would have done it, and so would you. And think of it from the point of view of the poor guy that had his arm healed. This is wonderful. Why make him wait another day to get it done when Jesus might not even be around the next morning? Now how did the Pharisees take it? Here’s a confrontation. They said, is it really lawful to heal on the Sabbath day? You shouldn’t be doing that. And Jesus said, well, let me give you an illustration. Then he proceeded to do it right in front of their eyes, and the man’s arm was made better. Now, how did they take it? Were they convinced? Did they glorify God and say, why, look how wrong we have been in our interpretation of the law? No. Verse 14 tells us, then the Pharisees went out and held a council against him, how they might destroy him. How many times do you suppose in The past years before this had someone come into the synagogue on any other day of the week and healed. When was the last time somebody with a withered arm had been healed? In fact, how come they made it all the way to the Sabbath day before this man with his withered hand was healed? Why didn’t somebody heal him on Friday or Thursday or Wednesday? Well, they couldn’t. And so here standing in the synagogue on the Sabbath day is the one person in the whole universe that can. And he does. He does. and they’re ready to kill him for it. Of all the reactions there might have been to this event, this one is the most astonishing. They were prepared to plot murder, to break the sixth commandment, because in their eyes, Jesus had broken the fourth. But he had not broken the commandment. There was nothing in the fourth commandment to forbid what Jesus had done. What he did was to reinterpret the Sabbath command, rejecting the Pharisees’ judgments and restoring the intent of the original commandment. In doing so, far from doing away with the Sabbath, Jesus reaffirmed the Sabbath. He made the day his own. Now forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but this has far-reaching implications for Christian practice, don’t you think? Until next time, this is Ronald Dart reminding you,

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