Evangelical Pharisees Quotes

If the Jewish Pharisees completely missed the mark on seeing the first coming, what makes evangelical leaders of America any less in the dark on the second coming?

Pharisees were the upstanding “conservative evangelical pastors” of their day, strongly convinced of the inerrancy of Scripture and its sufficiency for guidance in every area of life, if only it could be properly interpreted.69 Yet it is precisely such an environment in which a healthy perspective on the Bible can easily give way to legalism.

[I]f my faith depends on fear of punishment, what will happen to my faith when perfect love (Jesus) comes to cast it out? (1 John 4: 18) If God thinks that fear of punishment is something to be “cast out” like a demon, then our Gospel and our preaching better not rest on that foundation! Fear-based faith (a paradox) is the ultimate deception. We need to examine closely whether the devil has been hiding in plain sight - squatting within the very message that we’ve preached. Parasite and deceiver that he is, he found the ultimate host to help disseminate his terror campaign - the Church! If our faith message begins in fear, as it did for many evangelicals like me, it’s in trouble. I am reminded of Jesus’ warning, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are” (Matt 23:15). The negation of negation. Does preaching on hell produce converts? Oh yes! But if in the process it also saddles someone with fear of punishment, then it has simultaneously reproduced a “son of hell.

He said “beware” to the reality that the disciples might not be defeated by Herod or the Pharisees, but that they would become like them.

People who are starving and dressed in rags don’t want to hear someone read a list of propositional “good news.” They want to see the good news in action. The church doesn’t hold revival meetings and call it a day — we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, dig wells, and staff medical clinics. Social action isn’t an optional part of evangelism; it is evangelism. This is an important correction to the overspirituality that dominated evangelical Christianity just a generation ago. But the both/and of holistic mission still misses the heart of Jesus if we don’t see that the church needs the poor as much as the poor need the church. Jesus didn’t embrace the poor only because he pitied them or because he knew he had the resources to help them. Jesus embraced the poor because they were rushing into the kingdom ahead of the scribes and Pharisees — those who called themselves God’s people. Jesus welcomed people who knew poverty because they were ready to receive what he had to offer. Religious people, he said, could learn something from them. Our spiritual lives are linked to the material conditions of our life. When we feel like we don’t need much materially, we often have trouble remembering why we need God. We comfortable Americans can go through an entire day without thinking of God. But Jesus gave the poor more than food to eat and relief from their sickness. He restored them to God’s beloved community.

No, Zahnd is baffled by the so-called shepherds. Scripture says God demands more from these Christian leaders. And yet, whether it’s Strang platforming the MyPillow lunatic, or Liberty University’s leadership trading evangelism for electioneering, or the pastor down the road in St. Louis, a onetime friend who now leads his Sunday services with a fifteen-minute political segment called “Ron’s Rants,” Zahnd sees a reckless abdication of duty on the part of the people in charge. They are, as Jesus said of the Pharisees, blind guides, leading their followers to fall into a pit. “You are forming your people in anger and hate. You are helping to intensify their capacity to hate other people,” Zahnd said. “You are giving them permission to carry around this permanent rage.

I felt ruined and helpless." Then to his spiritual eyes, purged of self, there appeared the Crucified One; and to his spiritual intelligence there was given the Word of God. The change was that wrought on Paul by a Living Person. It converted the hypocritical Pharisee into the evangelical preacher; it turned the vicious peasant into the most self-denying saint; it sent the village shoemaker far off to the Hindoos.

According to Jesus, the gospel can be contaminated by at least two common attitudes, which can spread throughout the church and ruin the whole batch of dough. Some of the Pharisees were judgmental and hypocritical. Their religious instruction was heavy on control and rules and legalism and hoop jumping, and had a convenient way of overlooking the log in its own eye while barring entrance to God’s kingdom for others. For example, a gospel contaminated by such a yeast might condemn a gay, married, and monogamous person for sexual immorality, while simultaneously saluting a twice-divorced, thrice-married, unrepentant serial adulterer and sexual assailant who sleeps with porn stars while his wife is home tending to their infant son. This is the type of hypocrisy Jesus can’t stand.

The fate of the Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the “cross.”... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only—it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: “Who was it? what was it?”—The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible question, “Why just in this way?”—this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death? who was his natural enemy?”—this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one’s self in revolt against the established order, and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment—a plain indication of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the most public manner.... But his disciples were very far from forgiving his death—though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared to offer themselves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death.... On the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge, that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death: “recompense” and “judgment” became necessary (—yet what could be less evangelical than “recompense,” “punishment,” and “sitting in judgment”!). Once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was rivetted upon an historical moment: the “kingdom of God” is to come, with judgment upon his enemies.... But in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the “kingdom of God” as a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation, the fulfilment, the realization of this “kingdom of God.” It was only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the character of the Master—he was thereby turned into a Pharisee and theologian himself!

Zahnd sees a reckless abdication of duty on the part of the people in charge. They are, as Jesus said of the Pharisees, blind guides, leading their followers to fall into a pit.

No, Zahnd is baffled by the so-called shepherds. Scripture says God demands more from these Christian leaders. And yet, whether it’s Strang platforming the MyPillow lunatic, or Liberty University’s leadership trading evangelism for electioneering, or the pastor down the road in St. Louis, a onetime friend who now leads his Sunday services with a fifteen-minute political segment called “Ron’s Rants,” Zahnd sees a reckless abdication of duty on the part of the people in charge. They are, as Jesus said of the Pharisees, blind guides, leading their followers to fall into a pit. “You

Jesus possessed a uniquely pessimistic view of human nature. Having taken on flesh to redeem a fallen mankind, He saw how people continually tried to justify themselves rather than repenting and seeking renewal in God's grace. He especially saw this among religious people. There is a reason why Jesus is harder on the Pharisees than He is on the unbelieving masses. There is a reason why Paul demands we rebuke sinful church leaders "before everyone, so that the others may take warning." Throughout scripture, God demands a greater accountability from those in positions of spiritual influence.

If you are not drawing fire from both Pharisees and Sadducees, you are probably saying something other than what Jesus said. And if your message is not drawing both tax collectors (Roman collaborators) and zealots (anti-Roman insurrectionists) to repentance, you are probably speaking with a different voice than does he. Jesus wasn’t inconsistent. He saw the Roman Empire, despite all its pretensions to preeminence both in its own mind and in the mind of its opponents, as a temporary obstacle, not the defining point of his agenda. We stand and we speak, with reconciliation in view. We see, therefore, even our most passionate critic not as an argument to be vaporized but as a neighbor to be evangelized. This doesn’t mean that we back down one iota from the truth. But we proclaim the whole gospel of truth and grace, never backing down from either. That means taking seriously the arguments of our opponents, not merely caricatures of those arguments.

Pharisees were the upstanding “conservative evangelical pastors” of their day, strongly convinced of the inerrancy of Scripture and its sufficiency for guidance in every area of life, if only it could be properly interpreted.

The problem is not isolated to Southern Baptist churches; it is rampant. Unbalanced power in the church—caused by strict gender roles and a dearth of women leaders—is widespread and firmly rooted in most evangelical churches. The unsettling irony of complementarians favoring a male-dominated structure for church and society is that Jesus worked against such a structure during his ministry. In the story of the woman who crashed the Pharisee’s dinner party to anoint Jesus, Luke highlights how Jesus reverses the positions of the powerful, religious man and the shamed, sinful woman. He lifts up the faith and worth of the woman and demotes the leader from his position of honor and power. This, of course, was not the only time Jesus set men and women on equal footing. When he delayed a healing request from Jairus to speak and restore dignity to the bleeding woman of faith (Mark 5, Matt 9, Luke 8), Jesus gave a religious, male leader and a poor, female outcast equal attention in the kingdom (and equal access to health care). When he commended Mary as a disciple/rabbi in training (Luke 10), Jesus opened religious education and leadership to women. When he revealed his messianic identity first to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4, a story we will study later), Jesus confirmed that women have equal access to the truth. When he entrusted the message of the resurrection to Mary Magdalene (John 20), Jesus demonstrated that the gospel message of the kingdom should be preached by women and men. In these and many other teaching moments, Jesus dismantles the idea that men should have the sole claim to authority and leadership in society.

I never want to hear any evangelical ever again taking the moral high ground for anything. They support Trump to the hilt—according to polls, somewhere in the 90% range. Get that? The group of Americans who profess to be holier than everybody else because of the Pharisee-like over-religiosity backs the most immoral troglodyte in politics.

The Pharisees with whom Jesus was contending in Matthew 23 were the ultimate examples of those who recruited people to a religious system and not to God. We already know, from Matthew 23:1–12, that they were not looking to lighten the load of distressed and downcast people. They were looking for people on whom they could lay a load of religious performance. The truth is they were not evangelizing, they were recruiting. They were not seeking to liberate the lost, they were seeking to validate themselves.