Are We Pharisees?Sample

The Pharisees knew God sent Moses. Even if they wanted to disagree with Moses they couldn’t. Everything Moses said came to pass, up to the exile of Israel, which Moses predicted at the end of Deuteronomy. There was a thorough historical record.

So they studied everything Moses wrote. They studied the words of the prophets God sent afterwards, too, because their words came true as well! They honored these men by building memorials, memorizing their words, and working their hardest to heed their insights.

They knew: don’t work on the Sabbath. This Joshua (as Jesus translates into Hebrew) from up north couldn’t be up to any good because he fixes people on the Sabbath. Surely this guy was sent to test the faithfulness of the Jews, because a godly man wouldn’t heal or work then.

They knew: Jesus was a bad person, therefore anyone who thought he might be the Jew’s Messiah didn’t belong with the Jews--they could incur God’s wrath on the people!

As we know, their “knowledge” was wrong. Ironically, it was the Pharisees who led the people astray, incurring the wrath of God and the destruction of their temple (c.f. Matthew 23:33-24:2). They honored what God had done in the past, but they didn’t honor God right in front of them.

The Pharisees—the knowledge experts, disconnected, autonomous, and stuck in their heads and desires—had a vision problem. They couldn’t see God. This was because Jesus wasn’t known to them---who Jesus was or where He came from. God had acted sovereignly (as God desires) and He did what He deemed necessary and desired at that time, not in Moses’ day or the prophets after him.

You see, what God did is a known commodity; what God is doing is not, though. What God is doing is still unfolding! It can’t be fully known. It isn’t documented, tested, and verified. It can’t posthumously earn our approval. God often does things entirely different and new. God wants people who see Him—people who will see God first and be willing to understand later.

Moses didn’t understand everything God was doing. He especially didn’t understand why God wanted him. The prophets were normal, too. Nobody thought anything of them, either, until something supernatural happened. Even then, those who didn’t like what they said still didn't think much of them because it wasn’t what they knew or wanted. Moses and the prophets spoke and did things which deeply disrupted current power structures, exposing greed, injustice, idolatry, and selfishness.

Blindness is like that. We might not see God because, according to our understanding, we’re so certain we’re seeing something else… or because what God is doing is something so different… or so personally threatening… or because we want something else… or maybe all of the above.

Jesus said, “Happy are people who have pure hearts, because they will see God” (Matthew 5:8 CEB). Pure-hearted people, like the prophets, are often normal people. They don’t have much knowledge to work with, so they don’t take their “knowledge” so seriously. They’re not threatened when God’s disrupts power structures because they often don’t have power. Pure-hearted people are eager to admit, “I think I was really wrong,” confess their blindness to God, and ask for Him to help them see. They value the friendship of God more than their money, wealth, possession, and positions.

Ultimately, God and what He’s doing are most easily seen and appreciated by those who are humble and value Him most… walking with and yielding to Him, whether they understand or not. We test things to see if they are God, not if we understand them. God doesn’t have to fit in our matrix. He doesn’t have to do things our way. In fact, this is so much better because He does things His way.

So, how pure-hearted are we? Do we value our knowledge, finances, and status quos more than God? Is it more important for us to be right instead of becoming right? How much energy do we spend clinging to what God did 5, 10, 15, 25, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, or 1500 years ago? Do we see God and what He’s doing now? Or are we stuck in the past? Are we… Pharisees?