Matthew 23:29

PHARISAIC SINS

‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!’

Matthew 23:29

We have to do with what are familiarly known as ‘Pharisaic Sins.’ They resolve themselves chiefly into four:—Pride, Hypocrisy, Superstition, and a Dislike to Real, Spiritual Religion. The rest are offshoots; these are the roots and these are the only sins against which Christ was ever severe. Why? Because the men who committed them were the enlightened ones of the earth.

I. Pride.—‘God is in His holy temple,’ and all creation lies—poor and sinful—at His feet. All glory is God’s. Any glory given to any creature is a robbery of the Almighty! Hence God’s abhorrence of pride. Hence Christ’s detestation of a Pharisee!

II. Hypocrisy.—And the characteristic of our religion, as a test of everything, is reality. We have to do with a very real God—a God of truth—always the same. He abhors hollowness. The unfelt speech—the form, which represents nothing—the act, with no intention—the double face—the smile that covers coldness—the polite word which simulates affection—the prayerless prayer—the praiseless hymn—the fixed eye which looks out from a wandering mind—the self of a seeming worship— the whited sepulchres of black death—God flings them from Him; He cannot away with them; and hence, Christ’s ‘woe’ to a Pharisee!

III. Superstition.—Truth is always simple. Superstition complicates and clouds God’s great, simple plan. It loses the spirit in the letter; and makes more of little externals than of the great principles of our faith. That is superstition! Therefore God repudiates it—and hence, again, Christ’s denunciation of a Pharisee!

IV. Dislike of spiritual religion.—And once more. God is one God—therefore He loves unity, because it is His own reflection. All party spirit; all depreciation of what is spiritual; all that does not put Christ in His own proper place—making the Head one, and the Body one, and Christ all in all—is offensive to God; and this is just what the Pharisees did. Hence, again, the rejection and the curse of a Pharisee.

And Christ walks now this earth, and He confronts everywhere the proud, and the formal, and the superstitious, and the severe. He comes into our churches, and He sees—what?

The Rev. James Vaughan.