This is an incredible chapter. You need to read it for yourself. Jesus pronounces seven woes upon the Pharisees. You will never find a more scathing attack on a group of people anywhere in the Bible, with the possible exception of the chapter we discussed a few months back in which Ezekiel is given a vision of some of the wicked things going on in Jerusalem and he describes it in detail and names the names of those involved.
I am kind of rendered speechless by this powerful passage. I will just basically briefly summarize the seven woes:
1) They shut the door to the kingdom in people's faces
2) They doomed their proselytes to hell
3) They had buzzwords by which they could "swear" and really tell lies
4) They tithed out of their produce, but they neglected justice, mercy and faithfulness
5&6) (these go together) They cleaned the outside of the cup but neglected to clean the spiritual filth on the inside and they were like whitewashed graves- clean on the outside but full of dead men's bones within
7) They built and decorated the tombs of the prophets of the past, but they were about to kill the greatest Prophet, the One about whom all those other prophets were speaking of
At the end of this chapter, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, that they had rejected Him.
No comments:
Post a Comment