Good morning. I will ask you to turn in your Bibles, please, to Matthew 23. And this morning, in particular, we're going to be looking at verses 13 through 22. So Matthew 23, 13 to 22, once you are there, I would ask if you would please stand in reverence as we read God's holy and inspired and inerrant word. And these are the words of the Lord. But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces, for you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. Woe to you, blind guides, who say, if anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing. But if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath. You blind fools. For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? And you say, if anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing. But if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath, you blind men. For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? So whoever swears by the altar, swears by it and by everything on it. And whoever swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who dwells in it. and whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. And may God bless the reading of his word. You may be seated. So last week, in the text, we saw Jesus turning from the Pharisees, from those he was in debate with, and turning to the crowd, and essentially releasing them from the heavy yoke that the prideful Pharisees, and scribes, and Sadducees, and priests, and Herodians had laid upon them. He had encountered all of these various groups on Tuesday at the temple, confronted them, successfully pushed back against them, silenced them with a single argument, and now he turns to the crowd as to release them from this legalistic yoke that they were under. But Jesus has humiliated them in front of a crowd. And it has been said, rightly I think, in our time, that ridicule is man's most potent weapon. And I think we see that's true when we see how fragile heavy-handed authoritarians really are. One thing that they cannot stand is people laughing at them. And Jesus has made the crowd essentially laugh at these heavy-handed authorities. And this is why at that time, and down to today, those people who grasp the power, who know that deep down their gods are impotent, are the most dogged in demanding No dissent is allowed whatsoever. You see it in communist countries when there's a North Korean missile parade. Everyone must salute at the great power that is North Korea, even though everybody knows it's an impotent joke. This is why the tiny town of Imo, Ontario, this last week, got fined, and they're fined upheld in an Ontario court. Why? because they refused to participate in the mandatory high religious feast in Ontario, which is pride parades. Emo Ontario did not have a pride parade, and they got fined $15,000 for their religious dissent, and a court upheld that penalty. Amazing, isn't it? People who cling to impotent gods know their gods are impotent, which is why you are not allowed to criticize. You are not allowed to ask questions. And Jesus has disrobed the power of these false shepherds in Jerusalem by bringing them to open scorn in front of a crowd. The tension has heated up. We've seen that as we've gone through multiple passages that all have to do with this final confrontation on Tuesday morning in Jerusalem. And we're gonna see that that battle continues to intensify through chapter 24, chapter 25, and really throughout the rest of the gospel. And you may have noticed that Jesus did not go to the Dale Carnegie course of how to win friends and influence people, because he is intensifying He's deliberately provoking a kind of opposition. And in fact, Jesus's words are so harsh and his attitude is so rigid here that some critics and some unorthodox Bible commentators have actually suggested that Jesus was in sin in this passage. Jesus is too harsh. And to our modern sensibilities, it may seem that way. We live in an evangelical culture which seems to think that God has only one attribute, and that's basically being syrupy and sentimental. That's God's one attribute. We do not have a respect for the holiness of God whatsoever. And so this does strike us as odd that Jesus would confront so seriously. And these words are harsh by our standards, but they're even harsh by the standards of that time, which were probably more reasonable and more realistic than our standards. One more conservative commentator noted that if a modern evangelical was giving advice to Jesus, he may have chided him for not being winsome enough, and after all, Jesus, maybe if you were just a little more Christ-like, you could have won the crowd over. Now you provoked a confrontation, right? Jesus is not being Christ-like by the standard of many soft evangelicals in our time. But what is at stake here is the truth, and most particularly the truth of God. And so it makes sense that Jesus is not trying to be winsome. The time of being winsome is over. He did that at the early beginning of his ministry. There was an invitation, there was warmth, there was openness, but now as the hearts of the people become increasingly hardened, Jesus' response is fitting with their response. And when we get to difficult texts like this, I always want to set it in the broader theme of the biblical narrative, like looking at the puzzle box rather than just starting to click the pieces together. We want to zoom out and see what kind of a picture God is painting here before we look at the details more particularly. And as we move into a difficult passage like this and the ones that are to follow, I think this is important that we continue to take stock, zoom out before we zoom in. that we look at this with the telescope and then with the microscope. So we need to remember, where are we at in the story? What is the redemptive historical significance of what's happening? And of course, at this point, Israel is still under the old covenant that God established with Abram and Moses, and to a degree with David as well. And that covenant contains some unconditional promises regarding land, which Joshua, we saw last week, Joshua already speaks of in the past tense. So God kept, past tense, that promise as Israel took the land that God had indeed promised them. But that promise is kept, past tense. So there is no injustice, even when you read about Israel's exile from the land in the Old Testament, there's no injustice and there's no covenant breaking on God's part because God already kept, past tense, that promise. and the people have broken covenant with him. And now God is fulfilling the terms of the covenant that he made with these people. So what we have left, after they have taken the land, is conditional promises. And since the Jewish people, and most particularly their leaders, have broken covenant with Yahweh in every way imaginable, for God to keep covenant must mean that the curses of Deuteronomy, the curses of Moses, must fall on these people. And I mentioned that Last week, people wonder, how does this fit? Is God breaking covenant when he destroys Jerusalem? Absolutely not. God is keeping covenant when he destroys Jerusalem. He must do it because it was promised to them by Moses himself, that if they break covenant, these curses are going to fall on you. And now Jesus is the one to deliver what Moses had promised. Jesus has gone through a series of parables to show them what's happening and what's about to happen very shortly. We saw earlier on Tuesday, so keep in mind, we're still all on the same day in terms of when this actually happened. Okay, we've been in Tuesday for about two months already, but this is still all on Tuesday. So earlier in the day, Jesus had told a parable about an obedient son who obeys after seemingly not wanting to, and one son who promises to obey and not follow through. And the implication is clear. Who is the actual son? Who is the obedient son? Then Jesus tells a story about the tenants in the vineyard. And some that get the last opportunity to repent is messenger after messenger after messenger is sent to this vineyard to talk to the tenants about them not keeping covenant. And so finally the master, the owner of the vineyard sends his own son to warn these wicked tenants And in the words of scripture in Matthew 21, 41, the owner is going to put those wretches to a miserable death and let the vineyard out to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their season. A seismic shift is about to happen. Something of deep, eternal, redemptive historical significance is going to happen very, very soon here. And in the providence of God, those words that I just said from Matthew 21, 41, actually came out of the mouths of the Pharisees when Jesus asked them what was going to happen next in that parable. They knew it because he didn't know Jesus was talking about them. New tenants are going to be let in. Jesus tells it another way, about a wedding feast. And those who are first invited refuse to come, and in fact, they kill the king's messenger. They do not want to celebrate in the coronation of this son as he goes to his wedding feast. And so the king responds by sending his troops to destroy those murderers and burn their city, Matthew 22, verse 7. And as a result, the invitation goes out broadly to the highways and the byways. This ending, in one sense, makes it much wider in another sense, and commenting on this development that's rolling out the Puritan divine, John Owen comments that those wicked tenants of God's vineyard forfeited their right unto it by their unbelief, and by murdering the true heir, God disinherited them, dispossessed them, and left them neither right nor title to any interest in his inheritance as it is to this day. And so now we get up to Jesus preaching these woes. He's actually delivering these woes on the scribes and on the Pharisees in Jerusalem at this time. Jesus is acting as a prophet who is bringing a lawsuit to the people from God. And what we have in the final chapters of Matthew is the Old Covenant giving birth to the New Covenant and then passing away. And we can relate this to our own human experience, perhaps, of a mother who gives birth to her daughter. The two live together for a generation, and then the older slips quietly into the night. And so the old covenant is terminated after it has given birth to Jesus Christ and the new covenant. Jesus is now mere days, even hours away from his crucifixion and establishing the new covenant in his blood. And 40 years later or a biblical generation after that event in AD 70, the temple in the entire city of Jerusalem is going to be destroyed just as Jesus in fact promised. And this is why, as we get deeper into it, the catastrophe that Jesus is going to describe once we get to chapter 24 is not spoken of primarily in terms of death, but in terms of birth pangs. This is a giving birth. This is actually new life that's coming out of this. This isn't just destruction. It is the kind of destruction that comes, the kind of death that comes after birth has already happened. so the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem where this confrontation is going down does have a twofold significance. One, it is a punishment for the covenant breakers under the terms of the old covenant. The scribes and the Pharisees have been unfaithful and God is now visiting the terms of the covenant upon that wicked generation that killed his son, that killed his messenger. But the second meaning of the Destruction of the temple is that it is now rendered useless and unnecessary since Christ is about to offer one terminal sacrifice For all time the faith delivered once for all So there's no longer need for the types and shadows that previously Existed because the substance has arrived in Jesus Christ, and so it is fitting that the types and shadows fall away And again if we're going to zoom all the way out in terms of just food for thought this will not be a The main point, and I'm not even gonna make the case, I will offer it out there in terms of reading our Bible as a whole. This confrontation is clearly laid out in the gospel of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but it's nowhere to be found in the gospel of John, which is somewhat interesting. But as we get further into the gospel of Matthew, especially chapter 24 and 25, you're going to find that it reads an awful lot like the book of Revelation. which is John's follow-up book. John wrote the Gospel of John, and then he wrote the Gospel of Revelation. And I believe the Book of Revelation is part two of John's Gospel, describing the things in greater detail in that book, what Matthew, Mark, and Luke record in the Olivet Discourse here in Jerusalem. And so Revelation opens up, if you look at the timestamps of the Book of Revelation, it opens up with John speaking of things which will soon take place, and by chapter 1, verse 9, he says that he is a partaker. John, as he's writing this, is writing as a partaker in the Great Tribulation. I believe Revelation is looking at the same events that these Gospels are looking at, and the similarities are strong. In terms of seeing the harmony of Scripture, I'd encourage you to consider this possibility. I know this seems odd to our ears because for the last hundred years or so, we have been catechized to see what's coming in the book of Matthew and what's written in the book of Revelation as being things which are in our future. We have been trained that way over and over and over and over and over again, but that is far from a unanimous or even majority position throughout church history. Many have seen the similarities between Revelation and the tail end of the Gospels and seen that these are looking at the same events. These are looking at the things which will, in fact, soon take place at this catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the old covenant era, and then later zooming out to what is still future to us, which is the return of Christ at the end of history. And the structure, we're going to notice, is very similar. Jesus offers here a series of woes. And what do we see in Revelation? Seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls, seven thunders. And then after that's done, zooming out to the final return of Christ. And again, we have been trained in our generation to read Revelation as being mostly about things which are still in our future. But for much of church history, the book of Revelation was seen as things which are ancient history to us. These are things which happened in the first century. And only in the last four chapters does it zoom out to things yet future. I'm not going to suggest that there's only one orthodox way to read Revelation, not at all. But this is one of the ancient understandings of Revelation which I think becomes likely given the structure of the Gospel and what we're about to settle into here. I'll leave that with you and you can consider the merits or the dismerits of that. But Jesus, here, in pronouncing these woes that we're looking at, Jesus starts and ends his earthly ministry with a kind of sermon on a mount. Tim talked about two mountains earlier. Here's another two mountains. Jesus starts his ministry with the sermon on a mount out in the wilderness, and here he ends his ministry with another sermon on a mount, on the temple mount. as he now delivers the woes that Moses promised all those years ago, as these wicked tenants are about to kill the owner's son. Verse 13 opens by saying, but woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces, for you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. And so the mission of the teachers of God's word ought to be, it should be, to open wide the gates of the kingdom and to invite people in. God entrusted the scribes and the Pharisees with the Torah. We just saw last week that these men are to sit on Moses' seat, to open God's law, to invite people in, to be a testimony to the nations around that. And we see that in Moses in Deuteronomy 4, Five through eight, Moses says, see, I have taught you statutes and rules as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do them in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us? whenever we call upon him. And what great nation is there that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law that I set before you today?" And Tim, in fact, read much of that law, the Constitution of Israel, the Ten Commandments, God's moral law for his people. And we see that the whole point of Israel being called to be a great nation was for a larger purpose. It was for an evangelistic purpose. It was to be a testimony to the nations around them. And I know this is a hypothetical, and this is somewhat of a thought experiment, but consider with me, what would have happened had Israel kept covenant? I don't think they would have remained a small little island of righteousness in the Middle East. I do believe there would have been evangelistic zeal, and the nations around them would have seen how much better God's law is than their man-made law. I do believe it would have had evangelistic fire had Israel in fact kept covenant had they indeed kept God's law just as I don't think Adam and Eve would still be in the garden using wooden tools had the fall not happened I think the civilization they would have built would be far more advanced than this one because it would not have been hindered by sin so Israel had they kept covenant with God would have been a great mighty tower as in God in fact God called them to be a light unto the nations However, their leaders, their scribes and Pharisees, took an inward turn. They saw their inheritance as something to lock away and to keep safe rather than investing it and expanding upon it. We talked in Sunday school this morning about the parable of the talents. They very literally just buried what God had given them. Rather than investing it, rather than turning a profit on it, they just buried it and hid it away. Picking up on the sermon imagery of scripture, Peter Lightheart comments on this verse saying that the scribes and the Pharisees had become like a dragon guarding a cave opening to keep the people from the treasure. So they became serpents guarding what's inside the cave rather than as a city on a hill inviting people to the warmth of God's kingdom. And I mentioned last week, when we see this Sermon on the Temple Mount, these woes, that they actually are the photo negative of the blessings, the beatitudes that Jesus gave on his first Sermon on the Mount. So these are like the positive and negative side of the same kind of thing. And this woe would contrast then with Jesus' first beatitude in Matthew five verse three, which says, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So we see contrasting ways here. The poor in spirit inherit the kingdom, while the proud and the arrogant and the self-sufficient not only fail to enter themselves, but they actively try to keep other people out, which is far worse than just not going in yourself. You're actually trying to prevent people from coming in. And we don't know how many people, humanly speaking, were kept from the kingdom because of the pride of their leaders. They followed their shepherds, and these were false shepherds. They were shutting the doors of the kingdom when they should have been opening them wide. And so those who want to come into the kingdom have to do so against great opposition from their own shepherds. Think about that. Think of what a terrible situation that is. The gatekeepers of God's people are actually preventing people from knowing God. That is terrible. And I think that helps us to make sense of hard sayings in Scripture, like Matthew 11, verse 12, which says, from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force. Why? Because they have to. They have to push through all kinds of opposition from church leaders to get in. Luke 16, 16, the law and the prophets were until John. Since the good news of the kingdom of God is preached, and everyone forces his way into it. Again, they have to. They have to want it. They have to push through the opposition that they are facing from their shepherds. It's a sad picture, but some have the determination to push through and find the kingdom. We're going to move on in verse 14, and here's an interesting point. Well, just look at verse 14. There, that's my point. Some of you have verse 14, some of you don't. More particularly, you have it as a footnote. We've talked about this before as we've gone through the gospel. It's called textual variance, which means some manuscripts have this verse and some don't. The majority texts on which the King James and the Geneva Bible and the New King James are based have this verse in it. The other text families do not have it in them, and so some, have opted, some translations have opted to put it in, some have opted to make it a footnote because it's unsure. Does this change anything about the inerrancy of Scripture? Not whatsoever. because no doctrine is changed. All that we have is likely, because everything was in handwritten notes back in the day, sometimes people would write a marginal note in their Bible. Someone mistakenly thought that was part of the text, and it got into later transcripts that were based on that earlier one. So the earliest manuscripts of the Bible that we have do not have this verse. The majority of manuscripts that we have does have this verse, and so that is why different translations handle it differently. This is not a threat whatsoever to the inerrancy of Scripture. No doctrine is touched. The parallel accounts in Mark and Luke do have this verse, so I'm going to preach it on the assumption that it is perfectly fine, but if you're wondering why it's relegated to a footnote, that's why, and if you have further questions on that, we can discuss it later, but this in no way concerns the inspiration or the preservation or the inerrancy of the scriptures. So verse 14 says, Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows' houses, and for a pretense you make long prayers. Therefore you will receive the greater condemnation. So again, the scribes and the Pharisees are entrusted with the Torah and they were specialists in the law. And through their office, but also through their public displays of righteousness, or self-righteousness we might say, they were in a position to manage the estates of widows and ask for help. And likely they were to be trusted by these helpless ladies. And Jesus hates every bit of it. Their goal was actually not to help these widows, but to enrich themselves as they managed their estates for them. And this matches the second blessing in the Beatitudes. Matthew 5 verse 4, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. think one of the blessings of the gospel, it is often said, is that it is meant to comfort the afflicted. And what do these false shepherds do? They further afflict the afflicted. They find a woman who's already in sorrow, already helpless, already mourning, and they feed off of her. How wicked and self-serving are are these men. They should be feeding the widows, not feeding on them. Jesus hates it and he says, woe to you. I think we can understand Jesus's anger. These men are doing the exact opposite of everything they ought to be doing when they sit on Moses's seat. Verse 15 goes on. It says, Well, how does that fit? Some of them are just kind of hoarding the gospel, and now we read about missionary zeal. Well, the Jews in this time would be similar to talking about the Church today. Are Christians missionary people, or are they not? Well, it depends which ones you're looking at, okay? Were the Jews missionary people or not? Well, most were not, but some of the Greek-speaking Jews especially did have a kind of missionary zeal, although it was corrupted. And so frequently, these converts became students who surpassed their masters, and this means that their errors also became exaggerated. And this underscores, actually, the great need for the proper generational handoff as we teach the faith to others so that errors do not get exaggerated as time goes on. Much of the work of Christian discernment is not so much about spotting the difference between truth and error, but what makes it so tough is that Christian discernment is about discerning the difference between truth and almost truth. Between truth and 87% truth. That is why discernment is difficult. I'm going to ask you a question. If you've got a pantry or you've got shelves downstairs with all kinds of stuff on it, what poses the greater danger to you? The jug that has a big cross and, you know, crossbones and skull on it that says, do not eat or, you know, do not drink. Is that really that great a danger? Or what about the jug of orange juice beside it that has just enough cyanide in it to kill you? What's the greater threat? It's the almost acceptable that is far more dangerous than the outright heretical. Okay, and the Pharisees did get a lot of things right, but they got a lot of things wrong as well. Okay, and that happens to this day. Discernment is about discerning truth from almost truth, not from necessarily truth and outright heresy. Of course, that's part of it, but outright heresy is easy to detect. Almost truth is harder to detect. Frequently students especially new students that are new to something new to a concept or whatever lose a sense of proportion and balance when they discover something new and exciting right and I've talked before about the cage stage Calvinist who's you know that the obnoxious 19 year old internet Calvinist who on one sense is maybe believes the same things as the 85-year-old rural Scottish pastor who's been reading Banner of Truth paperbacks for the last 70 years. On paper, they maybe believe the same things. But the old man has wisdom. The old man knows about godliness. The obnoxious upstart is surpassing, in one sense, his teacher. But he has not yet learned wisdom. He has not yet learned balance. course, that's a bit more of a positive or orthodox example, but we can put it in a negative light just as well. A more fitting example might be the kind of conservative Christianity which desires separatism and withdrawal from the world, which can be understandable in one sense, but it very quickly turns into legalism and rule-keeping, and the gospel soon gets eclipsed and then forgotten altogether. But when you already start with something that's misguided, the errors actually get exaggerated as time goes on. That's why the converts are twice as much a child of hell as the teachers are. If you're on a boat trip and you start one degree off, a mile out's not such a big difference. 50 miles out, you're way off course for one degree of error. So as time goes on, errors tend to get exaggerated by overzealous disciples especially. Matthew Henry, commenting on this, notes that Paul himself, a disciple of the Pharisees, was exceedingly mad against the Christians when his master Gamaliel seems to have only been much more moderate. Paul was worse than his teacher. Many people are worse than their teachers. Many people also exceed their teachers in positive ways, and that's what we need to press into, but errors tend to get more obnoxious and more exaggerated by students who try to pass their teachers. And so the proselytizing of the Pharisees is proud and faithless in contrast with the third blessing, the third beatitude, which is this, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. What does meekness do? Meekness presses into Jesus' kingdom promises that what starts as a little mustard seed is going to eclipse the entire earth. And it walks consistently with inheriting that. That's very different than the kind of proselytizing that the self-righteous Pharisees were doing, leading people astray and making people twice as much a child of hell as they are. Again, you see two very opposite ways of being. Meekness inheriting the earth or a kind of self-righteous proselytizing which makes people twice as much a child of hell as their teacher was. Goes on, verses 16 through 22. Woe to you, blind guides, who say if anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing. But if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath. You blind fools. For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? And you say, if anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing. But if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath. You blind men, for which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? So whoever swears by the altar, swears by him and by everything on it. And whoever swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who dwells in it. And whoever swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. So this is another prime example, we've seen many of these, of the Pharisees quibbling over arcane little details while completely missing the big picture. They understand everything about God's law except for what it means. They understand everything about the Bible except for what it means. But other than that, they've got the details down pat. Including their extra details that aren't even in the scriptures, that they've just agreed upon in their own private gatherings. Here they're playing games with oaths, and we saw this too in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 where Jesus talks about oaths and vows. The Pharisees had a scale of how serious an oath was and how obligated one was to keep his word by depending on what it was that he swore. And this is really as childish and as mature as the playground games where you make a promise but your fingers are doing this behind your back, right? That's an oath you can break. But if you say, cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle through my eye, well that, of course, is a serious playground oath. That is a playground oath which must be kept. It's that level of seriousness that these men are doing this. It's clear here that the altar and the temple are themselves held by these men. The altar and the temple were held in lower esteem by the things they put on or in the altar or the temple in their conception. Why might that be? Well, here's one guess, and this is, I think, got some credibility because of what we're going to encounter later on as we go through this. I think the reason that they value the gold and the sacrifices more than the altar and the temple itself is because the gold and the sacrifice are currency. You can remove them from the temple and you can do commerce with it. can stay rich from the gold in the temple, but the temple itself can't make me rich. Again, this is pragmatic religion. This is what's good for my bank account, what's good for me, what's good for my pragmatism. That's the important thing. So the cow that's going to go on the altar, that's super important. The altar, yeah, whatever. Okay. The tithes and sacrifices that I get to keep in my pocket if I don't give them or bilk somebody out of it, that's really important. The temple, which is a symbol of God's presence, however, that's whatever. They've got this completely upside down. This is entirely personal enrichment, to continuing on doing their currency, and part of the reason I think this is a credible explanation is because we've already seen when Jesus cleansed the temple that they were in a bad business with Rome. The Jewish leaders had made bad arrangements with Rome about the temple marketplace and so forth. So these men were not just proud and arrogant men, they were probably rich and proud and arrogant men. They were very self- Sufficient and so they started to think well if it's to my benefit, then it must be right, right? You do the theology around what makes my life better But Jesus turns this logic on its head He says that there's actually nothing inherently holy about gold or about a cow rather the reason that these things are made holy is because they are brought into the presence of God and Offered as a sacrifice where his presence is symbolically kept at this time, which is at the temple which is in the altar and And so we see that God's value system is running the exact opposite direction of theirs. Further, since all belongs to God, no matter what they are swearing by, in a roundabout way, they are swearing by God's name. And so this game-playing of theirs runs opposite to Jesus' logic that we saw in the Sermon on the Mount, that you should just let your yes be yes and your no be no. It really is simple, isn't it? A righteous man is going to keep his word even if he's not under oath. And an unrighteous man isn't going to start magically becoming honest and having integrity just because he's under oath. The unrighteous lie under oath and the righteous tell the truth even when they're not under oath. This game playing is nonsense and Jesus sees right through it to the wicked heart. These people are playing games so that on the surface it looks like they're just kind of barely crossing the bar of God's righteousness when in fact they are not at all. And this is, again, the photo negative of the fourth blessing, the fourth beatitude. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. What do you do when you're hungry and thirsty? You want to take it all in, right? Don't let it stop. I want to internalize all this food, all this drink. I want the word of God to dwell in me richly. I want to see all the connections. I want to understand the scriptures. And then I want my theology to come at my fingertips. It's a maximalist approach. I want to have integrity no matter what. I don't have to be under oath. I don't have to play these games. I just want to be a godly, righteous man. That's what hungering and thirsting for righteousness looks like. These guys are doing the exact opposite. They're hungering and thirsting to get out of actual righteousness and just playing games to make themselves look righteous on the outside. These men are hungering and thirsting to get out of keeping their word. And we're going to pick this up again, these woes, next week. But by way of application for what we're seeing so far, there are two mountains here. There are two sermons on the mount. There are two very opposite ways of being. There's the one mountain of beatitude, of covenant faithfulness, of righteous living, and then a blessing that comes with that. But we're also seeing here this morning a mountain of woes. And this is a mountain of breaking covenant, of selfish, self-indulgent living. end of the cursing that comes from the hand of God as a result. These are two paths that God has laid out for man since he has placed us in the garden ever since. These options have been laid out before us, blessing or cursing. Which way will you go, oh man? And closely related to to these two mountains, to these two ways of being, are what we're seeing is a very different approach to scripture that we're seeing between Jesus and the Pharisees. One of biblical maximalism and one of biblical minimalism. One that is worried about just doing the outward least, playing games, setting up false laws so it looks like on the surface you're living righteously, as opposed to Jesus' method of understanding what the principle is and then pushing it into the corners. As the old saying goes, we want all of Christ for all of life. We want to internalize the Word of God so that Jesus Christ has something to say about everything in your life, even if there's not a Bible verse that puts it in exactly our contemporary language. If we're understanding the good and necessary consequence of what is being taught in Scripture, we can apply Scripture to every aspect of our life if we are actually internalizing the Word. particular, in this list, in particular view here, are the sins of keeping others from the kingdom instead of honoring the poor in spirit. And that's something we ought to consider. Are we gonna get comfortable? Things are going good here. We've, you know, we've got lots of people, we've got a beautiful place, we've got a healthy culture, a loving culture, a warm culture, inviting culture. Are we going to let that dry up because we don't want that to go to other people? Are we going to turn in on ourselves? Or are we going to make that be contagious and open wide the gates of the kingdom to others around us? There's also the sin of afflicting those who mourn instead of comforting them. And how easy is that for us to just turn a blind eye to people who are struggling instead of comforting them? There's the sin of evangelizing people into hell with human pride, instead of helping them into the kingdom through genuine meekness, through the way of the gospel, preaching the gospel instead of preaching ourselves. And lastly, there's the sin of playing games with our oaths, not letting your yes be a yes, telling lies, living by lies, promoting lies. And so these are all things that we consider as we examine our own life. and the collective life of this church, that we are pressing into the mountain of blessing, that we are pressing into the wilderness mountain of beatitude, of blessing, of happiness, rather than the internal self-righteous, self-sufficient mountain of cursing that Jesus is confronting the Pharisees with. And so I want to see application here for us as individuals and also for us as a church, and it's worth considering. Who are we the story? Are we following the mountain of blessing or are we following the mountain of self-service? Let's close in prayer. Lord God, you have hard words for those who break your law. You have hard words for hypocrites and people who want to seem righteous on the outside without internalizing your word, without loving you from the heart, without actually being in union with you. Lord, and if there are hypocrites here this morning, people who are playing games to look good for the public, then I pray that they would see the deeper meaning, that they would see the true message of your gospel, and that you would soften their hearts, even right now this morning, that they can internalize it and enjoy the blessing that comes with following you from a faithful heart. Lord, and for those who are already following you, Lord, I pray that we would be comforted by your word. I pray that we'd even be comforted here this morning as we take communion. And as we consider the Advent season and what it means that you came to earth to assume all the curses on our behalf and to give us blessing in return. Lord, I pray that we would be a thankful people. I pray that we would be a faithful people. I pray that we would be an evangelistic people. And I pray that we would be a people who point others not to ourselves, but to you and to your kingdom, that we would make wide the announcement of your glorious gospel and that many would be ushered in. Thank you for your kindness, Lord, and we pray this all in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.