The Pharisees Deceived Themselves

I’ve heard it jokingly said, “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.” The Pharisees acted out a similar phrase without trying to be funny. Jesus said that the Pharisees prided themselves in honoring and building memorials to the prophets. But the only prophets they admired were dead ones. The irony is that when they met a real one, they wanted to kill Him. They honored the dead prophets with tombs and memorials, but they dishonored the living ones with persecution and death.

This is the point Jesus made in Luke 11:47-51 and in a parallel passage in Matthew 23:29-32 when He said: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’ Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers’ guilt.”

The Pharisees had fooled themselves. They didn’t think of themselves as prophet killers or Messiah killers. They didn’t realize that their empty religion actually made them enemies of God. The flesh has always been at war with the Spirit. Religion is powerless to restrain the self-centered, self-protective obsessions of the flesh. It takes a living Christ to change the human heart.

History repeats itself time after time when people give themselves to religion rather than to Christ — just like the religious people Jesus confronted. With their lips they honor God and the Scriptures, but when a child or a mate confesses Christ as Savior they suddenly see red.

Very religious parents often resent the fact that their child thinks there was something wrong with the religion in which he was born, baptized, and confirmed. Parents who have been churchgoers all of their lives are often upset to hear a son or daughter talk about being “born again,” the very words that Jesus used when talking to a Pharisee named Nicodemus (John 3:1-16). Religious parents, however, who resent the fact that their child wants to follow Christ need to do some real soul-searching. A negative reaction to a son or daughter who says that he or she has accepted Christ is a fairly strong indicator that the parent is in the same condition of self-deception as the scribes and Pharisees whom our Lord lovingly but firmly confronted.

Tomorrow, another mistake the Pharisees made…