Christians Are Not Pharisees

This article is a re-post of something I wrote on Facebook yesterday. I apologize to any who waded thr read it earlier. 😉 However, it’s an issue I’m passionate about, so I think the article is worth repeating (with some editing) for those who missed it.

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Rant-ish article. I’m starting to connect some dots and I don’t like the picture I think is emerging. Last week author and friend Mike Duran wrote a blog post about the trend to discount the Bible in favor of following Jesus. That’s one dot.

A second is from the same camp. In this view, the Bible is the idol of the Calvinists (or anyone taking a Sola Scriptura stand). They think the Bible is the third person in the Trinity. (I’ve heard this accusation against some Christians more than once and not just on the Internet.)

A third dot is another trend, this from evangelical pastors wagging the finger at “Pharisees” in the traditional church. Well, if they were talking about non-Christians who pretend to be Christians, I could see the point. But no. This is aimed at people who “think they have to protect God, as if He can’t protect Himself. They have let their passion smother their compassion.” Like the Pharisees, who were just so dog-gone zealous for God that they went out and made a bunch of extra laws.

It’s this last position I’m ranting against. The Pharisees of Jesus’s day, in fact, were God haters. They were no longer keeping the law in order to be holy. I mean Jesus repeatedly nailed them for their hypocrisy—to the point that He called them sons of their father the devil, the father of lies. He spelled it out in Matt. 15

“You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS, / BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME. / ‘BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME, / TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE PRECEPTS OF MEN.’”

All of which seems rather mild compared to what Jesus said to them in Matt. 23. He started by saying

“The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses; 3 therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them.

Six times He called them hypocrites, but He also said they were blind guides, serpents, a brood of vipers, and whitewashed tombs.

I finally grasped what Jesus was driving at when I read John 19 recently—specifically this:

“And he [Pilate] said to the Jews, ‘Behold, your King!’ So they cried out, ‘Away with Him, away with Him, crucify Him!’ Pilate said to them, ‘Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar.’ ”

I’m emphasizing that last line because it’s the crux of the argument.

Could there be a more pronounced repudiation of God? Not just of Jesus as Messiah (because they still could have thought Jesus wasn’t who they were waiting for, but the true Messiah would still show up), but their repudiation was of any Messiah and of God as their head. That cry was really their declaration of independence. They didn’t hide their wayward hearts with that pronouncement.

But Jesus knew this about them long before they came out in the open. So, I don’t see the Pharisees as well-meaning over-zealous legalists who were trying to please God in the only way they knew how. Rather, they had gone their own way for their own political and financial gain, built their own system, and repudiated God, all the while pretending to follow Him.

So how does this relate to people dissing the Bible in favor of Jesus? I think one bleeds into the other. The implication is that it’s the Bible that makes people legalistic. They want to follow the Bible so they aren’t compassionate and they want to follow the Bible so they don’t follow Jesus. It’s following the Bible that makes the Pharisees because they’re trying so darn hard to please God, just like those poor misguided Pharisees of old.

So the answer is either (a) chuck the parts of the Bible that don’t fit with following Jesus or (b) wake up the silly Christians who have gotten bogged down with the silly legalistic stuff (you know, about homosexuality and such).

So here’s the truth: A Pharisee is a God hater who is trying to go his own way. Consequently, the true Church, Christians who have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, aren’t Pharisees. (I’ll qualify that statement in a bit.)

Second, anyone who wants to follow the Bible—not anyone who follows parts of the Bible that they pick and choose to follow, for whatever reason—most likely knows that Jesus boiled the commandments down to two: Love God and love your neighbors. In other words, there is no way someone reading, believing, and obeying the Bible is going to smother compassion with passion.

The REAL problem is that people aren’t reading the Bible. Christians aren’t and professing Christians aren’t. So, yes (here comes the qualifier), it’s possible for Christians to act in ways that seem Pharisaical. That’s a far cry, however, from being a Pharisee.

And a person doesn’t get Pharisaical by following the Bible too much. The hypocrisy comes from saying one thing and doing another–something the Bible speaks to over and over in James and the gospels and Proverbs and the prophets.

In short, rather than moving away from the Bible we Christians ought to be soaking ourselves in it.

Soaking. In. It.