Join us as we unravel the complex layers behind the teachings of Jesus, focusing on His use of Hebrew idioms and the assumptions of knowledge He made about His listeners. We discuss the religious culture of His era, the irony of those who demanded signs despite the miracles He performed, and how cultural traditions can blur the lines of true biblical authority. Discover how Jesus’ words continue to challenge religious norms and inspire a purer form of faith that transcends cultural rituals.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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When you’re reading the Bible, especially the words of Jesus, Have you ever wondered why Jesus did not speak more plainly? He was a man of few words, and I often find myself wishing for more words from him, more detail, more explanation, so that I could, well, I’ve just got a lot of questions I’d like to ask. Only a part of the problem is the brevity of Jesus’ remarks, because he really did keep his sentences short and his words few. But part of it is an assumption of knowledge on the part of his listeners. In other words, Jesus assumed that people listening to him understood certain things. He’s building on a foundation. And he looked out the crowd ahead in front of him and says, now these people surely have read the Scriptures. Surely they know what the Old Testament says. And there’s an assumption on his part that they know that. And I think the problem of a lot of modern readers is they have not read the Old Testament, at least have not read it very carefully, and are not familiar with the history. And as a consequence, they really don’t understand some of the things Jesus says. Part of our modern problem too is that we’ve got a lot of preconceived opinions about what Jesus said. You know, we hear all kinds of things in church. We hear sermons. We read books about it. And so we, over time, get this idea in our mind of what Jesus was all about. And then when we encounter something that Jesus actually said in the Bible that doesn’t match that opinion we hold, Well, we get confused, and more often than not, we dismiss what we just read that Jesus said, or we reinterpret it to fit the model we have always believed, or we say to ourselves, well, he couldn’t possibly mean that. And the result is that we end up with a very imperfect understanding of Jesus and his words. Part of our problem, too, is that Jesus spoke in the idiom of the time, and some of that idiom is lost on the translators. The information just has not carried through. An idiom is an expression, the meaning of which is not predictable from the usual grammatical rules of language or the usual meaning of its words. For example, if you said your grandfather kicked a bucket, try translating that into French. In this modern day and age, as much as we know about one another’s language, the French might possibly have adopted that phrase as one of their own. But it’s an English idiom. The words kick the bucket do not mean anything remotely resembling die. Literally. They only mean so as an English idiom. And our problem is that in Jesus’ words, he uses Hebrew idioms that have been translated into Greek for us as we read them in the New Testament, because Jesus was not speaking Greek most of the time to his audiences, even though the New Testament is written in Greek. He was speaking probably Aramaic, and they heard what he said, listened to it, and the elements of style, the idioms, the elements of grammar were all Aramaic. And so we, having gone through the change of two languages and sitting here 2,000 years later without the cultural background of it, we have a hard time sometimes understanding exactly what Jesus said. There are a lot of those idioms in the New Testament. Translators do their best with them, but they drive the literalists crazy. That is, the people who insist that you have to take Jesus literally all the time. Well, part of the reason why Jesus often seems obscure is that he was positively curt with some of the people in the religious establishment of the time. He flat was not going to give those people the time of day. He was certainly not going to explain anything he said to them, for an explanation would have done him no good at all. An interesting example of this is found in Matthew, the 12th chapter, verse 38. Some of the scribes and Pharisees said, Master, we would like to see a sign from you. Now, here’s a situation that Jesus has been performing miracles all over the place. Blind people have been seeing. The deaf have been hearing. You know, how much of a sign do you really need from God? But here they are. They say, Master, we want a sign from you. And Jesus answered and said, An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, but there shall no sign be given to it. but the sign of the prophet Jonah. Well, they didn’t, I guess, consider the miracles a sign, and since Jesus said, well, you don’t think that’s sufficient, you’re not going to get anything else except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Now, there is no explanation in this of death and resurrection. Just this. You and I are able to sort it out. We know he’s talking about his death, his burial, and his resurrection after three days. But his audience, we have the rest of the New Testament to work with. But the lawyers that heard him say this were at a dead loss. They probably assumed that this is some kind of deep allegory. And when Jesus went away, they probably spent the rest of the day trying to sort out exactly what he meant by it. Well, Jesus used allegories, but this was not one of them. He would quite literally be dead for three days and three nights, and he’d be in the grave that period of time. Mind you, three days and three nights, not one day and two nights, which nearly everybody assumes. Also note, he’ll be in the grave, not somewhere else. Now, there are other sayings of Jesus that are not as obscure as they first seem. Our problem is that we try to make more of them than Jesus really intended. An example of this is found in Mark 3 and verse 31. There came then to him his brethren and his mother, and they stood outside the house and called him. And the crowd that sat around Jesus, they said to him, Look, your mother and your brothers are outside looking for you. And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother or my brothers? And he looked round about on them that sat in front of him and said, Look, my mother and my brothers. For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same as my brother and my sister and my mother. Now, you could make a mistake here in assuming that Jesus did not care that his mother was outside. There’s no reason to say that from this passage, nor is there any reason to assume he did not presently go out to them. But what he did when someone made that statement was to take this occasion to establish the idea of a family relationship among the people who do the will of God. It means that you and I can actually be family to Jesus. That’s simple enough, isn’t it?
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I’ll be back in a moment with more of the words of Jesus. Many people have confused the return of Christ with the end of the world and caused untold heartache and worry. Learn about the assumptions people make and how not to make them yourself. Write or call for a free program titled, Are We Living in the Last Days? Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. or call toll-free 1-888-BIBLE-44.
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In any religion, over time, there’s a culture that develops. There are practices and customs and phrases and verbiage that the people who attend there come to understand, but a visitor might come in and be really something at a loss. Every church has its own jargon that forms a part of the culture. And people can identify you right away if you don’t know what to say and when to say it. They have expressions like slain in the spirit. They may be talking about, well, I was slain in the spirit. And if you’re an onlooker, just, you know, you’ve never been there, never done that. What in the world does it mean being slain in the spirit? Well, it means something very real to them, that the whole power of the spirit comes upon them and they fall flat on the floor on their back and are stiff for however long it might be and can’t move. To you, it might mean killed. You know, slain is to be killed in the spirit, and maybe you just died the spirit, but that’s not what they mean. There’s so much of that that, like I said, if you don’t know what to say and when to say it, they know immediately whether you belong or not. Someone was talking once about visiting a Catholic church and the strange experience of not knowing when to stand and when to kneel and when to sit. He joked that he felt it was designed to find out who the strangers were. Everybody all of a sudden went down to their knees and left the strangers standing there so they all knew who the visitors were on that day. The problem with a religious culture is that sometimes we lose track of where religion ends and culture begins. And when I say that, what I mean is we lose track of where the biblical authority, the really authoritative religion that we believe and must believe, where that ends and where the culture begins that surrounds that religion, which is not so much a matter of the true faith once delivered to the saints, but is really our own particular version of it. When Jesus was walking the streets of Jerusalem, there was a well-established religious culture. And there was an assumption on the part of the Jews that God had ordained that culture. And what I mean by that is that there was the fundamental law of God that formed the basis of their religion. And all around that law, they had built customs and practices. And it was very hard for them sometimes to make the distinction between what God had revealed and what they had decided they were going to do. Well, now, Jesus did not see the religion that God delivered the way they did. He saw clearly the delineation between their customs and their practices and what God had commanded. On one occasion, it’s recorded in Luke 11 and verse 37, as he was speaking, a certain Pharisee asked him to dinner. And he went and he sat down to food. And when the Pharisee saw him come in and sit straight down, he marveled that he had not first washed before dinner. Now, it’s obvious to anybody that it’s a good thing to wash your hands before you eat a meal, but most people know now that unless your hands are abnormally dirty, there’s no risk in eating without washing. You’re not going to get germs. There’s a kind of a natural germicide on your hands anyway from the acids, I guess, that are there, and that sometimes washing your hands too much gets rid of that and makes you more vulnerable. But in spite of that, what goes into your mouth has to face the stomach acids, and that’s not how we get most of our infections. And he just looked at it and said, this is not right. Well, the Lord said to him, You Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter. You do a lot of ritual washing of dishes and pots and pans. But your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness. You fool. Did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also? If you just give alms of such things as you have, look, all things are clean to you. Now, this is tough talk he’s giving. He called them fools. But it’s not hard to understand. What Jesus is saying here is that they have substituted ritual cleanliness for moral cleanliness. When your heart is dirty, it is not going to help you to spend more time washing your hands. It’s not unusual to find a man substituting the outward form of religion in the place of living a moral life, is it? I don’t have a lot of trouble figuring that out. You know, when it’s easy to go out and wash your hands, it’s easy to go to church. It’s easy to do all the ceremonial types of things people do in religion. It’s not so simple to straighten out the inside of your heart and of your life. Jesus is actually laying the groundwork here for what Paul would later say about justification by works. You can’t make your heart clean by washing your hands. That’s a simple explanation of what Paul was driving at in many of his epistles. But Jesus went on to say, “‘Woe to you, Pharisees! You tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs. You’ll tithe meticulously of your herb garden even.'” and you’ll pass over the judgment and the love of God. Now, you ought to tithe, but you ought not to leave the other undone either. Woe unto you, Pharisees! You love the uppermost seats in the synagogues. You love the greetings in the markets. You love to be recognized. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You are as graves which do not appear, and men walk over them and are not aware of them. Now, what does that mean? Well, there’s a passage in the law to the effect that if a man touches a grave, he’ll be unclean for seven days. So, theoretically, if you walked across a grave you did not even know was there, you’d be unclean for seven days. Now, be careful. Be sure you understand. It is no sin to be unclean according to the law. A woman was unclean after having a baby. And she doesn’t sin when she has a baby. There’s just an issue of blood, and that makes her unclean ceremonially. It’s not a sin. But… It was a sin to enter the courts of the temple to do sacrifice when one was unclean. In other words, the laws of cleanliness and uncleanness had to do with your ability to approach God in the ceremonial, Levitical way. You’re unclean. You can’t come in here and offer a sacrifice. Consequently, it was very important that graves be well marked, because if you walk across a grave, you’re unclean. You don’t know it, you go in unclean before God, and that’s not right. So the scribes and the Pharisees appeared to be righteous, but they had the effect of turning people into unwitting sinners, because they were hypocrites. They played at religion. They pretended to be religious, but they were not. Then answered one of the lawyers and said to him, Master, in saying this, you reproach us also. Now, I don’t know what he expected Jesus to say as a response to that. Here Jesus is talking to the Pharisees and the scribes, and he says these things to them. And the lawyer speaks up and says, well, Master, you’re reproaching us also if you say that. I guess he thought that that might intimidate Jesus and say, oh, well, I didn’t really mean to do that. But that’s not the response he got. Jesus turned and looked him in the face and said, well, and to you also, lawyers. For you laid men with burdens grievous to be born, and you won’t touch one of the burdens with one of your own fingers. You know, nothing changes, does it? In any society, it seems like the lawyers are the ones who think they don’t have to obey the law. They know the law. They can use the law. They can take advantage of the law. And as a consequence, they often break the law and get away with it. And so Jesus said to the lawyers in his own day, Woe to you, lawyers! You laid men with burdens grievous to be born, and you won’t touch one of the burdens with your own fingers. Woe unto you! You build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers kill the prophets. And you bear witness that you allow the deeds of your fathers, for they kill them, and you build their graves. Therefore, thus saith the wisdom of God, I’m going to send prophets and apostles, and And some of them they shall slay and persecute. Wait a minute. What’s going on here? What’s going on here is that these men had said, they built the sepulchers of the prophets, the graves of the prophets, built them up and made them gorgeous. But it was their fathers that killed the prophets. And they used to say, well, boy, if we had been alive then, we would not have been the ones who killed the prophets. The response of God is, well, I’ll tell you what. We’ll find out. I will send you prophets and apostles. and some of them you will slay and persecute. I’m going to do this so the blood of all the prophets which were shed from the foundation of the world may be required of this generation. We’ll know whether you would have done it or not because of how you conduct yourself in the end. Woe unto you, lawyers! You have taken away the key of knowledge. You entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in you hindered. Well, how’d they do that? By their interpretation of the law, by their rewriting of the law, by their creating a whole new code of law around the law of God, which had nothing to do with it, and caused people to lose sight of God’s purpose and of God’s intent. As he said these things to them, the scribes and the Pharisees began to urge him vehemently and to provoke him to speak of all kinds of things. They were trying to trap him, seeking to catch something out of his mouth that they might accuse him. Jesus was making a lot of enemies. How about what he did? He was making enemies by his words. I’ll be back with more words of Jesus after this message.
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For a free copy of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only. And request the program titled, The Words of Jesus, number 16. Quite a crowd had collected. I can imagine there would. There’s nothing like a good verbal fight going on to bring people together to such an extent that people were stepping on one another.
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But Jesus began to speak to his disciples, first of all, to his close-in group. And he told them, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. Now, in this passage, there are a lot of disconnected sayings. They read almost like notes jotted down in the evening while the memory was still fresh of what Jesus had said during the day. In this statement, the warning is against hypocrisy. The word hypocrite, oddly enough, is a Greek word. It just transliterated into English. What it means is actor. In other words, Clark Gable was a hypocrite. Now, in Greek, that’s not a nasty word. That just simply means he is an actor. But for the Pharisees, it was a bit of a nasty word because what he was saying was that they were acting out a religion that had nothing to do with their heart and nothing had changed on the inside. that when they came to the temple, when they went through their rites of service, they were playing a part, a part that they did not necessarily really believe or that was not a part of them. Then comes a warning that every one of us should listen to very carefully. He said, “‘For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed.'” Stay away from this leaven of the Pharisees, this play actor’s mentality. “‘For there is nothing covered that was not going to be revealed. There is nothing hid that shall not be known.'” Therefore, whatever you have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light, and that which you have spoken in the air in closets will be proclaimed on the housetops. You know, in my lifetime, occasionally, I have sat in with someone who was contemplating or recommending an action that would not necessarily be wrong or illegal or unethical, but that should it become known would sure be certain to bring rather severe criticism. And when someone is talking about that and they say, but of course, no one will ever know. I cringe because I know what Jesus said in this situation. And my counsel has always been to proceed on the assumption that what can be known will be known. And don’t ever make a decision based on the assumption no one will ever know. You know, secrets create a lot of stress. There’s not a lot we can do about the old mistakes we have made and worry about and hope nobody ever finds out about. But starting today, we can proceed on the assumption that what can be known will be known. And we cannot do anything today of which we will be ashamed later when it does become known. You know, another lesson I think that’s very important and connected with this is humility. When you make yourself out to be a religious person, a righteous person, Always know that sooner or later the real truth about what is in your heart will come out. So it’s really unwise to get up on your high horse or up on your pedestal and pontificate about the weaknesses and the sins of other people because the truth is sooner or later your own weaknesses are going to come out as well. This little lesson ought to give us a lot more patience with the people that we are prone to criticize. And Jesus went on and said, I say unto you, my friends, don’t be afraid of those that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. Well, you think that should be obvious. Once they’ve killed the body, they are finished with you. But he went on to say this, I will forewarn you whom you should fear. Fear him who after he has killed has the power to cast into hell. Yes, I say unto you, fear him. Well, fear who? Fear God, obviously. Now, the word for hell most places in the New Testament is Hades, and it doesn’t mean much. It just means the grave. And this wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense if it was saying, fear him who after he has killed you has the power to put you in a grave, because that happens to all of us. The word he used here is not Hades, it’s Gehenna. And it’s a concept well known to Jesus’ listeners. In fact, if he’d been standing on the side of the Mount of Olives and mentioned Gehenna, his audience could have turned their head and have seen the valley of Hinnom, that is Gehenna, and probably the smoke arising from that valley. The valley of Hinnom, which is just outside of Jerusalem, was something of a trash disposal area. Fires burned there all the time. It was the place where the carcass of a dead animal would be taken to be burned along with every other kind of refuse that would be burned. I expect it was a very unpleasant kind of place, a place that around one of our modern cities we simply would not allow. What Jesus is saying here is don’t be afraid of a man who can kill you and you’ll be buried and resurrected. There’s nothing more he can do to you. But Gehenna, was to Jesus’ listeners a symbol of final and permanent destruction by fire, a destruction from which no resurrection was possible. Fear him, Jesus said, who can not only kill, but can throw your dead body into Gehenna for utter and final destruction. He continued, are not five sparrows sold for two farthings and not one of them is forgotten before God? Well, frankly, that seems kind of expensive for sparrows if you live where I do. But his point is still, sparrows are cheap. But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered, he said. Don’t be afraid. You are of more value than many sparrows. Also, I say unto you, whoever will confess me before men, him shall the Son of Man also confess before the angels of God. He that denies me before men shall be denied before the angels of God. And when they bring you into the synagogues and the magistrates and powers, don’t bother thinking ahead of time what you’re going to answer or what you’re going to say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you in the same hour what you ought to say. Now, this little passage is a bit chilling after the previous encounters Jesus has had with the Pharisees, because the disciples of Jesus who sat there and listened to this confrontation with these men men who were the religious establishment, men who had a considerable amount of power, men who actually had the power to do them some very real hurt. The disciples had to know that Jesus was infuriating these men and that as his disciples, they would come under suspicion and maybe even come under sanction. And sure enough, Jesus starts telling them, don’t worry about it. I mean, sparrows are cheap. You’re much more valuable than sparrows, but God knows the fall of every single sparrow. These men in the years to come would suffer an awful lot for their faith and for what they taught and what they believed and what they did. And Jesus right here, right up front, is telling them what’s going to come, but also that they would be winners. Until next time, this is Ronald Dart reminding you, hang in there, you were born to win.
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The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at…
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1-888-BIBLE-44 and visit us online at borntowin.net Christian Educational Ministries is happy to announce a new full-color Born to Win monthly newsletter with articles and free offers from Ronald L. Dart. Call us today at 1-888-BIBLE-44 to sign up or visit us at borntowin.net
