Ecclesiology 100- Phariseeism

     I understand that this article will not render me the Pulitzer Prize, even in the Christian world, and that it may make some of the readers never want to read another article of mine ever again.  This, of course, would be acceptable as long as the information presented herein is taken to heart. Those of you who do take the time to delve into this will immediately notice that it has been written with the sole intention of transforming the reader into the person that God has called us to be.   That is, we will transform if we truly desire to adjust our course of direction and leave behind our old, decrepit ways.

 I must warn you that this article may bring about a great deal of stretching; and, stretching to this degree will be painful at times.  However, as a caterpillar never gets off the ground until he goes through his necessary metamorphic stage to obtain his wings, so it is with our Christian walk.  The flip side is to never read this or take this informative reprimand to heart.  Ultimately, the choice is yours.  All I ask is that you read the title to this article a few times, and then prayerfully reconsider.  Before we begin, just ask yourself these few questions; it will set the stage for what you are about to read:

• Have you ever thought or insinuated to others that your church was the best?
• Have you ever tried to witness your faith to others by trying to get them to come to your “church”?
• Have you ever tried to proselytize individuals away from the church they attend into yours?
• Have you ever inferred that your ideas on the scriptures were paramount to all other interpretations? 
• Are you more concerned about what people “do” than what people “are”?
• Do you teach or believe that you must do some type of “work” to get to heaven?
• Do you hold the traditions and/or ways that your church operates as the desires of God’s heart?
• Do you ostracize people if they don’t adhere to your regulations?
• Have you ever openly expressed your disgust against another church that operates differently than yours without praying for their leadership first?

    If you answered yes to any one of the above questions then this timely message is specifically for you and me.  I believe that no one is truly exempt from the above list.  After all, even John and the other disciples struggled with sectarianism or denominationalism, although this article is not about defeating or defending sects or denominations (Luke 9:49-50).  Therefore, I surmise that the first step we should take in the restoration process is coming to grips and admitting the shortcomings even within our own lives and church.  We should begin by not focusing on what separates us, but on the desires and will of the Father in heaven. Think about this:  Where does the splendor lie when things are absolutely the same?  I would not want to see the same faces, same trees, same houses, same birds, same church buildings and so on, day in and day out.  Therefore it is not our similarities that make us unique and treasured, it is our differences.  Many differences are good; however, some are downright evil.  When it comes to the Church, we must learn to separate the wheat from the chaff (the good and edible from the bad and unusable).  Any church that upholds the cardinal doctrines of faith from the early Church fathers has all the similarities that they need as long as they operate in love, while speaking the truth. 

      Jesus encountered His own religion-fueled wickedness during His earthly ministry; understanding the dynamics behind this evil will help us to see how we are to overcome the forces that propel these same misconceptions into our minds.  Let’s examine an instance where Jesus came head to head with this perpetual plague of what has been coined  “Phariseeism”:

Mark 3:1-6 (KJV II)

And again He (Jesus) entered into the synagogue. And there was a man who had a withering of the hand.  And they watched Him, whether He would heal him on the Sabbath[s], that they might accuse Him. And He said to the man who had a withering of the hand, Rise up into the middle. And He said to them, Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath[s], or to do evil?  To save a soul, or to kill?  But they were silent. And having looked around on them with anger, being greatly grieved over the hardness of their heart, He said to the man, Stretch out your hand! And he stretched out, and his hand was restored sound as the other. And going out the Pharisees at once took council with the Herodians against him, how they might destroy Him.  

     The Pharisees [the Jewish lay religious leaders who vowed to protect the laws of God] being introduced in the Maccabean Period (c. 167 B.C.), held to some very interesting, yet uniquely strange interpretations of the Scriptures. Even more so was their understanding of what God had meant behind His institution of the Sabbath, the day of rest inferred in the book of Genesis and then formalized in Exodus shortly after the children of Israel made their exit from their former enslavement in Egypt. 

     The Sabbath, of course, was made a law by God Himself in what Bible scholars call the Mosaic covenant, as God literally wrote His commands and decrees in stone tablets with His own finger (Ex. 31:18). What God did not give the people of Israel at Mt. Sinai were the vast interpretations and traditions that were later constructed by the Jewish Sages, which the Pharisees had eventually adopted as their own. (Bear in mind that the Pharisees were organized some 1200 years after God gave these commandments to Moses).  In fact, the Oral Traditions of the law (Midrash), which the Pharisees regarded as equal inspiration with the rest of their Bible, were not recorded in print format until after the New Testament had been written and canonized; most were passed down by word of mouth.

      Amazingly, what brought about so many man-made traditions on the Sabbath law was a single word that was, in the Rabbinical Sages’ minds, left open for explanation.  It is the Hebrew word hkalm, transliterated Melakah (Mel-aw-kaw’) and translated into our English language as simply, “work”.  They felt that this one word could describe and limit any number of specified activities on this holy day.  This is the original commandment that was given by God to Israel some 3400 hundred years ago:

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work… Exodus 20:8-10 NKJV (Emphasis Mine)

     The Pharisees had all types of religious notions concerning what they felt God really intended when He said to cease from doing work.  If today, in our own culture, we were to think of a simple definition of work we would immediately picture our nine-to-five jobs on Monday through Friday and all the things that we sometimes dread that encompass our livelihood.  We would never define work as taking a leisurely stroll through the park, walking the dog, or writing a letter to a loved one, yet these actions would have been strictly prohibited on the Sabbath during Jesus’ time.  In fact, being involved in these activities in full view of a religious cleric could have resulted in capital punishment because this would have broke their Sabbath traditions.  Moreover, their decrees became so drastic that they interpreted “work” to include writing two letters from the Hebrew aleph bet, tying or untying a knot, and even limited how far someone could walk, calling it the permissible Sabbath Journey (equal to about ¾ of a mile).  Mounce’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words has this to say concerning the weekly Sabbath:

 In each repetition of the weekly Sabbath command, that which is prohibited is…work for which one is compensated. The Sabbath commandment, therefore, has this primary lesson to teach: though we will never fully complete our labors (for there is always more to be done), we may rest in the reality that God has finished His work.  This foreshadowed the completed work of redemption accomplished by Jesus for His people, so that our rest is in what He has finished, not what we have completed (cf. Heb. 4:6-11). 

     As the New Testament unfolds, Jesus enters the stage and finds Himself having recurring confrontations with the Pharisees and their officially authorized legalistic traditions.  On one occasion, as is stated in the opening scriptural passage of this article, Jesus had an opportunity to heal and restore a man’s withered hand while He taught in the synagogue.  As He proceeded to make contact with this man in need, He came face-to-face with the Pharisees and their ideology.   Jesus was faced with an authentic need on one hand, and the fiercest supporters of legalism this world has ever known, on the other.  It seems obvious that Jesus was most concerned about those who had a palpable need, and offering the restoration that was within His realm of distribution.  Conversely, from reading the passage in Mark, it seems dubious that the Pharisees had any compassion for this man or any person that had a legitimate need.  It is one thing to hinder the deeds of someone who makes things progressively worse, but to hinder the Son of God and the perfect gifts that came from His hand for a hurting humanity seems absurd.  Jesus made a profound statement directly to the Pharisees concerning their portentous traditions:

So for the sake of your tradition (the rules handed down by your forefathers), you have set aside the Word of God [depriving it of force and authority and making it of no effect].  You pretenders (hypocrites)! Admirably and truly did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said:  These people draw near Me with their mouths and honor Me with their lips, but their hearts hold off and are far away from Me. Uselessly do they worship Me, for they teach as doctrines the commandments of men. Matthew 15:6-9 Amplified Version

     In the scriptural account of the man with the withered hand, it is inferred that the man was nearly in hiding because of his condition.  This is evidenced as Jesus literally asked him to come into the “middle” of the group where He and everyone else was situated in the room.  Jesus called on the man to bring his need into the light, in front of everyone, so that he could be restored.  But as this was happening the Pharisees were demonstrating the debased nature of their religiosity through their oppressive behavior.   Jesus, unlike the Pharisees, did not position Himself in specific places to become a cruel, callous cleric, but came to places where people were hopelessly destitute to demonstrate God’s love and restorative grace. 

      Jesus’ utmost obstacle during this Sabbath morning at the synagogue was not the fact that He was directly faced with a deformed man who desperately needed a touch from a miracle-working God.  In all honesty, this issue was minute and paled in comparison to the embellished atrocity that the Pharisees presented through their self-righteous piety.  This was a very real evil, and Jesus was now in the heart of the beast where these hypocritically pious clerics made their pompous theological traditions and debates; truly this was David’s Goliath, Daniel’s lions and Noah’s flood.  Looking from the outside, it probably seemed as though, like these other great men of faith, defeat was inevitable.  Jesus, however, did not go in unprepared; He visited His people at just the right time in history, when everything lined up the way it was needed to fulfill the Messianic prophecies.  In truth, the Pharisees helped to unfold the necessary drama that would unlock freedom for the nations and redemption for all mankind from the grips of a torturous, malicious sin depravity.

     Since near the inception of time as we know it, there have been individuals and religious groups that have monopolized humanity through their own blatant conceptual arguments of God.  Each left little or no room at all of challenging their misconceptions, and made God’s supposed ways of operating and what He truly desired undisputable.  If they were not saying this exactly, it was indirectly stated that their method(s) of conducting themselves in relation (or lack thereof) to God was superior to anyone or anything else. In essence, they constructed a god to fit their own ideology.  When the Pharisees tried to uphold all of God’s commandments they actually created a god of idolatry and thus failed to love God with all their heart (a transgression of the first and second commandments). 

      So how did Jesus keep from falling into this same trap of Pharisaical thinking?  He looked at the grand plan and overall picture.  He worked on the man’s heart before He dealt with the man’s mind and body.  Now many of you who are reading this are saying to yourself. “Yeah, but didn’t Jesus heal the man’s body first?”  That’s a good question. He healed the man’s body so that it would impact the hearts of the Pharisees standing in the synagogue.  Jesus was good at showing up to twist the blood from the religious-thinkers’ hearts.  In dealing with Nicodemus, a Pharisee and ruler of the Sanhedrin, Jesus never dealt with the indirect question that was given to Him, but immediately switched to dealing with Nicodemus’ heart (John 3).  Jesus was more concerned about the heart because He knew that when the heart became uncontaminated it would affect everything else.

      The Pharisees always thought that their lifestyle was more justified than anyone else’s and they would not suffer a seemingly uneducated man from Nazareth to teach them regarding the precepts of God. In their mind, Jesus’ good deed in healing the man’s withered hand on the Sabbath rest was worse than all the other mayhem in the world at that time. He was provoking them to think to bring about change, and by doing so was tearing away at the thin fabric that held their man-made religion together. Surely, He brought unquenchable flames to their parched comfort zone.

     Sadly, even today, a type of religious Phariseeism plagues the innermost sanctums of the grandest churches on the face of this earth.  We have all been guilty of it at one time or another; perhaps you are even practicing it as you read this paper.  After all, the modern day Pharisee may question who I am that I can write about such a sensitive issue.  Where do I pastor and what is my educational level?  Somewhere deep within us we have this competitive drive that will even transcend religious or denominational lines. We have all claimed that our church was the best, and some have gone as far as to say that they were more concerned with getting people’s lives into their church than getting Jesus into people’s lives.  In R.T. Kendall’s book, Out of Your Comfort Zone, he lists several reasons that we may be Pharisees.  Here is a condensed version of his list:

 ·        We love to point the finger

.·        We are good at sending people on a guilt trip.

·        We require standards of people not written in Scripture.

·        We assume something or someone is of the devil when their ministry makes us uncomfortable.

·        We esteem “the way we’ve always done it” above change, even when the latter is not heretical.

·        We do not practice what we preach.

·        We cannot listen to criticism without being defensive.

·        We judge by outward appearance.

·        We need to be sure that people know when we pray, fast or give.

·        We are motivated by money.

·        We major on minors.

·        We do not hold ourselves accountable to our sinful thoughts, only sinful deeds.

·        We are experts in finding loopholes in the law to excuse our sinful behavior.

·        We claim God’s approval of us rather than our rivals because we know our theology, not theirs,is sound.

·        We call another person a Pharisee.  

     I think that if we are honest, we can all see how we were Pharisees at one time just by reviewing one or two of the items on the above list.  We must make a concerted effort not to hold a secret agenda of getting people outside our fold to conform to our traditions and ways of doing things.  In fact, it should be stated that unity among the brethren accomplishes God’s desire, and conformity to traditions accomplishes man’s pleasure.  The Pharisees and Sadducees could not get Jesus to conform to their manipulative ways of religious workings and attempts at getting God’s attention. Because Jesus did not heed their agenda, He ignited every evil fiber in their bodies. They could not control Jesus with their bondages of vain interpretations and fanciful traditions regarding the laws of God, and this infuriated them. What they refused to receive is the very thing that sets us as Christians apart from the world.  Jesus said, “By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35 NKJV).

        Several Scriptures in the Bible make mention of what God truly wants from us.  He is not concerned with things that men do to be seen by other men; in fact, He even said that He desires mercy and not more sacrifices (Hos.6:6).  (Eventually, the sacrifices in the Old Testament became so ritualistic that they meant nothing to the one sacrificing.)   God is concerned with the condition of your heart.  If your heart is where it should be then your outward deeds will reveal that righteous condition.  The problem is that someone who has evil intentions in his heart can duplicate the good works that flow from a righteous man (Matt.7:15).  That is why it can never be our job to determine who has a legitimate heart toward God; however, we should be concerned with the intentions of our own heart. God alone will determine who has placed their trust in Him.

     Personally speaking, I have literally been ostracized because I did not graduate from the religious school of choice among some denominational groups.  I have been disregarded because of the biblical stances that I take on certain Scriptures, and I have been looked down upon for attending churches that don’t fit comfortably into the minds of some people.  Here is the clincher:  I have disregarded people for where they received their biblical training (or lack thereof).  I have looked down upon people for where they attend church and I have walked away from people when they were speaking because I felt they were imprudent when it came to God and the Bible.  Notice the past tense indication.  We all can change our ways of thinking and develop the mind of Christ.  We all must change our way of thinking in order to please the God we claim to serve! 

For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the…Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5:20 

     The above Scripture should be more than sufficient to transform the way we conduct our Christian walk.  Actually, I believe it is a stern warning to those who claim a relationship with God.   Sometimes there is a fine line between making a stand for what you feel is the correct way and crossing over into the sin of being Pharisaical.  However, there has never been a fine line between religion and relationship.  The two are at opposite ends of the spectrum and, just like magnets, you can never get them to come together. We must focus on the relationship that we have with the Father and gently cultivate and encourage those around us whom we can influence in deepening their relationship with Him.  Please remember that we are the body of Christ (I Cor. 12:12-19), His Church, and He is the head.  Therefore, the hand cannot tell the foot that it is not needed.  Each piece is necessary to accomplish the task that is set before us.  What is that task?  To reach people and share with them the desire that God has to bring them into a beautiful, everlasting relationship with Him.

 Father, I come before you and pray as Daniel prayed. Forgive us, Your Church, for committing the same sins that the Pharisees did toward Your Son.  Enable those that we have wronged to look past our misrepresentations, and guide them into an unadulterated relationship with You.  Lord God, hear our prayer and restore us to a right standing with You, O God, because Your Church and Your people are called by Your name. In Jesus’ name we pray.