Oy!! Jesus Condemns the Pharisees - Part 2, Matthew 23:16-28

We are studying in Matthew chapter 23 and are in a section that demonstrates the righteousness of God and his holiness as He is in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ outlining His condemnation of the religious leaders of Israel. This chapter is really ultimately all about Israel, but the implications of what Jesus says relate to every single person in human history because it demonstrates the contrast between grace and works. And this is why Jesus is so harsh in his condemnation of the Pharisees, because what they are offering to mankind is a useless life preserver and if we were to try to save someone from drowning with that which would not provide any help whatsoever, under the law we would be guilty of causing a death because we had not provided that which we could have provided. It is a serious matter.

And so today as people come to the Scriptures who were not oriented to the word of God at all it seems that that this just doesn't fit their view of Jesus as the Prince of peace because they misunderstand peace. They misunderstand who Jesus is, they think of him as sweet Jesus, meek and mild, and there is another side to his character.

Like any human being or any genuine person there are many different facets and dimensions to the person of God and the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are those actions that are the result of his love; there are other actions that are influenced more by his righteousness and justice. Righteousness, justice and love are not mutually exclusive, which is an assumption by fallen, rationalistic mankind that thinks that God must be a certain way or He can't be God, and that Jesus must be a certain way or He can't really be the Son of God. And so they take these ideas that are generated from the idolatry of their own soul where in their mentality they have manufactured their own idea of what God is, their own idea of what Jesus should be as the Son of God, and then they come back and they impose that on the text.

And it's difficult at times, as believers when we are interacting with a culture. Sometimes there are family members, sometimes their friends, sometimes their coworkers, but we all have to interact with people who have seriously distorted views of God and of Jesus. And so it is not our place to enter into the kind of condemnation that Jesus has here in this chapter. This is a unique sort of condemnation and it flows from the fact that He is the God of Israel. He is the second person of the Trinity, the triune God who is the God of Israel who is entered into covenant with Israel, and that covenant is ultimately based upon grace.

It's a false dichotomy to say that God in the Old Testament is a God of Law and in the New Testament He is a God of grace. He is the originator and the giver of the Law to Moses in the Old Testament, but He is still the God of grace.

We see this when God tells us in Genesis chapter 6 that Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord, and Moses was the recipient of God's grace in Israel by the giving of the Law. He is the recipient of God's grace. God chose Israel for a purpose; that was His gracious action. He demonstrated his love for Abraham and his descendents in entering into these covenants with Israel in the Old Testament. So there's not this false dichotomy between love and justice, they need to work together just as they do with mankind.

Jesus is bringing this condemnation against the Pharisees and it is building in a crescendo to His condemnation and complete rejection of Israel as a nation, and His announcement of the coming judgment that will destroy Jerusalem, destroy the temple and end up with the scattering of the Jewish people throughout the world in fulfillment of God's promises and prophecies in the Old Testament to bring this kind of discipline and judgment upon Israel if they failed to obey the Law. That is what this is all about.

But in studying this we get pictures of the legalism and the different ways in which legalism enters into the thinking of unbelievers as well as believers. There is application there, but it also reminds us of God's grace.

So what were looking at here is these seven woes, as I outlined, to remind you that there is another one that is debated due to a textual issue, but we are just going to deal with the seven main ones here plus +1.

Just to bring us back to where we've been since we've had our focus changed during the last week a little bit with the holidays. On this last section of Matthew from chapter 21 to chapter 25 just before his arrest, Jesus is presented to Israel as her messianic King and is rejected. He is publicly presented to Israel as a messianic King when He enters in what is referred to as His triumphal entry on what is traditionally known as Palm Sunday. Then He is rejected by the nation, but not by all of the people.

In chapter 21:18 to 22:46 is a whole series of interchanges between Jesus and the religious leaders where He is rejecting them, and points out through the parables as well as through His other interaction that they are rigid, have rejected Him, and there will be judgment coming upon them. This section is followed by chapter 23 where Jesus rejects the nation and announces these 7+1 woes on the religious leaders.

Now the issue throughout chapter 23 comes down to this. Religion is man doing the work, and there are many people who get caught up in this idea that we are to do things and God will bless us. That is the essence of legalism—man does the work. It comes from his self-absorption, and the fact that man is basically impressed with his own dignity and the good things that he does, but he doesn't have an infinite reference point. And a finite reference point does not have meaning without an infinite reference point. And when the infant infinite reference point is the righteousness of God, then we understand that the good things that man does is just a relative righteousness; it is just relative to what other people do. But in relation to God it falls short. For all have sinned, the Scripture says, and fallen short of the glory of God.

That phrase "glory of God" is a way that the Jews refer to the entire essence of God. It is a summation of the essence of God. So a nuanced translation of that verse would be for all have sinned and fall short of the character of God. And since we do not meet God's standards, then we are without hope.

God has a solution and in Christianity. We believe the God does all of the work and provides salvation through the penal substitutionary death of Jesus Christ on the cross, and we simply accept it by faith.

Religion is based on legalism and there are a lot of Christian legalists, and Christianity is based on a relationship with God that is grounded on faith alone in Jesus Christ alone.

Last time we looked at the first 2+1 woes. In the first one Jesus said: "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites". Now the word woe is important because it goes back to Isaiah chapter 5. It is a classic Old Testament word that refers to the announcement of divine judgment upon Israel. It's an onomatopoeic word; it sounds like what it is saying. The Greek is OI, which sounds just like the Hebrew word boy, sounds just like the Yiddish word boy. It's the interjection or exclamation somebody makes when something bad happens. They make this kind of noise, so it indicates something harsh that is happening. They're called hypocrites, a term that comes from a Greek term in drama, but it refers to someone who is wearing a mask. It's not really the idea in the Scripture being two-faced, it is the idea of saying you believe one thing and you are actually doing something else.

It is really developed in the seven woes that there is a problem with the Pharisees and that they are talking about just external realities with the denial of internal realities. And as such they are claiming to believe in a coming kingdom, in a coming Messiah, whose coming is soon, who will deliver Israel. But then they are preventing anyone from following the Messiah who came, Jesus, and entering into the kingdom that he is presenting. So they are saying they believe in a kingdom and Messiah but they're preventing anyone from truly entering into it.

This term also indicates that they are unbelievers. That's an important issue in interpreting several things coming up in future chapters. The Pharisees are presented here as unbelievers. This is further substantiated by Jesus who calls them a brood of vipers. That is in Matthew 23:33, which indicates they are the seed of Satan, and it indicates that they have no relationship with the Lord. This is seen in Matthew 15:7-9 ^NASB “You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS, BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME. ‘BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE PRECEPTS OF MEN.’”

They draw near to me with their mouth, as Isaiah said, that run near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips. This is just lip service; it is just superficial; "their heart is far from me". So we looked at the first woe in Matthew 23:13. They kept people from entering into heaven, and eternal life.

The other woe is Matthew 23:14, which echoes Mark 12:40 and a parallel in Luke. And this is not found in some manuscripts, and so some people say it is not in the older manuscripts, some of the best manuscripts, and for them older is best. But it is found in the majority of manuscripts, and so I believe it is here, but it's usually not counted. And since nearly everything you read will talk about the seven woes I'm not going to try to change that, I'm just going to call the 7+1, and then we won't get too confused.

The third woe (Matthew 23:16-22) is where we stopped last time. This is the longest of the woes, and there are just some things to learn about this.

It's the third, the longest and the most developed of the seven woes and the focus in this woe is on the Pharisees' superficial rationales that they developed in order to avoid fulfilling a vowel or an oath that they had taken. The first five books of the Old Testament known as the Torah or the Law, meaning instruction, has a lot to say about oaths. They are mentioned in Leviticus 5:4; Numbers 5:19; Numbers 30 and Deuteronomy 6:13.

The Mishnah, which isn't written down and organized until about 200 AD, has a whole tractate, a whole section called the vows, and that's followed by a second tractate called the Nazir from the Hebrew word that we take as Nazirite—talking about one kind of vow, the Nazirite vow. So there are at least two tractates in the Mishnah that focus on the vows.

Now the Mishnah is a collection of the teachings of the rabbis going back to 200 BC. So it's taking what they taught that it been handed down through oral transmission for almost 400 years and codifies that. That gives us a lot of ideas about what the rabbis said and taught about the vows. Some of it was good and follows what the Scripture says, and in some of it we see the kind of thing that Jesus is condemning here where they are trying to come up with various sophisticated sounding rationales that are very misleading, and are ultimately illogical, but they are designed to give people an out, so if you make a vow and then sometime later you decide. Well I was just a little too emotional, enthusiastic, I need a way out, and so it would give people an escape clause from these vows. This is a long section, verses 16 to 22.

I want to read them to you. I'm not going through them bit by bit to go through them bit by bit we are just going to summarize what they are saying in 23:16-22. "Woe to you blind guides". Notice how he several times will point out how he refers to them as being blind again. That emphasizes that they're spiritually dead. The fact that human beings are are spiritually dead, is represented by blindness.

We have the Jesus healing the blind man in John chapter 9 to teach that He is the light of the world. We will come back to that in our conclusion. Matthew 23:16 ^NASB “Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the temple, {that} is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple is obligated.’

This is where Jesus is summarizing their type of teaching. "Whoever swears by the temple, it's nothing". In other words, you can swear an oath by the temple, but it really doesn't mean anything. "But whoever swears by the gold of the temple", that's much more significant. Then you're stuck with it, he's obliged to perform it.

"Fools and blind"—notice how Jesus is again endearing himself to the Pharisees, calling them fools and blind. One thing we got a note about that is the Old Testament tells us that the fool has said in his heart there is no God. So when Jesus is calling them a fool He is not simply being insulting, He is saying something about their spiritual nature. Not only does he say they are blind, which indicates they're spiritual spiritually dead, but he calls them fools, which indicates that in their experience and they are denying the existence of God because of the way they handle His Word. And they wouldn't say, "We don't believe in God". They do, but the God they believe in is not the God of the Old Testament Torah; it is the God they have manufactured out of their own soul, and so that they can avoid what is actually said in the text. So that's a packed spiritual term.

Matthew 23:17 ^NASB “You fools and blind men! Which is more important, the gold or the temple that sanctified the gold?" He goes through and uses these several different examples where they are swearing by one thing and trying to artificially distinguish it from something else. For example, "Whoever swears by the altar, it's nothing but whoever swears by the gift that is on it, he is obliged to perform". So they're drawing an artificial distinction between the altar and the sacrifice.

Matthew 23:19 ^NASB “You blind men, which is more important, the offering, or the altar that sanctifies the offering?" He said fools and blind, again emphasizing their spiritual spiritually dead condition. By asking that question, He is showing that they've made an artificial distinction. He says,

Matthew 23:20-22 ^NASB “Therefore, whoever swears by the altar, swears {both} by the altar and by everything on it. And whoever swears by the temple, swears {both} by the temple and by Him who dwells within it. And whoever swears by heaven, swears {both} by the throne of God and by Him who sits upon it."

So what we see here if we break it down is a pronouncement of the woe in the first part of 16: "Woe or judgment condemnation to you blind guides who say …" Not all the Pharisees would of gone along with this. As I pointed out a couple lessons back we had seven different kinds of Pharisees. The seventh kind was the one who truly loved God. These would be represented by those who responded to the gospel both before the crucifixion and after the crucifixion. Before the crucifixion men like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea responded to the gospel, so there were some Pharisees even at that time who had already trusted in Jesus as Messiah, but for the most part they fit the patterns of the other six now.

A lot of Christians fit those patterns too. They get into very superficial approaches to their spiritual life.

So there's the pronouncement of the woe in verse 16a, and then the second summary of what He is saying is the reason for the woe. Why is He announcing this judgment? And that is because the Pharisees have made these artificial distinctions in order to avoid being held to an oath or a vow that they have taken.

We see this in the second part of 16, "Whoever swears by the temple, it's nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple He is obliged to perform." They make these artificial distinctions between the temple itself and the gold of the temple, or in verse 18 between the altar and the gift that is on the altar.

As we look at this, we see that there are basically four different pairs that are discussed by Jesus. There is the temple, and in all through this section the Greek word that used for temple here is the word NAOS, and NAOS almost always refers to the inner sanctum, the holy of holies in the middle of the temple, not all of the temple precincts. It wouldn't include the courtyard of the Gentiles or the court of the women, it's just that inner sanctum, the holy of holies in the holy place. So He makes a distinction. You can swear an oath by the temple, is what they were saying, but that didn't count unless if you were really serious you made an oath by the gold of the temple. So would sound good if you said I swear by the temple, but you're not held to it. So it's an artificial distinction.

Or they would swear by the altar. But if they were really serious they would have to swear by the sacrifice of the altar. Scripture does make those kinds of distinctions. In the second part of that passage, he talks about the fact that they would swear by the temple, but the temple is sanctified by the one who dwells there, who is the Lord. And the word for dwelling in Hebrew is shaken from which we get our of the other words, shekinah, a noun form from the verb to dwell, and it comes across into Greek as the word SKENE. And then they would swear by heaven, but Jesus says what sanctifies heaven is throne of God, so you can't make this distinction.

So he asked two rhetorical questions. Notice how Jesus uses questions. They are designed to get people to think. I am really trying to learn to this: ask people questions and not force them to hurry their way through the answers. Most people take time because most people don't think about things too deeply. I'm not being insulting. We have people who have a deficit in their education so they don't know how to think. In many cases they are people who have never ever had anyone around them who asked them a thought-provoking question, and it just blows their mind. So you have to give them time to think about things.

We are in too big of a hurry often to try to correct people on the gospel and correct people's understanding of God without letting them go through that thoughtful process of self-discovery. And so Jesus is asking them these questions. Of course Jesus' context is a little different than when we are trying to witness to somebody. He says, "Fools and blind, for which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold?" The way He sets up the question is pretty obvious. There is no distinction, and then He says the second time, "Fools and blind, for which is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift?

Jesus when is asking these questions He is asking them rhetorically to bring out the point. He is not really waiting for them to give an answer for self-discovery. He's already condemning them because they are people who are already set against God. You can ask them every question in the world and they're never going to try to probe or think because they've already decided in the core of their soul to reject God. That's where they are.

And then He concludes this little section with three positive statements where He says, "Therefore he who swears by the altar, swears by it and by all things on it". He was swears by the temple, swears by it, and by him who dwells in it, and swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God, and by him who sits on it. And the point that he is making is that that you can't come up with these little distinctions that are superficially plausible, but actually are logically flawed, and they are misleading and will lead people into divine judgment. By his argument here He is showing that the significance of both the place or the offering, or the person of God, are inseparably connected to one another. To swear an oath on one is to swear an oath on the other. Therefore all oaths, He is saying, are equally binding.

Now He doesn't condemn using an oath here. That is clearly authorized in the Old Testament. What He is saying is that you have to be extremely cautious and careful, and weigh the alternatives to taking an oath, because once you take it you're bound by it, and you can't just walk away from it.

So what He saying to the Pharisees really isn't difficult. He's just demonstrating the falsehood of their logic. Another way to look at this is by making these false distinctions they are profaning the name of God, and in effect by get coming up with ways that you can avoid fulfilling an oath, you're taking the Lord's name in vain. We often think will take the Lord's name in vain as some sort of curse word where you put the name of God or Jesus in front of something. That is probably the lightest form of taking the Lord's name in vain.

When people get in a pulpit and they say, "God has spoken to me", they are taking the name of God in vain in the kind of way that that the Law is prohibiting. When people stand up and say that that God is going to do this God is going to do that and there's no direct revelation for either then once again they are taking God's name in vain. There is a lot that happens in Christianity on every single Sunday morning from tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of pulpits in this country where the pastors are taking the Lord's name in vain. But we never call them on that because we've sort of miss interpreted and missed define what it means to take the Lords name in vain. We have to be very careful.

Jesus is in effect telling them that by this they're there breaking one of the 10 Commandments and taking the Lord's name in vain. Then by calling them blind guides He again indicates that they're spiritually dead and blind and have no perception of the truth.

This goes back to Matthew 15:7-9 and verse 14. There he calls them hypocrites. He did identifies the problem is lip service in verse eight, that their worship of them is vanity, "in vain they worship me", so they're taking the Lord's name in vain by the way, they are worshiping, and then in verse 14 he concluded by saying, let them alone, they are blind leaders of the blind. They're all spiritually dead, and if the blind leads them both, both will fall into a ditch; a picture of eternal condemnation blind guides. In verse 17 they're fools and blind. In 26 they are blind Pharisees. He reiterates this 5 times for effect. He emphasizes their spiritual death.

In Matthew 5:34-37 Jesus is teaching them about how to avoid taking oaths and simply affirming with a yes or no. He is not giving a new principal there, He is simply saying let your yes be yes and your no be no. So if you take an oath make sure that you are going to be able to fulfill it.

Underlying the warning against taking oaths is that we as creatures in the image of God, or to reflect the character of God. God is not a liar. Two

Passages: Titus 1:2 ^NASB "in the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie …" Just by this little parenthetical statement, Paul affirms that God cannot lie, and he will fulfill his promises.

1 Samuel 15:29 in Samuel's rebuke of Saul. ^NASB "Also the Glory of Israel [NKJV "Strength of Israel. Cf. Psalm 59] will not lie or change His mind; for He is not a man that He should change His mind.” That was apparently a common name to refer to God. Samuel used it first Samuel 15; David used it in Psalm 59.

So then we come to the fourth woe. The fourth woe, again, emphasizes their superficiality; that they are majoring in the minors and minoring in the majors. They are rejecting significant issues and spending all their times on minor issues. The minor issues are irrelevant to their spirituality, the major issues are important to their spirituality, but they would rather talk about that which is not important because to talk about that which is can be rather convicting. I know nobody here would ever do anything quite like that!

It is common in all religion. We don't want to talk about those things where the Holy Spirit is going to drive it home and it will be personally convicting. Let's talk about something else, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, that same kind of thing.

So in these two verses he articulates the woe. He says, "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites for you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin". These are herbs but they are considered to be part of the crop, part of that which is harvested. "… for you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy, and faith. These you ought to have done …" He is not saying that these you ought to have done without leaving the others undone. He is not saying you shouldn't talk about paying the tithe of mint and anise and cumin. But you do that, but you also have to talk about the weightier is more significant issues of the Law are related to justice, mercy and faith. He calls them blind guides, who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

Two passages in the Old Testament talk about herbs as being part of the harvested crops: Leviticus 27:30; Deuteronomy 14:22, 23. It's not that tithing her herbs was not important or not correct. It is just that it is a lower priority than weightier matters such as justice, mercy and faithfulness. This isn't an hierarchical ethic, it is saying that even with in the Law there are some things that are more significant than others.

When we look at this last verse blind guides, who strain a gnat and swallow a camel, I think that this was a common idiom and it is a play on words, especially in the Aramaic very possibly. Jesus said this originally in Aramaic, but was written under inspiration. In Greek the Aramaic word for gnat as you see on the board is the word qalma, and it sounds like and is very similar to the Aramaic word for camel, which is gamla; so it's a play on words.

The Bible is filled with these little puns or paronomasias and so even these sayings are are written that way so that it's memorable, so you can remember it.

Jesus is alluding to Micah 6:8 ^NASB "He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God?" That's the background for what Jesus is talking about in the fourth woe.

Then we come to the fifth woe. In the fifth woe and the sixth woe we see this emphasis on externals only with a it's more than just a denial. It is they are totally ignorant of the need for an internal transformation as the precursor to an external transformation. So in the fifth and the six woes the focus is on the ultimate spiritual issue of internal transformation.

Now in verses 25 and 26 we see a passage I've often seen applied to sanctification. I don't think that is the original meaning of Jesus. He is not talking about their spiritual life and spiritual growth, because in order to have spiritual growth you have to be born again. I think that the issue here is that they are spiritually dead. Therefore, there can be no genuine external cleansing.

Matthew 23:25 ^NASB “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence."

He is using a picture of the concern that we discover in the Mishna with the tremendous concern for the externals, for ritual purity in the area of dietary laws, and how to use the right dishes for the right things. In the Mosaic Law there is a command that a calf should not be boiled in his mother's milk. Now that has direct allusion to practices in the pagan worship of Baal, and what it was communicating was that the Jews were not to worship God in the way the idolaters worship their gods.

But in second temple Judaism they got to the point where they were trying to make sure they never ran the risk of violating that original law, and so they reached a point where they completely separated any kind of utensil that would be used in dairy products with those that were used in meat products. Even today you go to Israel and many of the hotels that cater not just to a Gentile crowd but also the Jews will have will have a either a meat kitchen or a dairy kitchen. And one of the nicer hotels where we stayed several times had a dairy kitchen, and I don't like to stay there very long because the menu gets rather boring. It's mostly like in pasta and fish. That's it, but I just I found out since I was there the last time that the room service menu is a meat kitchen. So if you want a hamburger you have to do it through room service.

So they go to an excessive amount to make sure all of these things are done proper, as well as cleansing. But he's using that as an analogy that they are just so obsessed with this that they clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside it's still dirty and looks good on the outside but inside it's filled with extortion and self-indulgence. It is filled with sand. They never correct the core problem and so I think that what this is saying is that in the light of the fact that they're again called hypocrites, they're blind guides, etc. they're not saying that is the cleansing of the inside, it's not talking about experiential cleansing, it's talking about positional cleansing. They're not saved, and so He tells them the first you have to cleanse the inside of the cup. That's what happens when we trust in Christ for salvation and then the outside can truly become cleansed.

If you just washing the outside that would be simple morality, and even unbelievers can be very moral and have a measure of integrity that often outshines believers.

I've frequently told the story of when I was in seminary I would housesit for a family and they went to Northwest Bible church. They were a solid, Bible-based family, but whenever they needed work done on their home they would always hire either a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness, because they were working their way to heaven they did a much better job than your run-of-the-mill grace oriented Christian. That is such a convicting thing.

Blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup—that would be regeneration—then it's possible to truly change the outside. This reminded me of what happens in Matthew 12 when Jesus is rejecting the Pharisees. They rejected him, accused him of casting out a demon by the power of Beelzebub, and He gives this example. He says, "When an unclean man goes out unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none is that I will return from a house from which I came. When he comes home, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order." This is morality. You can morally clean everything up, but if there's no real internal change, then it's going to end up being worse later on.

And when he comes home, he finds everything clean, this moral reformation, you cleanse the outside of the cup. Then this demon goes and takes seven more spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there because there's no internal transformation, no internal cleansing that comes from faith in God's promise of salvation.

The sixth woe in verses 27 to 28 continues the same idea of the previous one, which has to do with external cleansing when inside everything is still spiritually dead:

“You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness."

Now, according to the Mosaic Law if you touched a dead body or a carcass then you were you work rendered ritually unclean. There are a lot of graves in Israel, and so in order to warn people off so they would not accidentally sit down and have a picnic on top of somebody's grave, they would paint tombs and put t the tombstones over these graves. They would paint them with whitewash so that it would warn people from coming to the grave and being rendered ritually unclean. That is what Jesus is referring to. On the outside it looks very white and very clean, but on the inside it's a grave, it's filled with dead men's bones. And the idea is you look good on the outside with your morals and your ethics and all your ritual activity in religious activity, but on the inside you are spiritually dead. You're unregenerate, and that has to be solved before you can truly work on the outside. "For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness."

Even so, you also outwardly appear righteous to men but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness, you're still spiritually dead. So these are covered the first six. I want to wait and cover the seventh because it goes directly into the final judgment on Israel. I will cover that next time and finish the chapter.

What is our conclusion here? This passage is about condemning legalism, condemning religious activity instead of genuine spiritual rebirth, and grace based salvation and living. So the conclusion is that first of all, there must be an internal transformation before there's a relationship with God. There has to be a transformation internally from being unclean to being clean. This compares with the transformation from being blind to receiving site. The perfect picture of this is in John chapter 9 when Jesus healed a blind man. And in verse five Jesus said in reference to what He was doing: "As long as I am in the world I am the light of the world". John chapters eight and nine teach that Jesus is the light of the world. He comes in to illuminate.

This is goes back to John chapter 1 that He is the light and in Him was no darkness and He brings light into the world. And John 9:35 after an interchange with the Pharisees again He is talking to the man who was blind that He healed. Notice the blind man had no idea Jesus was going to heal him. He isn't believing in Jesus to be healed, He is in seeking to be given site. Jesus just did it out of his sovereign will now is going to come back and use that as an opportunity to focus on the gospel.

Jesus heard that they had cast him out, the Pharisees dumped him and he went. Jesus went looking fore the man said do you believe in the Son of God, and the blind man answered and said, "Who is he, Lord?" He's still not sure. Remember he was blind and never really got a good look at Jesus. He said, "Who is He, who is the Son of God, that I may believe in him.

He wants to believe. That's an expression of his positive volition. And Jesus said, "You have both seen him and it is He who is talking to you". So Jesus says, "I'm standing right here. I'm the one who healed you". And then the blind man said, "Lord, I believe".

Throughout the Gospel of John the only basis for salvation is believe. It's not asking Jesus into your heart, it's not walking an aisle, it is not changing anything, it's not making a commitment, it's not even repenting, although I do think that one sense of repentance is to change from not believing to believing, but in John there's no mention of the word repent. It is simply believe, believe, believe, believe; that is how the internal transformation takes place. It is totally on the basis of grace and not on the basis of works.

Second, what follows that should be an experiential internal transformation. This is what Paul describes in Romans 12: to "not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." Now that can't happen until you first trust in Christ the Savior. After that we have to have our mind renewed so that we can prove or demonstrate that the will of God is good, acceptable and perfect. That's the process of the spiritual life. It is an ongoing cleansing process.

And third, both of these are based on grace, not on a superficial obedience to an external morality but an internal transformation that takes place on the basis of grace.

Ephesians 2:8, 9 says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God not of works lest any man should boast." Titus 35 says that it's not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us. So salvation is based on grace; the spiritual life is based on grace, but that doesn't mean it's lawless. It means that we understand that God is the one who does the work and we accept it. We don't do the work and expect God to bless us. God has already blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies with our heads bowed in her eyes close.

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