Good morning. This is exactly how I kind of had hoped and dreamed Christmas would be here. Red hip roof barn with the gentle snow falling outside. It's great. It's my favorite view at our place, too, is the red old hundred-year-old barn standing in the snow. We're going to look this morning at Matthew 23, starting at verse 23, and we're going to go through to verse 28. So I'd ask you to turn there, and once you have turned in there in your Bibles, and I'd please ask if you would stand out of reverence for God's Word. Matthew 23, 23 through 28, and these are the words of the Lord. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others, you blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence, you blind Pharisee. First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside may also be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead man's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. And may God bless the reading of his word. You may be seated. So I've drawn attention to the fact that Matthew's gospel, the pace of it slows way, way, way down in Holy Week. We have been on Tuesday, I actually wanted to go see, we have been on Tuesday of Holy Week since September the 15th. That's how much the narrative slows down. So we have much more about this day than we do about Jesus' entire growing up years, at least in the Gospel of Matthew. So Matthew is pointing us to something very significant that is happening in this week. We saw last week a rehash of some of the parables that Jesus told the scribes and the Pharisees earlier this day to let them know that a cosmic shift in redemption is happening. He told the story about the tenants in the vineyard who are going to be deposed and put to a miserable death so that real tenants can be put in. And it's essentially telling the same story about a wedding feast, that those who are first invited are deposed and the king is going to kill them and burn their city. And those who come in faith are going to be invited. And so there is a cosmic shift in what is happening in the history of redemption in this very week in which Jesus is going to spill his blood. And the woes that he pronounces to Jerusalem, to the scribes and the Pharisees that are ruling this city, are very significant because they do, in fact, mark the closing of one age as another is brought up. The parables that Jesus told are going to take form in actual world history. Jesus is going to spill his blood by later in this week. And within that generation, by the late 60s AD, the city of Jerusalem and actually all of Israel is going to be embroiled in catastrophic civil wars that the Romans are going to come and put down. they are going to bring catastrophe on Jerusalem that is unprecedented. So Jesus' prophecies do in fact come true. In terms of historical significance, much has been written about this. The historian Josephus writes lots. Paintings have been commissioned about this event. There are many Roman military journals, where even unbelieving Romans see great spiritual significance to what happened after this event and in this event. And so in terms of biblical and theological interpretation, the destruction of the temple, the destruction of Jerusalem, these woes that Jesus is announcing, which are going to happen very soon, can be understood as a shift in covenants. The new covenant coming up and the old covenant drawing to a close. And Jesus highlights much of this change in terms of the pharisaical understanding of the law and what God had actually promised in the Old Covenant. And we see great continuity, but we also see discontinuity. I've given the picture before of a corn seed that pushes out a new plant. So there's great continuity. This little seed pushes out a new plant that looks different than the seed, but is in fact in continuity with it. It pushes for a little while until the husk of the old falls away. So this is a maturing and a fulfilling rather than a change of outright programs. Those Jews who understood God's covenant with Moses and Abram and David move along into the Christian church and those who misunderstood are destroyed and their whole Jewish system changes in a very significant way as it is to this day. And I think when Jesus addresses the law, the weightier matters of the law, I think there's much confusion and much lack of clarity in our minds because clearly some things pass away. Peter has his white sheep vision and now pigs are good to eat and shellfish is good to eat. And we all know that. And yet Jesus says not one jot or tittle of the law can pass away. So what's going on? And again, this is in terms of reference. So when we get into the details, I've summarized God's law in the Old Covenant into three primary categories. I'm only going to look at two this morning. God's moral law, which is a reflection of who God is, his basic character. Ceremonial law, which pertains only to God's Old Covenant and the sacrifices and then the priestly system and so forth. And then civil law, which is for all society. We're not going to look at that one this morning. But clearly, The Pharisees are caught up on the ceremonies and on the types and shadows of their system, and they're missing the principle behind it. And that is, in fact, the law that passes away. And I think in terms of even our own instincts or our own experience, we have to think about this. How different is it? Could God have made the temple 10% larger or smaller than he did? Could God have chosen blue instead of purple for a curtain? Could God have said, I want figs and not pomegranates on the priestly robes? And we could say yes to all of those things. Those are what's called positive laws. That means they're not at all obvious in nature. They're not a direct reflection on God's character. They're positive laws in the sense that God needs to give a special word of revelation for us to know this. They're positive laws. God's moral law is of a different nature. So, if God said, okay, I want a blue curtain in the temple instead of a purple one, that's within his right. Thought experiment. Could God say by divine fiat that rape is good? Could God do that? Of course not. There are some things God cannot do. God cannot violate his own character. This is what we see in the moral law. It is such a direct reflection of God that God himself cannot change it because it's a reflection of who he is. And this is what the Pharisees and the scribes keep missing. One way that we could see this, in a very short summary, if you're a note-taker, you might write this down, and if you say it to yourself a few times, it might make sense, but I found this to be a helpful summary. Positive law is good because God commands it. Moral law is commanded because it is good. Okay? So moral law is a reflection of God's character, and he gives it to us because it is inherently good. It's good in itself. And the ceremonial laws, the things that the Pharisees and scribes were so hung up on, were in fact good because God said them, but that doesn't mean they must be abiding or that they are a direct reflection on God's character. And this is the kind of stuff that they keep getting hung up on. They follow the ceremonies, but they don't know what's behind it. They're not seeing accurate picture of who God is and Jesus has made it as obvious as he can to them and they refuse to listen they refuse to obey they refuse to see it and so Jesus starts calling woes down on their city Because not only are they missing what's in the new covenant, they have completely misunderstood, they have completely missed the old covenant as well. These are blind guides, they don't get it. And now things are shifting and maturing into Jesus Christ and the covenant with him that we enjoy. So the dividing line after Christ no longer becomes about who's a Jew and who's a Gentile, but rather who has placed their faith in Jesus Christ and who has not. And this is a significant change. This is a significant thing to get used to. In one sense, it was always that way. But for these Jews that Jesus is contesting with, this is a major, major, major paradigm shift in their thinking. And again, we need to recognize who these men were. We tend to think of the Pharisees as religious leaders, and they were. This is true. They were. But we see also repeated emphases in the New Testament to the Sanhedrin. Well, what's the Sanhedrin? Well, the Sanhedrin was the political ruling council of the city. It was the 71 leading men in Jerusalem. And so these scribes and Pharisees not only had religious power, but they had political power as well. So this would be like, to put it in our context, this would be like if Jesus walked into a building which was simultaneously the Vatican and the Supreme Court of Canada, and he said, woe on all of your houses. Nothing that happens here is legitimate. You are all a bunch of grave robbers. This is a den of thieves. None of you, you Supreme Court justices don't get it, you senators don't get it, you priests don't get it, none of you get it. Okay? So Jesus did not follow Thanksgiving-gathering etiquette. He did, in fact, bring up religion and politics when he is picking a fight with these men, and he is absolutely at the point of picking a fight. I brought up the Dale Carnegie book two weeks ago, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and I was asked, are you against that book? And no, I'm not. But Jesus did that. He did the winsome approach. He did the invitational approach. Nobody listened, and so now he is moving on to cursing, to woe. to ripping out of the hands of these wicked and evil men what they have illegitimately grabbed towards. Jesus is picking a very significant fight, and again, in our context, we need to remember who these men were, what they stood for, what they represented, to understand the deep significance of what's happening here. Verse 23 and 24, Jesus starts here again in these list of woes that we started looking at last week. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. So again, we see a picture that these guys, these Pharisees, were in fact meticulous on some details, not on all of course, but on some they were very meticulous. They were tithing on spices, and by the way, these spices are of very low value. Mint and dill and cumin have very low currency. So they were tithing on low value crops as well. So these are the kind of guys, if they found a dime on the sidewalk, they would tithe a penny. That's how meticulous they were in one sense. Again, of course, they didn't catch on to the big picture, but they were meticulous about tithing on the small stuff. And Jesus doesn't say it's wrong that they were meticulous about the small stuff. He actually says, these you ought to have done. So Jesus is not saying, oh no, tithing's not necessary, doesn't say anything about that. There is, in fact, a tithing principle, and we see about an agricultural tithe in Deuteronomy 14, where the law lays out a tithe for grain and wine and oil. So there is a tithe on the high-value stuff. It doesn't actually mention mint and dill and cumin. They're applying it to mint and dill and cumin, which Jesus says, that's good, that's good, except you're missing the big stuff. We don't know that they were observing the grain, wine, and oil tithe, but they are valuing the low-dollar tithe. And so by being so meticulous on the small details and missing the big things, in one sense these guys have kind of substituted a law unto themselves. They're more biblical than the Bible, you could say. They've set aside Moses and they're just doing their own thing, thinking they're going beyond Moses, which in one way they are, but in another way they're missing it all together. And you see how self-serving it would be of them to neglect the big tithe. If they're not tithing on their wine, if they're not tithing on their oil, if they're not tithing on their grain, but they are tithing on these low-value things, you see how meticulous that is and how self-serving it is in another sense. Jesus has said earlier in his ministry in Matthew 5 verse 20 that our righteousness is supposed to exceed their righteousness. And I tried looking for statistics on evangelical giving patterns today. And the best one I could find is that 4% of evangelicals tithe. Jesus says our righteousness is supposed to surpass these guys. And we see what their giving patterns were like. They were very self-serving. They missed the big picture and they got the small one. And again, we need to understand that while the Pharisees got many things wrong, they also got many things right. And likewise, we also get many things wrong. And so when we read about Jesus's harsh words to these religious leaders, when he condemns Jerusalem, when he condemns Israel, when he condemns the scribes and the Pharisees and the priests, one hermeneutical principle that we should remember at all times is rather than asking how blind could they be, The right question is, how am I blind just like them? That's a better question. How am I blind just like these men were? That is a question that can actually get you into some application. And we can see on the small scale or on the large scale how we likewise subvert the law of God for our own pleasure and our own wisdom that gets substituted. We've just come through a time, and I don't want to draw undue attention to it because I'm glad we're past it, But how many Christians thought or criticized other Christians that it was legalistic to treat the Fourth Commandment as though it still belongs in the Bible? You legalists, okay, about corporate worship on the Lord's Day, and yet they followed health orders meticulously, thinking they were spiritual. Okay, missing God's law completely, and worse, calling those who want to uphold the big items as legalistic, and then following the law of man to a T. That's one egregious public example, but how many examples can all of us think of in our own lives where we just miss the big stuff and we harp? on the small stuff. And again, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about the small stuff. Jesus doesn't tell them that they should sweat the small stuff. Rather, he's saying it makes no sense to be so meticulous on the small stuff when you're missing the big stuff. It makes no sense to tithe on mint, which is worth nothing, and then to miss your wine tithe. That doesn't make any sense. We've read about earlier about widows and how they were devouring the widow's estate. And Christ is clearly angry at the way these men have used their religious office and their lengthy prayers to impress these widows who need help and take advantage of them. And in here, Jesus is echoing the curse that Isaiah, likewise, has called down hundreds of years earlier about devouring widows. In Isaiah 5, 8 through 10, the prophet says, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land. The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing, surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses without inhabitant. For 10 acres of vineyard shall yield but one bath, and a homer of seed shall yield but an ephah. So these are the kind of men, and we're largely in a farming community, and we all hear those stories, you know, some farmer gets laid up, or he even dies during harvest, and all the neighbors get together and help him bring in the harvest, and combine for him, and put it in the bin, and they all help, and they all pull together. But there's always the one guy who shows up at the funeral, not to help, but to see if there's an angle on the land. He adds field to field. He's looking for an angle. He's not there to help. He's there to make his farm bigger. These kind of predators were there then, they're there in the time of Isaiah, and they are there now. And Jesus is drawing attention to those kind of people. This tithe should actually be supporting the widows and orphans in Israel, and you're using it to your own advantage. You're stealing from the widows. You're missing the big stuff, and There's a hyper focus on these small insignificant things. And Jesus again uses satire, he uses a kind of sanctified sarcasm to demonstrate their lopsided priorities. And so he uses the largest of the unclean animals and the smallest of the unclean animals to prove his point. A gnat and a camel, they're both unclean. And there's actually a play on words, because in Aramaic, those two words rhyme. So there's a small play on words here as well. You're straining out a gnat, but you're swallowing a camel. And because it's rhyming, it's kind of clever, and you can just picture everyone kind of laughing, haha, Pharisees, right? Because Jesus is drawing attention to how lopsided this is. Their tithes and offerings were meant to feed the orphans and widows and the helpless. And now, instead of that, they're preying on those who were intended to be helped by this, and they're substituting the big tithe for a small tithe on very low-value crops. And we've seen, and this pattern follows through, that the pattern of the woes that they have been delivered by Jesus are the photonegative, they're the exact opposite, they're the negative side of everything, the eight blessings that Jesus gave on the Sermon on the Mount. And this one pairs with the Sermon on the Mount as well. The fifth curse, the fifth woe, contrasts with the fifth blessing in Matthew 5-7, which says, blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. So in that Sermon on the Mount, the merciful receive mercy, and here we have unmerciful religious leaders devouring those who are they intended to help, while simultaneously trying to act righteous by paying attention to small little details that aren't even in the Bible. They are not going to receive mercy from Jesus. They are going to receive vengeance from Jesus. The fifth woe contrasts with the fifth blessing. And Jesus goes on in verse 25 and 26. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside may also be clean. And so these next two woes, they're closely related, they have to do with internal versus external emphasis. And again here, we may be tempted to overreact and to see something in the text which is not there. Look closely. Does Jesus say externals don't matter? Does he say that? Does Jesus say the outside doesn't matter? He does not say that. He says the inside matters more. He's not saying the externals don't matter. He's saying the internals are what really matters. That's what we've got to focus on. So he's not saying that external forms don't matter. And again, if we look at the temple that they're standing in front of and the very precise instructions God gave for how everything ought to be ordered, of course God does care deeply about externals, but not to the exclusion of the internals. He cares about what's happening in the heart of these people. primarily, and then that expresses itself in following God on the details on the externals. So again, form, symbols, externals, are meant to communicate things. And here Jesus does show that he is concerned. He even says that the outside of the cup may be clean. It's good if the outside of the cup is clean, but we need to get the inside of the cup clean first. God cares about our behavior, but he cares more about the heart that is behind that behavior. We'll deal with the heart issues, and then that will show itself up in the externals. But it must be heart first rather than legalism, just from the outside and leaving the inside issues unaddressed. And again, when we think about externals and internals and, you know, moving ancient Israel into modern times, moving into Advent, different churches have different traditions. If you're around high church traditions, like Roman Catholicism or Anglicanism or some other high church traditions, You may notice, I actually never noticed the significance of this, but you know, sometimes the priests wear a white robe with a green belt, and then there's a purple belt, and sometimes there's a white pulpit scarf, and a green pulpit scarf, and a purple pulpit scarf, and is that just all arbitrary? No, actually I found out this week, I was... This week where I found out that as you move into advent you put the royal pulpit scarf out as a sign of royalty Because we just got through Pentecost season which is green with the growth of the church And so there's there's thought that has actually gone behind some of these forms and yet if those things are never Explained if they're never internalized it just becomes blind tradition and people are just going through vain repetition Not thinking it through and this is how legalism. This is how traditionalism sinks its hooks into Christians even To this day. I think some of those things can be helpful if they're explained But if they're not they go into this empty formalism that the Pharisees themselves were guilty of and so again We could overreact and say well, then we're just going to have the lowest of low of low low low low church traditions which again, does not absolve you from tradition, it's just a different tradition. Now it's a low church tradition, but we still are stuck with the fact that we have a tradition. And I've mentioned before, churches that have no liturgy do have a liturgy, because they always sing two songs, and then they do this, and then they sing two more songs, and then during the sharing time, the same six people always share, and then Sally has the same prayer request every Sunday, and it's always the same. Okay, you cannot avoid this, it's just our traditions, are they thought through, are they intentional, are they explained, or are they just vain repetition? I've described to other pastors, I've described our liturgy here as being a rural mid-church liturgy. We're not high church, we're not low church, we're rural mid-church, and I'm okay with that. We, too, have a liturgy. We have customs. We fill our service with Scripture. We follow the time-tested format of covenant renewal worship, which is hundreds, in some cases, even thousands of years old. We respect ancient creeds and catechisms. We look at the big five evangelical feast days, but we don't do robes, we don't do incense, we don't have an overfull liturgical calendar. So again, we need to be aware of some of the things that we do and some of the things that we ought not to do. But there are symbols and forms and rituals which do nothing in themselves other than to symbolize and to capture our imagination and to get us to think more deeply about those things, which is why they must be explained. A few customs that we have, a few symbols that we use widespread in the Christian world today, and we need to think about it. Why bread and wine? Why not Doritos and Sprite? Can you just make that switch? I would argue, no, you can't just make that switch without fundamentally altering what you're doing. Why bread and wine? Why the five C's of covenant renewal worship in the order that they're in? We explain it in our bulletins, so it does not become vain repetition, but so we can understand it. So again, Jesus is saying that the problem is not the fact that forms or customs or externals exist. The problem is that these things have taken over. People are moving, they're going through the motions without understanding, they're going through the motions without internalizing, without loving it, and it just becomes formal externalism. Formalism and externalism. And we can absolutely commit the same sin in our own time, because I enjoy history. I happen to love the Big Tradition, capital T, Tradition of Church History. It is the family story of God's people. But we actually cut ourselves off from the Big Tradition when we get hung up on our small, little traditions that we so zealously cling to. And so it's a problem that stays close at hand. The Eastern European historian Jaroslav Pelikan has aptly summed up the difference here. I've always appreciated this quote from him. Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Why do we have traditions? So that we are in communication with the saints who have gone on before us. That's why tradition is actually very important, that we uphold it, that we understand it. When that devolves into traditionalism, well, that's just the way I'm used to it, so that must be right, because I got that answer when I was 12, so it must be right, and my mom told me, so it's obviously right. And this absolutely cannot change under any circumstances. That's traditionalism. And that is the dead faith of the living. It's not faith. That's comfort. It's different. And the Pharisees have moved into traditionalism. It's dead faith. Their bodies are alive, their faith is dead. And so again, we need to make application to ourselves. Jesus is using a picture of eating utensils here. And in so doing, he's appealing to the ceremonial law in Leviticus 11, which has to do with eating utensils. And we have instructions there that a metal pot has to be scoured if something unclean falls into it, so it's clean. But if an unclean thing goes into a clay jar, it has to be broken if it's contaminated. And again, on the surface, you could think, okay, so God's really concerned about how the church kitchen is run? I don't think so. What's God really concerned about there? He's concerned about you and me. He's concerned about the fact that everyone in this room has an inside and an outside. And we are, according to the New Testament, jars of So if we get contaminated, we must be shattered. You can't fix this. It has to die and be made new. We need a new vessel. A jar of clay that's contaminated has to be broken. That's what this is pointing to, but they're missing it. They're missing it. They think this is just about food, and they're not seeing the deeper meaning behind it. They're not seeing what the food rules are communicating. Okay, and again, I love this illustration, but if you register, you know, for military service and you're in army training, you're gonna learn a bunch of things, right? Usually with some old man, you know, this close to your face, barking instructions right in your face, and you're gonna learn a few things. You're gonna learn how to use a gun, but you're also gonna learn how to make sure that there's a perfect pleat on your pants and that your shoes are perfectly polished. Are all of those things equally useful once you're on the theater of battle? Does anyone care how shiny your shoes are once there's guerrilla warfare in the jungle in Vietnam? Nobody cares. It doesn't matter. So why the emphasis on it here? Why? Because you need to learn how to obey. You need to learn how to not question authority when your commander knows more than you do about what's happening there. So it's just simple obedience when it's at that phase. You just need to learn how to obey without question, without anything, and then once we're there, you'll see why it was so important that your shoes were always polished and that your pants were always pressed, even though it's not directly meaningful. These guys lost the plot. They lost the plot. They're out in the bush, they're doing guerrilla warfare, and they're still worried about the shiny boots and the pleated pants. And they put their gun down because they don't know what their training was actually about. They've missed it. They've lost the plot completely. And Jesus has already reprimanded them of that back in Matthew 15, where he says about the food and the unwashed hands, that it's not what's on the outside that contaminates you. What contaminates you guys is your heart. It's not what goes into the body that's so bad, it's what comes out of you, because that shows the filth that's inside you. And you're still worried about unwashed hands and my disciples eating that way. Jesus says first the inside must be clean and then the outside will be cleaned. And again, the Pharisees have shown that they get the inner and outer dynamic backwards. They're scouring the outside of the pot. They're doing window dressing and not dealing with the heart issues. They refuse to see that they are jars of clay that need to be shattered and not cleaned. And again, we see the symmetry with the sixth blessing in Matthew 5, verse 8, which says, blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God the pure in heart, the internal clean people are those who are blessed and they will see God. Those who are pure on the inside have a heavenly reward and those whose purity is merely an external show by inference will not see God. Question for you, do you think it's a mistake that Jesus calls these people who will not see God blind guides? He says, you're blind. You're not going to see God. In fact, God's standing right in front of you, berating you, and you don't see that. So you'll never see God. It's clear. Your time has come. The clock has run out. You're out of last chances. Now this is just blessing without any chance of parole for you guys. It's too late. It's done. You made your bed, and now I am announcing it to you. These blind guides will not see God. They do not see God. Jesus goes on in verse 27 and 28. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. And again, this is a picture of more or less the same thing, the inner man versus the outer man. And again, why were Jesus and the disciples in Jerusalem on this week? What week was it in Jerusalem? It's Passover week. It's Passover week. So Jerusalem becomes the hub of religious pilgrims. And what happened if you were a Jew and you touched a grave, you touched a dead body? You're unclean. You can't participate in temple worship if you're unclean. So what did they do to make sure that nobody accidentally touched a tomb on their way in? They whitewashed them for Passover week. So these tombs were very literally, they were painted up for Passover week so that religious travelers would see, okay, I don't want to go there. And in fact, of course, like Pharisees always do, they had laws upon laws. It actually got to the point where if your shadow touched the tomb, that you were unclean, so you had to stay six or eight or 10 feet away so your shadow wouldn't touch it. Also, unfortunately, Even though it's not in the Bible anywhere, if your shadow touches somebody whose shadow touched the tomb, you're also out, so. It's a real bummer. So you really had to stay away from these tombs. And so they painted them white. They made it very obvious to stay away from these tombs, lest you be unclean. If you become unclean, according to Numbers 19, it would take you a full week to get clean again. So Passover week is out for you if you make this mistake. So this was kind of like a big hazard lights. Don't touch this, don't come near. This was a protection for the worshipers to not accidentally come in contact with a tomb. But, if we think about that, and Jesus comparing these men to those tombs, this is a twist of providential irony that only God could write into a story. The whitewash looked beautiful on the outside, but what did it signify? Uncleanness. The Pharisees are getting all dressed up in their priestly robes. This is their big week to show off. I'm going to put on my whites. I'm a Pharisee. Everyone's going to see that I'm clean. I'm white. I'm fashy. I've got a fresh coat of paint on me. In a divine twist of irony, that fresh coat of paint actually says, I'm clean. There's dead men's bones in there. Yeah, it looks fancy, but all that comes out is bones and guts. It's just death that belches out of their mouth. Don't go anywhere where those guys are. It's as if Jesus is saying, do you want to see how you can identify the living dead? Do you want to see how to identify a zombie who's technically walking but just completely dead spiritually? Go around and look for the priests who have covered themselves in white and avoid them because they contaminate everything they touch. Mark and avoid the clean people because they're tombs. Jesus says on the inside they are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness. Lawlessness, but they're so meticulous about yeah. Yeah, they're meticulous about the laws that don't matter the ones that aren't even in the Bible the laws the ceremonies the positive laws that are not permanent and they're missing the permanent things and Hypocrisy and in our day hypocrisy has actually the meaning has shifted a little bit in our time when we use the word hypocrite typically what we mean is somebody who says one thing and does the exact opposite like a double standard kind of a thing and that is of course a form of hypocrisy and But at this time originally hypocrisy just meant you're a play actor It literally meant like in a in those ancient plays where you put a mask on it just means you're masked up You're you're fake. You're you're putting on a show for the public. It doesn't necessarily mean a double standard It can include that but this is anyone who's just play acting just wearing something so that they look righteous in public but inside they are full of dead men's bones and So despite their meticulousness, despite their shiny robes for Passover week, Jesus says they're filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness. They're filled with dead man's bones. They're as unclean as the graves that everyone needs to stay away from. And again, we see parity here with the seventh woe to the seventh blessing. Matthew 5 verse 9. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Well, sons of God are raised up on the last day, and Jesus is making clear these men will never be raised up. These men have no future with God. They're empty tombs. They're cannibals, not shepherds. They're just filled with dead men's bones. There's nothing pure. There's nothing righteous that can come out of these men. And so what do we do with this? Well, the main thread in these woes, in all of them, is the question of what true religion looks like. When Jesus enters Jerusalem and then he cleans the temple on Monday, he cited Jeremiah 7 when he calls these men a den of robbers. And as he delivers these woes, we see how the story is being told over again. There's lots of repetition, there's lots of circularity and symmetry in scripture. As the Old Testament draws to a close, one of the pictures in the latter days of Old Covenant Israel Is Jeremiah condemning the false religion of Israel? Jeremiah the weeping prophet warns this wicked city of doom and he doesn't get listened to, what happens? He gets thrown into a pit. Interestingly, 40 years after his ministry in the year 586 BC, the Babylonians come and take siege of Jerusalem and destroy the first temple. And now as the New Testament closes, this greater Jeremiah, Jesus Christ comes to do the same thing. He's condemning the false religion. You stand at the temple and you think that touching the temple is gonna undo all your wicked actions. You show up in church on Sunday morning with a smiling family and a clean vehicle and you think that undoes everything you did this week. Like it's a good luck charm, Jesus is saying the same thing. And he gets swallowed up in death. And interestingly, in a remarkable act of divine symmetry, 40 years after his death in 70 AD, the Romans come in, destroy the city, and destroy the temple. And so it's fitting that in this final week, when Jesus echoes Jeremiah 7, he's reminding them of the same types of things that destroyed the city previously in the ancient times. Says, behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, we're delivered, only to go on doing these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the Lord. Go now to my place, which was called Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it because of the evil people, my people Israel. And now, because you have done all these things, declares the Lord, and when I spoke to you persistently and you did not listen. And when I called you, you did not answer. Therefore, I will do to the house that is called by my name, and in which you trust, and to the place that I gave you, and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. And I will cast you out of my sight, as I cast out all your kinsmen, all the offspring of Ephraim." What happens at Shiloh? The glory departs. A dying widow gives her final scream as she gives birth to a fatherless baby who has just been struck dead together with his uncle and grandfather. And she names him, The Glory Has Departed. Jesus is reminding them of that. The glory is about to depart. You people are guilty of the same things. And friends, has it changed? Can this be true in the church even to this day? Again, the question is not how could they be so blind, although that is a legitimate question. How could they? I get it. The question is, how am I blind just like them? What kind of ungodly things are we doing? And then we show up in church and think, because we're here, it's all fixed. Or because I had quiet time with Jesus this morning, it's all fixed. We need to get to the root issues. We need to see the inside of the cup, the inside of the pot. What's on the inside is what Jesus is drawing attention to and that will eventually manifest on the outside. But I would suggest that we have many of the same problems. We have our own customs, we have our own security blankets in our own time. There's a book that's coming out shortly called Worshiptainment. by a Presbyterian pastor, and I heard him interview on that, and I quite like the premise that worship isn't really about God today in North America. It's about entertaining ourselves. It's a concert. We're here for ourselves. We're here for an emotional high, right? Did anything happen important in worship? Well, it depends. Did I get all the feels? Did I get goosebumps? Did I start crying seven minutes in as though that's the test? We let emotionalism and experience dictate far too much in the Christian life in our culture. It's weak, it's effeminate, it's cowardly. and it's externalism, as though what matters is me and not what's happening for God. And then some of us overcorrect about that. I mentioned this morning in Sunday school. I've read all four volumes of Bovink's Reform Dogmatics. I'm more reformed than John Calvin, so I'm not guilty of those crimes, because after all, I'm the sharp, astute theologian, right? Calvin's got nothing on me when it comes to being reformed. What's that? It's the same thing. It's me. It's me. It's external, okay? We're not addressing the heart issues. We're just going through these motions, right? Well, I do this, or my church does this, or my family does that, as though that's the test. And some of these things, not all of them, but some of them can fit in in a rightly ordered Christian life, but we can't ever let them take over. That's what Jesus is so concerned about here, that we don't let the forms take over, we don't let the customs take over, whether they're very high formal forms or whether they're very low base kind of, you know, blue-collar forms, neither can take over. We need to stay oriented to the Lord Jesus Christ. We need to address the inside of the cup that the outside may also be clean. And so that's our challenge this morning. is to make sure, whether it's in our corporate worship, whether it's in our family customs, whether it's in the way we work, whether it's in the way we celebrate holidays, whatever it is, Jesus has something to say about it, that we need to deal with the inside of the cup. Otherwise, we're just full of dead men's bones with no future. So no matter which way we're wired, one way or the other, we can't ever let the forms that we are familiar with take over from the substance, or else we are going to find ourselves in a similar fate to the scribes and Pharisees. And Jesus, this morning and always, has a better word to address the heart, to be soft, to clean things up with the Lord, that we may be filled with the joy of the Spirit and not with dead man's bones. Let's pray. Lord God, even as the narrative that we read is clearly coming to a confrontation after which there is no return, Lord, we thank you that we are in a better position today, that as long as we can hear your voice, we can turn and live. Lord, and I pray for each one here, whatever we struggle with, whatever forms, whatever customs, whatever security blankets that seem safe and comfortable and familiar to us, Lord, I pray that if they are to be abandoned altogether, that we would do that, and if they just need to be properly ordered in a balanced Christian life, then I pray that we would have the wisdom to do that. But Lord, I pray for each individual here, and I pray for us as a church, that we would never give in to formalism, or to externalism, or to traditionalism, even as we see that forms and traditions can be good if understood correctly. Lord, help us to be balanced, help us to live for you, for your glory, and that the inside would start to show itself up on the outside in a meaningful way that is for your glory and not for the applause of other people, not for a public reputation, not for a persona, not to fool ourselves or anyone else, Lord, but in humble service to you and to you alone. And we commit, each person here, we commit this church into your hands, and we thank you for your kindness to us, and amen. Please stand to sing. For what we have done and left undone, we fall on your countless mercies. For sins that are known and those unknown, we call on your name so holy. Envy and pride for closing our eyes, for scorning our very neighbor. In thought, word, and deed, we failed you, our King. How deeply we need a Savior. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy on us. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy on us. what you have done, your life of love, you perfectly lived, we praise you. Though tempted and dry, you fixed your eyes, you finished the work God gave you. And there on the tree A king among thieves, you pled for a world's betrayal. You loved to the end, a merciful friend, all pure and forever faithful. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy on us. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy on us. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy on me. For hearts that are cold, for seizing control, for scorning our very Maker. In thought, word, and need we've hailed You, our King, how deeply we need a Savior. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy on us. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us. C.S. Lewis has noted, in agreement with today's text, that of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings, the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God. There seems no way out of this. The scribes and the Pharisees sit on the seat of Moses, but neither understand nor love the law that God gave through him. They are blind guides, clenching tightly to the outward forms, but despising the substance to which they point. The long line of servants have offered the choice of life or death, blessing or cursing. Lastly, the vineyard owner's son has come, first to offer blessing and beatitude, but now, with the final summons, pay homage or perish. And I'll leave us with the benediction from Colossians 3, verse 15, which says that we ought to let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts, to which indeed you are called in one body, and be thankful, and go in peace.