Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Sermons
I. THE HYPOCRITE IS WOEFULLY GUILTY. 1. He is guilty of heart wickedness. (1) Under the utmost ceremonial strictness, like the garnished tomb enclosing "dead men's bones and all uncleanness," is concealed the greatest moral laxity. Thus - "Nature, like a beauteous wall, (2) As an adorned tomb is but the garniture of death and corruption, so is the external sanctity of the Pharisee in disgusting contrast to his inward turpitude. (3) The meat and drink in the platter and cup, externally so scrupulously cleansed, are the nourishment and refreshment of the hypocrite. His luxuries are procured by means nefarious and corrupt (see ver. 14). The hypocrite is selfish to cruelty. (4) The nourishment and refreshment of the Pharisee is, in the estimation of Christ, filth and poison. Luxury punishes fraud, feeding disease with fruits of injustice. The disease and death thus nourished are moral more than physical. 2. He is guilty of deceiving others. (1) The cleansed outside of the cup and platter, and the whiting on the sepulchre, are intended to be seen; and so is the piety of the hypocrite. The purpose is to divert attention from the filth and rottenness within. (2) The success is often too well assured. Man surveys surfaces. His vision does not search substances. To do this requires experiment which he is too lazy to institute. (3) Hence the professed belief in human nature. (a) Unconverted men must be hypocrites to be endured. Society would be intolerable but for its veneer. (b) The children of nature are readily deceived in a world of hypocrites. Their pride and self-conceit leads them to credit themselves with virtues; and the Pharisee deceives them. (c) But that religious persons should "believe in human nature" only shows how successfully the hypocrite may even "deceive the very elect." (d) The believers in human nature are liable to trust in it instead of Christ for their salvation, and perish in their delusion. 3. He is guilty of insulting God. (1) He ignores God. While he strives after the praise of men, he leaves God out of the account. Is God to be treated as nobody with impunity! (2) He degrades God. Affecting the praise of men rather than the praise of God, he treats the Creator as inferior to his creatures. Will this insolence be endured forever? (3) As the whitening of the sepulchre was intended to warn passengers to avoid its defiling contact, so should the sham piety of the Pharisee warn honest men away from the sphere of his moral infection (see Luke 11:44). (4) Let the sinner be alarmed at the formidableness of the impending woe. Let him repent, amend, and sue for mercy. II. THE HYPOCRITE IS CRIMINALLY BLIND. 1. God requires truth in the heart. (1) He is himself essentially holy. This means that his nature must repel from him everything that is unholy. God must needs wage eternal war against sin. (2) But his grace has made possible his reconciliation to the sinner. (a) In the provision of the atonement. (b) In the gift of the Holy Spirit. (c) Through faith the righteousness of the Law may not only become "imputed to us," but also "fulfilled in us." (3) The life will be holy when the heart is clean. "The heart may be a temple of God or a grave; a heaven or a hell" (Slier). The cleansing of the inside affects the outside, but not contrariwise. "Cleanse first the inside of the cup and of the platter, that the outside. thereof may become clean also." (4) There is a cleansing that is external even after the heart is clean. This our Lord evinced when he washed the feet of his disciples. 2. The hypocrite imposes upon himself. (1) He is criminally blind to the folly that avoids those scandalous sins which would spoil his reputation with men, while he allows the heart wickedness which renders him odious to God (see Psalm 5:9). Jesus saw the filth within the cup and platter, and the rottenness within the sepulchre. (2) He is criminally blind to the fact that in imposing upon his fellows he does not impose upon his Maker. The same Jesus who showed the Pharisee the extortion and excesses of the heart will show these things to him again in the day of woe. (3) The hypocrite is criminally blind to the fact that the life is cleansed in the heart. Those only are externally clean who are inwardly pure. Christ views the profession in relation to the state of the heart. In this light he will judge the works of men at the last great day. - J.A.M.
For ye make clean the outside of the cup. By this allusion to the cup and platter the Saviour taught that it is necessary to cleanse the heart first, that the external conduct might be pure.I. WHY must we cleanse ourselves from sin? 1. Because it renders us injurious to our fellow-men. 2. Because it hinders prayer. 3. Because it renders us offensive to God. 4. Because it is destructive to ourselves. II. How may we cleanse ourselves from sin? 1. Not by merely desiring to be cleansed. 2. Not by external reformations. 3. Not by scrupulous attention to religious ordinances. 4. Not by mere repentance. 5. But by faith in the only cleansing element — the precious blood of Jesus. III. WHEN may we cleanse ourselves from sin? Now! 1. Delay increases the difficulty. 2. The present the only time of which we are sure. 3. God's commands brook no delay, etc. (A. Tucker.) Hypocrites are like pictures on canvas, they show fairest at farthest. A hypocrite's profession is in folio, but his sincerity is so abridged that it is contained in decimo-sexto, nothing in the world to speak of. A hypocrite is like the Sicilian Etna, flaming at the mouth when it hath snow at the foot. Their mouths talk hotly, but their feet walk coldly. The nightingale hath a sweet voice, but a lean carcase; a voice, and nothing else but a voice: and so have all hypocrites.(Adams.) As a thick wood that giveth great shadow doth delight the eyes of the beholders greatly with the variety of flourishing trees and pleasant plants, so that it seemeth to be ordained only for pleasure's sake, and yet within is full of poisonous serpents, ravening wolves, and other wild beasts; even so a hypocrite, when outwardly he seemeth holy and to be well furnished with all sorts of virtues, doth please well the eyes of his beholders; but within him there lurketh pride, envy, covetousness, and all manner of wickedness, like wild and cruel beasts wandering in the wood of his heart.(Cawdray.) Hypocrites seem as glow-worms, to have both light and heat; but touch them and they have neither. The Egyptian temples were beautiful on the outside, when within ye should find nothing but some serpent or crocodile. Apothecaries' boxes oft have goodly titles when yet they hold not one dram of any good drug. A certain stranger coming on embassage unto the senators of Rome, and colouring his hoary hair and pale cheeks with vermilion hue, a grave senator espying the deceit stood up and said, "What sincerity are we to expect from this man's hands, whose locks, and looks, and lips, do lie?" Think the same of-all painted hypocrites. These we may compare(as Lucian doth his Grecians) to a fair gilt bossed book; look within it, and there is the tragedy of Thyestes; or perhaps Arrius' Thalya; the name of a muse, the matter heresy; or Conradus Vorstius' book-monster that hath De Deo in the front, but atheism and blasphemy in the text.(J. Trapp.) If yon go into a churchyard some snowy day, when the snow has been falling thick enough to cover every monument and tombstone, how beautiful and white does everything appear! But remove the snow, dig down beneath, and you find rottenness and putrefaction — dead men's bones and all uncleanness. How like that churchyard on such a day is the mere professor — fair outside, sinful, unholy within! The grass grows green upon the sides of a mountain that holds a volcano in its bowels.(T. Guthrie, D. D.) A very capital painter in London exhibited a piece representing a friar habited in his canonicals. View the painting at a distance, and you would think the friar to be in a praying attitude. His hands are clasped together, and held horizontally to his breast; his eyes meekly demissed like those of the publican in the gospel, and the good man appears to be quite absorbed in humble adoration and devout recollection. But take a nearer survey, and the deception vanishes. The book which seemed to be before him is discovered to be a punch-bowl into which the rascal is all the while, in reality, only squeezing a lemon. How lively a representation of a hypocrite!(G. S. Bowes.)There is a spice of hypocrisy in us all. (S. Rutherford.)The hypocrite — the man that stole the livery of heaven to serve the devil in. (R. Pollok.) The hypocrite maps out the road to Zion, knows it well, has sounded with plummet the depths of the promises, can talk about them. But he has accepted a two-parts Christ; there is perhaps a little pet sin, snugly tucked up in a warm corner of his heart, that he is unwilling to part with. Christ is his Priest, his Prophet, but he will not have Him as his King.Formality frequently takes its dwelling near the chambers of integrity, and so assumes its name; the soul not suspecting that hell should make so near an approach to heaven. A rotten post, though covered with gold, is more fit to be burned in the fire than for the building of a fabric. The dial of our faces does not infallibly show the time of day in our hearts; the humblest looks may enamel the former, while unbounded pride covers the latter. Unclean spirits may inhabit the chamber when they look not out at the window.(Archbishop Secker.) I. A SERIOUS CHARGE.1. A too late recognition of goodness which, when living, was ignored or persecuted. 2. A pretended veneration of the characters of the pious dead. 3. In truth a signalizing of their own goodness. II. A FALSE DEFENCE. 1. Their character belied their profession — persecutors of Jesus would hardly have been defenders of Isaiah, etc. 2. Betrayed great ignorance of their own character. III. A SOLEMN VERDICT. 1. Pronounced guilty of the righteous blood shed by their party. 2. Hypocrites for pretending a veneration for departed worth while they persecuted living goodness. Tombs are the clothes of the dead: a grave is but a plain suit, and a rich monument is one embroidered. Tombs ought, in some sort, to be proportioned, not to the wealth, but deserts of the party interred. Yet may we see some rich man of mean worth loaden under a tomb big enough for a prince to bear. There were officers appointed in the Grecian games who always, by public authority, did pluck down the statues erected to the victors if they exceeded the true symmetry and proportion of their bodies. The shortest, plainest, and truest epitaphs are the best. Mr. Camden, in his "Remains," presents us with examples of great men who had little epitaphs. And when once I asked a witty gentleman what epitaph was fitted to be written on Mr. Camden's tomb, "Let it be," said he, "Camden's Remains." I say also, "the plainest; " for except the sense lie above ground, few will trouble themselves to dig for it. Lastly, it must be "true;" not, as in some monuments where the red veins in the marble may seem to blush at the falsehoods written on it. He was a witty man that first taught a stone to speak; but he was a wicked man that taught it first to lie.(N. Rogers.) Momus, the heathen god of ridicule, complained that Jupiter had not made a window in the human breast, so that it might be seen what was passing within. To an omniscient God no window is needed, every thought, and wish, and intention being perfectly discerned.The tombs of saints in Egypt are held in great veneration. They are covered with a circular building in the form of a cupola, and are regularly whitewashed, repaired, rebuilt, and decorated, as was the case with the Jews. In the larger tombs lamps are kept constantly burning, as amongst the Romanists, and no Christian is allowed to enter. At Pera the tablets are all upright, and surmounted with turbans, tarbooshes, or flowers. The dignity of the person in the grave is displayed by the kind of turban at the top of the stone. Most were of white marble, and many richly gilt and ornamented. They are about the size of our railway mile-posts, and are as thick on the ground as nine-pins. The flowers denote females. Some are painted green, these were descendants of Mahomet.(Gadsby.) In the plains of Sahrai-Sirwan Rawlinson noticed many whitewashed obelisks placed on any elevations which occurred conveniently, some rising to the height of fifteen feet, a modern example of "whitened sepulchres." The custom of "garnishing the sepulchres" prevails more or less throughout Persia.I. It is a characteristic of fallen men that they are apt to content themselves with cleansing the outside. They are at greater pains to seem pure than to be pure.II. Though outward purity is desirable, and even measurably praiseworthy, yet, if it be not the fruit of a purified heart, it is unreliable and comparatively valueless. For the welfare of this life it is better that one should be winning than repulsive, moral than immoral. It is better to have a washed outside than to have both outside and inside filthy. If outside only it is unreliable; has no inherent permanency. III. A cleansed heart is a sure producer of genuine and permanent purity of life. Learn: 1. That God estimates character by the state of the heart. 2. That man has a corrupt heart, and is therefore loathsome in God's sight. 3. That to have God's favour man must be cleansed, and that to be effectual it must begin in his heart. 4. That there is such a thing as being effectually cleansed and rendered acceptable to the Holy One. (T. Williston.) So it ever comes to pass that we are punished for deceiving others by being ourselves deceived. Our success secures our delusion. When an act which is properly an indication of some good motive is repeatedly performed in the sight of those who cannot see the heart, they take for granted the motive and give us the credit of it — provided only the act be of the class which it is the fashion of the day and place to applaud as religious. We are assumed to be what, at first, we know we are not. But in time this knowledge fades away; we accept as the independently formed judgment of others that which really rested upon our own successful deception; we come to consider our conduct as in itself sufficient proof of the motive which is universally assumed to be its source. We move in a circle of hypocrisy, and it becomes difficult to decide whether we are the authors or the victims of the delusion. We are, in fact, both.(J. C. Coghlan, D. D.) People Abel, Barachias, Berechiah, Hen, Jesus, Zachariah, Zacharias, ZechariahPlaces JerusalemTopics FALSE, Behaviour, Clean, Cleanse, Cup, Curse, Desire, Dish, Excess, Extortion, Full, Greed, Hypocrites, Incontinence, Inside, Intemperance, Law, Ones, Outside, Pharisees, Plate, Platter, Rapacity, Rapine, Robbery, Scribes, Self-indulgence, Teachers, Uncontrolled, Unrighteousness, Violent, Wash, Within, Wo, WoeOutline 1. Jesus admonishes the people to follow good doctrine, not bad examples5. His disciples must beware of their ambition. 13. He denounces eight woes against their hypocrisy and blindness, 34. and prophesies of the destruction of Jerusalem. Dictionary of Bible Themes Matthew 23:25 5311 extortion 5381 law, letter and spirit 5379 law, Christ's attitude 8761 fools, in teaching of Christ 2009 Christ, anger of 5173 outward appearance Library The Morality of the Gospel. Is stating the morality of the Gospel as an argument of its truth, I am willing to admit two points; first, that the teaching of morality was not the primary design of the mission; secondly, that morality, neither in the Gospel, nor in any other book, can be a subject, properly speaking, of discovery. If I were to describe in a very few words the scope of Christianity as a revelation, [49] I should say that it was to influence the conduct of human life, by establishing the proof of a future state … William Paley—Evidences of Christianity Jesus' Last Public Discourse. Denunciation of Scribes and Pharisees. Christianity Misunderstood by Believers. First Attempts on Jerusalem. For which Cause Our Lord Himself Also with his Own Mouth Saith... Relation of the Pharisees to the Sadducees and Essenes, and to the Gospel of Christ Among the People, and with the Pharisees The General Service to a Prophet. Of the Power of Making Laws. The Cruelty of the Pope and his Adherents, in this Respect, in Tyrannically Oppressing and Destroying Souls. Hints to Teachers and Questions for Pupils On Attending the Church Service Machinations of the Enemies of Jesus. The Early Ministry in Judea The Crossing of the Jordan Subjects of Study. Home Education in Israel; Female Education. Elementary Schools, Schoolmasters, and School Arrangements. Letter Xliv Concerning the Maccabees but to whom Written is Unknown. Number and Order of the Separate Books. Elucidations. "The Carnal Mind is Enmity against God for it is not Subject to the Law of God, Neither Indeed Can Be. So Then they that Are We are not Binding Heavy Burdens and Laying them Upon Your Shoulders... Repentance and Impenitence. Second Sunday after Trinity Exhortation to Brotherly Love. Links Matthew 23:25 NIVMatthew 23:25 NLT Matthew 23:25 ESV Matthew 23:25 NASB Matthew 23:25 KJV Matthew 23:25 Bible Apps Matthew 23:25 Parallel Matthew 23:25 Biblia Paralela Matthew 23:25 Chinese Bible Matthew 23:25 French Bible Matthew 23:25 German Bible Matthew 23:25 Commentaries Bible Hub |