Matthew (23): Seven Woes (III)

Matt. 23:25 “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.

Matt. 23:26 “You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also.

Once again, Jesus calls these men “hypocrites”. Earlier, we saw Him condemning them as false teachers. They portrayed themselves as godly and pious. And they convinced an entire generation of Israel that they were the experts on God, and therefore the most qualified to teach the people of Israel about how to please God. But in reality, those guys were far from God. They didn't possess what they claimed to offer others. They were unbelievers. And that's the key element, the key characteristic of a false teacher, according to Scripture. 

2 Peter 2 gives us this - that a false teacher is false because they're not of God. They don't know God. They're not believers, as we would say, and so, they're speaking about things that they have no hope to understand themselves. And that's what made these men so dangerous in their day. Religious people are naturally attracted to the outward piety of people who practice religion in a zealous way. That outward appearance convinces believers that these false teachers are genuine and they're trustworthy. But inside, they're actually very different. 

So in this 5th woe, Jesus condemns these men for so-called “selective piety”, for their caring only for the outward appearance. They ignored the inward reality of their character, and to make the point, He uses this very simple but very effective illustration of dirty dishes to describe these guys.

Now, in verse 25 Jesus says these men were only cleaning the outside of their dishes, leaving the inside dirty. And He's referring to the way Pharisaic Judaism, as a religion, placed importance only on the external behaviors, the things you do rather than who you truly are. That system of religion put virtually no importance on inward character, on the quality of your inward godliness. And so you could have this strange situation in which you have Pharisees who were scrupulous about their rituals and at the same time they gave absolutely no attention to their inner sin.

Imagine sitting down to eat at a restaurant. You have a waiter who comes to your table, and as he sets your table, you notice at first glance that all the dishes look spotless. But then, as you inspect them a little more closely, you start to notice that the inside of your cup is absolutely filthy, it's never been cleaned. And so naturally you complain to the waiter. And you say, “My dishes are not clean.” Now how would you react if the waiter then turned to you and said, “Oh, no, no. Look, the outside is perfectly clean. You don't need to worry about the inside.”

Well, Jesus’ point to the Pharisees is essentially that - they were selective in what they cleaned. They chose to focus only on the outside of the cup, so to speak, claiming that cleaning the outside of the person, of their nature, was good enough. Like the waiter saying the outside of the cup being clean was good enough. And Jesus compares the cleaning of the outside of dishes to ritualistic traditions and the various external practices of Pharisaic Judaism.

Pharisaic Judaism, as you’d have come to know now, is an exercise in making the outside of a person as clean as possible, speaking ritually. From their clothing to their public prayers, to how and what they ate, everything they did, all those rituals were a means of pursuing godliness in their minds.

They would fuss over how they wore their hair and their beard, or how many times they washed their hands before a meal and so on. They had all these rules that were designed to affect the outside of the person. And they did these things in the belief that those rituals had the power to make them acceptable to God. They actually believed that that scrupulous devotion to external rituals made them inwardly pleasing to God. And they did it without any thought about whether it was actually working or not. They just took it for granted. 

And Jesus says the truth inside those men was robbery and self-indulgence. Now, robbery, just to define it, is forcibly taking something, stealing something, from someone else in a show of force. And self-indulgence is obeying your own lusts, doing what your flesh would like. And we learned verses earlier how these men were lovers of money and how they use their religious position to steal from people. And that's the robbery and the self-indulgence that Jesus is talking about here. They have a corrupt, sinful character, and it comes out of them in those ways. 

So if it were possible for us to look at the hearts of these men, spiritually speaking, you would see effectively a cup filled with mouldy filth. And if you would have pointed that out to them, they would have done what the waiter did. They would have taken their cup and turned it over, so to speak. And they would have said, “Oh, yeah, but look how clean the outside of this cup is!” And that's why Jesus condemned these men - they were experts in religious rituals and yet cared nothing about inward character because they assumed one was a means to the other. 

And, of course, this kind of hypocrisy is not unique to Pharisees. They were the poster children of it in their day, certainly, but anyone could do this. Christians could do this. Christians, unfortunately, do this all the time. We put on acts in front of other people. We can pretend to be better than we truly are. We can try to do it to gain approval or just to feel better about ourselves.

And because we have the Holy Spirit living inside us, we tend to be aware of these games even as we play them. There's a part of us inside that knows this is not real. We know God knows our true self, and we know that He will judge us for our inside as much as our outside, if not more. And so, as we play a game of hypocrisy with other people we will tend to feel some guilt about it, some conviction about it. And hopefully that conviction will eventually lead us to drop the pretense and to submit to the Spirit so that we actually become the person that we're pretending to be. 

But the Pharisees, being unbelievers, lived without that conviction. They actually went through this pretend life of religious ritual not as an act, not as something that they knew was false, but as their only real understanding of religion and of what it means to be devoted to God.

For them, it was the equivalent of internal righteousness. And they truly believed that if you practise the rituals and you do them reliably and do them well, then you will be more holy and more righteous before God.

Before you have a true relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ, religion for you will be nothing more than ritual, because ritual is all you have when you don't have relationship.

But religious rituals have no power at all. They have no power to change the inside of anyone, no more than making barking sounds will turn you into a dog does repeating religious ritual turn you into somebody holy and pious and pleasing to God. The only way that the inside of a person changes, is by a work done by the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ.

Paul says it this way in writing to Titus, in Titus 3:4 he says

Titus 3:4 But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared,

Titus 3:5 He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit,

Titus 3:6 whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior,

So as Paul explains, because of the kindness and mercy of God, we were saved. Not because we accomplished some kind of religious ritual which we thought was making us righteous, but because He renewed us through the Holy Spirit, given to us by our faith in Jesus Christ.

Being born again is the way it's described in John chapter 3. It's a reference to that inward cleansing, literally speaking. By faith in Christ you received the Holy Spirit who cleanses the inside of your cup. He makes the inside of us spiritually clean. That's a work that only God can do on the inside of a human being. 

But here's the best part, perhaps. After that inward cleansing happens, Paul says, then a renewal process begins inside us, also done by the Holy Spirit. And that renewing process which the Bible calls sanctification, leads that inward cleanliness to move outward - so that, as Jesus says, “clean the inside of the cup and you'll get the outside clean also.” - because the righteousness that God puts in us by His spirit will show itself over time through changes in our behavior. 

By the grace of God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the person you have become on the inside, by virtue of that renewing, will start to show itself over time in changes to the way you think and speak and act. That process of renewing you is the inside of you coming out over time. And that is the power of a true relationship with God through Jesus Christ. 

And if you notice, it's the complete opposite of what external ritualistic religion claims to be able to do. Those who practice that kind of religion, are hoping that by adopting outside behaviors, they will work inwardly to change who they are. It’s a false way of thinking. The truth is exactly the opposite, which is so often the case when it comes to the Bible - that you have to first be changed on the inside so that God will work that change outwardly over time. It's the cleaning of the outside of the cup versus the cleaning of the inside of the cup. 

And so what these men did was promote a selective approach to piety, selective in the sense that they only worried about the outside of themselves. And as a result, they adopted ritual and not relationship. And Jesus condemns them for it in the 5th woe, which is now leading us into the 6th woe. Matthew 23:27 - He says

Matt. 23:27 “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.

Matt. 23:28 “So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

So, the 6th woe sounds an awful lot like the 5th one, as you might imagine. And that's because Jesus uses another illustration of outward versus inward - outward appearance versus inward reality. But the point He is making in this 6th woe and the condemnation He's issuing is for something entirely different than the 5th woe.

The problem in the 6th woe is how the Pharisees contributed to a lack of righteousness in others. Jesus calls these men white washed tombs - perfectly clean and attractively painted, and yet inside, like all graves, they're full of dead men's bones. 

Now, to understand what He's really getting at here and how this establishes a different critique than the 5th one, we first have to understand some unique practices of Judaism in that day, which is what Jesus is alluding to here.

Every year at Passover in Jesus’ day, you'd find thousands, maybe even millions, of Jewish pilgrims coming into the city of Jerusalem from all over, walking from every direction into the city. And it's not a very big city in Jesus’ day, and there was no way that it could accommodate thousands and millions of visitors. There was no room for them, and so inevitably these pilgrims would end up sleeping on the neighbouring hillsides, and in the little towns that dotted the region around Jerusalem. 

Now, in the law of Moses, a Jew could be barred from participating in the Passover if that person became ritually unclean in the days before the Passover. For example, in Numbers 19:16, we're told that if a Jew comes into contact with a grave, a tomb of any kind, then that person is considered unclean for the next seven days. And so, if a Jew were to come into contact with a grave in the days before Passover, they would be ineligible to participate in the Passover.

And because the hillsides all around Jerusalem were covered with tomb sites and graves up around the hills, it led to this interesting practice in Jesus’ day - it became customary in the weeks leading up to Passover for Jews to go out into the hillsides around the city of Jerusalem and paint all of the graves they could find in a fresh coat of white paint.

Now, not only did it make the graves look more attractive, but its main purpose was that it made them easier to spot. And so travelling pilgrims could avoid those graves by seeing them more clearly and avoid stumbling over them and being disqualified from participating in the Passover that they were coming to enjoy. 

And that's the scenario that Jesus is talking about, or referring to here as He talks about the Pharisees. He says they're like those white washed tombs right before a Passover. They have white washed themselves in a sense, that is, they've made themselves look attractive on the outside. They played the part of being pious, and they do it all very well. So they look very attractive.

Yet no one really could tell that if you could have seen inside them. They were like a grave. They were full of dead things, full of hypocrisy, full of lawlessness. But here's the real issue - the distinction between this woe and the 5th one before it - the problem was that attractive exterior that the Pharisees created would lead other people to look to them for religious guidance.

As the people of Israel came to the Pharisees for that guidance, they were unknowingly walking on graves, so to speak. That is, the people of Israel were being defiled by their coming to the Pharisees because they thought the Pharisees had something they needed.

The Pharisees would then lead the nation of Israel, the people of Israel, to become unclean in the sense that they lead people away from the truth of God. And by defiling the people of Israel, in that way, the Pharisees disqualified the nation from participating in the true Passover. 

Remember when all this is happening we’re just barely two days away from Passover. And in this year, Jesus is going to fulfill the Passover. In its full sense, He is going to be the Passover Lamb. He's going to put Himself up on a cross, to die for the sins of Israel and for the world.

And as the Passover is being fulfilled in that year for that generation of Israel, that generation is going to miss it. They are going to be prevented from participating in the fulfilment of the Passover, that is, in believing in their Messiah. Why?

Because they have stumbled over, so to speak, the whitewashed tombs of the Pharisees. And they've been disqualified as a result. 

And so the 6th woe spoken against the Pharisees is for their defiling influence on the nation of Israel, causing them to miss their Messiah at Passover. They were the tombs that defiled the nation. Yet on the outside they were pretty and white and because of that beautiful appearance they attract people to them. And the irony of it all is this:  the white washed tombs were supposed to warn people to stay away. 

Now, before we move to the final woe - the 7th woe - let's reflect for just a moment on the two that we've now come through - the 5th and the 6th woes. You have the first of those emphasizing ritual over relationship, and they were condemned for that. And now you have this 6th woe of allowing hypocrisy to become a stumbling block for others. And they were condemned for that.

And I think it's easy to see how we can fall into the footsteps of these men in our own way, that is, Christians falling prey to substituting ritual for relationship, or by becoming a negative influence on another person's walk with God. These are not hard to understand or imagine. Let’s just give a moment's thought to a couple of things. 

First, every Christian should be asking this of themselves continually at all times in their life and it’s if we’re letting ritual take the place of relationship in our walk with Jesus. The Christian church has very few prescribed rituals in the New Testament - In fact, I can only think of a handful that you would find in the Bible - baptism, communion, the regular gathering and the laying on of hands - those are the only rituals that I can think of that are prescribed in the New Testament.

Yet, over the centuries, men and women have added countless more rituals and made them a part of the traditions of the church. Ritual by itself is not wrong, it’s not a bad thing, necessarily. But it can become a crutch. If you don't have a relationship with Jesus by faith, and yet you want to appear to have one, that is, you want to fit in, in some sense - what you do then is you adopt empty rituals in place of that genuine relationship. You go through the motions, but you don't really understand what it's about. 

Or maybe we have a faith in Jesus, maybe we are saved, that is. But we don't want to spend the time or the energy to invest in that relationship. So we would rather just repeat a ritual of showing up every week into a building, sing, kneel, shake hands, do what they tell me to do and then go home. And then the other six days of the week, we don't give any thought to who we are in Christ.

We'd rather do all of that than invest the time required in disciplines of prayer and study and following the Lord, in obeying His commands and listening to His instruction, all those things that take effort and some investment of time, and it certainly requires a denial of self repeatedly. It’s hard work, and it’s hard in the sense that it could be hard to discipline the flesh. 

Moving on to the 7th and the last of these woes, Jesus says, 

Matt. 23:29 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous,

Matt. 23:30 and say, ‘If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’

Matt. 23:31 “So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.

Matt. 23:32 “Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers.

Matt. 23:33 “You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?

Well, once again, Jesus draws upon a Jewish practice of the day here. We need to understand the history if we're to get the full sense of what He's saying here. And the history involves tombs. And He makes a comparison between the tombs of Old Testament prophets and the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. So back in the time of the Old Testament and all of the books that we have of the Old Testament, you see prophet after prophet who came to Israel at various points in their history, during times of disobedience generally. And they came with a message from God to the people of Israel to repent or to heed the Word of the Lord.

And because that was their ministry, prophets, generally speaking, were not popular people. In fact, being a prophet to Israel was about as thankless and dangerous a job as you could possibly have. They were almost always killed by those they came to serve. The writer of Hebrews kind of gives us an overview of the fate of the prophets when he writes this - it's in Hebrews 11:32. Speaking about the saints of old, these prophets we're talking about, the writer says, 

Heb. 11:32 And what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets,

And listen to how He describes the prophets…

Heb. 11:33 who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions,

Heb. 11:34 quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.

All that sounds great… 

Heb. 11:35 Women received back their dead by resurrection; 

and then it changes… And He says, 

and others were tortured, not accepting their release, so that they might obtain a better resurrection;

Heb. 11:36 and others experienced mockings and scourgings, yes, also chains and imprisonment.

Heb. 11:37 They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted, they were put to death with the sword; they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated

Heb. 11:38 (men of whom the world was not worthy), wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground.

Well, they certainly achieved some powerful things, as the writer said at the beginning. But they were mistreated in some horrible ways as well. They were universally hated. They were martyred for bringing the truth to Israel. But the Pharisees, for their part, declared, “Oh, no, no, no! If we had been there, if we had been alive in those days, that's not what we would have done. We would have defended the prophets. We would have been against the people in those things.” 

Some of the Pharisees had actually gone about designating the places in Israel where the tombs of these ancient prophets were supposedly located. They would make a show of honoring the memory of these men by honoring their grave sites, building these fabulous monuments on the location where they were supposedly buried. And they said this is proof that they would have known to be on the prophets’ side.

In other words, they would have had the insight to change history had they had the opportunity to do so. But Jesus says in verse 31 that by making such claims now, these men were actually testifying against themselves by acknowledging they are the responsible parties for what Israel does today. In other words, these men were now in a position to direct the people concerning the prophets of their day. 

So if they're so quick to say they would have known better concerning the older prophets,  then they can prove that they're right by showing the insight concerning their present day prophets. And who were the present-day prophets? Well, ironically, the present-day prophets of the Pharisees’ time were the very ones that the prior prophets foretold.

Isaiah was the one who said there would be a voice crying in the wilderness to make crooked ways straight for the coming of the Lord, referring, of course, to John the Baptist. And Isaiah is also the one who said that the root of Jesse would come and one day be the Messiah, speaking, of course, of Jesus. So the people of Israel hated Isaiah and eventually killed him. 

And now you have the Pharisee saying, “Oh, we wouldn't have done that!” Meanwhile, what are they doing? They're persecuting John the Baptist and Jesus. And so even if they publicly embrace the memory of the martyred prophets, they're leading the nation in their day to reject their own Messiah.

And Jesus says that's the absolute worst kind of hypocrisy, and He condemns them for it. He says in verses 32 & 33 that they're filling up the measure of their own guilt. That is, the guilt of their fathers which they now have taken upon themselves. That is, they’re doing worse than their fathers did. That's what He's saying. Their guilt exceeded those who killed the prophets because they're not only killing prophets, they're killing the Messiah Himself.

So the 7th woe involves the Pharisees thinking themselves righteous and better than the people, when in reality they were the worst kind of unrighteousnous. Now, this sin of self-righteousness in their case was not just a matter of pride. It wasn't just the fact that they saw themselves improperly in this way. It's also the way they inoculate themselves from the reach of God's mercy.

Look, if you don't believe you're a sinner, if you don't think you're in need of saving, well then, when the Messiah shows up offering forgiveness, you won't have any need for it. If you don't think that you are due hell, you're not looking for a solution to find heaven. That's the problem with these guys. That's the basic problem with self-righteousness.

It's at the heart of the 7th woe here - this issue that these men did not see themselves honestly. They were self-deceived, and as a result, they couldn't see Jesus honestly, either. They were blind to their own predicament. And they were blind to who the Messiah was. Remember, the gospel came as a pronouncement of “repent and believe”. You have got to repent. You’ve got to know you're not okay the way you are. Things need to change. You have a problem that needs to be solved. 

But these guys had a different expectation. They truly believe that when the Messiah came, whenever that happened, that He would go to the Pharisees first. And He would praise them, as if to say, “I'm glad I've got at least somebody here that knows how to do this. I am here to save Israel, and thankfully, you're here with Me, Pharisees.” They expected that kind of welcome from the Messiah because in their mind, they were the epitome of righteousness.

So when Jesus came and honored prostitutes and tax collectors and criticized these Pharisees as hypocrites, it was the exact opposite of what they expected. It led them to judge Jesus as not being the Messiah. And they wanted to condemn Him. Jesus dismisses all that hypocrisy here, and says they are the fraud. 

And notice, He repeatedly calls them “blind guides”. And here's the thing He's talking about - they’re blind most of all, to their own sin. As Jesus says in John 9, where He said to the Pharisee, “Because they said to themselves, they see”, meaning that they had spiritual insight and were already righteous, He said, “Because you say that, I'm going to leave you in your blindness.”

So, that's the 7th woe: believing yourself more righteous than you truly are. In fact, not recognizing you are wholly sinful. 

Now let's look back on all seven of these woes. And you may remember, they're organized as a chiasm. And a chiasm is a literary structure that you commonly find in the Bible. It's all over the place, from Genesis to Revelation. And a chiasm is an arrangement of ideas. You take the thoughts you're going to lay out and you arrange them in a pattern that helps the reader follow the logic; follow the development of the argument or the development of a story. And in this particular chapter, there are 7 woes and they are set up in a chiasm and the way it works is you pair up the first and the last, and the next to last and the next to first. You pair them up in thought, in idea.

Now, why is this in the Bible?

First, in having this pairing up, you get a chance to appreciate that the interpretation of the first one and the last one need to pair up, and the interpretation of the second and the sixth one. So, if you're having some doubts about your interpretation, you should see your interpretation confirmed by noticing whether it's paralleled or not. And if they're not paralled, then your interpretation is not quite right. 

But secondly, and probably more importantly, a chiasm’s purpose is in directing you to the point. If you notice in this chiasm, and in all chiasms, there is one point that is unpaired and it lies at the very middle. In this case, it's number 4. And as they like to say, the point of a chiasm is the place in the design where it reverses back out. And it draws your attention to that point. So in this chiasm, the main point, the main thought of what Jesus is teaching is found in the 4th woe.

The 4th woe was against the Pharisees’ selective obedience to the Word of God. If you remember, that's the one when He says they chose to tithe on mint and herbs and so on, but they ignored the weightier aspects of the law, like justice and mercy. So they were selectively determining which parts of the law they would follow and which parts of the law they would ignore.

Now, when you start picking and choosing what you're going to follow in the Word of God, you inevitably do something called “cherry-picking”. You pick the ones that look best. You don't pick the ones that look bad to you. And cherry-picking in the Bible means going into the Bible and looking for the rules, the commandments, the direction that you prefer and adopting those wholeheartedly but then conveniently ignoring anything the Bible says which does not fit with your preconceived notions or your personal desires.

So if the Bible says that there's something we can't do or there is something we should do, we just ignore those rules if they don't fit our liking. But I’d like to think of it this way: it's like we pick the rules we like, and we do those rules extra hard to make up for the ones that we’re choosing to ignore. It's kind of a subconscious process. And it’s a game of hypocrisy. It's living in rebellion to God's authority but pretending you're not, by how you pick certain things to show off with. 

No one obeys the Bible perfectly, of course. None of us can. But that's not the concern that Jesus had here in the 4th woe. He didn't condemn these men because they were trying to do what the Bible said and they were just failing at it. That's the common experience of all believers.

No. He condemned them for ignoring the Bible when it suited them. And that's the core issue that leads to every other one of the 7 woes. It's why this particular point sits at the point of the chiasm, because how you approach the Word of God will determine how you live and how you obey the Lord.

If you come to the Word of God sincerely, with an open heart and with a desire to accept what you find when you get there, then you are truly obeying or seeking to obey. On the other hand, if you go into the Bible with this intent to manipulate what you find to validate your life, to validate your opinion or your ways, then you're a hypocrite playing a game with God. 

The Pharisees were master manipulators of the Word of God. And they played their game perfectly in such a way that they could ensure they had their cake and ate it, too. They could get the praise they wanted from people and the money and all the rest by being scrupulous in the things they liked. And at the same time they could still get away with doing all the things they truly desired because those they swept under the rug. So they pointed to the Word of God when it supported what they desired, and they ignored it when it didn't.

And look, when you look at this from your own perspective as a Christian there are, generally speaking, three ways that you can live in respect to the Bible. But only one of those three ways will bring you spiritual maturity and godliness. 

First, you can just ignore the Bible. And I think that's the path that, presumably, a lot of Christians choose. You treat it like a dictionary on your bookshelf at home. You take it down when you have a question, when you need a definition, when you have some problem to solve. And then when that need is over in the moment, it goes back on the shelf and it gets dusty until the next crisis.

It’s like Bible Bingo. You play Bible Bingo in the sense that you just need a certain letter to complete the problem you’re in or to solve the puzzle that you're trying to solve. I just need that one little element there.

Another analogy is this: the Bible is kind of like a recipe book - just kind of guides me when I need it, but the rest of time I'm cool without it. It's for the pastor to know the Bible. I don't need to know the Bible. If that's who you are with the Bible, you'll grow almost nothing at all in your walk with Jesus because you're not immersed in what God gave us for growth. I'd like to say it this way: the spirit of God is the engine of change. Remember, He renews us, but the fuel for that engine is the Word of God. 

The second group engages in some level of study routinely, but here's the difference: they're not searching for truth. They're searching for affirmation. This group has preconceived ideas about God and about faith. Maybe they got it from their denomination or from their pastor, from their friends or in a myriad of other ways they came upon their ideas.

They bring those ideas to the process of study whenever they engage in it. And they aren't going into this study so much with the interest of having their minds changed about anything, especially if that happens to be personal correction in some area of their life. For them, the Bible just exists to confirm their views. And if they should stumble upon something that contradicts what they believe, well, they could just kind of set it aside or explain it away.

And that is what we call cherry-picking. And what it produces is not only a lack of spiritual growth, but worse than that, it produces pride and arrogance. It puffs up the heart, and it inoculates you to conviction because you've always got a reason why something doesn't apply to you or why it's wrong. 

Finally, there are Christians who will go with the process of studying the Bible as a lifelong pursuit. They enter into the experience expecting to change as a result. They expect God to change their mind. They expect to have to change their behaviors, and they ultimately hope it will change their hearts. And they know they're going to be convicted. They're ready to repent when the time comes. They may not always like it, of course. It doesn't always feel good, but they expect it. And when the correction comes, they embrace it gladly because they understand it is a path to greater peace.

As the writer says in Hebrews, we don't like correction in the moment but in time it bears this peaceful fruit of righteousness. And along the way they also expect to be amazed and to be intrigued, and maybe even to be confused at times. But they don't worry about that because they expect to be engaged in study for the rest of their lives. And they anticipate that it's all going to work out in time. God will do the good work that He does through His word.

And this is the group we call truth seekers, because that's what they are. And they're the ones Jesus is seeking because they are the opposite of Pharisees, and all those who live in a hypocritical way. 

How you approach the Word of God is the key determining factor on who you will be in Christ. Because it's why God gave us the Word of God - that we would grow in the grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. From the studying of these seven woes, we learn a little bit about the men who brought Jesus to the cross, and we learn a lot about Pharisaic Judaism, and we certainly see a little bit of our own sin in some of these things.

But maybe more than anything else, what we get from this section of Matthew's gospel is an appreciation that our approach to the Word of God is all important to our walk with Jesus. Let us give it the time it deserves and come at it with an authentic and sincere heart, one that's open, willing to be corrected, looking to change. Because if we let it do that work in our heart, we'll find that peaceful fruit of righteousness in our life. And that's what this is all about as we await our Lord's return. 

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