Senior Pastor, Robert Dennison, preached this message on July 6, 2025. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Audio Transcript
Chapter 11. It’s page 923 in the Pew Bible. Or please take your own copy of the Scriptures and turn to page Luke. I mean, Luke 11:37, 53. We’re looking today at the signs of hypocrisy.
And Jesus is going to be confronting the religious leaders of his day. Two of the groups, the Pharisees and the scribes, who would also be known as the lawyers, that were those that were more intellectual. And what we’re going to see today is it’s a comparison of what true religion is versus false religion. And the religion that the Pharisees and the scribes espoused was one that was false religion because it was all about being better than other people. And that’s what hypocrisy is.
It elevates you in your mind that you are more religious than other people, that you are more holy than them, but in better terms. Instead of saying true religion versus false religion, it’s really a true relationship that believers in Jesus Christ have. It’s a relationship that’s characterized by love and friendship and a right relationship with God the Father. And Jesus is going to be confronting the Pharisees today and the scribes. And as we’re going through it, look for the comparisons of what isn’t.
A bad heart that is hypocritical versus for the keys that we can see that that should be evident in our lives as true followers of Jesus Christ. I begin reading in verse 37 of Luke 11. As he was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him. So he went in and reclined at the table. When the Pharisee saw this, he was amazed that he did not first perform the ritual washing before dinner.
But the Lord said to him, now you Pharisees, clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are full of greed and evil fools. Didn’t he who made the outside make the inside too, but give from what is within to the poor, and then everything is clean for you. But woe to you, Pharisees. You give a tenth of mint rue and every kind of herb, and you bypass justice and love for God. These things you should have done without neglecting the others.
Woe to you, Pharisees. You love the front seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. Woe to you. You are like unmarked graves. The people who walk over them don’t know it.
And one of the experts in the law answered him, teacher, when you say these things, you insult us too. And then he said, Woe also to you experts in the law. You load people with burdens that are hard to carry, and yet you yourselves don’t touch these burdens with one of your fingers. Woe to you. You build tombs for the prophets and your fathers killed them.
Therefore you are witnesses that you approve the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them and you build their monuments. Because of this. The wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute, so that this generation may be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible. Woe to you experts in the law.
You have taken away the key to knowledge. You didn’t go in yourselves, and you hindered those who were trying to go in. And when he left there, the Scribes and the Pharisees began to oppose him fiercely and to cross examine him about many things. They were lying in wait for him, to trap him in something that he said. May we pray.
Heavenly Father, we come to your word as a message that you have for us today. We give you praise and you give us your word that shows us the way to a right relationship with you and also how to live our lives, that we might be more like your Son. Give us understanding today. Give us conviction of heart. Empower us by your spirit to carry out those things that you want us to do and be differently in our lives.
It’s in your Son’s name that we pray. Amen. We’re looking at two groups of people today, the Pharisees and the Scribes. The Scribes were the experts in the law. They were a smaller group within the Pharisees, and they had hypocrisy in their life that they wanted to exalt themselves above others.
They exalted themselves above all the other Jews, saying that they were better in the Lord’s sight. And the Pharisees did this by. By dwelling on those external traditions and things that would make them look good to others. But they weren’t concerned about changing their hearts. And the Scribes were very intellectual, that they were trying to make the Scriptures more difficult than they were meant to be by God.
They were making themselves look smarter. They were the great theologians, and they looked down on other people because they wanted to make themselves, themselves look better. So we have legalistic hypocrisy and we have intellectual hypocrisy. But both were meant to exalt a person over others. Let’s go to the text.
Now. In verse 37, it says, as he was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him. So he went in and reclined at the table. And when the Pharisees saw this, he was amazed that he did not first perform the ritual washing before dinner. I want to read an excerpt from R.K. hughes that describes very well what the Pharisees were like so you understand this person that Jesus is dealing with.
Without the benefit of historical hindsight, one could naively suppose that the Pharisees would follow Jesus. They were not the upper class like the Sadducees, but they came from the common people. The as did Jesus. They were committed to holy living. Their very name means the separate ones.
And they were thought to be holy men, the true community of Israel. And when a man became a Pharisee, he first endured a probationary period of up to a year in length, during which time he had to prove his ability to keep the rituals of the law. Now, many of the Pharisees are scribes. These were experts in the law who so revered it that they hedged it with extra protection laws. As the Mishnah says.
This would be the Jewish writing from those that were scribes. Tradition is a fence around the law. They loved the law. They loved God’s word. Full entrance into the Pharisaic community came after the probationary period.
And the man pledged to observe all the laws regarding purity and tithes. And the Pharisees drew a hard line between themselves and the masses because they were better those who did not keep the law as meticulously. And therefore the conflict between the Pharisees and the masses was largely due to the people’s neglect of tithing. Tragically, however, their spiritual eyes had become bad. They had become darkened by pride and greed, so that the very light within them had become appalling darkness.
So deep was the darkness that these fastidiously religious idealists became Jesus bitterest enemies. Jesus is invited to dinner. Now, with our kids, when they’re little, we always tell them to do what before they come to the table. Wash your hands. And by the time you’re adult, you should just know if you need to do that.
Jesus, with his knowledge of everything, came into that house knowing that washing hands was very important to the Pharisees. And what does Jesus intentionally neglect to do? He doesn’t wash his hands. And when the Pharisees saw this, he was shocked. He was amazed.
This man is claiming to be a rabbi and he didn’t was his hands. But it’s very specific here. It’s not that Jesus didn’t wash his hands. It says he did not first perform the what? The ritual washing before dinner.
So you have to understand that the Pharisees, in order to make themselves look better than other people, they didn’t just wash their hands. They had all these rules and regulations about it. Let me read about those. They wrote that the hands are susceptible to uncleanness and they are rendered clean by the pouring over them of water just up to the wrist. Thus, if a man had poured the first water up to the wrist and the second water beyond the wrist, then the water flowed back on the hand and the hand became unclean.
But if he poured both the first water and the second beyond the wrist and the water flowed back to the hand, then the hand remains unclean. And if he poured the water over the one hand alone, and then bethought himself and poured the second water over the one hand, his one hand alone is clean. And if he had poured the water over one hand and rubbed it on the other, it becomes unclean. But if he rubbed it on his head or on the wall to dry it, it remains clean. Now imagine trying to teach your kids something like that how to wash their hands.
I mean, we go into the restroom in a public place and it says, employees must do what? Wash their hands for 20 seconds. That’s the extra rule that nobody can seem to remember. It has to be on the wall. But here you can see they were adding all of this and it was just putting a burden on the people.
And they’re thinking so much about washing hands that Pharisees should have been thinking about not the external, but about who was with him. The Pharisees loved the law, but they loved the law more than they loved God. God’s word is important. Jesus wasn’t saying that it’s wrong to wash your hands. What he’s saying, it’s more important.
Important that we love the Lord. And the part of the bad heart is here is that Jesus had a perfect heart. He was God in the flesh. But this Pharisee is judging Jesus by what? By his appearance and by what he’s doing outwardly.
That is a sign of hypocrisy. When you look at people and you make a judgment of them based upon what you see without knowing their heart, next thing is we see that they put the external as being more important over the internal. Jesus points this out when he says, now you Pharisees you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are full of greed and evil fools. Didn’t he who made the outside make the inside too? Your porta pulled a cup out to make coffee in it.
It looks wonderful. And then you tip it over and you see something that doesn’t belong there on the inside. Do you continue to make your coffee in that cup? No, it’s pretty gross. That’s what the Pharisees were doing.
They were polishing the outside, but they weren’t looking at the inside. And Jesus isn’t talking about whether they have clean or dirty dishes. He’s talking about their lives. They followed the rules. They tithe, they gave alms, and they looked clean, but their hearts were not clean.
They gave, but they were still greedy and evil. They tithed their 10%, but they didn’t serve God with the 90% that was left.
It’s a good thing to tithe. God wants us to do that, but he doesn’t want just control of the 10th that we give him what still we keep for ourselves. Whether it’s our time, our talents, our treasures, what we have, all of that is still supposed to belong to God. But the Pharisees, living as hypocrites, they only gave God the 10th that externally looked good, but they were forgetting to give him the other 90%. The key here is that on the other hand, we are supposed to emphasize the internal and as more important or over the external.
And we read this in Psalm 24. Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? The one who has clean hands, but also has what? A pure heart. The psalmist prayed, God, create a clean heart for me.
Renew a steadfast spirit within me. The external following of the law was important, but more important was that the heart also match on the inside. What was going on on the outside.
It was always God’s desire that people would change internally. When he gave the law to the Jews in his mind, it was not enough that they just follow it externally. He wanted things to change on the inside. And. And that’s what the prophet Ezekiel tells us.
God promises here that one day he is going to give them a new heart. He says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will place my spirit within you and cause you to follow my statutes and carefully observe my ordinances. Ezekiel is pointing to the time when the Savior will come into this world.
The promised Messiah. And by faith in him, by faith in Jesus Christ. Not only are we changed outwardly, but we receive a new heart. We read this in Acts, chapter 15. He made no distinction between us and them.
He cleansed their heart not by what they did externally, but by their what, by their faith. It was always God’s intent that the hearts of people be changed. And true followers of Jesus have new hearts because God has given them what they could not obtain for themselves. The Pharisees, on the other hand, thought that they could save themselves. They rejected Jesus because they thought that they were good enough by observing externally.
But they didn’t realize that they needed a heart change that only Jesus could give. Next thing we find here is that Jesus told them, you need to have hearts for the poor. Remember, they were giving their alms. But Jesus says, a follower of him goes beyond that. It says, give from what is within to the poor, and then everything is clean for you.
We don’t have money inside of us to hand to people. What do we have in our hearts? We have love, we have concern, we have compassion. True followers of Christ not only help the poor, but they have a compassion for them. They have hearts for the poor.
The next two things about the heart that we’re going to see here is that they were more concerned about their works than they were about justice. And they were more concerned about their good works than they were for having a love for God. Jesus says, woe to you, Pharisees. You give a tenth of mint, rue and every kind of herb, and you bypass justice and love for God. It’s these things that you should have done without neglecting the others.
He’s not saying that it’s wrong to tithe. He’s saying, yes, it’s a good thing to tithe. But if you’re tithing but you’re not adhering to justice and you’re not loving God, then you’re missing the point. Tithing is praised, but it is meaningless if one’s heart is wrong. This is evidence that Jesus was praising their tithing.
But the Pharisees were actually going beyond what was required of them according to the law. The rules said that they were to give a tithe on everything, even down to the mint that they used. But according to the Mishnah, you tithed on your mint, but you didn’t have to tithe on rue or goose foot or purslane or hill, coriander, celery or meadow, uruka. All of those things you didn’t have to tithe on. Now I’m assuming they’re all spices, do any of y’ all use those when you cook?
Could you imagine going into your spice cabinet and measuring out and taking a tenth of that and giving it? Or every time you went to the grocery store and you bought one of those things and you measured out? Well, the Pharisees weren’t only doing that for the mint, they were doing it for all of their spices. So all the time that they were spent doing these external things, Jesus is saying you should be more concerned about justice and love for God. Let’s go to Micah chapter six, verses six through eight.
And we read here about all the sacrifices that could be offered to the Lord, even to sacrifice your son. And what we’re going to see here is that’s not what God really wants. What should I bring before the Lord when I come to bow before God on high? Should I come before him with burnt offerings, with year old calves? Would the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or win 10,000 streams of oil?
Should I give my firstborn for my transgression, the offspring of my body for my own sin? Mankind, God has told each of you what is good and what it is that the Lord requires of you. More importantly than giving thousands of anything is to act justly, to love faithfulness, and just to walk humbly with your God. Matthew 22:37. Jesus summed up the greatest commandment.
Read it with me. Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. I mean, if you can memorize that, you have what’s most important. Just put aside all these other rules about washing your hands and things that you’re supposed to do.
Focus on loving God. That’s a key to not being a Pharisee.
We go back to verse 43. Now he said, woe to you Pharisees. You love the front seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. So unlike our church today and their synagogue. Everybody rushed to sit in the front.
And all of y’ all rushed to sit where? In the back. I guess you’re trying not to be hypocritical. So. But they, they were looking for recognition.
They wanted people say, oh, they’re so holy, they’re so wonderful. They’re following the law. They’re doing all of this. They liked people to give them special greetings in the marketplace and they liked to take the seats of honor. A sign of being a hypocrite is to love recognition.
Jesus didn’t come to be recognized. He came as a servant. He washed people’s feet. He did just the opposite of this. Verse 44, Woe to you.
You are like unmarked graves, and the people who walk over them don’t know it. According to the law, a person was unclean if they walked over a grave. And if you were unclean, that meant that you couldn’t go into the temple area to worship, and you had to separate yourself from your family and your friends. So you couldn’t even interact normally in social situations until you were clean after one day or seven days, depending on what had defiled you. So as people would come into Jerusalem, they would walk across fields and roads and whatever, and in order to keep them from accidentally stepping on a grave, people would go out and whitewash.
They would mark the places where the graves were so that they could be avoided. Jesus is saying, this is what the Pharisees are like. They’re dead on the inside. But people don’t even realize that being around them is going to lead them down a false path. These religious leaders weren’t leading people to the Lord.
They were offering them not life inside of themselves, but they were offering death instead. And they were making people unclean instead of helping them to have a right relationship with the Lord. After Jesus said this, it says that one of the experts in the law, teacher, when you say these things, talking to the Pharisees, well, you’re insulting us too. Now Jesus gets onto the experts in the law. He says, woe also to you experts in the law.
Jesus had been talking to the Pharisees, but now he addresses these experts in the law. We might call them lawyers, we might call them scribes. This group of people had added extra rules to what God had given in the Old Testament. Supposedly they were doing it to add extra protection to God’s word. Now you can raise your hand.
How many of you think that they added up to a thousand extra rules? How many of you think they added up to 2,000 extra rules? 3,000, 4,000, 5,000. They added around 6,000 extra rules to what God had already commanded them to do. Can you imagine living your life trying to live according to what we have in Scripture and then to have memorized 6,000 more rules that you have to follow in order to supposedly please the Lord?
That’s what these experts in the law were doing. They were super intelligent. They were so big into doctrine that was more important to them than living a life that pleased the Lord and loved him. And because of this, Jesus says, you load people with burdens that are hard to carry.
Yet you yourselves don’t touch these burdens with one of your fingers. They were putting their traditions above Scripture, and they were making these traditions very burdensome on people. But they weren’t doing anything to help them. Let me read again from R.K. hughes. That helps us to understand this.
Among the most notorious of these laws were those created to protect the fourth commandment, which says, remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work. So to ensure that no work was performed on the Sabbath, the scribes in The Mishnah listed 39 classifications of labor.
And each of those 39 classifications had endless subdivisions about what you could not do on the Sabbath, that was considered work. So think about 39 categories, all these subcategories. I’m going to read you just about one of those. For example, One of the 39 categories forbade the carrying of burdens on the Sabbath and hedged it with minute prohibitions for every occasion. This section declared that anything equal to or heavier than a dried fig was a burden.
How many of you have ever carried anything heavier than a dried fig on Sunday?
That was the measurement. So it was permissible to carry something that weighed less than a dried fig on the Sabbath. But if you carried it and then you set it down and you picked it back up, that was against the rules, because now you had picked up double the weight. This is how particular they were about what you could and could not do on the Sabbath. The Mishnah also specified that there were permissible ways to carry burdens.
I want you to memorize all of this now, okay? Remember all this. You got to carry this out on the Sabbath day. If a man carried a burden in his right hand or in his left hand, in his bosom or on his shoulders, he’s culpable for this. Last was the manner of carrying of the sons of Kohath.
If he took it out on the back of his hand, or with his foot, or with his mouth, or with his elbow, I don’t know how you pick it up with that. Or you carry it with your ear or with your hair, or in your wallet, as long as your mouth is downward. Or you can do it between the wallet and your shirt or in the hem of your shirt, or if you do carry it in your shoe or in your sandal, then you’re not culpable. So otherwise you can carry something with your ear or your elbow or in your shoe, then it was okay to carry something more than a fig. That way he’s not culpable since he is not taking it out after the fashion of them that put put it on a burden.
That’s only one petty regulation that was just adding burdens to people and to them. The rabbinical reasoning stated that while it was a serious matter to offend the Mosaic Law, that’s what Moses written. And they said that in itself was sometimes hard to understand. They said it was an even greater offense to offend against what the scribes had written down in their interpretations. So more important to them, what God’s word said were all these traditions and the rules that they had written down.
These just all became burdens to people instead of leading them to the Lord. People just would give up and say, we can’t do all this. It’s too much. Jesus, on the other hand, said in Matthew 11, Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. What a different refreshing message Jesus had for everybody.
I don’t put all these laws and regulations upon you. And then not only did he tell people that they could have rest, he said, take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. The heavy weight that the scribes and the Pharisees put on people that they would not help them with, Jesus says, the weight that I put on you is going to be a light weight. And who bears that weight with us?
Jesus is in the yoke with us. A yoke would go over the neck of one animal here and one animal here, and they could carry or they could pull things. And Jesus was saying, I’m on this side and you’re on this side. Whatever you’re carrying, I’m right there with you. Instead of trying to add extra burdens in Psalm 1, 2, 3, we read about focusing on Scripture, not on traditions.
It tells us about the righteous man, that his delight is in the Lord’s instruction, and he meditates on it day and night. And when he does that, he becomes this fruitful tree that’s beautiful and green because it’s planted beside flowing streams that bears its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither, and whatever he does prospers. You can tell if you are not living a hypocritical life if your focus is on Scripture and and not on tradition. We have to stop and think do we have any traditions? There used to be a tradition in the south where I grew up that all pastors had to wear a tie.
I used to have enormous tie collection. One of the blessings of moving to the north is I don’t have to wear a tie. I don’t think I do, Brad. Do I have to wear a tie all the time? Okay.
But in the South, I mean, it’s a serious offense. I knew of two older pastors that they actually wore a stuff and a tie when they mowed their grass, because in their town, they would have been kicked out of their church if they were ever seen without it. Because it was a tradition that pastors do that.
And that became more important to people than to following God’s word. I mean, you probably have some outfits in mind. If somebody walked into our church today that you would say, that’s inappropriate to wear to church, would you all agree with me that somebody could walk in some way if. If we had a prostitute walk in dressed that way? I want to ask you, raise your hand.
But our tendency would be, well, it’s not our tradition to dress that way to come to church. You shouldn’t be here. But that person doesn’t need that extra burden added. They need what they need the gospel of Jesus Christ shared with them. Focus on scripture, not on tradition.
Another aspect of the bad heart is they were exalting their religious knowledge. Jesus said, woe to you. You build tombs for the prophets, and your fathers kill them. Therefore, you are witnesses that you approve the deeds of your fathers, you approve the fact that they killed the prophets, and you even build monuments to that.
It’s kind of difficult to understand here. And it’s odd how he’s saying it, but he’s saying that in essence, you didn’t physically kill the prophets, but you have these people that were studying the word of God, they were so exalting the book of Moses that when it came to the prophets, where God was telling them, a messiah is coming, that’s going to bring heart change, they rejected those prophets. And just as they had been rejected in the past, they’re still rejecting those prophets now. Because if they had accepted what the prophets had said, they would have seen the passages that pointed to Jesus and they would have understood that he was fulfilling that. The first case that Jesus is building against them is that they didn’t accept the prophets of the Old Testament.
And because of that, they’re now not accepting him. Because of this, the wisdom of God said in verse 49, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute. And he’s very specific here. He says, so that this generation may be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. These people, these that were trained in the law, that were intelligent, had time to study it.
That particular generation of all people should have known this is the Messiah when Jesus came and he taught, when he cast out demons, when he healed people. But the people that should have recognized him the most from what they knew intellectually were the ones that rejected him. They had killed the prophets. And they’re likewise going to kill who. They’re going to kill Jesus now that he has come.
Woe to you, experts in the law. Verse 52 says you have taken away the key to knowledge. They knew how to get into a relationship with the Lord from what they had in the Scriptures. But it says you didn’t go in. They didn’t choose to have a relationship with the Lord.
And not only that, but they’ve hindered the other people who were trying to get in themselves. This is the picture of someone who has the gospel. They won’t accept the gospel, and then they go out of their way to make sure that nobody else hears the gospel.
So they didn’t accept the prophets of the Old Testament, these highly educated men, they’ve rejected the truth and they’re now keeping others from learning the truth. It’s like a pastor that stands up in the pulpit and doesn’t preach, preach the Bible. They’re acting like they’re religious, but they’re really keeping people from a relationship with the Lord. They have the Scriptures, but they are not preaching them in a way that helps their hearers to understand. They have great knowledge, they have a large vocabulary, but they’re exalting their own religious knowledge instead of exalting Lord Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world.
After Jesus had told them all these things and rebuked them, they knew what he was saying. And when he left there and walked out. In verse 53, it says the scribes and the Pharisees began to oppose him fiercely and to cross examine him about many things because they were lying in wait for him to trap him in something he said. They wanted to prove him wrong. And then they go from that to conspiring on how they can put him to death and move him out of the way.
God wants us to not live like hypocrites. He doesn’t want us to live like the Pharisees and the scribes. What’s most important to him is that we have a loving personal relationship with him. God wants to be in a friendship relationship with us. And it’s not about what we do on the outside.
It’s not about what we know. Those things have their place. But it’s most important that we concentrate on having a right heart before the Lord. And there’s nothing that we can do to change our heart. I mean, physically.
How many of you can change your heart today? You’ve got to depend on someone else to do that. That’s where faith comes in. We trust that Jesus Christ died on the cross to take care of our heart condition. And all we have to do is accept what he did for us on the cross by faith.
Ask God to give us a new heart. And if we change the inside, then everything on the outside will become what God wants it to be in our lives. May we pray? Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word today. Help us to see how we have tendencies in our lives to be hypocritical.
Father, we confess that before you today show us where we are, possibly being like the Scribes and the Pharisees, that we would shun those things and come back to emphasizing what is on the inside as being most important. And Father, we ask today that there are any among us that they still have hearts of stone because they’ve not placed their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. That you would touch them today. Father, show them that need and lead them to faith in your son. It’s in his name that we pray.
Amen.