Dangerous Religion
Luke 11:37-54 ·December 3, 2023· Joel Passmore
Part of: Luke
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Anybody here, anybody else here grateful for the love of God today? Boy, we need it. His mercies are new every morning, church. His mercies are new every morning. They're new today. It's a good thing because we're talking about dangerous things today. When I went to VCU, one of the things that my parents were concerned about was how dangerous it might be. And sure enough, when I was there for orientation, they talked to us a whole lot about safety, how to be safe on campus and around campus.
When people have learned that I went to VCU, sometimes I hear this question fairly often, was it dangerous? I was in a conversation this week with some folks who were all sharing about the hometown that they were from and how they recognized certain parts of it were dangerous. You just don't go here, you don't go down this street. They recognized that certain people and places were unsafe. I think we all have an innate sense of what can cause us danger, what poses us danger.
Jesus has the same sense of what can cause us danger, but he is in a whole different category about what is really dangerous. In the passage today, Jesus makes a scene at dinner. I don't know if you've ever been at a dinner where somebody made a scene, but Jesus makes a scene. He makes a big old scene because he is confronting something dangerous. But here's the twist, here's the surprise. The danger comes from religious people. And I'm not talking about religious fanatics the way that we use the term today.
I'm talking about good, moral, upstanding people. Jesus says, you're dangerous. The way that you live your life is dangerous to yourself and to others. So turn with me to Luke 11. This is God's word for us today. And I mean that. This is God's word for us today. So let's receive it as God himself speaking to us through his infallible, reliable, holy word.
Starting in verse 37. It's in your bulletin. It's also up on the screen. Hang on to your seats. While Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked to dine with him. So he went in and reclined a table. The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner. The Lord said to him, Now you Pharisees cleansed the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you were full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside also?
But give his alms to those things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you. But woe to you, Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb and neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. Woe to you, Pharisees! For you love the best seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. Woe to you! For you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without knowing it.
One of the lawyers answered him, Teacher, in saying these things you insult us also. And he said, Woe to you lawyers also! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. So you are witnesses, and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they kill them, and you build their tombs. Therefore also the wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute, so that the blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world may be charged against this generation.
From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation. Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.
As he went away from there, the scribes and Pharisees began to press him hard and to provoke him, to speak about many things, lying in wait for him, to catch him in something he might say. Let's pray.
Lord, as we read about your confrontation with these men long ago, we pray that you would confront the sin in our own hearts. That we would hate it like you hate it. That we would want to be different. That we would come alongside your spirit in mortifying our sin, rejecting the kind of posture that these men had, and instead live humbly and relying on you and your work instead of looking to our own work. Jesus, give us life because that is exactly why you came.
You came so that we could have life and life abundantly. So give us life today through your word. In Jesus' name we pray. Okay, we're talking today about dangerous religion. Dangerous religion. Religious morality without the gospel fools ourselves and harms others.
Religious morality without the gospel fools ourselves and harms others. So let's start with this. Jesus confronts someone. Who does he confront? He confronts the so-called religious experts. We're going to talk about who these people are and what it is exactly that Jesus is confronting. So a little bit of background. I'll try to be very brief here. The Pharisees emerged a few centuries before Jesus was born. They weren't politicians. They weren't priests.
They were an association of religious experts. They were consultants. God had given his people commandments and laws long ago through Moses. He said, God said, my people are set apart from the world and so they should live set apart from the world. That was part of the reason why those laws were given. After the Babylonian exile ended in 538 B.C. and all the Jews came back to their land, to Judea, well, they weren't so distinctive anymore. They had been in exile for too long.
The Pharisees wanted to restore the distinctiveness of the Jewish people. And they tried to do it through keeping the law. This is what's going to make us distinctive again. They got real serious about it. They carefully, they themselves, the Pharisees, carefully followed the laws and commandments that God gave Moses. And they wanted to do it so much, they started to add more laws, more things on top of those laws. New guidelines, new traditions about how to obey.
Eventually, those new guidelines and traditions, which were a fence around the law, those things began to be just as binding as the law itself. And then you would add more things and on and on it goes. The beginning of this passage gives a good example of this. Jesus is invited over for a meal. The Pharisee was astonished to see he didn't wash before dinner. Astonished is usually a word translated marveled and it's almost always used in the Gospels to describe someone responding to Jesus' miracles.
So it's interesting that this Pharisee is astonished not by his miracles but by he didn't wash. He is just gobsmacked. Some of you are looking up gobsmacked now. Why was he so astonished? Because there was a rule about that, of course. There was a rule about washing. It had spiritual connotations, washing of hands and feet to show that you were clean before you would have a meal. Now listen, God had given his people laws about cleanliness because he wanted them to know that they had to be clean spiritually to approach him but this was not one of those laws.
It was nowhere in the law of Moses to wash before dinner but it had become just as binding on people. The Pharisees observed it. They thought they were great for doing it. They wanted everyone else to do it and so he was astonished. By the time of Jesus, Jewish law was this amalgamation of elements of the law that God gave Moses along with centuries upon centuries of traditions, layer upon layer of teachings and customs and guidelines, this huge thing.
This is where the scribes come in. The Pharisees needed scribes as document experts. They're sometimes called lawyers because they kept track of Jewish law. Scribes and lawyers are used interchangeably in the New Testament. Together, the scribes and the Pharisees maintained this complex web of rules and they told everyone to do the same.
They were seen as very pious people. Okay? They were not seen as villains. We read the New Testament. We read it through Jesus' eyes. We see them as villains. The people didn't see them as villains. They thought of them as the best of the best. The most moral people around. They know what they're talking about. We ought to do things like them. If they come in and say you need to do this and this, people would listen.
They were experts in how to practice Judaism in all of life but there were two problems and this passage gets at both of those problems. First, they ignored the biggest parts of God's command.
This is on the next slide. They ignored the biggest parts of God's commands. Verse 32 is a good example of this. You tithe mint and rue and every herb and neglect justice and the love of God. To tithe is to give 10% of one's income to support the priest in the temple ministry. Tithing was in the law of Moses. This is from Deuteronomy 14. You shall tithe all the yield of your seed that comes from the field year by year. Okay, so the Pharisees are so diligently following this that they want to apply it now to the little herb garden that someone has in their yard.
They're applying it there. They have attached something new to the law of Moses. They said, it's not just your field, it's also the little herb garden you have outside your window. You've got to tithe that too. But they're ignoring something. They're so diligently gathering their parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme that they are forgetting about the weightier matters of God's law.
There are poor people in the community getting extorted. There are crippled people starving and all they can talk about is have you brought in your mint today?
Jesus is not discouraging tithing. He says these you ought to have done, but he says you should not have neglected the other things. His problem is that they are disregarding love of God and love of neighbor. Here's the second problem, and this is even worse. They ignored the state of their own hearts. They acted like their diet, their tithing, their fasting, their prayer, their keeping separated. They thought that these things not only made them distinctive from the world, but acceptable to God.
This is why God loves me, because I am so good at following all these rules, and if you'll just try a little harder, God will love you too. But they were fooling themselves. Look at verse 39. You Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. If you were at a restaurant and you sat down and the waiter put a glass down and was about to pour water in and you looked and you saw that inside the glass it was filthy.
The outside was clean, but the inside was filthy. You'd say, hold on, hold on, hold on, the inside's dirty. Imagine the waiter said, but look at how clean the outside is.
You would ask for a different glass, probably a different waiter, right? I don't want this guy serving me food. It's so obvious when you put it this way, right? Of course the inside needs to be clean. It matters just as much, if not more, than the outside. Jesus is peering inside the Pharisees right now and saying, you were so busy making your lives look all pretty and nice and pristine and pious on the outside, it hasn't done a thing to cleanse your hearts.
Nothing. Here's the point. Jesus is opposing empty morality of man-made religion. He's opposing the empty morality of a man-centered religion. Now listen, this is important. This can happen to anyone, anywhere. Our natural default thinking is being good comes through doing good. If I do enough good, I will be good. I don't need to ask for help or forgiveness. I can do it myself.
Christians and church-going people are no exception to this. In fact, people who call themselves Christians can be some of the worst Pharisees out there. And I know, because I've been one, and I still struggle today, if someone gets near enough to the truth to learn what it is that God requires of us, how we're supposed to live, but doesn't have humility in their hearts, watch out. You've got a Pharisee emerging. When you learn all the things you're supposed to do, but you're not humble enough to center yourself on God and to say, God, I can't do it, you are set up to be a Pharisee.
And like I said, I would know. Oh, it's so easy. I remember that several many years ago now, I was preaching and I said, I was something similar to this, and I said, I would have made a good Pharisee because I like to make lists and sometimes put things on I've already done so that I can check the box. But I want to amend what I said. I said, I would have made a good Pharisee. What I should have said is, I do make a good Pharisee.
Church, we have got to approach this text seeing that Jesus is not just confronting out there, but Jesus is confronting what's in here. Don't look around and think of other people when you read this text. Search your heart with the Holy Spirit so that you will find the places that need to be confronted in here.
So that Jesus calls you out of this posture. Out of a man-centered religion. Let's keep going. This is, it's dangerous, Jesus says, and he tells us what happens when we practice this. Let's look at what he tells the Pharisees. The dangers of a man- centered religion. The first is this. We prioritize the superficial over the substantial.
Imagine Nikki said to me, you know, it really bothers me that you leave the toilet seat up. It really bugs me, and I just want you to do better about that. When you're finished using the bathroom, put the toilet seat down, please. And I want to be a good husband, and so I said, okay, okay, I will. But I don't want to just be a good husband. I want to be an awesome husband. And so I say, you know what, I'm going to go through the whole house and check every toilet twice a day, and make sure the toilet seat's down.
And I start doing it, and I say, you know what, I could do this better if I had a checklist. And so I create a spreadsheet where I can track all of my toilet seat checking. And I go a couple years, and I'm perfect at it. I haven't missed a day, but the whole time, I haven't taken her out on a date. I haven't asked how her day was. I haven't spoken tenderly to her.
I haven't offered to help cook dinner. I haven't told her that I loved her or showed her that I loved her. Could I get to the end of two years and hold up my list and say, see what an awesome husband I am? No. Should I stop putting the toilet seat down? No, I shouldn't, right? I need to start doing some things that I have neglected. Friends, man-centered religion will always focus on the surface-level things instead of the deeper things. Why? Because the superficial things are all we can do.
That's all we can do. And so we do them. And we tell ourselves we're doing great because we do them. And we try to tell God, look at how good I am because I do them. We like to check boxes. Tithing herbs is easy. That's why the Pharisees did it. Giving attention to right and wrong and the community and love of God in your heart, well, those things are more difficult, aren't they? You can't just check those boxes. That's an ongoing work of seeking the Lord and being led by Him.
We all prefer nice little boxes to check. Things that don't fit into boxes, we skip them. We get to the page in our Bible where we get uncomfortable and we turn the page.
Here's the next thing. We try to get people to notice how good we are. Of all the new phrases that have started to be used in our culture over the past few years, I think my favorite is virtue signaling. I really like this phrase, virtue signaling, because it's a way to criticize someone for loudly proclaiming, usually on social media, loudly proclaiming a belief or a support or a cause or a practice, just to get the pats on the back, just to show how good they are.
I like that phrase, virtue signaling, because I think it criticizes something that Jesus criticizes. He's criticizing it here. When the Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup, they are virtue signaling. See how virtuous we are? And then they go out in the marketplaces and they get the greetings. They go into the synagogues and they get the best seats and they love that. You love the best seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces.
They love looking good to people. We all, virtue signal. Have you ever done something good and looked around and kind of, did someone see that? Did someone notice? Oh good, I think that they did. I'll keep doing it.
It's okay. We all do it. Let's repent together that we do it and come into the light. Our reputation is an idol that we bow down to so easily. We do this because we're insecure and we're insecure because our own goodness is such an unstable foundation for our lives. So we're insecure and so we look for the pats on the back. Somebody just tell me that I'm doing okay. Because the foundation we're building on won't last. It's our own works.
We need their praise. Here's the next thing and we're starting to get more serious here. We cause spiritual damage to others. Religious morality, a code of God accepts me because I do all the right things, it has no life to offer people. In fact, it's the opposite. You are like unmarked graves, Jesus says, and people walk over them without knowing it. He's saying, Pharisees, there is death in you. You don't even know it and neither does anyone else.
When people come close, that's what they get. They get death. Now what is it that brings death? It's this endless burden of the law, of the rules. You load people with burdens hard to bear and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Lord, have mercy for any time I have done that or any time you have. That's hard to read. The labyrinth of do's and don'ts that just exhausts people and leads them on endlessly without ever leading to Christ.
Woe are we for when we do that. That's why he says you have taken away the key of knowledge. Did not enter yourselves and you hindered those who were entering. They have a ministry of spiritual discouragement.
There's no real spiritual life in empty religious morality. No matter how clean our lives look, we don't have anything to offer anyone. When we teach other people to live this way, what we're teaching them is to trust in themselves. And that's spiritual death.
Now here's the last thing. And then there's good news. The last thing is this. We reject what God is saying. When you build your security on your own morality, you do not like to be told that you're wrong. It's too destabilizing.
God had sent many prophets to his people over and over and over. Many of them were killed because they said things people did not like to hear. Things like your hearts are far from God no matter how religious your lives look. Does that sound familiar? That's what Jesus is saying in this passage. The Pharisees are building monuments to them in Judea. They had been doing this for some time when Jesus was around. Jesus sees right through them. You build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed.
They act like they honor those prophets, those men who brought God's message. But they're standing in the presence of God's great messenger, capital M messenger. God's great prophet, capital P prophet, and they are grinding their teeth, waiting for any chance to get at him. They're acting just like their fathers.
Friends, if you are never open to hearing correction, you're probably trusting in your own goodness. Now those are the woes. But there's good news. And it does not come through cleaning up your act. It comes through looking at Jesus. In living in the gospel. Centering yourselves on the gospel. And this is good news. I want you to hear this. It's not hopeless. Remember, most of the New Testament was written by a former Pharisee. Right? Paul was a Pharisee.
He was probably the best Pharisee that ever lived. He learned that his zeal for keeping the law was not going to save him or anyone else. And this is what he preached after he came to see Jesus for who he is. He said, let it be known, therefore, brothers, that through this man, forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. And by him, everyone who believes is freed from everything which you could not be freed by the law of Moses. Look at that. A complete repudiation of how he used to live and a complete centering on Jesus.
How did Paul get to that place? Because he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, he encountered the risen Lord, and he learned that Jesus is the way to the promised salvation of God. Not cleaning up your life. Paul learned that the gospel is spiritual rebirth that happens only through repentance and faith in Christ. And Paul learned that that rebirth leads to a whole new life, a whole new way of living. And that's what I want to talk about now. Let's revisit the four things that he pronounced the woes on and see how the gospel changes every one of those four things.
The first is this. Instead of feeling like we just have to focus on the superficial, the gospel tells us that Jesus fulfilled the whole law on our behalf. The small things and the big things, Jesus did it all. When we have faith in him, his perfect record is given to us. His perfect record is credited to us through faith. In Christ, we are righteous now. So we can courageously seek to obey all that he says to do. We don't have to stop at the simple things.
We can keep going. We can care about deeper things like justice and the law of God. Why? Our future isn't relying on our performance anymore. Our future is secure. We're righteous. You can say to God, God, this command that I'm reading right now, this is challenging. This is challenging stuff. It seems like more than I can do. But you know what? You've already made me righteous. So here we go. Here we go.
Without the gospel, we try to elevate ourselves. We try to get people to notice us. But the gospel tells us that we are desperately needy and desperately loved. Listen, you and I are way more of a wreck than we like to admit. That's what the Pharisees didn't understand. Listen, the perfect son of God had to die so that you could be made righteous before God. How big of a problem was it if the perfect son of God had to die to fix it? It's a big problem.
But here's the other thing. We are far more loved than we realize. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit work together to give grace to the needy, to show redeeming love to the lost. So when you put your faith in Christ, you are agreeing with both of those statements. I am desperately needy and I am deeply loved at the same time. Both of those statements, they are embedded in your confession of faith. If you say I'm a Christian, that's what you're telling people, in case you've forgotten.
You're telling everyone, I could not fix myself. I was too big of a mess for that. But I am so loved in Christ, I am lifted up and exalted to heaven through faith in Christ. That's your confession, Christian. You already know who you are. You're both of those things. You're a loved mess.
And you're united to Christ. In Christ, you are secure now. You can live without pretending or posturing. You don't have to bow down to the idol of reputation anymore. For the first time ever, your obedience can be a simple act of worship. Of worship. Something you offer to God. And not something you do to try to get people to notice how good you are.
Without the gospel, we cause spiritual damage to other people. But with the gospel, listen, the gospel tells us that Jesus gives spiritual life to the humble. Jesus said, my yoke is easy. My burden is light.
When we rest from our works and rest in Him, we find the life we've been searching for. And that makes us careful in what we require other people to do. No longer do we want to tie up heavy burdens on them of man-made traditions and rules. No, in Christ, we're alive and we want to point other people to Jesus to lift their burdens. We want to get out of the way and say, run to Jesus. And this posture helps us live as the body of Christ with a sweetness and a unity that is supernatural.
Free from imposing man-made traditions on one another. Instead, pointing each other to Jesus. Finally, instead of not listening to God and what He's saying, the gospel tells us that God's word is for our good. Our Savior Himself, He is the word of God. He was made like us in every way. He lived and He suffered and He died for our sake. He was God's message of gracious salvation. In Christ, we're forgiven so we can receive correction with humility.
When we read Scripture, the prophetic message of God still comes to us. That's the point I've been trying to make from this passage today. The prophetic word of God from Jesus is coming at us. We can be open to challenge, to correction, to rebuke, because we're forgiven. There's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Critique us. Challenge us. Correct us. We need to hear it. We can hear it because we're already forgiven. We can grow.
Friends, there is deliverance for Pharisees like us through faith in Christ. And that is the best news that I could ever imagine for people like us who would prefer our rules. Jesus came to deliver us to something better, to life in Him. Let's pray.
Lord, these are harsh words that you spoke in Luke 11, and yet they were meant to lead people to life. Through the working of your Spirit, Lord, lead us to life. Help us to leave behind every tendency, every inclination in us, any hard-heartedness in us, that wants to live the way the Pharisees were living, with a man-centered religion, with just an empty morality, Lord. It's just, it's hollow. Instead, Lord, help us to rest in You, to taste and see that You're good, that You have fulfilled the law on our behalf, and now we can obey as an act of worship.
Lord, thank You for the security, the forgiveness we have through Jesus. In all things, may He get glory. May we live with Him at the center of our lives, and the gospel operating in our lives.
We pray this in Your name.