Am I a Pharisee?
Part eight.
Hi, welcome to today's little lesson.
Thank you so much for joining me.
If you're a regular viewer, you know that we're currently in a little series of lessons
as we work our way, verse by verse through Matthew chapter 23.
Matthew was apparently inspired by the Holy Spirit to record Jesus's detailed denunciation
of the scribes and the Pharisees.
And it's very easy to think to ourselves that none of this has any application to me because
of course I am not a Pharisee, I'm a Christian, and when you take the letter of the law, the
exact things that Jesus said, you can say, "Well yeah, no the application to me whatsoever
because I'm not doing what they're doing."
But if you look a little bit deeper into the principles that surface in Jesus's criticism
of the scribes and Pharisees, you can find some application.
And we've been finding some application too many of us, this guy included.
So we're going to continue in that vein today.
So we're in Matthew chapter 23 in verse number 16.
Let's look at something that would be very easy to wiggle our way out of if we take the
letter of the law.
But when we take the spirit of what Christ said, oh my Goodness.
Yikes.
Many of us are in deep trouble.
So Matthew 23 verse number 16.
Woe to you, blind guides who say, "Whoever swears by the temple, that is nothing; but
whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is obligated."
And we could add there he's obligated to keep his vow or his word because that was the practice
the Pharisees had.
They'd make a vow, swear by something else.
I swear by the whatever, and I will do this and so, but they had a little rule there that
if you swore by the temple, you didn't have to keep your vow, your promise.
But if you swore by the gold in the temple, then you were obligated.
And it reminds me of a little game we had when I was a kid that we had this idea that
it was okay to lie as long as you had your fingers crossed behind your back.
And so you tell somebody something and you make a promise and they get all excited because
it was some good promise and he goes, ah, fingers crossed.
So that somehow relieved us of that responsibility to keep our word.
And so it's an excuse, a justification for not telling the truth, for lying.
And the Pharisees had this very sophisticated system.
Jesus goes on to elaborate on other examples of the same thing.
Here's what they would say.
Matthew 23 verse 18, "Whoever swears by the altar, that's nothing; but whoever swears
by the offering on it, he is obligated."
And then it goes on.
But Jesus points out something here.
And here's the beginning of the spiritual principle that surfaces verse number 19.
"You blind men, which is more important, the offering or the altar that sanctifies the
offering?"
Therefore, whoever swears by the altar swears both by the altar and everything on it.
Whoever swears by the temple swears both by the temple and by Him who dwells within it.
And so Jesus is just writing their very wrong thinking in this regard.
And it comes down to their perception of what was important.
Or maybe we can say their perception of what was really valuable.
The gold in the temple was more valuable in their minds then the temple itself, which
that's wrong, right?
Because if the temple is a place where God's presence is kept, and as Jesus, Jesus said,
"Whoever swears by the temple swears both by the temple and by Him who dwells in it."
So the greater value was not the gold.
The gold was really of no value in comparison to the person in the temple, the Lord God
Almighty.
It was his house during the Old Covenant as it were.
Again, Solomon, at the dedication of that temple said, "We know we can't confine you
into this temple.
You're bigger than the whole universe.
You've made the whole universe."
But yet still, there was an aspect of God's presence there.
So it shows that the Pharisees had their focus on the wrong thing and they didn't value what
was really valuable.
In this case, they valued gold over God and not just of course they weren't clinging to
gold coin so much.
But the gold in the temple, the vessels of worship and so forth that were made of gold.
And oh boy.
If you swear by the temple, that's nothing, God's house where God lives, but if you swear
by the gold in the temple, then you're obligated.
And then the same mixed up thinking concerning the sacrifice and the altar, a misplaced value.
And so I think there's application there to us, and you can probably go a million different
directions of misguided values.
But here's the fundamental question that we need to ask ourselves.
Do I value, do I consider sacred what really is sacred according to God?
And there's a lot of Phariseeism going on in the church in that regard.
I would say that one of them, we're not doing any of the swearing stuff, so that has really
no application.
We know we're not supposed to be swearing.
We know our yes is supposed to be yes and our no is supposed to be no.
Jesus said that in the Sermon on the Mount, but we value certain things and make them
much more sacred than you'd ever find in scripture.
And they usurp the sacredness of other things that God said are extremely sacred.
Like Him.
Oh, we're in the church building now, let's quiet down, behave ourselves.
We have to put on our church mode, shift into church mode and we walk into God's house as
we sometimes even hear pastors, it's amazing that they say this, but "Welcome to God's
house.
Isn't it good to be in the house of the Lord?"
You know what I'm thinking.
I'm hoping you're thinking it too, because under the New Covenant, the temple of the
Holy spirit, one of the temples is our own bodies and we're always in our bodies and
our bodies are supposed to always be made a living sacrifice unto God.
But you know...
So here's a temple of the Holy spirit right here.
How come I act so special when I go to church, but every other time I'm not really valuing
what God values?
God himself.
He's not living in a church building as a matter of fact.
Under the Old Covenant, sure, his presence to a certain degree was kept in the temple.
But that's Old Covenant folks.
The temple is no longer a building in Jerusalem.
The temple is all the believers in Jesus Christ individually and collectively.
And so, how come we're saying or implying or acting that, oh, it's really important
to be very sanctimonious when we go to church and be thinking about God there, but when
we walk out the door, great to be away from God and out of his territory?
Now we're free once again.
Oh my goodness.
That is not a Christian thought whatsoever.
Okay, well, we're out of time for today, but something to think about.
Okay?
Thanks for joining me.
Hope to see you next time.
God bless.