“For I [Jesus] tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” – Matthew 5:20
The largest and most influential religious party in the days of Jesus Christ and the New Testament was the Pharisees, and they are mentioned roughly 100 times in the Bible.
Their two goals were simple: separation from the world and division from fellow believers they judged to be too worldly. Defining and defending these lines was much harder for the Pharisees than the Essenes, for one simple reason. While the Essenes retreated from the general culture, the Pharisees sought to remain in the culture, living in towns and cities with everyone else while carving out a distinct subculture of their very own. (1)
In the New Testament, the Pharisees are probably the closest in theology to Jesus, but they are His most ardent enemies and opponents. They were a popular group, but Jesus became more popular; good old-fashioned jealousy is often the root trigger for a Pharisee spirit. Jesus also didn’t appeal to them, and He wasn’t approved by them. He didn’t make it through their process to be considered acceptable for their conference, publishing house, seminary, or Bible college. They would confront, attack, and argue with Him. What he would not do is submit or surrender to them. Instead, He would publicly rebuke and sometimes even mock them.
The fatal flaws of Pharisees yesterday and today are many, including the following:
- They do not understand the difference between open-handed and closed-handed issues. Close-handed or primary issues are truths that must be believed in order to be a Christian. These include Jesus being born of a virgin, living a perfect life, dying and resurrecting three days later, and that Jesus is the Son of God. Open-handed or secondary issues are things that Christians can disagree on because the Bible doesn’t explicitly answer. These include how you baptize (e.g., sprinkle or full-immersion), is the Earth really old or really young, and how to educate your children (e.g., homeschool, public school).
- They assume they are always right, and those who disagree with them are always wrong. This, of course, leads to pride, arrogance, and a haughty spirit.
- Because they are devoted to separation, they publicly attack fellow believers they do not know without personally meeting with them to confirm what they believe. They want to hold Jesus accountable and correct His “false” teaching. They do rules, not relationship. As a result, they tend to win arguments and not people because their focus is outward, not inward.
- They see themselves a bit like the drug dogs at the airport – sent by God to sniff out any false teaching, heresy, compromise, or wrong belief. They will call this a ministry of discernment, but often it is nothing more than a spirit of criticism.
- Perhaps the most fatal flaw with the Pharisees is that they had two lines of authority: the Torah (God’s Scripture) and their own traditions. This led to a lot of conflict between what the Word of God says and what the teachers added to the Word of God. Today, we fall into the same trap when there is no distinction between principles and methods. The principles in the Bible are like the Torah: fixed and unchanging and the methods are like our traditions and ways of living the Christian life.
For those Christians who want to be involved politically and culturally, living as a subculture within the world system without compromising on the closed-handed issues of the Bible, the caution is to avoid the spirit of the Pharisees. In our day of the negative world, when Bible-believing Christians are seen as an immoral minority, it is unhelpful to have a group of Christians spending their time and energy attacking fellow Christians over secondary issues.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s devotional looking at another, more progressive group, the Sadducees.
Are there any areas of your life where you tend towards a Pharisee spirit?
(1) To learn more about the Pharisees, see Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993).
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