The Way of Confrontation

Introduction

I want to begin this morning by just making the admission that whatever I do this morning is going to be woefully inaccurate, not inaccurate, inadequate. Inaccurate would be bad. Inadequate to actually cover the depth of content of what’s going to happen through Matthew 21 through 23. So I just want to make that clear from the beginning. There’s so much rich material in here and what Jesus is doing. And so much of it is deep and difficult, and we’ll only be able to cover so much in what we’re going to do in this short period of time. And a lot of that’s going to be focused primarily on chapter 23, which I want to read here in a few moments. But I want to kind of set the scene before we get there and kind of set up what we want to do in reading chapter 23.

And some of this will be, you know, you making your own applications. I’ll I’ll give some ideas and some suggestions.

We’re getting to a point in the story as we’re working through Matthew where now there is a rising tension that’s taking place. There has been a kind of a low-level tension that has existed all through the story. The leaders, the rulers coming and opposing Jesus, and him countering them. But we’re entering a part now where he has come into Jerusalem. He has come into the temple complex. That’s where chapter 21 through 23, sinners, is actually Jesus in the temple itself, encountering various leaders, groups of leaders, engaging with them, kind of these honor challenges, and they continually end up on the shameful side of these challenges. And of course, they’re getting more and more angry, and they’re plotting how they’re going to ultimately destroy Jesus. And so all of this is leading toward this concept of the contestation of Jesus and who he is and what he’s trying to do.

I want to set the stage with this picture we’ve used a number of times now and show where we are in the story. Even visually, you can see we’re kind of nearing the end. Let me go back. We’re nearing the end of what’s happening here. We’re in the fifth book. We’ve sort of set this up. That Matthew is arranged a little bit like the Torah in five books, where we have narrative sections, and then we have discourses, sermons, or teaching episodes by Jesus. And we’ve now reached the last one leading up into what is going to be the pinnacle of the story as he heads to the cross. We’ve begun that begun that process already. He is entered Jerusalem. This is beginning the final week of Jesus’ life.

And we’re already making our way toward the conclusion of the story. But what we’re finding here is this kind of clashing of two systems, two kingdoms that are coming together, and there’s gonna be this massive transition of power that’s gonna be taking place between Jesus, the one who now is coming as a reigning king. He is coming in very royal fashion into the city of Jerusalem. That’s what happens when he sends his disciples in, and they get this donkey and he rides in on a donkey, which you might think is kind of odd. You know, wouldn’t you come in on a war horse or something more glorious? But actually, this is a pretty common ancient Near Eastern practice. It is a sign of peace, right?

It’s kind of the idea that I’m gonna come and in my administration, I’m coming in humility, I’m coming in peace, I’m gonna bring good things to the people. And we see these kinds of things happening in other stories, even in scripture. Solomon is put on David’s mule, and he has rode through the city on this donkey to demonstrate that he is the next king. The people are laying their garments down on the street as Jesus is passing over, and this is much like the story of Jehu, and similar things happen with him. And so the stories of scripture and ancient Near Eastern thought are even coming into what’s happening with Jesus. This is certainly a royal statement. It is a statement that Jesus is coming with power and authority.

And if that’s not enough, he immediately enters the temple and starts creating havoc for the people there. Your Bible probably says something like, Jesus cleanses the temple. That’s fine. But what actually is happening is Jesus is condemning the temple. He’s going into the heart of Jewish thought and religion, and he’s saying, What you’re doing here is wrong. He’s going to continue doing this both through imagery and through the teaching that he does through this entire segment. He goes out to a fig tree. You probably remember the story, and the leaves are there, and he walks up and he looks and there’s no fruit. And he condemns the fig tree and makes this statement may no fruit ever come from you again. And what we’ll find eventually in the next sermon is that he’ll come back to this image, and the whole symbol here is the fruitlessness of the temple.

It looks so grand and amazing on the outside, but actually within it is corrupt and decrepit. They’re greedy, they’re self-indulgent. And he’s condemning the things that are happening with the leaders who are part of the temple, and even the temple itself, he is the new temple. And he’s demonstrating that something new is now on the horizon. Something better has come. Now, as you can imagine, the Jewish leaders aren’t really thrilled about this. He’s in the middle of the center of their religious worship and their religious thought, and he’s condemning them, and he’s condemning the temple and the practices that are taking place there. And so they begin to challenge his authority. What gives you the right to come in here and act this way? And so the story of confrontations begin and end with Jesus posing questions for them that they cannot answer.

He asks them about the baptism of John. Is it from heaven or from man? And what we learn through some of these episodes is their lack of sincerity. It’s not about truth. They’re actually afraid of the people, and so they won’t answer. They’re worried of what the people are going to think. And so they say, Oh, we don’t know. We can’t answer that question. And then later on, he asks them, well, whose son is the Christ? And they don’t want to answer that question either. Again, they’re afraid of the people. They’re afraid of the loss of their influence that’s taking place. And although they want to question Jesus thoroughly, they will not answer his questions. And yet, throughout all the questioning that they do of him, and as they try to trap him in the various ways, whether it’s political or doctrinal or according to the law, he comes out on the honorable side of all of those, embarrassing them all along the way.

Even more.

And they begin to pick up pretty easily that they are on the bad side of those too. He’s going to take the kingdom from them because they’re not worthy. And it’s going to be given to someone else, to the tax collectors and prostitutes of all people. And can you imagine? Just I want you to picture this scene before I read chapter 23. You know, we read this on paper and we’re familiar with the stories, but I really want you to envision as best you can. This guy from Nazareth walking into Jerusalem. Well, he rides in on a donkey, but then he walks into the temple, and he starts throwing tables over and condemning the people there, and he’s quoting places like Jeremiah 7 and 8. Jeremiah 7’s the great temple sermon of Jeremiah, where he says, You take comfort in the temple of the Lord, but you are corrupt.

And then Jeremiah 8 actually has the portrait of a fig tree with leaves and no fruit. He’s purposely doing this. And this guy who’s not trained, who’s does has no status, who’s unimportant in the eyes of the Jewish leaders, he comes in and starts telling stories against them. He starts telling people he’s going to take the kingdom away from them. They’re the rulers, they’re the leaders of the people, and he’s going to start giving it to sinful people. And then he says this, beginning in chapter 23 and verse 1. The scribes and the Pharisees stood on Moses’ seat. So do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do, for they preach but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens hard to bear and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.

They 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, but you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you were all brothers, and called no man your father on earth, for you have one father who is in heaven, neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, whoever humbles himself will be exalted. But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces, for you neither enter yourself nor allow those who would enter to go in.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselite, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourself. Woe to you blind guides who say, if anyone swears by the temple it is nothing. But if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath, you blind fools, for which is greater? The gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred. And you say, if anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing. But if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath, you blind men, for which is greater the gift, or the altar that makes the gift sacred.

So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And whoever swears by the temple swears by it, and by him who dwells in it, and whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God, and by him who sits upon it. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weight of your matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. 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 Pharisees, first clean the inside of the cup and plate, and 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 you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we’d have not taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets. Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up then the measure of your fathers, you serpents, you brood of vipers. How are you to escape being sents to hell? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zachariah, the son of Barekiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.

Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation. Can you imagine that? You’re sitting there in the crowd, and all these guys in the fancy robes and phylacteries and the long fringes are walking around and come up, and Jesus sits before them and starts pronouncing all of these things against them. That’s incredible. I think people would be thrown out of a lot of churches for a whole lot less than what Jesus said right there. Can you imagine the amount of indignation, anger, wrath that these people were feeling against Jesus as he pointed out what is essentially just the simple truths of who they were. The truth hurts and it’s difficult sometimes. And Jesus has reached a point now where he is willing to say what needs to be said.

There are seven woes in this text, most likely arranged in this fashion. There’s three sets of two, and then there’s a seventh that is built on top of that. And they are arranged in a pretty easily discernible way. The first two are related to people keeping others out of the kingdom. They’re putting obstacles or hindrances between someone and them, understanding truth. They’re getting in the way of that. The second two, woes three and four, are about distorted perspectives. it’s about placing details above what really matters. It’s about focusing on human things, right? Even in their kind of legal loopholes and the way they make oaths, they’re really focused on the gold and the gift rather than the altar, rather than the temple. They’re losing sight of what actually matters in all of this.

And then woes five and six, they focus on outward appearances rather than inward purity. And to some extent, these are the same kinds of things that Jesus has been hitting on throughout his entire ministry, even in Galilee, when sometimes rulers from Jerusalem were coming up to challenge him, but now he has come to the temple itself, and he’s bringing out these woes in great fashion before everyone, embarrassing the rulers even more because of who they really are. And then the last.

We would say it this way don’t kill the messenger. But that is exactly what they do over and over and over. And he even predicts that it’s going to happen again. He said, You claim if you lived during the time of your fathers, you wouldn’t have shed the blood of the prophets, and you decorate the tombs and all this sort of thing. But even in doing that, you recognize that your fathers were murderers. And the reality is you’re going to be the same way. I’m going to send prophets to you and wise men. I’m going to send scribes, and some of them you’re going to kill and even crucify, speaking of himself and even some others after him. You’ll flog and beat others to try to silence the truth.

And in all of this, now the bloodshed, the guilt of bloodshed will come on you just like it did your fathers. Because of the way you handle truth. And this is not the Jesus we like to think about. I do want to point out, as we’re getting into this contentious section of Matthew, that Jesus has spent years at this point trying to work with these people.

And so there’s a context that surrounds all of this when it comes to the confrontation we see here with Jesus and these leaders. If you’re to read 21 through 23, the whole thing, you’ll see it just over and over again. But we have to understand that this is coming at the end of Jesus’ ministry, after he’s been working for quite some time. And sometimes the means by which you try to help somebody is by pulling them out of the fire. And that’s what Jesus is trying to do here. The time has come for him to clearly point out the problems that these leaders have without any vagueness. As I said from the beginning, I think it’s going to be very difficult to cover this in fullness.

But what I see here in this text is a division between people who are trying to protect their systems, who are interested in self-preservation rather than serving God. Jesus is a threat to who they are, to their system of practice, to their center of worship. And they’re doing everything they can to protect themselves, to protect their status, to protect themselves from shame as they can confront him over and over again. And ultimately it’s just they got to get rid of him because he continues to create problems for them, not because he’s wrong, but because he continues to point out where they’re wrong. And now, and from their perspective, he’s stealing their influence and their power. And so the points I want to make from this text as we think through Matthew chapter 23, sort of relate to this whole concept of self preserving rather than God serving.

I’m if I’m more interested in protecting myself and elevating me and who I am than I am in honoring God and serving God, it’s going to create a whole host of problems that will affect not only myself, but all sorts of people around me. I want to point out as well, before we get deeper into this, that the idea of fruitfulness or fruitlessness is sort of the hinge on which everything turns and hangs in this passage. You go back to the fig tree being withered. That’s the key symbol, this sign act that Jesus does, much like the Old Testament prophets, where he looks at this leaf and says, There’s no fruit on it. And we’re going to keep seeing this idea in every aspect of what we’re talking about.

What he’s pointing out is the fruitlessness of Jewish worship, how they have missed it. They have missed God’s point. They’ve missed God’s purpose in every imaginable way, even to the point that when the Messiah, the Christ Himself comes and is standing before them, they can’t see it. That’s how off they are. And so now the time comes to point all of this out. And so we need to learn some lessons from this about what it looks like to preserve systems and organizations and ideologies rather than seeking the truth of God and the will of God as the essence of who we are.

1. Jesus Measures Greatness by Fruitfulness

Jesus measures greatness, I want us to understand by fruitfulness, not status, not position, not appearances. Those are the things that don’t really matter to Jesus. These are the things that greatly matter to the Pharisees and the scribes and the Sadducees, you know, the seat of power that they have, the titles that they wear, the rank that they walk around with. And this is where Jesus begins his condemnation of them in chapter 23, when he’s pointing out this reality that they love the honor at the feast and they like to have the best seats and they like greetings in the marketplace and for people to call them rabbi and instructor and all of this. And what he’s not saying here is that you can’t call your biological father a father.

That’s not really his point here. What he’s saying is you have one teacher, one instructor of which you are a disciple. We are disciples of Christ. We’re not disciples of other men. We’re not disciples of some other system. That is not who we are supposed to be.

Not the appearance that they put off or the recognition they have or how popular they are. It’s not about how many people are in a church or how nice the buildings are or how others view us or think about us. None of those things make any difference. What actually matters is whether we are bearing fruit for the Lord and his kingdom. That is the true sign of health. And the dangers that Jesus is pointing out when you do things the way the Pharisees and the scribes and the Sadducees are, is that you do a lot of this preaching but not practicing.

2. They Preach but Don't Practice

One of the most concerning things when you get to Matthew 23 as a preacher is realizing the weight of what that means when you get up and you say the things that are in this text? I can’t think of a worse condemnation. If one of you said, hey, you say a lot of good stuff, but you don’t live it? That would hurt. Maybe it’s true. And hopefully I’d have enough humility to see that and be willing to change. But that is a strong indictment that Jesus is making about these rulers. They preach. They sure do preach a lot. But they don’t practice. They focus on the outward things and getting attention rather than truly producing fruit for God. They’re caught up with their own self-glory rather than God’s glory.

And fruitfulness is about transformation. We actually sang a little bit about that this morning, about these ancient words, changing me and changing you. And so if we want to think about fruitfulness, maybe in terms of what’s happening here, you know, is my religion like the Pharisees, or is my religion the way Jesus wants it to be? We can begin asking some questions. How has my faith changed my life for the better? Or maybe even more precisely, who is being helped right now through my faith with Jesus? What about my religion is helping change somebody else’s life? Does my religion offer Jesus’ easy yoke and light burden, as he mentions in Matthew 11, 28 through 30? Is that what I’m offering to people? And is that what I’m living?

Is that what people are seeing when they see me that I believe that the yoke of Jesus is easy and his burden is light? Or does my religion lay heavy burdens on people’s shoulders that are hard to bear? That’s Phariseism. Am I making it difficult for people to serve the Lord? Is my religion tied up in making things hard and holding myself above others and looking down at them and saying, you can never be what you really need to be, and yet at the same time, I won’t even lift my finger to do the things I’m telling them to do. This is what Pharisees do. They tie up heavy burdens, they make it hard to bear, and they lay these on people’s shoulders. That’s a yoke.

3. They Shut People Out of the Kingdom

Their yoke is difficult, and their burden is hard, and they make it hard on people to do the right things and to think the right things. That’s what Pharisees do. And they shut people out of the kingdom. Am I converting people to my system or to God’s kingdom? Have I become an obstacle to people finding Jesus in an effort to convert them to my ideology? You know, this is woe one and two. I’ll remind you, he says, but woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you travel across sea and land to make a single convert.

That’s what a proselyte is. It’s a convert to your way of thinking, right? You’re out promoting yourself and evangelizing for self. You make one convert, and when he becomes a convert, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourself. Man. We’re out preaching our ideology and our ideas and our opinions and our kingdom instead of Jesus’. We are a hindrance. We’re shutting people out of the kingdom. When I was younger, I remember some of these sorts of things happening. I ended up working with Brother Bowman, as many of you know. But when I was a little bit younger, there were men who traveled to the Philippines and other places to let others know that you shouldn’t have fellowship with D. Bowman or Ed Harrell or Paul Earnhardt or various others.

And I’ll tell you, these Filipino brethren, they couldn’t pick these guys out if they were the only normal ones in a lineup of rodeo clowns. They have no idea who these people are. And yet that was the gospel. Traveling land and sea to convert people to their ideology and their way of thinking. How ridiculous. And yet the same thing still happens today.

What it speaks to is my desire for status, for recognition, for holding others below me and elevating myself. And Jesus has some things to say about that. Actually, he said it to his disciples earlier. But he says it again to the Pharisees here. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled. Whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Greatness comes through fruitfulness. Not through the aura I present and the appearance I give. But through the true faithfulness that I demonstrate for the Lord. The Jewish leaders were far too focused on appearances rather than actually bearing fruit for the kingdom, which was their job. That’s what they should have been doing, and they should have been helping others do, is to truly work for the Lord and honor him.

4. Prioritize the Weightier Matters

These are the condemnations of Jesus here for these rulers, right? Don’t lose sight of what matters most. Prioritize the weightier matters. The Pharisees and the scribes had such a distorted perspective. They were obsessed with secondary matters. Sometimes in an effort to demonstrate their own righteousness, other times to justify their actions, as Jesus has pointed out, all the loopholes they could jump through and the legalities they could make that make it okay to do the things they wanted to do. So it was sometimes one, sometimes it was the other. And these religious systems are dangerous when they elevate technicalities and especially in man-made traditions, to the neglect of what actually matters to the Lord, and that is justice, mercy, and faithfulness. They were all about their loopholes and how oaths could work to justify certain things over others.

You know, if you only swear by the altar, but not the gift, or you only swear by the temple, but not the gold, then maybe you don’t have to as much keep that vow. Right? So they had all these kind of systems in place and legalities to do the things they wanted to do. Meanwhile, they unjustly condemned people, even plotting against them. They purposely kept away from others, like tax collectors and prostitutes and other sinners, thinking they weren’t worthy of the kingdom. And isn’t it interesting that Jesus in Matthew 22 turns this right around on them? In verse 8, he says, then he said to his servants, the wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. The ones who were not worthy were the Pharisees in the end.

The scribes, the Sadducees, the ones who thought they were righteous, the ones who held themselves above others and kept their distance from the lower people who were sinful. And it was actually they who came to the wedding feast. They’re the ones who listened to the invitation. And by the way, the wedding garment isn’t about dressing the right way, it’s about bearing fruit. When he was invited to the wedding and he came and he wasn’t in the wedding garment, he didn’t change. He didn’t change who he was. He wasn’t transformed. He didn’t meet the expectations. And so when they find him here and he’s not dressed appropriately, even though he accepted the invitation, he was not bearing fruit. This is the theme, the concept that undergirds everything we’re talking about.

Caught up in their own self-preservation, rather in the glorifying of God. They have become blind. And blindness is equal to hard-heartedness. That’s the idea. They’re unwilling to listen. They have resisted the needed correction that Jesus has tried to offer this whole time. They’re just unwilling to do it. They’ll even go to the point of silencing uncomfortable challenges to their current beliefs. That’s what they want to do to Jesus. They don’t want to hear what he has to say, and they want to get rid of him because he’s uncomfortable. They’re not interested in the truth. And ultimately they will kill the messenger himself. Weightier matters are more important. That’s what they are. They’re not more complex. It’s not the more difficult things to understand. So sometimes maybe our perspective gets a little distorted.

We think, oh, the weightier matters that maybe that’s understanding the Holy Spirit or the Trinity or digging into more complex passages. Or maybe it’s the doctrinal disputes over specific worship practices or beliefs or deciphering all the nuances of correct church organization or the church treasury and all of that. Those things can be important. They certainly have a level of importance, and I think if we get things ordered the right way, we will care about those in the proper regard for what they are. But they are not the weightier matters. The weightier matters are justice and mercy and faithfulness. Why? The reality is you can understand the Holy Spirit. Maybe some of you do really well. You can understand the Trinity or difficult passages. Or you can be on the right side of every doctrinal disagreement, know all the right answers about church organization and treasury and work of the church, the things that some may see on the outside and say, what a holy person, and yet still be full of greed and self-indulgence.

I would say it’s unlikely that any of us is getting it all right, but let’s just assume we could. We could still be a hypocrite, blind to our own self-righteousness. And that’s why it’s the weight of your matter.

Maybe you’re right about everything, but if you have an attitude that’s not like Jesus, if you have an attitude like the Pharisees, then you are completely wrong, even while you might be right about something. These are the kind of people who major in minors and minor in majors. They strain out a gnat and swallow a camel, Jesus says. They preach and they don’t practice. They do all their deeds to be seen by others. The kind of people who are willing to stand in the way of helping others to elevate themselves. But if you’re focused on the way to your matters, it tends to set the rest of things in proper order. If we’re truly interested in justice and how we treat people and mercy and how we think about others and faithfulness and true loyalty to the Lord rather than our systems or our own desires.

Whatever doctrinal debates or ideas or complex texts or things about the church, whatever it is, we’re going to seek to honor God in what we’re doing because we have things aligned in the right way. And it’s not about me being right or you being right. It’s about honoring God in everything that we do. And this is what Jesus is trying to get them to understand is the importance of what they should be doing in the weight of your matters. You’ve neglected these things for all these details. How much you’re contributing to the church and all the legal issues of an oath or a vow or whatever. In the midst of all of that, you’re mistreating people and you’re unloving and unmerciful, and you’re not faithful to the Lord.

So what does all that matter anyway?

And so, as we’ve been saying throughout the whole gospel of Matthew, this is a matter of the heart. We can get caught up in all the rules and all the regulations and trying to demand other people be perfect and all of that, but what Jesus keeps saying is it is the intent, it’s the heart that matters. And we can be completely self righteous in an effort to think we’re doing all the right things. And maybe you’re tired of hearing that. I don’t know. But rest assured the Pharisees are tired of hearing it too. Because he keeps talking about it over and over and over again. So it must be pretty important. And in this final harsh condemnation, he brings all of these matters out again in full force.

5. The Willingness to Listen to the Voice of Truth

Ultimately, what we find here is that Jesus is condemning them because they’re unwilling to listen to truth. And all we can do with this passage is try to take these lessons ourselves and learn from them to not be like the Pharisees. And so what us want us to understand that Jesus’ way, if we’re going to follow him, is the willingness to listen to the voice of truth, wherever that truth comes from, honestly. I mean, remember earlier in the story, when he’s coming into the city, he talks about the cry of babies praising him. They’re speaking truth about who he is, that he is the son of David, he is the Lord. From the mouth of children, praise is prepared. He quotes Psalm 8. Even little kids can speak truth.

Don’t keep the kids from me. We’ve already seen twice in the text. So it’s not about being older. That’s not the determining factor of truth. It’s not because something has been believed for such a long time. It’s not because you’ve never heard someone else say it, or you’ve never heard a preacher or an elder have that belief.

Not who said it, not how long they’ve said it, not how long we’ve done it, or how long we’ve thought it. What matters is whether or not it’s actually right or actually true. And that we have the humility when that happens, to say, I haven’t thought about that the right way, and maybe I need to change. Jesus’ kingdom is marked by a willingness to continually seek truth for the glory of God, a desire to truly understand scripture on its own terms, rather than as a tool to say what I want it to say. And the humility to repent and confronted with error or incorrect thoughts. And I want to end with this morning. And I probably will do a full sermon on this at some point, but it’s just such a prominent part of what Jesus continues to do throughout this entire story in the Gospel of Matthew.

6. Have You Not Read?

Over and over and over again, he is exposing how the supposed leaders of the people are wrong. And they’re wrong because they don’t know Scripture. They actually don’t know it well. And so he keeps pointing this out. And he keeps using this phrase. Now there’s a lot of other phrases and a lot of other ways he does it, but this is very obvious. Have you not read twice in the Sabbath encounters? He says, Have you not read? I mean, don’t you remember the stories of scripture and the truths we learned back here? No, they didn’t. They had missed it. They’d missed it for all their details and all their rules and all their human traditions and regulations that he also condemned them for in Matthew 15.

Matthew 19, 4. Have you not read? They’re asking about divorce. Hey, how is it we can actually divorce our wives? Can we figure out how this can work, Jesus, so we can do the things that we want to do? No. Have you not read from the beginning it was not so? He made the male and female. What God has joined together, do not separate. Why are you so focused on your own human desires? Stop it. At the triumph or entry, they don’t like it too much that Jesus is being praised as the one who has come to save. So he points to Psalm 8. Haven’t you read it? Haven’t you read this? Haven’t you read that the Messiah is going to be the stone which the builders reject?

Conclusion

Haven’t you seen all this before in the Old Testament? How did you miss it? Maybe we can even go to Nicodemus and John 3. You’re the teacher of Israel. How do you not understand this? And so over and over and over again, it’s not because of their status or their position, their place before the people, or that their rulers or leaders, or any of that. He says, you are wrong because you know neither the scripture nor the power of God. Have you not read? That is the determining factor of truth. It’s what the scriptures say. And that’s what he continually points people back to. And so, in conclusion, with what we’re working through here with Matthew 23, I want us to think about this. Some of this, the applications you’re going to have to think through yourself.

Couldn’t possibly bring up all of them. Or think through them even comprehensively in any sort of way. But given Jesus strong rebuke of those who were supposedly the leaders of the religious establishment of the day, the ones who are supposed to have the answers, and who people think know what the truth is, and they thought themselves they knew what the truth was. Shouldn’t we carefully consider this lesson from Matthew 23? And with humility, think very carefully about the conclusions that we draw and the way that we approach Scripture. They certainly thought that they were right. They thought they were using Scripture correctly, but Jesus keeps pointing out to them they’re missing it. So I have to ask myself, am I missing it? Am I willing to honestly think through that?

And carefully investigate. That’s the way of Jesus. To carefully think through Scripture, to constantly challenge my thinking. To be willing with open hearts. We just sang that. Right? Ancient words, ever true. Right? He says, We come with open hearts. Is that true? Do we come with open hearts? Or do we come with our beliefs already in place, already decided what we think? These words came through sacrifice, the song says. Blood was shed. The martyr’s blood was shed so that we could have these words and read them. Do we come to them with open hearts, willing to accept whatever the truth is?

That’s the question I have to ask myself every day as I read and as I study and as I think. If not, I’m no different than the Pharisees. And I’m comfortable in my own ideology and my own beliefs, unwilling to be challenged. That’s going to lead me to a place that is not good. Maybe this morning you realize your need to change, to be transformed, and the gospel that gives you that. Jesus says, you can come to him. If you are heavy laden, if you are burdened in your life, he will give you rest. This is the promise in Matthew 11, 28 through 30. This is the message of Jesus. And if you feel burdened this morning, there’s an answer for that. Maybe you need more information about it.

We’d be glad to talk to you about that. But if you already know the answer is Jesus, you can come and give your life to him. You can be baptized into Jesus Christ this morning, and you can put on his yoke, which is easy, and his burden, which is light, knowing that you’re walking the way of the Messiah. Can we help you this morning? Come now as we stand and we sing.