[Note: This sermon expounds Matthew 23:27–33, the sixth and seventh woes. Delivered 13 May 1981, Montreal.]
Today we continue our study in the teaching of the Lord Jesus in Matthew chapter 23. We saw that this chapter describes the symptoms of diseases that can prove very fatal in the Christian life, and that we must come to it with the right attitude — not imagining we are not the kind of people being described. The more we study this chapter, the more evident it becomes that these words are meant not for Pharisees who lived two thousand years ago, but for us. Last time we covered the fifth of these woes; today we come to verse 27.
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity." Notice that hypocrisy and iniquity appear side by side here as synonyms. Hypocrisy is iniquity, and we shall return to that. The dreadful situation described is this: outwardly appearing righteous to men, while inwardly full of rottenness. I never forget as a young Christian the shock of discovering that a preacher I knew — who had built a very successful Christian organisation that still exists today — was living in sin. I had the vision of him preaching at various meetings, expounding the gospel, speaking in pious language, appearing righteous to men. And then, the shock.
Why did the Jews whitewash tombs? Because at Passover — which coincides for us with Easter — anyone who accidentally touched a grave became ceremonially unclean and was therefore excluded from participating in the Passover celebration. To prevent this kind of accidental defilement, the tombs were painted white so they could be clearly seen and avoided even in dim light. The Lord Jesus says: you are like those tombs. Outside very nice and clean, beautifully white. But inside, full of dead men's bones. And lest we imagine this applies only to Pharisees, let us read Revelation chapter 3, verse 1, where the risen Christ speaks to the church in Sardis: "I know your works. You have the name of being alive, and you are dead. Awake, and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death, for I have not found your works perfect in the sight of God." There is a church that has become precisely a whitewashed tomb. Not a group of insincere actors — but a community that once had life both inside and out, in which the inside slowly ebbed away while the outside remained intact. And notice what he says in verse 5: "I will not blot his name out of the book of life" — meaning that for those who have soiled their garments, whose inner life has died, that is precisely what is at stake.
What causes this kind of spiritual decline? It is taking liberties with the word of God. This is part of human nature. When two people are courting, they are very careful with one another — they watch every word, every action, every gesture, because the relationship is still fragile and the other person can still say: this is over. But once they are married, very often they begin to take liberties. They speak to each other in ways they would never have dared to during courtship. They assume rights. They stop treating the relationship with the same care. And many marriages break down within a year or two precisely for this reason. There is a Chinese saying that the way to keep a marriage sweet is to treat each other as guests — perhaps going a bit far, but the insight is right: do not take the other person for granted.
The same thing happens with the word of God. When we first study scripture, we approach it with a certain respect, a certain humility. But as time goes on, familiarity can breed contempt. We begin to say: "I know the word of God says this, but surely we can take it this other way." We begin to twist it to suit our particular taste. We begin to leave out whatever doesn't happen to suit us. And once we start doing this — once we begin intentionally not doing what we know the word says, or doing only part of it — we are well on the way to disaster. The liberal scholars take this to an extreme, picking and choosing passages, discarding others; but the tendency begins earlier, in much smaller, more private compromises. We must never dare to take such an attitude toward the word of God. Whatever it says, I will aim, by the grace of God, to do it.
The spiritual cancer of this kind of decline is terrifying precisely because it is imperceptible. A person can have cancer that is already killing them without feeling anything yet. They still feel fine — until the day the doctor diagnoses it. In the same way, spiritual death can slowly, slowly encroach upon you like a cancer, without your even being aware of it. You may justify the sin that is eating away at you. You may think it is nothing serious. You may not even clearly identify it as sin. But like a small growth that begins as a pimple and expands until it consumes the whole body, that small compromise will grow. And one day — outwardly you still look healthy, still use the right language, still appear to others as a Christian, but inwardly, the life is gone. That is the whitewashed tomb. This is what the Lord is saying to the church in Sardis: "Other things are on the point of dying — rescue them quickly through repentance. Because if you do not, there will be nothing left alive in you." And if you are dead, your name does not belong in the book of life.
The seventh and final woe is in verses 29–33: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, saying, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.'" What is the symptom here? Honouring the prophets with their mouths while their hearts are far from God. Isaiah 29:13 said it: "These people do honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me." When God looks into your heart, what does he see? Is your heart near to God? That is what matters — not that you are a pastor, not that you preach, not that you stand in covenant relationship to God. What God looks at is the heart.
The Pharisees thought of course that they were better than their fathers who had killed the prophets — the monuments they were building proved it. But the Lord says: "Thus you witness against yourselves that you are the sons of those who murdered the prophets." In my first year in theology, I entered the common room and found the students in a heated debate about predestination. My heart felt sick within me — not because of the subject but because of the manner in which they spoke to each other, attacked each other, denounced each other over the word of God. I was staggered. And once in Cambridge I was permitted to sit in on a meeting of prominent church leaders — names you would recognise from the covers of books. With one or two honourable exceptions, they went at each other tooth and claw in a manner that left me staggered and amazed.
[Continues in Part B]
# But Within You Are Full of Hypocrisy and Iniquity — Matthew 23:27–33 (Part B) — Peter's Hypocrisy; What Hypocrisy Really Means; How to Overcome
[Note: This is Part B of the sermon on Matthew 23:27–33, continuing directly from Part A. Delivered 13 May 1981, Montreal.]
These church leaders in Cambridge were attacking each other directly, in a manner I can only describe as going tooth and claw. I came out staggered and amazed. I pleaded to God that by his mercy I might not conduct myself in this way, if at all possible by his grace. We can be so fully engaged in what we think is God's work — building the tombs of the prophets, honouring the word of God — while in our actual conduct toward one another we completely forget ourselves and become hostile and aggressive. Do you think those students debating predestination consciously wanted to behave like non-Christians? Of course not. Do you think those church leaders consciously chose to go at each other like that? No. They were so caught up in their particular project that they forgot themselves. That is the tragedy. The outward form of religion continued; the inward reality had slipped away without their fully noticing it.
This brings us to the most important point about hypocrisy, which is the most persistent misconception we have about it. We tend to think hypocrisy means insincerity — that a hypocrite is someone who deliberately pretends to be something he is not. That is not a biblical definition of hypocrisy at all. Consider Galatians 2:11–13: "When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And with him the rest of the Jews acted insincerely." That word "insincerely" in the Greek is the word hypocrisy. The Apostle Peter and even Barnabas are charged with hypocrisy. Was Peter consciously trying to be insincere? Was he deliberately deceiving anyone? Of course not. He was simply careless at that moment. He became concerned about what the Jewish party from Jerusalem would think of him eating with Gentiles, and so he withdrew. That was not calculated. It was a moment of inconsistency born of carelessness and concern for other people's opinion.
The Chinese translation of the word hypocrisy — jiǎ mào wéi shàn, "making a pretense of being righteous" — is a completely false definition and a very bad translation. It is an interpretation that has already imposed a meaning the word does not carry. No one who knows the Pharisees would charge them with insincerity. The Apostle Paul was a Pharisee; insincerity was not the Pharisees' problem. What happened was that the spiritual life inside ebbed away, leaving only the outer shell, often without any conscious realization that the spiritual life had slipped. It is nothing about pretense. When the church at Sardis had a name of being alive and was dead, it was not accusing them of pretending to be alive — they once genuinely were alive inside and out. The inside had slowly died; the outside remained.
The Greek word study confirms this. The word "hypocrite" is used 17 times in the New Testament, and every single time by the Lord Jesus himself. The word "hypocrisy" occurs six times. In the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, hypocrisy translates the Hebrew word for "godless" — not "pretender," but godless. Sincerely godless you can be. The parallel in Mark 12:15 uses "wickedness" where Matthew 22:18 uses "hypocrisy"; Luke 20:23 uses "deceitfulness." In Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion — all the major Greek Old Testament translations — the word consistently carries the sense of ungodliness, wickedness, and iniquity. The synonym in Matthew 23:28 confirms it: "within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity." These are the same thing.
What then is the root of hypocrisy? It is simply that other people's opinion of us matters more to us than God's opinion. That is what caused Peter to withdraw — he was more concerned about what the Jewish party thought of him than what God thought of him. There is a quick test: are you a touchy sort of Christian? Do you get easily hurt and offended when someone criticizes you? If you feel deeply offended when criticized, it is because the opinion of the person criticizing you matters more to you than God's opinion. If what God thinks of you were truly paramount, what would it matter what people say of you? You can check your spiritual health by this simple test. The person who is more concerned about God than about what people think of him is not going to be touchy when criticized. If you can genuinely thank someone for bringing a correction to you — "I really appreciate you caring enough to tell me this" — that may be an indication, by God's grace, that you are more concerned with pleasing God than pleasing men.
A second characteristic of the hypocrite, as the Lord says in Matthew 7:5, is that he is always more critical of others than of himself. "You hypocrites, first take the beam out of your own eye." The person who is constantly examining and criticizing himself, confessing his own faults to others, is on the way to life. The person who is always observing what is wrong with the church, with this person and that person — always pointing outward — is on the way down. Be worried about such people. They are candidates for spiritual disaster.
A third characteristic appears in Matthew 15:7 — the hypocrite is scrupulous about man-made rules but careless about God's commands. He is exquisitely careful about things that no scripture actually requires, and quite careless about things that scripture clearly requires. When my wife Helen was working at the hospital, we were sometimes invited to social events with doctors and colleagues where sherry would be passed around and people would dance. We often felt as Christians that we could not go — because what would people think of us holding a sherry glass? And so we cut ourselves off from the very people we wanted to win for Christ. We could never meet them, because we would not go where they were. But if I said that attending a sherry party with these colleagues was acceptable, some Christians would be horrified. That is a man-made rule. Did God say you cannot hold a glass of sherry? If you can show me that in scripture, I will be careful. If I go to such an event I might decline the sherry and ask for orange juice — that is fine. But I am not going to allow a man-made rule to cramp my outreach for God.
A fourth characteristic appears in Matthew 24:48–51, where the wicked servant — who "beats his fellow servants and eats and drinks with the drunken" — is grouped with the hypocrites: "his master will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will punish him and put him with the hypocrites; there men will weep and gnash their teeth." The wicked are grouped with the hypocrites. That is the end of hypocrisy.
How can we avoid this disease? First, learn to be hard on yourself and gentle on others. The person who constantly examines and criticizes himself is not going to be a candidate for hypocrisy. Second, learn to confess your faults. Don't be afraid to make yourself the object of criticism in front of others. I found this a great cure in a difficult personal relationship — once in China, instead of criticizing a very difficult woman I was staying with, I kept criticizing myself in her presence. And remarkably, God transformed her life as a result. She began criticizing herself too. It is wonderful what God can do when we are willing to humble ourselves in this way. Third, subject everything to the scrutiny of the Spirit of God. Learn to ask constantly: "Is this of God or is this not of God?" Let the Holy Spirit lead you into all truth.
Let us now be quiet before God. Amen.