This message was given at Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. At the end, we will give information about how to contact us to receive a copy of this or other messages. Luke chapter 11. And while we are picking up in about verse 45 for our sermon, I want to just start a couple of verses back so you don't forget. what Jesus was just saying right before this. Let's pick up in verse 43. Luke chapter 11, verse 43. This is the reading of God's word. Woe to you Pharisees, for you love the best seed in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. Woe to you, for you are like unmarked graves and people walk over them without knowing it. One of the lawyers answered him, teacher, in saying these things, you insult us also. And he said, woe to you lawyers also, for you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe to you, for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. So you are witnesses and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them and you build their tombs. Therefore, also the wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute so that the blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world may be charged against this generation. from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation. Woe to you, lawyers, for you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering. As he went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard and to provoke him to speak about many things, lying in wait for him to catch him in something he might say. This is a reading of God's word. So my gift, my gift to you this morning is that I think it will be therapeutic for many of you to listen to a sermon that's titled, Woe to You Lawyers. I could have named it a whole bunch of other things. I named it, Woe to You Lawyers, just for you. I come from a family of lawyers. If I had not gone into ministry, you may find this to be utterly incomprehensible. I probably would have gone into law. You know, there, except for the grace of God, go I kind of moment, I suppose. But I hear they have a very good sense of humor on these things, and so if you are a lawyer, welcome, and this won't actually be just about you. So we look at this text, and I confess that these opening verses, I love them. I love them. I think they are some of the funniest things I have ever read in all of the Bible. And I want to remind you what it is. And you can really summarize it before I read it in two words. It's essentially, who, me? Verse 45, right after Jesus gets done railing at the Pharisees, one of the lawyers answers him, teacher, in saying these things, you insult us. Also! Oh, this moment is rich. This moment is so rich. Jesus is denouncing the Pharisees. And what do you know? There are some lawyers present. They had a lot of common ground, common interests. And what these lawyers are, and another word for them is scribes, but what these lawyers are is they are experts in the law of Moses. And one of the lawyers is listening, and he cannot help it. He has to speak up. Maybe that's a condition of lawyers, I don't know, but he just has to speak up. You know, it's hard to know exactly how he said what he said, but my initial instinct is to think it's just total cluelessness. It's sort of like, teacher, I don't know if you realized, but what you were just saying, that kind of sounds like you might have been talking about us too, and that's sort of insulting. You see how that could be insulting for us, right? Now, I mean, possibly it's not total cluelessness. Possibly it is like an outright challenge, you know? The lawyer steps up and he's sort of like, you have insulted us. Now we are angry, right? I mean, maybe it's a moment like that. This guy just stepping up in, in dignity, but however he means it, The lawyer clearly thinks that he and his lawyer friends are right. He believes that they are living right, that they are in the right of things. And so he comes and he asks this question that at the very least represents true spiritual blindness. He does not even suspect his own fault in the situation. Now I tell you, there's a lesson there for all of us. Because spiritual blindness, I hate to break it to you, it is not rare. Spiritual blindness is not rare. When Jeremiah famously says that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick, who can understand it? He's not just talking about other people. He is not just talking about other people. He is saying that we, all of us, as a people suffering from the effects of sin, we are a naturally self-deceiving people. Now, the good news of the gospel is that the Lord is, bit by bit, transforming us. He's making us to be more like Him. He's making our hearts to be more like His own. But, whenever you are just doing what comes naturally to you, So whenever you're just doing instinct kinds of things, whatever just flows naturally out of your heart, you are being led by a deceitful and desperately sick guide. And when God is speaking conviction to you, Your heart's most natural response is just going to be just to step up and say, that is a great point. I know exactly who needs to hear that. I can only imagine how many times in our lives the Lord has tailored a word for us. He has spoken straight into our lives and straight into our situation and we have dodged it. Just let that blessing go sailing right on by. It turns out we all have a bit of this clueless lawyer inside of us. I'm driving here this morning and the blessing and the curse of preparing sermons is that the text and what you're preparing to say is just working on you all week long. And up to this very moment, I'm driving and I just have this moment and I think, why do I think this passage is so funny? It's because I don't think it's about me. You feel me, right? It's really funny because it's about someone else. Clearly it's not talking about me. And it's certainly not talking about any of you. I just imagine, and we'll get to the reaction of the Pharisees and the lawyers, do you think they thought this moment was hilarious? Oh, no. No, they didn't find it funny at all, because they knew it was about them. If we learn anything from this lawyer, it's this. When God is giving conviction, don't assume it's for other people. And my goodness, this is hard to do thoroughly. I'm sitting there singing these songs and thinking, wow, I hope so-and-so is thinking of this lyric too. Don't assume it's for someone else. Assume it is for you, you first and foremost. The only way it can possibly get to someone else is if it just overflows in your heart and then it starts bubbling over to other people, but not until then. Don't assume it's for someone else. When we assume that the word doesn't apply to us, we short circuit what the Lord would do in us. So I give you a challenge. I give you a lifelong challenge. When God is giving conviction, I want you to picture it something like this, that there's your heart and you are just throwing yourself at it, tackling that heart to the ground, holding it down and saying, how does this apply to you? And if your heart's anything like mine, it's going to be this slippery, evasive thing, and it's going to wiggle, wiggle, wiggle to try and get out from under the microscope of that lens of the Word of God. Don't let it. Let the Holy Spirit work His conviction. Let Him. We're going to launch into three points that a specific group in a specific time was doing very badly. This is a lot of sin from a people 2,000 years ago, and there's going to be the temptation to think that we are hearing a sermon about someone else. That's a long time ago. That's a very specific group. That's not me. That's not my life. But that's an interesting history lesson. Thanks for that. Let the Holy Spirit do his work. Don't dodge the blessing that the Holy Spirit wants for you. In our passage today, this lawyer is absolutely dodging that blessing. See, Jesus, he's dealing with some deep, deep blindness. I want you to consider again what a lawyer was. A lawyer was a specialist in God's law. In other words, he devoted himself to the word of God. And so a lawyer should have been a person marvelously shaped by God's word. A lawyer should have been more than knowledgeable A lawyer should have been godly. Because he spent so much time in the word of God, he should have been deeply attuned to the heart of his God. But this lawyer, this lawyer is clearly none of those things. And the lawyers of that time in general were apparently none of those things. This situation, it would be entirely different if Jesus was dealing with someone who was ignorant of the Word of God. But these lawyers, these lawyers were well-versed in the Word of God. In other words, their blindness was willful. It was willful. They had spent their lives evading the word. They had spent their lives perverting the word. And so you have to understand that or else Jesus comes across like he's being a little bit harsh. But Jesus isn't teaching Sunday school to children here. He is talking to calloused unbelieving, so-called experts in the law of God. And so, Jesus goes after these guys with fearless intensity. I know some of you have a background in feeling like you have to buck authority. Jesus is good at bucking authority. He goes after them. He went after the Pharisees last week and he goes after the lawyers this week. And just like last week, he has three woes for them. And while we discuss this last week, I would just give a quick reminder of what was a woe. A woe was not a threat. See, a woe is not God shaking his fist and saying, I'm going to get you. No, and a woe is not mean. A woe is not God going around putting people down, making them feel bad for the sake of making them feel bad. No, a woe is a compassionate warning. A woe is a merciful last chance to avoid the judgment that someone is already headed toward. Jesus gave the Pharisees three warnings, and now he gives the lawyers three warnings of their own. Verse 46 is the first woe. Woe for burdening the people. We'll pick up in the text. Verse 46, and Jesus said, woe to you lawyers also, for you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Now there are two parts, two parts to this first woe. First, there's the woe to you lawyers also, for you load people with burdens hard to bear. So what Jesus is talking about, he's talking about how lawyers had come to interpret the law. Because the law of God, it didn't explain every situation, it just didn't, and so the lawyers tried to apply the law to every imaginable situation and in great detail. Leon Morris, he just did a great job describing the situation, and so I'm going to quote him at length here. The first thing that Morris pointed out is that according to the scribes, According to the lawyers, it was actually more important to obey the scribal interpretations of the law than to obey the law itself. Do you hear that? More important to obey the interpretations of the law than the law itself. Now the idea behind this seems to be that the law, you might violate the law because you weren't clear on what it meant. And so in that sense, that could happen. But the scribal interpretations were much clearer. So when you violate a much clearer word, your condemnation would grow. And you see how there's sort of a logic to that. But these scribal interpretations, they were a big deal. And they were a real burden to keep up with. To really drive home how burdensome these interpretations were, Morris aptly goes to the section on understanding carrying burdens on the Sabbath, just to show us a taste of what these interpretations could result in. So Jeremiah 17 verse 21 clearly says that people were not to bear a burden on the Sabbath day. And the whole idea is keeping the Sabbath holy. The whole idea is properly resting in the way that God had commanded. Now here's where the question comes up. What counts as a burden? That's a natural question, right? That's not an evil-hearted question. What counts as a burden? Is there like a weight limit? Is there any kind of exception? I think of my wife. She carries our two, three-month-old all the time. Is that a burden? Can she just put him down all day? There are these kinds of considerations. What counts as a burden? And so the scribes, the lawyers, they step up. They're going to supposedly clarify this. Now, hear this. It would be considered an unlawful burden if you carried something with your hands, with your shoulders, or on your chest. In contrast, it would be okay to carry a burden if you carried it on the back of your hand, or on your foot, or in your mouth, or, this is my favorite, with your elbow. Or in the hem of your shirt, maybe you're really good at sewing pockets into your shirt and you can load those down. Or on a shoe or on a sandal. All of those are legitimate ways to carry a burden on the Sabbath day according to some of these scribal interpretations. Now, as Morris concludes this, he says, multiply this by all the regulations of the law. And ordinary people have a burden beyond bearing even to know what they might do and what they might not do. So, I mean, use that general number people will use, right? 600 plus commands that there are to keep in the law. Well, then multiply 600 laws by the dozens of so-called clarifications of those laws, and you get a staggering number of new laws that you have to keep. And so that's the first part of the woe. Truly, these traditions, these interpretations, they had become an incredible burden. Jesus says, woe to you lawyers for burdening the people like this. And then there's the second part. He says, you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Now, this might mean one of two different things. On the one hand, Jesus might be describing a hypocrisy of the lawyers. So, get this, so they make up all the confusing rules, but they are also the ones who know all of the loopholes. So you take that interpretation on burdens again and you imagine that Jane is over there and she really wants to carry some important burden, but it's a Sabbath day and she's thinking, I can't do it. I can't carry that and obey God's law, at least according to all these lawyers. But then suddenly she looks over and she sees a lawyer go zipping by carrying a burden, but he's holding it with his elbow. She says, how come you can do that? He says, it's all okay. It's part of the interpretation. See, if this is about lawyer hypocrisy, then the lawyer is avoiding the burden of even keeping the interpretations because he knows how to get around all the interpretations. And so that idea actually, it definitely carries some truth to it. But I want to hold out to you that it seems like the thrust of what Jesus is talking about is something different. The second and more likely possibility here is that Jesus is talking about how the lawyers are of no help to anyone. They come up with all these burdensome interpretations and then they take their interpretations and they pile them on the backs of the people with no concern about even helping them to bear those burdens. They won't even lift a finger to help with the massive burdens that they themselves have created. You see, the lawyers had dedicated themselves to interpreting the laws for how people can be right with God. But the big problem here is that it turned out they just weren't that concerned with the people in that equation. Jesus resents the person who not only is adding to his word, but is also burdening his people with these false additions. And then on top of that, they won't even help with the burdens that they're creating. Whoa, to these lawyers. They undermine God's word. They burden and afflict God's people and they won't even lift a finger to help the people they're afflicting. The second woe is in verses 47 through 51. which is essentially woe for their unsurpassed rejection of God's prophets. Let's just read 47 and 48. Woe to you for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. So you are witnesses and you consent to the deeds of your fathers for they killed them and you build their tombs. First part of this picture is just a, what apparently was a common practice, the idea of building tombs to memorialize past prophets. And on the surface, that seems like an honoring kind of thing to do. It's like putting up a statue of a great hero or something like that. But this is where the problem comes in for Jesus. The problem is that all of those prophets were actually paving the way for Jesus coming. Jesus is the great and final prophet. And all those who came before him, they were like signposts pointing the way to Jesus. And so the unbelieving lawyer of that time has two big strikes against them. Because on the one hand, they're not even living out or accepting the message of the prophets of old. And on the other, they are rejecting Jesus. And he was the ultimate point of all the prophets who had come before. So when they reject Jesus, this is Jesus' point, when they reject Jesus, they are rejecting the prophets. And when they reject the prophets, they show they're in total agreement with their forefathers who killed the prophets in times past. Daryl Bach says that the memorials they build for these prophets, they're really just memorials of rejection. Or as another commentator said, the only prophet they honor is a dead prophet. So Jesus declares that the prophets who God sent have become a source of judgment. for those who reject God. God in his wisdom and in his justice, he will bring justice for every martyred prophet. And he says every single one of them from Abel to Zechariah. And there's two important things to explain about that phrase from Abel to Zechariah in verse 51. Because first you have to think about Abel. We know who Abel is. Abel was the first person murdered in the Bible, murdered by his brother Cain. But he's not particularly known as a prophet. So what this tells us is Jesus is using that title of prophet. He's using it in a broad sense. And perhaps the idea is Abel's life and Abel's actions, they filled that prophetic role in Cain's life by convicting him of his wickedness. You have Abel, and then you have Zechariah. Why does Jesus mention Zechariah? Well, this isn't a reference to the minor prophet, the book by Zechariah. Rather, this is a reference to the prophet Zechariah of 2 Chronicles chapter 24. That Zechariah testified to the wickedness of Judah and so the people wickedly stoned him in the house of the Lord. And so how this all comes together, if you've followed me this far, how this all comes together is that Chronicles is the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures. You see, the way we order our English Bibles, it's not the same way that the Old Testament in the Hebrew is ordered. So in the Hebrew Bible, you still start with Genesis on the one hand, but where you end is you end with Chronicles. And so this is Jesus' point. He says, the first martyr of the first book, And the last martyr of the last book will be held against this unbelieving generation. And so his point is from A to Z, from Abel to Zechariah, from first to last, the generation that rejects Jesus will bear a sort of cumulative judgment for rejecting all that the prophets were pointing to. That is a terrifying thought. No wonder a woe is deserved here, a merciful warning. Woe to those people for walking in the steps of those who killed the prophets back in the day. And the third woe in verse 52, it's basically woe again for hindering the people. This is the text. Woe to you lawyers, for you have taken away the key of knowledge and you did not enter yourselves and you hindered those who were entering. The lawyers, because of all their convoluted interpretations, they had made it impossible for people to enter into the true knowledge of God. They had muddied the waters with their so-called clarifications. They had burdened people's souls with their rules. And in effect, they were pointing people away from God because their opinions had crowded out God's word. And so the woe is twofold. Woe to the lawyers that they didn't even enter in. And so think about that. If anyone, if anyone should have been a shoo-in for the kingdom of God, if anyone should have been a shoo-in for a true and saving knowledge of the king, It should have been the people devoted to His Word. What a tragedy that they somehow accomplished the very opposite. It's like borrowing a saying, they snatched damnation from the jaws of salvation. Rather than entering in, they kept themselves out. And second, woe to the lawyers that they hindered others who were entering in. This woe is like the first one. You can just hear Jesus's heart. You can hear Jesus's zealous concern for his people, because what he sees is he sees his sheep being afflicted. He sees them being hindered from entering in to his blessing. And when the true shepherd sees that, he cares and he cares deeply. There is certain judgment awaiting those who persist in oppressing the sheep of God. As you can imagine, none of this went over real well that day. The Pharisees, the lawyers, I feel safe in saying I think they hated what was said that day. And verse 53 tells us they didn't repent. They had the Son of God in their face, giving them specifics for how badly they were living their lives, how sinfully they had devoted themselves, how they were actually undermining the very work of God. And still they wouldn't repent. What they actually did is they stepped up their opposition. They responded to the truth by hating the truth. Christ proclaimed merciful truth and they rejected him. In fact, the truth mobilized the opposition to Jesus. From that day forward, their one mind, we're gonna get this guy. These lawyers, they had built these lavish tombs to memorialize the prophets, but they loved the idea of a prophet much more than an actual prophet. They loved their cherry-picked understanding of what a prophet had once said, but they didn't love an actual prophet like Jesus speaking painful truth into their lives. As Leon Moore said, it says in your bulletin, it is always easier to honor dead saints than living ones. Even today, even today, in a secular society like ours, people will still often describe having such respect for Jesus as a historical figure. but they don't care so much about the historical teachings of that same Jesus. People talk about the incredible historical and cultural significance of the Bible, but they don't really want the truth that's contained in that Bible. They certainly don't want to submit to it. People may still have respect for various Christian principles. Ideas like charity or honesty, for example. That doesn't mean the world wants anything to do with the core ideas of the faith. Of a sovereign God who has a claim on your life. Of our defiling sin, of our guilt that will drag us down to hell. if we don't do something about it before Judgment Day. They don't want anything to do with our only hope being Jesus Christ. No, people generally don't want anything to do with that at all. Christians need to speak the truth. We must. We must speak the truth. We'll speak it with discernment. We'll speak it with love. We'll speak it with gentleness as we are able, but we must speak it. And I just have a burden to remind you that they must also prepare for the truth to be despised. The Holy Spirit's not working. Don't expect a parade for how you just presented the gospel. They'll count it folly, if not much worse. If Jesus was opposed for speaking the truth, child of God, you should expect no less. If we look at this message of woe, if we look at it as a whole, this is what Jesus is saying. Every woe is Jesus crying out and proclaiming the certain destruction and judgment that awaited those lawyers. He's crying out, if you blindly obscure the truth of God, you are walking toward destruction. If you burden others and prevent them from finding the truth of God, you are walking toward destruction. If you are walking in the footsteps of those who have opposed God, you are walking toward destruction. But bound up in all of those woes is the ancient plea of God He's saying, why would you perish? Why would you die? Why would you turn down the blessing of God so that you can embrace your condemnation? Why? And in this merciful warning, God is also pointing to the way of life. You're headed towards destruction. Just turn around. Life is the other way. You're living for yourself, stop, live for God and you can have life. You can have hope, you can have forgiveness, you can have grace, you can have truth, you can have it all. Stop walking that way, come back to God, repent, turn back, turn back from destruction and find life. I think so many of us can relate to what it is like to want to give up on someone. I think so many of us can relate to that moment when you say, fine, I can't stop you. Go your way. Go your way and see what happens when you walk down that path. Have you ever been there? You know what? Jesus doesn't do that. Jesus doesn't give up on us. Even as we are shaking our fists at Him, even then Jesus offers us mercy. Even as we are twisting and perverting the very gifts that He has showered upon us, He offers us blessing. Even as we are willfully trying to close our eyes and our ears and our hearts, even as we are embracing our spiritual blindness, even then he does not give up. Even then he says, whoa, to you, I'm warning you, don't go down that way. Even when we have absolutely no right to hope for anything good from Him, our Savior, while the day is still today, He offers us grace. He offers you grace. And this is the theme that deserves the emphasis as we close. These woes that Christ is pronouncing upon these sinful men, they only serve to remind us of how great a Savior we have. Christ declared woe upon those who burden the people of God. How amazing is our Savior who would not burden his people, but instead he would bear their burdens. He would bear their suffering. He would bear their sin. Christ declared woe on humanity's unbelieving chain of persecution against God's prophets. How faithful is Jesus Christ, the final prophet who came knowing that he would likewise be rejected and killed. But he did so because he was determined to save his people. Christ declared woe on those who took away the key to the knowledge of God. How glorious is the savior who made known to us the father like he's never been known before. How glorious is the Savior who made a way for His people so that at last they might enter unhindered into true and eternal fellowship with their God. Christ came and He came in mercy and He came in judgment. He came to bring a merciful warning of the certain judgment that lay ahead. And I have to tell you straight, if you will not believe it, if you will not heed the warning, if you will not turn from your destruction, then not only will you walk towards destruction, but these very warnings today will be held against you. But if you will believe, if you will believe, Even the filthiest sinner, the most broken sinner, the most repeat sinner, the most backslidden sinner, even the very worst of us will find mercy. Friends, choose mercy. Let's pray. Our Father, We thank you for the mercy that is found in Jesus Christ, our Lord. We thank you that you did not give us what we deserved. We thank you that in our spiritual blindness and our hard-heartedness, you called us back. There's not a single one of us that would still be here if it only took one mistake and we were done. But the fact that we are here is not a testimony to our goodness, it's a testimony to your faithfulness. Thank you for being faithful to your people. And Lord, we beg of you, pour mercy out upon the ones that need it today. Pour mercy on those who are hard-hearted still today. Pour mercy on those who are far from you. Pour mercy on those who have had every opportunity in the word and yet they reject it. Be merciful, Lord. Please save. We pray this in Jesus's name. Amen. We hope you've enjoyed this message from Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. To receive a copy of this or other messages, call us at area code 775-782-6516 or visit our website gracenevada.com.