Toxic Religion

I want to read a passage from Matthew chapter 23, if you'd find that in your Bibles. I want to use the first four verses of this chapter. Our country is a very religious country. If you were to pass out surveys to the people in our country and ask them to check the religious group that they're associated with or affiliated with, almost everybody would check some group. Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, whatever it might be. And if you left a space at the bottom of it to say if you're not in any of these group, are you spiritual or not spiritual, most people would check that they're spiritual even. I know at the college when they give those surveys out, list all the different denominations people would be a part of, and then they have an opportunity at the bottom to say whether or not you're spiritual. And many of them that aren't in those groups will check spiritual because they have some feeling inside of spiritual interest. That might seem like a good thing on the surface. It might seem like that it'd be good for a country to have religion and to have people who are religious in it. But in this story, Jesus is talking about the danger of religion. Religion can be a poison, a toxic subject in the life of a person that can be destructive rather than helpful. That's what Jesus presents. He says to his disciples, then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, the teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses seat, so you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. Jesus, in front of all of his crowd, the disciples and other people are watching, raises this very powerful accusation. Now the Sadducees and the Pharisees and the scribes have all been questioning Jesus in the two chapters preceding this. They're asking him questions hoping to expose his ignorance or expose his being a failure or fraud. And the intensity of those questions had become more and more pointed. Now Jesus answers the last one and he turns to the crowd and says in the presence of these scribes and Pharisees standing there this message. He says to them, they sit in the seat of Moses. Now I think it would be helpful to remind ourselves of who the scribes and the Pharisees were and why they were there. Whenever they built the temple they had a special place called the Holy of Holies where they said God resided there. Now they knew that God didn't actually live in that Holy of Holies. They said at the temple dedication that the whole world could not contain God. He's so big and so majestic even the world can't contain him. But they saw in this special place an idea that God was showing them a sign of his presence with them. So they got to where they could look at the temple and it always reminded them that God was with them. Whenever Israel fell and people were carried into captivity in Babylon the temple was no more. All of a sudden they were separated from their religion. They were separated from their holy land. They were separated from the holy city. They were separated from the temple. It was as if God had left them. There was nothing that they could hold on to except the law of Moses. And so they began to focus their attention on the law of Moses more than they ever had when they were in the holy land. Some of the men thought that it would be a very good idea to record what they knew about it. Now the law Moses gave them, the first five books of the Old Testament, is called the Torah. And these laws that God had given were to direct all of the lives of the people of Israel. But if you read the story of the Exodus and how they traveled across the country in the desert time and all the things that took place, you may remember the story about Moses sitting every day and listening to the troubles of the people. They brought to him the issues that they were confronted with. What they were doing was saying, OK, we have the law here. But now let me ask you a question. It says we shouldn't work on the Sabbath. What if I get sick and I need some medicine? Is it OK for me to go out in the garden, pull some herbs, and mash it up and take the medicine to get well? Or is that violating the Sabbath? Well, there's nothing in Moses' law about that. So someone need to help them apply the law so they'd know how to obey it. Moses' job was to sit down and listen to the people's troubles or problems and then take the law that God had given him and apply it to that particular circumstance. Moses' father-in-law came and he noticed what was happening to Moses. From early morning to late at night he was sitting out there listening to the people's problems. His father-in-law said this can't go on. You can't keep doing this. Too many people. There were thousands and thousands of people. He said what you need to do is appoint somebody over the ten, somebody over the hundred people, somebody over the thousand, somebody over the ten thousand, somebody over the hundred thousand. So there's a whole lot of other people out there who can sit down with people who have problems and give them an answer to the questions that they have. So many of the people in the nation of Israel were doing exactly what Moses was doing, interpreting the law so that people would know how to live in obedience to God. This practice of helping interpret the law was carried over into the nation of Israel. Now the people who were in exile needed someone to be able to apply this law. So they thought we would sit down and write in as much as we could remember all of the interpretation of the law. They called this the oral Torah. And now they were going to write down the oral Torah, all the things they remembered Moses saying, all the things they heard the other rabbis saying. And then they would have a book in which everything was written down and could be passed on from generation to generation to generation. The people who wanted to do this were lay people, not the priests, but lay people. And so they were diligent in doing it. There were thousands of pages of this oral law. When they wrote it down it was called the Mishnah. And this Mishnah was a written record of everything that had been done. But once they had written it down, then there were other problems that arose. Things changed. Circumstances changed. So the rabbis, or the lawyers here, who had written all of this down were experts in it so people would come to them. They'd say, I know I've heard this, but here's a problem that's come up in my life and I don't exactly know what the Bible says about it, what the law says about it. And so there were more oral traditions. The lawyers here, the scribes who write down the law, were the people who wrote this record down. They knew the law from beginning to end. They made every effort to memorize the law and they read it every single day. In Israel today there are still men who are devoted to this oral law. In fact the government pays their salary. They can't be enlisted in the army. That's all their job. Every day they just study the law to be prepared when people come to ask questions about how to live in obedience to it. This is what the scribes listed here were doing. They were trying to make sure that the law of Moses was carried down and applied to the lives of the people who were there. The Pharisees, some of them were scribes but not all of them, they arose also in the exile. Whenever the law was being written down, this oral tradition, some of them said, you know we need to make sure that the people of Israel obey the law. And so men devoted themselves to saying we will obey the law in every single instance. But there are thousands of pages of the law. So these men devoted themselves to keeping every single detail of the law. It was such a big job that they couldn't work. They couldn't have normal lives or normal families. There never were many of them, more than 6,000 of them in Israel. But they were people that folks looked up to. They lived separated lives. That's what the word Pharisee means. It means someone who's separated. He wasn't like the rest of the people. All they did was obey the law. Very much like what's happened in Christian tradition where people moved into monasteries and spent their whole time just studying the Bible and praying. That's what the Pharisees did. Now Jesus is talking to these experts in the law and these people who devoted every day of their lives to living in obedience to the law of Moses. He says about them to his people. Now these are his followers. These are people who have come to follow him. He says you listen to what they have to say for they now have the chair of Moses. I didn't know what that meant when I read it. It didn't seem to make very much sense. I tried to research what it was and a lot of things have written about it. But what seems reasonable to me is you know whenever the people that Moses recruited did also help him with his job, they sat down and listened to people and gave answers from the law exactly like Moses did. They were carrying on Moses tradition. The lawyers here were carrying on the tradition of Moses. We look at the law. We ask God what it means and we tell it to people. So they sat in the chair of Moses. Now if you go to universities sometimes you'll hear that a person has a chair of philosophy. When I first heard that I thought what's a chair of philosophy? But when I got to college I found out what it was. No chair at all. It just means they have the tradition of teaching philosophy in a special place as a professor. These people had the special responsibility of bringing the message of God to the people of Israel. Now let me tell you why that's important. Not everybody could do that. In the New Testament it talks about gifts to the church. It talks about spiritual gifts that God gives to the church. There's a gift of being a teacher. Being able to teach and proclaim the message of Christ. It is a spiritual gift. It means that not everybody can do that. I don't understand why it works this way but when God calls you he gives you a capacity to do something that not everybody has. To be able to read the scripture and understand what it means and present it in a way so that people can understand how they should live according to the scriptures. I know people sometimes say well I'm a Christian but it's not necessary for me to go to church. I'll tell you why it is. Because God gives gifts to teachers and preachers that you don't have on your own. And the commandment here to the people of Israel was not just listen to what I've told you but also come to listen to the scribes and the Pharisees because they have knowledge of the Bible that you have to have. If you try to live your life without this spiritual gift that God is trying to give you. In other words the gift of a teacher or preacher is not given to the person who does it. It's given to you. I want you to know how to live so I've given you the chair of Moses. These people can sit down and explain to you what the law is and tell you how to be able to face circumstances in your life the way God wants you to do that. And in the spiritual gifting there are teachers who have been gifted to proclaim and to teach the message of Christ in a way that those without this gift cannot do. Not everybody who says they're a teacher or preacher has that gift. You know how you can tell? You can tell. You can tell when a person is teaching and preaching whether or not they have the gift because you can tell that they're making the scriptures clear and helping you know how to live it. I've said in classes, heard preachers preach it, I thought I don't think they really have that gift because it's a gift that comes from them to the hearers. Only you know that. I can't know that for myself unless you tell me. This has helped me. You have made the scriptures plain and clear. Then I know that the gift has been given. Now the commandment is given to you. I want all of you who are my followers listen to those who've been given the gift to proclaim in the chair of Moses. I've given it to you and I require you or demand of you that you listen to them and you do everything they tell you to do. A powerful demand on the people who are following him. Now Jesus also told his disciples to follow him and to do everything he told them to do but now he tells them also that the scribes and the Pharisees who've been so hard on Jesus they're also required to listen to them because the Old Testament and what Jesus taught complemented each other. They provided a means by which the people then saw the full picture of God. So Jesus stood before his people and said I require you to listen to these who are in the seat of Moses. Now there was also a custom in some of the Jewish synagogues where the leader who was teaching that day would have a chair to sit in. They didn't stand like this and didn't have a pulpit like this but they had a chair. In some of the synagogues they called the chair that the rabbi sat in to teach the lesson that morning the chair of Moses because he was doing this proclaiming openly and publicly the message of God. When I was growing up it was very common for people, pastors, to call the pulpit the sacred desk and in some churches if you got up to make announcements they wouldn't let you get behind the pulpit because this was only for holy preaching the Bible. So no one made announcements or no one led the music from this. They had another place for them over there somewhere else because this was just for the Word of God. So the chair of Moses represents very much like what many people say the pulpit would represent the place where the Word of God is given to us. There is both someone to give it and the command to his people to listen to it and obey it. Now what's strange about this whole story is the next part of it. Not only did Jesus make this requirement of them, so you must obey them and do everything I tell you but do not do what they do for they do not practice what they preach. After this great compliment that he pays the people who are teachers in Israel then he turns to his people and says you must listen to what they have to say but do not look at what they do because they know the law but they do not always do the law. This really helped me to understand how it is that the very good preachers who are powerful and many people's lives are changed by listening to them and then you find out that their life does not match their preaching. It seems scandalous to us and many people who see this take place are puzzled like I've been about how could God bless someone like this who's standing up and preaching these things whenever in their own private life it's very immoral, very wicked, and very evil. Here he lets us know why. The spiritual gift in the person to understand and proclaim the scriptures is given by God and God gives it power even though the life of the person does not match what's going on. You see it's not up to us to punish the person who's not doing what God wants them to do. That's up to God and the public revelation of what's happened in their life is God's judgment on them. He lets everyone know that what they say they believe they don't do so they're open to ridicule all across the nation and the larger they are the bigger they are and the more people know them the more humiliating their fall really is. But that doesn't remove anything from the responsibility that you should listen to the things that they say that are true. God takes care of the people who are teaching and preaching one thing and doing another. After all they work for him and he takes care of them. He exposes all of that. Their religion you see has been toxic for them. They understand what the law says. They understood what they were supposed to do but they felt like learning it and knowing what it meant was enough and when people came to them they were filled with arrogance to say I can speak to people the very message of God and they didn't take care to make sure that they did it themselves. This is a great danger for all of us who are involved in church work. Pastors, teachers, members of the church. It's awfully easy for us to think I know these things and not be careful with the way we live and practice. You can be a soul winner. You can be a teacher. You can be a preacher and not practice what it says. You can be effective and see things done that are amazing. Jesus told at the end of the judgment time people would come and he'd say depart from me I don't know who you are and they would say but we did miracles in your name. We did wondrous works for you. He didn't deny it. He didn't say you're lying. He just said well I didn't know you. You did not surrender yourself in obedience and submission to me. You knew and you did tell what you knew but you did not live what you knew. Whenever you hear the word Pharisee no one in our culture says that's a wonderful thing. I think I'll name my child Pharisee. No. They have made sure that that word to describe themselves has been forever a word no one wants to claim. What Jesus told them was I've given these people a job and they have the knowledge and they do it but I require of you something more than simply listening. I require you to do what you know is right. Now Jesus was telling them this even though it was difficult for them because all they had was a scripture which they couldn't read themselves most of it. They had to depend on the fact that they were telling them the truth. Now we have a greater opportunity to get this right because we have the New Testament that tells us what's right. It's printed and we can read it and so when someone teaches or preaches we can read in the scriptures to see if what they say to us is really true and we have also the gift of the Holy Spirit. You should have in your own heart if you surrendered yourself to God the presence of God's Spirit so when something is said to you on the radio or the television or church service or Sunday school class suddenly your mind stops and you say I'm not sure that's exactly right. It's the Holy Spirit warning you letting you know that maybe that truth is not as true as the person who says it thinks it is. We are responsible for knowing what's true. All of us continue to learn all of our lives. If you stopped reading the Bible or you don't read it day by day your spiritual growth will go backwards in the same way if you quit eating food. Spiritual food for your life enables you to grow and it's essential for you to keep reading the scriptures reflecting on them being in church listening to God's expert explain his words to you. That's the way you grow and you never get past it. If you go in my office you'll see books lining the walls. I don't preach or even read scripture to you until I've sat down and reflected on what it means. There are many people who are more holy than I am and more educated than I am and I go and consult with them and say what did you hear this to say? What did you think it meant? And so I learn from them like the chair of Moses I learned from some of them what it meant. All of us are in the learning process listening to the people who sit in the seat of Moses and there are some that sit in that seat that helped me week by week and day by day to be able to learn. Every one of us is in that mode trying to find out what it is that God wants us to do and how he wants us to live. What Jesus said to his followers I want you to listen to these people and do everything they do but be careful to watch their lives too. If you see their life is different than what they said then I want you to follow what they do what they say and not what they do because they're not practicing what they're proclaiming to you but what they're proclaiming is what I want you to hear and follow. Then Jesus turned to those Pharisees and the scribes to direct them. They tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. The job of the scribe was to tell people exactly what they were supposed to do and they could explain that in different ways and sometimes when people came to them they might make life so difficult that it was hard for them to follow it. The Pharisees could not follow all the laws and even live a normal life. The burden of the law was so great that they couldn't do it. Jesus is giving them here a hint. It is not the task of God to make your life so burdened that you can't live. The law is intended to give you a roadmap as to how to live well. If you find that the teachings that you're hearing are so burdensome that your life is not possible, then you know that this is not the message of God. I've given them the right truths and they teach that to you but some of them are so concerned that they place heavy requirements on you. You can't be a Christian unless you do this, this, this, this, this, and this. Adding on to what Jesus required is common in the Christian community. The scripture is plain about what God requires and when people add on to what is plain and they make burdens that are heavy, they're not fulfilling the words of God. Here he really gives us a test as to whether or not a leader, teacher, preacher is adequate because he talks about the fundamental commandment. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and your neighbor as yourself. When you go to the person who sits in the chair of Moses, do you find that he makes you understand the message of God so that your life then becomes more clear and helpful or does it burden you down? Does it overwhelm you or does it open the door for life? These people enjoy telling you all the things that you must do until you're so burdened down that you're so heavy that you can't lift and they're not interested in removing any of those burdens. Here he gives us a clue. Is the teacher of the Word of God concerned about the person's life and as they treat them with love and respect? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. Do you see in the words from me through this teacher the love of God? Has it helped you to stand? Has it helped you to walk? Has it opened up life for you or is it closed it? For the message of God is intended to bring life and not burdens. It's intended to bring purpose and not confusion. It's intended to give us certainty and not uncertainty. God has given us his message and the message can be a message of burden and death. It can be a message that is said and not lived and in that way it becomes dangerous and poison or it can be the Word of God that gives life in all of its fullness. Jesus said, I have come that you might have life and that's the point of what God wants us to do and anyone who sits stands in the seat of Moses. It should be a person who not only proclaims the truth but the truth he proclaims brings life to the people who hear. Now the task that you face is to remember what God says to you. I want you to do everything that I told you. That means for us because we have the scripture so easily available to us, that we can read it. You read it every day, but you read it with the idea to say, what is it, God that you want to help me learn to do. How do you free me from the things that are oppressing me, anger, retentment and guilt, all the things that make life terrible and oppressive. What do I hear here that I should do differently to open up my life. What is it that I am doing that is causing my life to be a miserable life. Tell me what needs to change. Some of us read that way. And then you look at the words in Sunday School classes and in Bible study classes that God speaks to you because in those words, there is a word, a change. And that is what you need to do that God tells you. If you value those words for a moment, when you come to God, you hear the change in your life. This is what Jesus said, you don't know how life is going to turn out to be, but you do know that all the things that I have said to you, they are the truth. Because God's Word has said to you, this is something you need to do. If you need to change, start doing what God is doing. Some times it's hard to do. Some of us are not prepared. Some of us can't accept. But God is telling you, do what God is telling you to do. And if you can't do it, don't do it. Because if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it. And if you can't do it, don't do it.