THE TRIUMPH OF GOD DISTINGUISHES BETWEEN TRUE

AND FALSE RELIGION I

Matthew 23: 1-22

INTRODUCTION

Jonathon Edwards was a pastor and theologian who lived in the first half of the 18 th century in colonial New England. He is arguably the greatest pastor, theologian and philosopher that the North American continent has ever produced. It was in part due to reading his sermons in the early 1990’s that God awakened me to the fact that the point of life was to know and love God above all else. His vision of God and of the work of ministry is the main reason I am a pastor today. In the opening line to his foundational work, “Religious Affections”, he writes this: “There is no question of greater importance to mankind in general and to individuals in particular to be resolved than this: ‘What are the distinguishing qualifications of those that are in favor with God, and entitled to his eternal rewards?’ Or, to say it another way, ‘What is the nature of true religion? Wherein lies the distinguishing marks of that virtue which is acceptable in the sight of God?’” He goes on to note that there is no question more debated among the professing Christian church than this question. To his observation we can add that there is no more debated question among the peoples and religions of the world than this question. He points out that the variety of opinions on this question makes “manifest the truth of that declaration of our Savior, ‘small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it .’” The proliferation of ideas about how to please God does not prove that everyone is right but rather that most people are deceived.

As I have said before, this is the issue that is at the center of the controversy between Jesus and the religious teachers of his day. They have been engaged in a debate over the nature of true religion. Jesus, by his teaching and his life has exposed the religion of the Pharisees and teachers of the Law as a false religion, while declaring that he is the final and absolute authority on the nature of true religion. In fact, the last thing he said to the Pharisees in chapter 22 uncovered their counterfeit religion. They reject Jesus as God’s Savior promised in the OT and yet they do not even understand what the OT says about the identity of God’s Savior.

Chapter 23 is the culmination of Jesus’ discussion with the Jewish religious leaders. He turns his attention away from directly confronting them and now addresses the crowds of people and his own disciples to set before them the distinguishing marks of false and true religion. He is telling them and us that we must choose which way we will go. Every human being is either following Jesus Christ or following false religion. Jesus is here seeking to help us answer that most important of all questions. What is the nature of true religion? How do you know that you are a Christian and thus heir to God’s promises?

Let me make sure we all understand that the importance of this question is not just intellectual. Your eternal joy or eternal misery depends upon your not only understanding these distinctions but also which view you embrace. The language of Jesus in this chapter is shocking, especially to us living in this relativistic, tolerant, democratic, egalitarian culture. He is absolutely convinced that our eternal destiny depends upon our agreement or disagreement with what he tells us in this chapter. You cannot listen correctly to what Jesus says here unless you are prepared to admit the possibility that you, at this very moment, could be involved in a false religion. If you presume that you are safe, that there is no way, no possibility that you could be wrong, then you are not going to be able to hear what Jesus is saying here. What I’m going to do today and continue next week is to set forth a series of contrasts between false and true religion that seek to summarize the various things that Jesus says about what characterizes people who have been given the favor of God.

CONTRASTS BETWEEN FALSE AND TRUE RELIGION

I. False religion claims God’s authority while true religion has Christ as its authority (vv. 2-3a)

Anyone who has been paying attention as they have read the gospel of Matthew is going to have a serious problem with vv. 2-3a. Jesus has repeatedly told his disciples and the crowds of people to watch out for the teaching of the Pharisees and scribes. At one point he said that their teaching is but “rules taught by men.” In what follows he criticizes their teaching over and over. So how can it be that he says that they have the authority of Moses and that everything they say is to be listened to? Most commentators simply say that Jesus is telling us that we should not reject the word of God because the teachers of that word speak error and live as hypocrites. Just because those who claim to speak for God are found out to be liars and sinners doesn’t mean that we have the right to throw out God’s word. So Jesus is saying that we are to listen to what teachers of the Bible say as long as what they say lines up with the Bible. Now, while I think that is good advice I can’t get around v. 3a telling us to listen to everything they say. In the original it is even stronger, “All things, whatever they say, do and keep.”

The solution is in the tense of the verb “sit” in v. 2 and then understanding 3a as sarcasm, not a command. Let me show you what I mean. The Greek tense of the verb in v. 2 is usually translated as a past tense. This means that it says, “the teachers of the law and the Pharisees sat down in the seat of Moses”. The NASB captures this idea in its translation when it says, they “have seated themselves in the seat of Moses.” In other words, Jesus isn’t saying they are speaking with the authority of Moses but rather that, they claim to speak with the authority of Moses. So what Jesus does is he says they claim to have Moses’ authority and then he speaks with heavy sarcasm, “Therefore you should do what they say. After all, they claim to speak with Moses’ authority and if they say it is so then it must be so and you had better do what they say.” This makes the most sense in light of the context. He says vv. 2-3a right after showing that they do not understand the OT. (There are a number of other examples of this same kind of sarcasm in the OT prophets and in several of the NT letters, Jeremiah 28: 5-6, 1 Cor. 4: 8 & 10).

Jesus, in chapters 21 and 22 has claimed to be God’s Messiah. Every person in his audience knows that Moses said that the Messiah was going to be a prophet just like him (Deut. 18:15-20). In fact, when Moses said this he said that anyone who would not listen to the Messiah would be destroyed. Therefore, Jesus is saying that when people claim to speak for God, or when they claim to know what God requires of them but they disagree with Jesus, then God is going to destroy them. Jesus is the only one who speaks the truth about God and therefore it is only those who are in agreement with him that are holding the true religion that God approves. The religious teachers have rejected Jesus and therefore God has rejected them.

II. False religion has no help for sinners while true religion gives rest to sinners (vv. 3b-4)

The point that Jesus is making when he says that they do not do what they tell others to do is not that they do not obey the regulations they tell others to obey. The Pharisees are very religious people. They conscientiously observe their religious duties. Jesus says so himself in just a few verses when he talks about how they make sure that they even give a portion of the herbs they grow in their vegetable gardens. What they don’t do is they don’t please God. They don’t truly love God. They say that they love God and they parade around in all their religious piety as though they are loving God but they don’t truly love God. They do not practice what they preach in that they do not actually obey God’s laws. They say they are obeying God’s laws but in reality their teaching is but rules made by men, as Jesus says in Matthew 15. They tell people that what they say is what God says and they do what they tell people to do but they don’t actually obey God because what they teach is not what God says. As Jesus will show in a moment, they are not motivated by love for God but by other loves.

Verse 3 tells us that they are not truly doing what they say they are doing, loving God. However, v. 4 tells us that what they are doing to others is harming them. They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders however they are unwilling to do anything to help men carry those burdens. Jesus is not simply repeating what he said in v. 3. He is saying that these men command people how to live but they don’t tell men how to truly obey and love God. They have no good news for sinners. Their religion is a will power religion. It has no help for sinners, unlike Jesus’ teaching. The minute the disciples and crowds and the reader of Matthew’s gospel hears Jesus say that they tie up heavy “burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders” their minds and ours ought to fly to what Jesus said in Matthew 11:28-30, “Come to me all of you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

All false religion is will power religion and has no grace and no gospel in it. The true religion of Jesus is a religion of grace. The weary and the burdened, hear the commands of God, “You shall have no other gods before me.” “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength”. When they hear these commands they faint from fear because they know they have not obeyed these laws. They groan under them and can see no solution as they find that they love and trust and prefer everything but God himself. They have no desire to obey and therefore no ability to obey. They know that God is justly angry with them for not loving him and trusting him and preferring him to all. So when the Pharisees come along with lists of rules to keep in order to please God, it only adds to the burden of the weary. They know the rules have no power to forgive their transgressions and no power to transform their hearts. However, they hear the invitation of Christ with joy. They see in the suffering of Jesus the satisfaction of God’s anger against them. They see in the obedience of Jesus, righteousness for them. They see in the promise of the Holy Spirit a new heart that loves God’s law and wants to obey it and therefore has the power to obey it. Jesus’ burden is light not because it ignores God’s law but because Jesus fulfills all the law for us and then gives us his Holy Spirit so we begin to actually obey because we want to obey it, not because we are trying to prove we are worthy of God’s approval.

All false religion appeals to proud and self-righteous people. But to the humble, to those who know they have not obeyed and cannot obey God’s laws, false religion is but a burden, for it commands love and describes duty but it has no provision for sin and no power to change human hearts. That is where Jesus goes next. He describes why it is that the religion of the Pharisees ties up heavy burdens and lays them on men’s shoulders but does nothing to help people with those burdens.

III. False religion is proud while true religion is humble (vv. 5-12)

Jesus is showing why it is that false religion does nothing to help burdened people. The reason is because false religion is primarily concerned with what people think, not with what God thinks. In verses 5-12 Jesus describes several behaviors. He describes the kinds of clothing that is worn, the parties that are attended, the seating arrangements in religious assemblies, the ways that men talk to one another. But his emphasis is not on the behaviors but upon the motives that lie behind the behaviors. He begins and ends this section by talking about the hearts of those who practice false religion. Everything they do, they do in order to be seen by men, which is a different way of saying they seek to exalt themselves. They do all that they do in order to show off how great they are. This is the exact opposite motive of the weary, the burdened, the humble. Those who follow the true religion of Jesus aim to show off the greatness of Christ, not their own greatness. They are looking to the reward of their heavenly, unseen Father, not other earthbound men. They want his approval, not the approval of men. Please note: Jesus is doing what he forbids us to do. We are commanded not to judge. Jesus is here judging, not simply the wrong behavior of people but the wrong motives. He is condemning people for bad motives. You and I cannot know what motivates another human being but Jesus, because he is the Messiah, knows what is in the hearts of men and he has the right to condemn men for what is in their hearts.

Like a prosecuting attorney Jesus sets forward the visible behavior of these men in order to show the invisible motives of their heart. Then he contrasts what these men do with how the true children of God are to live. The first piece of evidence that proves these men do what they do to be seen by men is they make their phylacteries bigger and the fringes of their robes more extravagant than the average Jewish person. What is Jesus talking about? In Deuteronomy 6 Moses says, “These commands that I am giving you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.” Jewish people would put small pieces of parchment with Scripture verses on them in little leather boxes that they would tie around their wrists and around their heads as symbols and reminders to obey God’s word. In Numbers 15 God commands Israel to put tassels on the edge of their garments to remind them to obey his commands. Jesus is not condemning either of these practices. Rather he condemns the Pharisees and teachers of the law because they made their phylacteries and the tassels on their garments bigger and showier. By the size of these symbols, they implied that they were more obedient to the commands that these things symbolized. They were not interested in actually obeying God’s commands just that other people thought of them as obeying God’s commands.

Then Jesus condemns them for loving the seats of honor at feasts and in the place of worship and being greeted in public with honorific titles. The emphasis here is that they love the seats of honor and the greetings of honor. This is what gives them pleasure. This is what motivates them in their religion. Their joy is in being recognized and honored by men. They are grieved when they are not accorded the kind of respect they think they deserve. Here is a great clue as to our spiritual condition and a help in our battle with sin. What gives you pleasure? What do you love? Does your heart thrill when men approve of you and greet you and treat you with respect? Are you sad or mad when people are rude to you or indifferent to you? What happens to your heart when people treat you well and when they treat you poorly or ignore you? What happens to your heart shows what you love. Is it enough that God knows you are praying, reading your Bible, fasting, denying yourself pleasure in order to love someone else? Or are you unhappy until someone else knows what you are doing? How do you respond when people don’t say thank you?

In vv. 8-10 Jesus forbids us from being called Rabbi and teacher and from calling any other human, father. He is not saying that there are to be no distinctions of authority in the church. Verse 11 presumes that there will be leaders in the church. In Matthew 10 Jesus appointed 12 men as apostles to teach. In Matthew 28 he is going to command all his disciples to teach. The apostle Paul describes himself as the father in the faith of Timothy, the Galatians and the Corinthians and says he is a teacher to the Gentiles. So Jesus is not saying that because we are all brothers there are no distinctions in authority. Neither is he condemning social customs that address people with respect. It’s important that we teach our children to address adults by Mr., Mrs. or Miss. I think that children should call me Pastor John. However, I think it better if adults call me John.

The point Jesus is making is not so much about words as it is about what we mean by the words. The contrast in each verse is the important thing. We only have one master, one father and one teacher. Pastors, elders, parents and others in authority in the church are not to act as though disobeying them is disobeying God. We are to require obedience to God, not to us. We are to require respect for God, not for us. We are slaves of God and of God’s people and so we ought not to be offended when we are treated like slaves. It should not grieve the heart of any pastor, elder or other leader in Christ’s church to be treated with contempt and indifference in respect of themselves. The only reason that we should be grieved when people disrespect us is if their disrespect is due to a disrespect for the gospel we are teaching and the God we represent. We are to be grieved by men’s indifference to God but not by their indifference to us. Additionally, we are not to give respect to men that is for God alone. We are not to give any person authority over us that is due to God alone. Christ is our Master, God is our Father, the Spirit is our teacher. We must not put anyone else in the place of God in our lives.

There is such a balance needed here. Pride and arrogance can be just as present among those who refuse to accord others with titles of honor as there is in those who demand to be addressed with titles of honor. We are commanded to honor one another above ourselves. Yet, we are to never demand that others honor us. The key is in the word love. Religious hypocrites love to be honored and made much of by others and they are angry and sad when others are indifferent to them or rude to them. True Christians are humble people and find their joy in serving others and in the contemplation of God’s reward in heaven. They are not grieved when men think poorly of them or treat them with disrespect because they are not doing what they do to be noticed by men but to be noticed by God. They are so overcome with their own sin and with the love of God for them in Christ that they hardly notice when others do them wrong and they delight in being a slave to others without anyone noticing.

IV. False religion sends people to hell while true religion takes people to heaven (vv. 13 & 15)

Jesus begins a litany of seven “woes” in v. 13. The term “woe” is the opposite of the term “blessed”. When God pronounces “woe” upon a person or nation it means they are under his judgment and subject to his wrath. Woe means the person addressed is condemned to eternal suffering in hell as the just expression of God’s anger against them for their sins. These seven woes of Jesus continue to delineate the difference between true religion and false religion. If we will pay attention to them we can discover what characterizes those who are truly born again by God’s Spirit and those who pretend to know God. The other point we need to remember is that Jesus is not addressing these woes to the religious leaders but to the crowds and his disciples about the religious leaders. Jesus is showing the awful end of these false teachers so that the people won’t listen to them. He criticizes them and condemns them so that others won’t be led astray by their false teaching and so share their fate. In the same way it is my duty and the duty of every true pastor, elder and parent to warn others about the false teaching that exists in the world. Calvin makes the point that the shepherd who allows the wolves to come among the sheep and does not protest and seek to drive them away with loud shouts is no shepherd at all. Therefore, in every true pastor there is going to be a measure of harshness towards those who teach false doctrine so that the sheep will not be misled.

The first two woes in vv. 13 and 15 emphasize how false religion inoculates people from the truth. Jesus is God’s only savior. He is the only one who is the way, the truth and the life. It is only through him that anyone will ever enter into God’s kingdom. However, the religious teachers have rejected Jesus as the Messiah. They have slammed the door in the face of all those who think that Jesus might be the Messiah. They threaten men with ostracism and persecution if they dare to follow Christ. They teach their converts that it is by their own goodness and their own “law-keeping” that they are made right with God. They seek to persuade men that it is possible to gain heaven without the pain of repentance and of hatred of sin and humbling themselves before God and men as sinners. They act as though it is possible to pursue and love the approval of men and yet to be loved by God. In this way they shut the door to heaven and they make others into twice the sons of hell that they themselves are.

Verse 15 tells us that missionary zeal is no proof that you are a child of God. Great sacrifices in order to persuade people to agree with your religious system is not evidence that you have been born again by the Spirit of God. I do believe that every true child of God will be concerned that other people hear the gospel and trust in Christ. However, contrary to much teaching in the evangelical church, a desire to share the gospel is not a primary evidence that God has granted you repentance leading to life. Being excited when people adopt your religious point of view does not show you are born of God. Everyone loves it when others agree with them. Virtually all false religions engage in missionary work. Therefore, why you want to be a missionary, why you engage in sharing the gospel matters as much as being missionary or doing evangelism.

These two verses ought to strike terror into the hearts of all who take on the task of teaching others about the things of God. The Pharisees did not think they were shutting the door to the kingdom of heaven or that they were turning their converts into sons of hell. However, that is exactly what they were doing. Every teacher of God’s word ought to tremble as they talk about the kingdom of heaven and plead with God to keep them from doing this to others. Every true child of God ought to plead with their heavenly father that human teachers not mislead them. Every Christian ought to give themselves to the study of God’s word and to the reading of theologically oriented books. Ignorance is suicide when it comes to our relationship with God.

V. False religion provides cover for sin while true religion uncovers sin (vv. 16-22)

In vv. 16-22 Jesus condemns the religious teachers for how they use God to justify lying and deception. Jesus is not saying it is wrong to ever take an oath. Rather he is condemning the practice of making certain oaths binding while others are not binding. Let’s say I wanted to borrow money from you. I would say to you, “I swear by the altar in the temple that I will repay this loan in one month.” The point is that by invoking a sacred object I aim to convince you that I am trustworthy. I appeal to something that we both hold in high regard as evidence of my sincerity and honesty. What the religious teachers were doing under the guise of protecting people from being scammed was describing which oaths were binding and which oaths were not binding. They would say that because I swore only by the altar and not by the gift on the altar, that my oath was not binding and that I was not guilty if I didn’t repay the money. In other words they provided people with cover for their sins. You can claim to be a Christian and yet love the world because you used the right words.

The distinctions they made about which oaths were binding showed their indifference to God and their love for this world. They said that a person was bound to their oath when swearing by the gold on the temple or by the gift on the altar. In other words, they valued the gold and the gift more than the temple and the altar. The temple and the altar were infinitely more valuable than the gold and the gift because they were the physical symbols of God’s presence, justice and grace. In addition, their whole method was foolish and blind because it doesn’t matter what you swear by, everything belongs to God and so every oath automatically is invoking God. Whenever you promise to do something, no matter what words you use, you are calling God to witness your promise and therefore inviting his wrath if you don’t keep your promise. They are blind guides and fools because they act as though you can escape God’s command to always tell the truth by verbal and legal maneuvering. God sees all, knows all, and is going to hold everyone accountable to the promises they make.

The point here is that false religion is constructed to give the appearance that you are pleasing God while you actually love the world. False religion permits people to lie while claiming to tell the truth. It permits people to act as though they love God by providing religious cover for their love for this world and the pleasures of sin. False religion never confronts the heart and what the heart loves but only deals with behavior. False religion enables you to keep loving what you always loved while acting like you love God.

•  False religion claims God’s authority while true religion has Christ as its authority

•  False religion has no help for sinners while true religion gives rest to sinners

•  False religion is proud while true religion is humble

•  False religion sends people to hell while true religion takes people to heaven

•  False religion provides cover for sin while true religion uncovers sin and promotes godliness