< Matthew 23 >

The Pharisees were the most influential sect among the Jews and were the administrators of God’s law to the people. Jesus taught the Jews to keep this law, but not to follow the practices of these hypocrites. They put heavy burdens on the people by the imposition of grievous regulations while they themselves sought, not God’s glorification, but their own, and distorted God’s laws for their own benefit. For example, God required the people to pay a tithe (tenth) of their crops as provision for the priests, and the Pharisees enforced this law rigorously, even applying it to the minutest herbs Luke11:42. But while they were fastidious about the minutiae of the law they discarded the vital virtues enshrined in that law, such as justice, mercy and faith.

This condemnation by Jesus of apparently very religious people should serve as a serious warning to all those who claim to be religious, especially in view of the retribution pronounced on the Pharisees: “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?”. “Hell” here is “Gehenna” in the original Greek, the valley south of Jerusalem used for burning rubbish and a metaphor for the judgments of God. Indeed all Jerusalem would soon be burnt by fire at the hands of the Romans, the prospect of which caused Jesus to weep.

Neither God nor Jesus wished for Jerusalem’s destruction, nor for its inhabitants to suffer, but these calamities came because the people continually sinned and refused God’s exhortations to return to him in righteousness. Better and glorious times will, nevertheless, come to the city when Jesus returns from heaven and the inhabitants of Jerusalem will then cry: “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord”.