[Machine transcription]
Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.
You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, our Lord Jesus Christ and his Sermon on the Mount is refuting
Phariseeism, the doctrine that we can be righteous according to our own works and please God by our own efforts.
Now we might say, well, what good is that to us because we’re not Pharisees.
We want to remember that each one of us has a Pharisee that lives in our heart, remember
what Martin Luther used to call the little monk that lives inside of us, the little Pharisee
that lives there, that is always trying to make the case for our own righteousness and
for our own goodness apart from the righteousness of Christ.
Phariseeism goes wrong in at least four different ways.
So the picture, the best picture I know of Phariseeism is, and I think I’ve told you this
story before, when I was a kid we got a new basketball hoop and it was one of
those hoops that could be raised and lowered and so I was the oldest of
three brothers and so before my brothers came out I got the basketball and I
lowered the basketball hoop to where I could barely jump and dunk the
basketball and I mean I tested it to make sure that I got it as high as I
possibly could but if I got it too high and I couldn’t do it I would lower it a
it so I could I knew I could dunk the basketball and I knew because it was
that high that my brothers wouldn’t be able to dunk the basketball and so I got
I got the hoop just right and then I went inside and I said to my brothers
let’s go have a slam dunk contest. That is perfect Phariseeism. You take the law
of God which requires everything that we love the Lord our God with all our heart
heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and all our strength, that we love our neighbors
and ourselves, the bar is set so high that nobody can keep it.
We take the bar and we lower it, but we lower it just enough to where we can keep it and
nobody else can, and then we can use that law to show our own righteousness and to despise
everyone else because of their sinfulness.
That’s Pharisee style.
We all do it.
We all want to be those who keep the law ourselves and then use the law to point at how other
people haven’t kept it.
We want the law to declare us righteous and declare everybody else sinner.
We use the law to argue then for our own goodness and our neighbor’s wickedness, at least our
enemy’s wickedness.
The people that we don’t like, they obviously are sinners.
God must really be disappointed with them and really proud of us.
That’s the idea.
So Phariseeism messes with the law, and it messes with it in four distinct ways.
Number one, Phariseeism is only concerned with the external activity of the law, not
with the heart.
Number two, Phariseeism is concerned with using the law to justify the self.
off.
Number three, Phariseeism wants to use the law to despise or to accuse the neighbor.
And number four, Phariseeism misses the whole point of the law, which is to point to Jesus
and His sacrifice on the cross for us.
In fact, do you know this?
That the Pharisees didn’t even have the sacrifices.
The Phariseeism, in fact, as a historical reality, grew out of the historical events
of the Babylonian captivity when the temple was destroyed and there was no priesthood
in Jerusalem.
There’s no temple in Jerusalem.
And so the people had to say, well, how can we be Jewish now if there’s no temple and
there’s no altar and there’s no sacrifice, there’s no lamb’s blood, how can we be
Jewish?
And the Pharisees said, we have a better sacrifice.
sacrifice.
We can offer the sacrifice of our own works, of our own goodness.
Isaiah, we heard in the text, remember, was blasting them.
They invented their own works and they neglected the love of the neighbor.
You just can’t do it.
God will not be pleased with your own self-invented works.
So Jesus comes and he preaches a sermon on the mount and already in the nine beatitudes
which we had last week, these nine blessings, Jesus taught us faith and love and hope.
He taught us repentance and to trust not in ourselves, to hunger and thirst for righteousness,
and then we’ll have it by faith.
The Lord declares us to be righteous.
And then he taught us love, to be peacemakers, to be kind and generous, all this.
And then Jesus said, now you’re going to suffer.
Pharisaism remember is not content to live and let live.
It always wants to afflict and harm the neighbor.
So, Jesus knows that the Christian who is set in this life with the gift of repentance
will be persecuted.
In fact, that’s the last of the nine blessings, blessed are you when you’re persecuted and
people utter all sorts of evil against you in my name.
They did the same thing to the prophets, and that’s what comes immediately before our
text today.
So, we ask ourselves, well, who is Jesus talking to?
It’s kind of an amazing thing when Jesus says that you are the light of the world.
Can you imagine if Jesus was standing here and he said to you,
you’re the light of the world, and you would say, wait a minute, Jesus,
you’re the light of the world, which is true.
He is the light of the world.
He’s the light that came into the darkness, and the darkness didn’t overcome it.
He is the light, but he gives his light also to us.
If you want to think of it like the sun and the moon, right?
The moon doesn’t have any light in itself.
It just reflects the light of the sun. So it is with a with a Christian. We are reflecting the light of Christ
We are the light of the world because we have Christ the light of the world and we are the salt of the world because the
Holy Spirit has filled us and given us faith
This is who Jesus is talking to though in that very first verse. You are salt of the earth
Who is the you there the you is those who are persecuted for righteousness sake those who are rejected because of the name of Jesus
Those who are driven around the world because they are just simply not at home in the world
because they belong to the Lord.
Those who are not content to sin and to live according to their own desires and to listen
to the ways of the world or our own sinful flesh or the devil, but rather would listen
to the commands of God and suffer for that, that’s the you that Jesus is talking about
and He says that you then are salt in the earth.
Salt did a lot of things, does a lot of things, flavors, food.
it.
They would offer the salt on the sacrifices in the Old Testament, but the main thing that
the salt would do is it acted as a preservative, and so Jesus sets his church in the world
to preserve the church, to keep the earth from rotting away.
So Jesus salts the earth with Christians.
And he sets us in the earth also to be this light, to have the light of the Lord’s wisdom,
Him, His law and His gospel, the light of repentance, like a lamp that shines in a dark
room or like a city that sits on top of the hill.
Now I think the Pharisees who were listening to Jesus preach would have said, now hold
on Jesus, you’re teaching a different doctrine than we’re teaching, and we teach Moses so
you must be rejecting Moses.
We, the prophets would say, we teach the prophets, the Pharisees would say, we teach the prophets
So you must be rejecting the prophets and Jesus says no don’t even think it for a second
I did not in fact listen to what he says. He says don’t think
That I’ve come to abolish the law or the prophets
I haven’t come to abolish them
But to fulfill them in other words the whole point of Moses the whole point of the prophets the whole point of the Old Testament
Is to preach me
Do you remember the sacrifice that animal in the garden that was me do you remember the Passover lamb and the blood on the door?
That was me. Remember the day of atonement when the Lamb would carry off
the sin into the wilderness? That was me. Remember my coming to you to
forgive your sins after you committed all these iniquities? That was me. I was
the whole point of all of it. Don’t think that I came to abolish the law. Jesus
says I came to fulfill it and further I say heaven and earth will not pass away.
Until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass away
from the law until all is accomplished.
Whoever relaxes one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be
called least in the kingdom of heaven.”
There’s the idea, and I think it creeps into my head sometimes, and maybe it creeps
into yours.
You’ll have to tell me after church if this is true.
But I think this is a common idea, that God in the Old Testament is very strict, and in
the New Testament is a lot more lenient. In the Old Testament God is kind of mean
and in the New Testament he’s nice. In the Old Testament God is angry and in
the New Testament God is friendly. Like Moses was pretty grumpy but Jesus is
just happy-go-lucky. That’s not the case. That’s what Jesus is telling. He
says, don’t you dare think that whoever relaxes one of the least of the
commandments and teaches the others to do the same is least in the kingdom of
heaven. Jesus doesn’t come to relax the law. That’s what the Pharisees did. The
Pharisees were the ones who lowered the basket. Jesus raises it. He raises the bar.
In fact, next week we’ll hear him say it. You’ve heard it said, you shall not murder.
I say, if you call your brother a fool, you’ve murdered him. You’ve heard it say
you shall not commit adultery. If you look with lust, you’ve committed adultery.
Jesus is raising the bar. And why? To show that all of us are guilty, all of us
sinned and this is the point of the law to show us that all of us need a Savior.
So the zinger comes at the end and I like to imagine the Pharisees listening
to Jesus because you know the Pharisees were pretty proud of themselves. The
Pharisees are the guys that they walk by the mirror and then they back up to
just get a second look. The Pharisees you know they walked around town and they
knew that everybody was looking. This is Pharisee style. They’re pretty proud of
how well they’ve accomplished this law business. They’ve done it themselves.
They think that God is pretty lucky to have them on his team. And so
when Jesus says this in the sermon, unless your righteousness exceeds that of
the scribes and the Pharisees, you can’t enter the kingdom of heaven. You have to
think that the Pharisee says, yeah, wait a minute. Because Jesus is saying of all
the people who claim to be righteous, you can’t do much better than the Pharisees,
but that’s not enough. You can be as righteous as the Pharisee and you can’t
get in. In other words, nobody can be good enough with their own righteousness.
Nobody can be good enough by their own efforts. You could dedicate your
whole life to keeping the law and you will never achieve it. So then we’re left
with this question, well then what are we supposed to do?
How are we supposed to get a righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the scribes
and Pharisees?
Where are we going to find that?
If we can’t do it by our own efforts in keeping the law, where are we going to find it?
And the answer is in Christ alone.
There is the righteousness of the law, the righteousness of the commandments, and that
is not enough.
But there is a second righteousness, a righteousness that’s not commanded but promised, a righteousness
that’s not extracted but given, the righteousness of the gospel that we have by faith.
It works like this.
Paul says in, remember 2 Corinthians 5, he says that God made him who knew no sin, that’s
in Him, so that in Christ you are righteous. And not just with the
righteousness of the Pharisees, not even with the righteousness of Adam and Eve
before the fall in the garden, you are made righteous with the righteousness of
God. This is unbelievable. You could never could never believe this unless the Lord
had written it down for us. That when you believe in Christ, all of your sin is
gone and all that Christ has done is given to you. Put on your name, put into
your account so that the Lord looks at you not according to your works, not
according to your sin, not according to your failures, not according to your
accomplishments. He looks at you according to the blood of Jesus, His life and
death, His suffering, His resurrection, Jesus, so that His perfection is given
to you.
You can imagine a test where, or some sort of thing where you’re judged for doing wrong
and rewarded for doing right, well everything wrong that you’ve done, Jesus takes that punishment
and suffers.
That’s the business of the cross.
And everything right that Jesus has done, he’s given to you and me.
So that you have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees.
you have the righteousness of Christ, the righteousness of God, the righteousness of
faith. So while it’s true that unless you your righteousness exceeds that of the
scribes and Pharisees you’ll never enter the kingdom of heaven, that the little
Pharisee can never get you there, but Jesus can and he does and he has. His
righteousness is yours. God be praised. Amen. The peace of God which passes all
understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
