Judge of Judges

Sermon Transcript

This year marked 250 years of the existence of the United States of America. However, the current term of the United States Supreme Court, which began in October of last year and runs until October of this year, is only the 236th term. The U.S. Supreme Court was created by the U.S. Constitution in 1789, and began its first term in 1790. Courts and judges were already part of the American legal system, but any time you have a judge, and you realize the judge is also a fallible human, the question begins to arise: Who judges, the judges? The final answer in the United States Federal court system is the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

Today we’re looking at the Gospel of Luke, which took place in first century Israel. They too had their judges, but who judged them? In fact, if The U.S. Supreme Court is our highest court, what do we do with the fact that it too is composed of fallible people? Of course, we all must recognize that as long as we’re talking about human courts, fallible judges are the only option available to us. But Christians have a higher hope, because we believe in a real God who is perfectly just, who will execute perfect justice in the end. If that’s the case, though, it’s important that we know by what standard he will judge us. As we come to Luke today, we are going to encounter Jesus yet again doing something very God-like. So far in Luke’s Gospel he’s forgiven sins, he’s commanded wind and waves, he’s raised the dead, among other things; all things we’d generally expect only God to do. And by now we know why that’s the case, because in chapter 9 even God himself, from heaven, bore witness that Jesus is his son. Well in this passage, the God-like thing he does is he takes it upon himself to judge Israel’s judges. He presents himself as the highest court. And in so doing, he reveals to us both the sort of righteousness that God condemns, and the sort of righteousness that God is actually after. Man looks on the outward appearance, but Jesus judges the heart. To understand that we’ll look at the contrast between outward and inward righteousness, then at the characteristics of outward righteousness, and finally at the comeback of the outwardly righteous. The contrast, the characteristics, and the comeback.

 

The contrast between outward and inward righteousness

 

Our story today begins with Jesus being invited to eat at the house of a pharisee. The Pharisees are not portrayed very positively in the Gospels, and Jesus has some harsh words for them in this passage. Nonetheless, when Jesus was invited to dine with a pharisee, he accepted the invitation. We should not miss that even those we may be naturally inclined to like the least, even those to whom God issues his sternest rebukes, are also those God will gladly accept if they will repent. The reason God even issues woes, curses, like the ones Jesus utters in this passage against the Pharisees and lawyers, in this life, rather than just waiting to pronounce them all at the final judgment, is so that people have an opportunity to turn before that time, and be forgiven.

 

But nobody turns until they’re first convinced that they’re heading in the wrong direction, and it’s on that that this passage focuses. We begin to see the contrast between Jesus and the Pharisees when before dinner, Jesus didn’t first wash. God nowhere commanded that people wash before dinner, but a tradition had arisen beyond Scripture that treated ceremonial washings before meals as compulsory. This was a hallmark of the Pharisees to keep in mind: They went beyond the words of scripture in what they told people they must do. They treated the extrabiblical traditions of their elders as just as binding on people as the very words of God. 

 

Well, Jesus didn’t feel bound by such traditions. Though he was without sin, on this occasion and on others, he disobeyed Jewish tradition. What’s that show us? It shows us that the traditions of men, even when those traditions develop within God’s people, are not ultimately authoritative over God’s people; only God’s words occupy that unique position. In the Protestant reformation, this doctrine was clarified under the label “sola scriptura,” which means “scripture alone” declares what God requires of us, and he requires of us no more than what is written in scripture, or what can be deduced from it by good and necessary consequence. 

 

So Jesus felt free to disobey the traditions of the Jews, and not only that, but he saw in this Pharisee’s astonishment that Jesus would do such a thing something that was typical of the Pharisees: A focus on externals, and he was ready to talk to them about it. When we spend time socially with those who don’t yet believe, are we ready like this to speak of things of eternal significance? Jesus said in verse 39 that they cleanse the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of greed and bitterness. In addition to elaborate traditions about how people were to cleanse themselves before eating, they had traditions about cleaning cups and dishes. But of course, if you were to only clean the outside of a bowl, it wouldn’t do much good, since you eat from the inside of a bowl. So Jesus says the Pharisees are like that: Outwardly they appear righteous because they follow the traditional washings, which you can see. But inside, where no one can see, they are full of greed and wickedness.

 

No one can see what’s inside, except of course, Jesus. In saying this Jesus purports to know what is really inside a person. Generally it’s a very dangerous thing for us to proclaim peoples’ motives. Even secular therapists label it as a “mind reading” and scripture forbids us from rendering a judgment against someone except on the evidence of two or three witnesses, that is, the report of two or three who have sensible evidence of something, not two or three people who “just know” what someone else is thinking. But Jesus is not a mere human. Multiple times now in Luke, and even in the passage we looked at last week, we see that Jesus does know what people are thinking (v. 17), and here we see he knows peoples’ motives. He is not only truly man; he is truly God.

 

And that is part of why it is safe for him to act as judge. The Pharisees were used to judging others, as were the lawyers, who we’ll talk about in a bit. These were the first century experts in the law, and so they often made judgments: “This is what the law says. What you’re doing violates it.” That’s what the Pharisee tries to do to Jesus here: The tradition says you should have washed. You didn’t. But now we see Jesus turning the tables on the Pharisee and presenting himself as the higher court that sits in judgment on him. This is yet another reason an appreciative, but unbelieving approach to Jesus is impossible. If he’s not truly God, then he’s doing something really wicked here: He’s rendering a judgment on others and impugning their motives when he wouldn’t actually have known whether they were full of greed and wickedness. How would you like it if someone accused you of being full of greed and wickedness without adequate evidence?

 

But Jesus has adequate evidence. 1 Samuel 16:7 says that man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. So here, man looks on the outward appearance, but Jesus looks on the heart, because Jesus is the Lord, as Luke even calls him in verse 39. And what he sees when he looks at the Pharisees’ heart is greed and wickedness. They loved money, and they loved sin, and it is possible for those loves to be ruling your heart while you hold fast to the traditions of men. How often do peoples’ hearts remain far from God while they attend church services, observe traditional fasts, and say traditional prayers? But it’s foolish, Jesus says in verse 40, because he who made the outside made the inside also.

 

Notice the logic: Since God made both our bodies and our souls, the outer man and the inner man, God is worthy of the devotion of our entire selves, outside and inside. He made both, and he sees both, so who do you think you’re fooling when you make an appearance of faithfulness to him, while harboring greed and wickedness in your heart? 

 

Instead, Jesus says in verse 41, that if you give as alms those things that are within, then everything will be clean for you. The problem Jesus is essentially confronting is hypocrisy: When what you appear to be externally doesn’t match what you actually are internally. Today the way people often try to resolve that tension is by conforming their external presentation of themselves to what they feel internally. When Christians are conformed to the world in this way, they think if I don’t feel like singing God’s praises (internal), then I shouldn’t sing at all (external). But if that were really what Jesus wanted from us, then he’d say to the Pharisees here: Go do greedy and wicked things! After all, that’s what you’re full of inside, and you don’t want to be a hypocrite, do you?

 

But that’s not what Jesus tells them to do. Instead, he tells them to give as alms those things that are within, and says that if they do, everything will be clean for them. So instead of trying to conform your external actions to your greedy and wicked hearts, give your hearts to the Lord, and then your external actions will follow! That’s the biblical path away from hypocrisy. That’s the biblical path toward being a whole person of integrity: Actually give up your heart to the one who made it. Just trust him; take what he says by faith. Submit your will to his. Love what he loves; hate what he hates. Instead of trying to conform your external appearance to your internal desires or your internal desires to your external appearance, give what is inside to the Lord, and the externals will follow. In that way, everything will be clean for you.

 

Of course, Jesus doesn’t mean by that that if you give your heart to the Lord, adultery, murder, and theft will be clean for you. He means that if you give your heart to the Lord, you won’t want to commit adultery, murder or theft! If your heart is really devoted to the Lord, nothing you want will be unclean. And even if you eat without washing, you will eat with thanksgiving in your heart to the Lord who provided the food, and with that God will be pleased. As 1 Timothy 4:4 says, “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.”

 

The contrast between an outward righteousness and an inward one, then, is between a righteousness that only appears to be righteous in the eyes of men, often assessed more by the standards of tradition than the standards of God’s word, and a righteousness that flows from a heart genuinely devoted to the Lord, that issues in obedience to the standards of God’s word, rather than the traditions of men. The contrast is real, but sometimes it can be hard to spot. So next, our text shows us more of the characteristics of a merely outward righteousness.

 

The characteristics of outward righteousness

 

It’s important that we are aware of these characteristics for a couple reasons. First, we need to be aware of the danger that we ourselves will slide into them. There’s a Pharisee in each of our hearts. We are all prone, to varying degrees, to what theologian Sinclair Ferguson calls a “legal spirit.” But second, we need to be aware of the danger of following Pharisee-like teachers today. Since they do have an outward righteousness, it’s easy for us to be led astray by them. Luke records Jesus’ woes against them in part to protect us from following them.

 

The first woe is recorded in verse 42: Woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God. Tithing was the practice of giving a tenth of whatever you had to the priests, who would then offer some of it to the Lord, keep some of it for themselves, to meet their needs, and then distribute some to the poor. Tithing was commanded in the law God gave Israel (e.g., Lev 27:30-33), and the way it would typically work would be if you harvest a crop, you would take the first tenth of whatever you harvested, and give it to the priests. But the Pharisees were so on top of tithing, that even for the smallest plants, the herbs, they made sure to give a tenth of whatever they grew. 

 

They were fastidious in their tithing, but then they neglected justice and the love of God, what Jesus elsewhere calls “the weightier matters of the law” (Matt 23:23). I mentioned earlier that the Pharisees were often involved in making judgments, but here Jesus says that when they do so, they don’t actually administer justice! He doesn’t detail here how they do that–it could have been by accepting bribes, showing partiality in their rulings, bearing false witness, or interpreting laws in such a way as to excuse themselves from obedience while requiring it of others. More broadly, justice in the Bible involves giving to each his or her due, and in the Bible assistance is due to marginalized people: The poor, the orphan, the sojourner, and the widow, most famously. So probably here Jesus is also charging the Pharisees with neglecting the justice owed to such people.

 

And then, of course, there is the love of God. They not only neglect justice to man; they neglect the love of God. Beneath all their traditions, beneath all their rituals that they ostensibly did for the glory of God, Jesus saw their heart, and saw that they simply did not love God. He wasn’t dear to them. They didn’t adore him, rejoice in him, and, ultimately, they didn’t obey him. Sometimes evangelicals say the Pharisees were good law keepers, but they really weren’t. They were good tradition keepers, but they didn’t obey the two commandments that Jesus said were most important: They didn’t love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, and they didn’t love their neighbor as themselves (Luke 10:25-28). One characteristic of outward righteousness is a vigorous concern for lesser matters of the law at the expense of the weightier matters.

 

What should they have done, instead? Jesus says in verse 42: These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. So he says you are right to tithe mint and rue and every herb; don’t neglect those, but focus on justice and the love of God! Working hard to obey God down to the details is a good thing in Jesus’ mind: Don’t neglect that, he says! The problem comes when we only focus there, and lose sight of the end of these things: Justice toward our fellow man, and love for our God. Tithing was meant to serve both ends, as it provided material for the sacrifices offered to the Lord, provided food for his priests, and provided food for the poor. But there is also a way to tithe such that it functionally replaces love for God and neighbor, and that was the Pharisees’ problem.

 

One thing I love about this church is that we are concerned to obey God down in the details. We spend time on questions like how does God want his churches to be governed, what is baptism, who are the proper recipients, who should take the Lord’s Supper. Those are worthwhile questions for any church to ask; we shouldn’t neglect such things! But let us devote ourselves to the more important duty we have to love God and do justice. If we have a correct form of church government, but have not love, we gain nothing. If we have biblically ordered worship, but have not love, we gain nothing.

 

On more of an individual level, consider where much of your thoughts and efforts at obedience are focused. Do you spend a lot of time evaluating your own performance–”I should have prayed 5 minutes longer to make sure I also included prayer for that unreached language group.” “I shouldn’t have eaten that dinner alone. I could have invited someone over and showed hospitality instead.” “I should have shared the gospel with that stranger I was next to on the bus instead of scrolling on my phone.” Of course, these things are all good, and self-examination is an important discipline. I wouldn’t want to take off you conviction that the Holy Spirit is putting on you. But I do want to take off you the burden of trying to do the Holy Spirit’s work yourself, because here’s the irony: If you spend all your time evaluating yourself, you’ll end up spending all your time thinking about yourself, which means you aren’t spending that time thinking about God and your neighbor. Ironically, you end up so self-focused that you neglect justice and the love of God, the stuff that matters most! Forget yourself, and focus instead on loving God and doing justice to your neighbor.

 

The second woe in verse 43 is that the Pharisees love the best seat in the synagogue and greetings in the marketplaces. Outward righteousness does what it does in hope of being recognized, and therefore exalted, by others, whereas inward righteousness, a heart righteousness, is righteous even when no one is looking, and even when that righteousness costs us the best seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. Here’s the dream many Christians indulge, myself included: I live a righteous life, a life fully pleasing to God, and it is just so winsome, so attractive, that even though everyone recognizes that I’m different, they respect me. So I get promotions at work, even the coolest unbelievers in the city want me in their inner ring, and the Christian world more broadly also sees me as exemplary: I get asked to sit on the board of Christian ministries, I get asked for my perspective or views on theological and cultural issues. And look, sometimes in the Bible things like that happen: There is the occasional Joseph, Daniel, or Esther, who are faithful to God, and enjoy significant favor in the world. 

 

But there is something very dangerous about wanting that, craving that, and something downright sinful about loving that. Thus, it incurs Jesus’ curse in verse 43. It’s natural to want a better seat and to prefer a warm greeting to scorn, but to love these things, to build your life around getting these things, is just pride. Instead of giving those things that are within to God, you will give them to the praise of people, and therefore, instead of walking the narrow path to life, in today’s world you’ll look for a more culturally agreeable, popularly accessible version of Christianity, that allows you to maintain a self-assurance that you’re walking with Jesus while also avoiding the discomfort of upsetting the sensibilities of others, especially those with power and wealth. The Christianity of the Bible with its clear lines and consequences will get sacrificed to a more vague, inspirational version, that not all will agree with, but that none will really oppose. An outward righteousness will be formed by what best draws outward praise and advancement.

 

And, third, an outward righteousness leads others astray. So Jesus says in verse 44 that the Pharisees are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without knowing it. Under the law of Moses, the law God’s people were still under at the time, contact with the dead rendered one ceremonially unclean. So faithful Jews would never knowingly walk over someone’s grave. But, of course, if a grave was unmarked, they’d walk over it, and become unclean without realizing it. Jesus says the Pharisees are like that: They appear outwardly righteous, they are popular, they enjoy the best seats in the synagogue and the greetings in the marketplaces, so what do unsuspecting Jews do? They follow them! And in so doing, they learn to love what the Pharisees love–money, wickedness, the approval of man, and as a result, they too actually become unclean. False teachers don’t wear “false teacher” t-shirts. They don’t mark their graves. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14).

 

Now evidently there were other people at the Pharisee’s house that day, because next a lawyer interjects and says that in saying these things, Jesus is insulting them also. The lawyers are also known as the scribes, and were a closely related group to the Pharisees with similar tendencies. So the lawyer thinks that in saying these things, Jesus is also pronouncing woes on them. And you have to love Jesus’ boldness and clarity, because he basically says, “Yep, and now on to some woes for you.” As he had three woes for the Pharisees, so here he has three more targeted at the lawyers. 

 

The first, in verse 46, is that they load people with burdens too hard to bear, while they themselves do not touch the burdens with one of their fingers. The charge here is not that the lawyers burdened people by telling them they needed to obey what God commanded–God’s commandments are not burdensome (1 John 5:3). God’s commandments sometimes feel burdensome to us, but that’s because of something in us, not something in the commandments. 

 

But remember what the Pharisees and lawyers did? They added to what God said, and told people they still had to do it. So not only do you have to receive your food with thanksgiving, like God says, you have to wash in a certain way before doing so, like we say. Not only do you need to rest from your ordinary labors on the Sabbath, but they had elaborate lists of what was and was not permitted on the Sabbath, and they wouldn’t do anything to help you obey! So like when Jesus’ disciples were hungry on the Sabbath and picked heads of grain to eat, not only would the lawyers say you shouldn’t do that because they saw it as a kind of work, but the lawyers wouldn’t share their food with you! They’d expect you to keep their man-made rules, even if it meant starving yourself.

 

If you want the best seat in the synagogue and greetings in the marketplace today, it’s common to tell people they need to do less than what God says–lower the bar of what God requires to a least common denominator that even the wealthy and powerful all agree with–don’t murder, be nice to everyone, help the poor. But another way to win a crowd can be to add to what God says. Especially in a time when many things feel unstable, if you just give people a clear roadmap, a clear “way of life,” even though it goes beyond scripture, some people will follow that! So don’t just tell people to pray, tell them at what time to pray, where to go for prayer, and what to say when they pray. Don’t just tell wives to submit to their husbands, but get real specific about what submission has to look like. Don’t just tell parents to bring up their children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord; tell them what school to send their kids to. Don’t just tell Christians to honor the Lord with their vote; tell them who to vote for, and so on. This is part of the appeal of Christian nationalism today: It doesn’t just tell you what scripture says; it tells you exactly how to apply it to the nation at a time when the nation feels unstable.

 

I mentioned earlier that scripture alone is finally authoritative, and that everything God wants us to do is either explicitly stated in it or can be deduced from it by good and necessary consequence. So, for example, scripture never says, “Mike Anderson shall not take Gareth Weakly’s glasses without Gareth’s permission,” but God certainly forbids me from doing that, because it’s a good and necessary consequence of the command, “You shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15). Problems come, though, when we start to think that every good consequence of scripture is also a necessary one. Like voting for a certain candidate may, in your mind, be a good application of scripture, but is it a necessary once, such that everyone who votes for a different candidate is necessarily sinning in doing so? That’s the distinction we want to be careful to make so that we don’t burden people’s consciences with a host of things God never commanded of them, things that will ultimately distract them from justice and the love of God.

 

And even when we are just telling people that they must do what God has commanded in scripture, let’s be a church that doesn’t just tell one another to obey, but that helps one another obey. This is one way the elders and deacons try to think of our benevolence fund: We don’t want to use it to help someone disobey: Scripture says if someone will not work, they shouldn’t eat (2 Thess 3:10). But we do want to use it to help people obey–so if we’re going to tell someone they must not steal, but stealing feels to them like their only way to get their next meal, then we want to use our benevolence fund to feed them. I think of sisters here who have exhorted others on the necessity of gathering with a church, who have then offered to come, pick them up, and attend a different church with them if for some reason they don’t want to come here. I think of brothers who have had other brothers over or have taken brothers out to do something because they know their brother is more likely to be tempted to sin when home alone. When Galatians 6:2 tells us to bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, it comes specifically in the context of restoring someone who is caught in a transgression (Gal 6:1). Outward righteousness lays extra burdens on people in the place of real righteousness, and then does nothing to help them, while heart righteousness communicates God’s standards of righteousness, and does what it can to help others obey.

 

The second woe to the lawyers is that they build the tombs of the prophets whom their fathers killed. It’s hard to see off the bat why this would be something worthy of Jesus’ curse; if anything, you might think building a tomb for prophets was honoring them with a proper burial. But the issue, as Jesus goes on to explain, is not with honoring the bodies of the prophets. The issue is that their ancestors killed these prophets, and they aren’t saying anything about that. They aren’t saying what their ancestors did was wrong, and they aren’t moving in another direction. Their building of the tombs acknowledges that these were true prophets, and yet their ancestors killed them! Think of it like someone in the south building a monument to murdered slaves, but still refusing to admit that American chattel slavery was evil. Well then why are you building the monument? Today we might say, “You’re telling on yourself.” Well Jesus says the lawyers’ building tombs for the prophets was them telling on themselves.

 

So God says in verse 49 that he will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will persecute and kill. In other words, God will send them more prophets and apostles, and their actions will show that they aren’t moving in a different direction from their fathers. Indeed, at the end of this story we’ll see them persecuting Jesus, at the end of Luke’s Gospel, we’ll see them kill him, and in the book of Acts, the sequel to Luke, we’ll see them killing Jesus’ apostles. That generation committed the ultimate sin in this regard, in killing the final prophet, the very son of God, along with his apostles. So, Jesus says at the end of verse 51, that it was of his generation that the blood of all the prophets would be required. What Jesus is almost certainly referring to there is the invasion of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70, which included the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem, an event we’ll see Jesus predict with further clarity later in Luke’s Gospel. 

 

That judgment fell on that generation, but as with all temporal judgments in scripture, they point ahead to a final judgment, in which God will bring justice against all those who persecuted his true messengers, those who spoke his word. So be careful how you hear the word. If you find you don’t like something a teacher is saying, stop to consider: But is what he’s saying a good and necessary consequence of scripture? If it is, then don’t shoot the messenger. Instead of fighting the messenger, fight your sin, or you will end up not only opposing the messenger; you will end up opposing God. The words of scripture are the words of God, and so to disbelieve or disobey scripture is to disbelieve or disobey God himself. Another characteristic of an outward righteousness is a violent, angry reaction to those who try to preach true righteousness.

 

And finally, the third and final woe to the lawyers, the sixth and final woe in this passage, is a woe to the lawyers for taking away “the key of knowledge.” They did not enter themselves, and they hindered those who were entering. What is this key of knowledge? Parallels from Matthew (Matt 16:19, 23:13) helps us see that this is a reference to the keys of the kingdom of heaven. In other words, the keys are used to lock and unlock the doors to heaven because it gives people the knowledge of what they must do to enter that kingdom. But in saying the lawyers have taken away that key, he means they have not taught the way to enter the kingdom truly. As a result, they themselves have not entered the kingdom, and they have prevented those who otherwise would have entered from doing so.

 

When a lawyer came to test Jesus in the previous chapter as to what one must do to inherit eternal life, and he said you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself, Jesus said that was right (Luke 10:25-28). We could paraphrase the answer also as “justice and the love of God,” like Jesus says in this text. But apparently that’s not what the lawyers had been teaching the people. Apparently they’d been talking about washings and tithes and Sabbath laws, things that will not lead people to the kingdom of heaven if they neglect justice and the love of God. The people needed words from God, words God has given us in scripture, words the lawyers were supposed to be experts in, and yet words that they took away from the people.

 

The parallel to past generations of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches is too obvious not to mention. Both churches held major councils, the council of Trent for Roman Catholicism, the synod of Jerusalem for Eastern Orthodoxy, in which in different ways they officially restricted ordinary Christians from reading the Bible, the place in which they could have encountered what God says about what one must do to enter the kingdom of heaven, while also requiring of them all sorts of beliefs and practices nowhere recorded or deduced from scripture. Today affirming or universalist churches take away this key of knowledge by not clearly telling people that they must repent in order to be saved. False teaching on what one must do to be saved, attempts to hide God’s truth from people, these are more characteristics of a purely outward righteousness.

 

What’s the composite picture of a merely outward righteousness, then? A merely outward righteousness focuses on the minutiae of God’s law while neglecting justice toward man and love toward God. It morphs into whatever will bring greater popularity and less opposition from especially the wealthy and powerful in society. It leads people astray without their knowing it. It adds the traditions of men to the words of God and requires them of people without helping them obey. It gets angry and even violent toward those who try to teach the truth of God, and it ultimately hides that truth from people and presents to them a different way of salvation than the one God has revealed in scripture. 

 

So Luke records all this to guard us from slipping into it, and to guard us from following those who are only outwardly righteous. But Jesus spoke it originally to rebuke the Pharisees and lawyers, who then had an opportunity to repent. So let’s look, finally, at the comeback from the outwardly righteous.

 

The comeback from the outwardly righteous

 

What did they do in response? Verses 53 and 54 tell us they began pressing him hard to try to catch him in something he might say. Instead of repenting, they dug their heels in further. Their opposition to Jesus was not a mere misunderstanding; it was a revelation of their hearts, hearts full of greed and wickedness, and hearts that were not ready to let go of that greed and wickedness. And they would not let go as long as Jesus lived. The opposition to him that intensifies at the end of our passage culminated in them killing Jesus through the gruesome method of crucifixion.

 

And yet, after he rose from the dead, and before he brought judgment on that generation, he sent his apostles to Jerusalem, who said to the people who killed Jesus, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). They said, “God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness” (Acts 3:26). So do you see what happens, then? Here’s the true way to eternal life in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus says, the true key of knowledge: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself–justice and the love of God. Then here he says that’s what the lawyers and Pharisees have not done. But then he goes to them after he rises from the dead, and offers them eternal life! How could that be?

 

Because before Jesus came in judgment in AD 70, before Jesus came for the final judgment, on the cross Jesus took the judgment. The woes he pronounced here fell on him, though he was truly righteous, so that people who had not done justice and loved God could be forgiven of their sins and receive eternal life! And I don’t want to take away the key of knowledge from you. If I send you out of here today and all I’ve told you about how you can inherit eternal life is love God and do justice, you’ll never inherit eternal life. You can’t enter the kingdom of heaven that way; you know why? Because you’ve already failed to love God and your neighbor, just like I have, and just like the lawyers and Pharisees did. But Jesus succeeded at that, then took the judgment we deserved on the cross, and rose from the dead to inherit eternal life in the kingdom of heaven, so that we could enter it through him.

 

So in Acts 16:33 when a man asked one of Jesus’ apostles, Paul, what he must do to be saved, Paul didn’t take away the key of knowledge. Instead, he said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you, will, be, saved.” Believe in the Lord Jesus, and God will forgive all your sins. Believe in the Lord Jesus, and God will remove that greedy, wicked heart, and give you a heart that is actually devoted to him, so that everything will be clean for you. With Christ’s righteousness now given to you, you won’t need to spend all your time focusing on how to carve out your own righteousness. You can forget yourself and focus instead on justice and the love of God. With God’s acceptance of you secure, you won’t need the best seat in the synagogue or greetings in the marketplaces. The inward, true righteousness, the righteousness of the heart that Jesus requires, is the righteousness only Jesus can give. 

 

But if you reject him, if you dig your heels in further like the Pharisees and lawyers did here, then these woes will fall on you. There is a Pharisee in each of us. Don’t feed him; kill him. And there are still plenty of Pharisees in our world today, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Don’t follow them. Follow Jesus, rest on his real righteousness, and you will enter the kingdom of heaven, for man looks on the outward appearance, but Jesus judges the heart.