A Snapshot of the Pharisees: Good Intentions Gone Awry

A Good Beginning

The Pharisees were a religious group with a very noble beginning. They began sometime during or shortly after the exile of the people of God in Babylon. The Pharisees understood that it was Israel’s disregard for God’s law that led them into the peril they had faced. They understood that the nation’s cavalier approach to covenant life as God’s people was disastrous. So, with great zeal for both God and for their fellow man, the Pharisees founded a religious movement that sought to call the nation of Israel to earnest spiritual purity by being zealous in their devotion to God—especially in their striving after obedience to God’s law.

This zeal drove them to begin thinking very seriously about the holy commandments of God and how they could be faithful to conform their lives to them. For every commandment given in the Old Testament they would ask, “What does that look like in everyday life? What is required of God’s people in this commandment? What is forbidden?” We must understand that this is very good. The Pharisees began with a holy impulse and sincere desire to honor the Lord. As they answered these questions, and hundreds of other questions like them, over time their answers eventually came to form what our text today calls, “the tradition of the elders,” (Matt. 15:2). The “tradition of the elders” was the accepted interpretation of what it meant to obey God’s law as God’s people. Again, this in and of itself is very good and can be a tremendous help when undertaken in the right spirit. But, over time, three serious shifts in the Pharisees original impulse occurred that led this good desire to honor the Lord with a holy life to become a sinful form of false religion.

A Good Impulse Gone Awry

1.) The Pharisees moved away from the good desire of striving to honor God with their obedience to striving to earn their salvation by religious performance.

The Pharisees’ religious movement originated in a sincere desire to love and honor God through holiness. But, over time, they allowed the focus to become centered on their own performance. Although the sacrificial system which God had set in place continually told them that salvation was found through the blood atonement of another who died in the sinner’s place, they sought to be righteous by their own effort. The Pharisees viewed their religious works and outward obedience to the law as the means of earning the blessing of God.

2.) The Pharisees went (far) beyond what was written. They added numerous and highly scrupulous extra requirements to the law of God which God himself had not given.

The Pharisees reasoned that if they created a system of “traditions” that required far more than the law of God, then the people would be kept from ever getting anywhere close to actually breaking the commandments. They referred to this aspect of their tradition as “building a fence around the law”. In some ways, this initially sounds like it could be helpful. But in reality, it proved disastrous because it neglected to address the sinner’s heart. These extra religious requirements reduced true obedience to God to be nothing more than external conformity to man-made expectations, rituals, and practices. All that mattered was doing the right religious-looking things on the outside—the inward corruption of the heart was ignored.

3.) Righteousness before God came to be measured by a person’s external conformity to the established “tradition of the elders” rather than the true standard, which is the Word of God.

Over time the “traditions” which were originally intended to support and explain God’s law for the blessing of the people, ultimately came to obscure and supplant it. Doing what men said about God became more important than actually doing what God had said to men. It was thought that so long as a person held to the prescribed outward rituals and practices of the “traditions," then that person was living righteously before God. To give a modern example, this amounts to the notion that physically going to church and physically putting money in the offering, etc., makes a person righteous. But we all know that people are quite capable of outwardly doing the right things for very wrong reasons. We all know that it easy to check off religious boxes. It is easier to put on a suit on Sunday and call ourselves reverent for having done so, than to actually fear God in the heart and walk before him in life. And this is the very problem.

A man-made “fence around the law” may be built quite tall and strong, and it may successfully keep me from physically going on the other side. But it can do nothing to stop my heart from wanting to go on the other side. It has no power to address or correct the inward rebellion of my soul against God. True righteousness is not so easy as merely physically keeping on the right side of the “fence” and performing certain external religious rituals. True righteousness is not merely doing the right things on the outside, but doing the right things from a heart of sincere love for God on the inside—and this is something that no sinner has on their own. By the measurement of this true standard, no man has any hope of being declared righteous before God by what he himself has done. This is the very reality which the Pharisees were missing, and their failure to recognize this truth rendered all their scrupulous devotion and meticulous zeal to be nothing but false religion.

The Heart of True Religion

Before the Law of God can helpfully lead us to walk in true obedience by faith, it must first lead us to true repentance by exposing not only our outward rebellion, but even more, by exposing our inward corruption from which all our outward sinful actions flow. Only then will we recognize that there is no hope of producing righteousness from within ourselves and therefore look outside of ourselves to the righteousness which God has provided for us in Christ. Until that revelation takes place in the sinner’s heart, all the human effort and religious tradition-keeping in the world is nothing but empty and false religion that has no hope of saving the sinner’s soul.

What the Pharisees failed to understand about the law is that external conformity must always flow from a heart of love for God or it is nothing more than an empty self-righteous performance. It is not that proper religious form is unimportant or something in conflict with grace. By no means! God cares very much about how we approach him. Form matters! The point is that all the right outward religious form in the world can never replace the necessity of having sincere faith in the heart. Sincere faith, not external religious form, is what unites a sinner to God in Christ. Faith in Christ not works for Christ are what saves the sinner’s soul.

*This article was taken from the introduction to a recent sermon on Matthew 15:1-20 called, “Outward Religion Can Never Cleanse Inward Corruption”. The sermon can be accessed here.