Matthew 23:27-28 (Hypocrisy)
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness" (Matthew 23:27-28).
Matthew 23:27-28 is a mirror image of the verses that precede it: Matthew 23:25-26. Here, Jesus once again drives home the point of our preoccupation with dressing up the public exterior of our lives only to self-protect the inner sins and iniquity that has taken residence in our hearts.
The question I have struggled with for the past 3 weeks though is what greater point Jesus is making. 2 Timothy 3:16 states that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” so there must be a finer point to Christ's rebuke of the scribes and Pharisees in comparison to verses 25-26.
It is quite poignant that Jesus uses the example of a whitewashed tomb (symbolizing death) to describe the fallen state of man in this passage "for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23). We cannot understand the magnitude of our sin until we balance the truth of God's wrath with the gracious and merciful gift of His love.
Jesus Christ is the bridge that allows man to exist in both states of God's being simultaneously, but that is not an opportunity to indulge in sin and hypocrisy. On the contrary, one does not want to fall into the trap of being outwardly beautiful as a whitewashed tomb glistening in the sun.
The reality is that underneath the external mask of adornment is a rotten and lifeless existence that feeds upon the greatest sin of mankind: SELF. Left untreated, it develops into a terminal, SPIRITUAL cancer.
Love of self simply results in a slow and agonizing death that leaves one numb over time to the convicting presence of the Holy Spirit. Left untreated, this wilderness attitude can drive us further into self-righteousness and inevitably, spiritual death.
2 Timothy 3:2-5 is a perfect example of the Bible's warning on how a heart can become consumed with sin'.
"For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power."
Now this passage was written as a warning of godliness in the last days, but I believe we are living in the last days (a point my wife firmly has conveyed to me that I agree with). How do I know? I need not look any further than my own reflection in the mirror.
D.A Carson provides a profound understanding in The Expositor's Bible Commentary concerning Matthew 23:27-28.
“In the context of Matthew 23, the point Jesus is making is not that the scribes and Pharisees were deliberate and self-conscious hypocrites, but that in their scrupulous regulations they appeared magnificently virtuous but were actually contaminating the people. ”
This statement is incredibly convicting to me on many levels due to the sins in my life that over the years have hardened my heart so as not to face the consequences of my actions. More importantly, as I reflect back upon the enormity of my conscious and subconscious decisions to sin and avoid punishment, I realize that in my self-protection I made it appear publicly that I indeed was virtuous and righteous.
My actions, while clean on the outside, were masking a love of self that when exposed to the light of day left a destructive path on those I love the most. Therefore, I shamefully fulfilled in every sense the point Carson interprets upon in Matthew 23:27-28.
I did not intentionally nor deliberately set out to be a hypocrite, but through my self-protecting actions I both knowingly and unknowingly embraced that identity and contaminated those around me, resembling dead man's bones rather than the righteousness of Jesus Christ and proclaiming myself in retrospect as the greatest of hypocrites without fully understanding my fallen state of self.
If I am being completely transparent, I believe I have fallen prey to in various degrees every sin Timothy lists in his letter, some to the point of near death. I confess that I am a man that in the deepest part of my heart has lived for himself for decades, genuinely desiring to be a man of righteousness, but unwilling to relinquish all control of my life to Christ.
Through recent counseling on this issue, though, I have had to come to grips that this is the most profound and convicting truth of my life, that I am not completely entrusting my heart to Christ which consequently only allows God limited access to transform me from the inside out. No doubt God has made His presence known in my life and used me as an instrument to accomplish Him will, but as it relates to the ministry he wishes to do in my life, I have self-protected for too long.
Thankfully though, by God's abundant grace and mercy I found myself at a spiritual marker crossroads five weeks ago that He ordained which allowed me the opportunity to begin the processing of dying to self by choosing to live in the light of truth through confession of past sins rather than basking in the pit of darkness and essentially living under Satan's influence and lies.
The moment arrived for me to apply the truth of Joshua 24:15, "choose this day whom you will serve," and I chose to serve Jesus Christ and embrace redemption through the blood of the lamb who was slain for my sins.
The beauty of redemption is that through genuine repentance, God can restore the years the locust has eaten (Joel 2:25). For as 1 Peter 2:24 states, "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed."
Regardless of how deep I have fallen into the pit of self, God is faithful and has used grievous sins in my life to expose hypocrisy in order to bring me to an understanding of my sinful state and wisdom for how to create a new life in Jesus Christ.
Therefore, I cannot ask Him to remove the thorns in my flesh (2 Corinthians 12:7) for they are the greatest reminders of my need for dependency on Him that will keep me victoriously faithful to Him in the midst of future trials and temptations.
Consequently, the application I have found to Christ's warning in Matthew 23:27-28 is written by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans.
"For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living" (Romans 14:7-9).
What an amazing truth for a follower of Jesus Christ! The real question is whether we will embrace that truth to the extent that it drives us to transparency, confession of sins, repentance, and restoration in righteousness.
For me, I can attest that embracing this process and living in transparency through confession of sins and repentance is excruciatingly difficult to endure in the moment (based on consequences of sin), but the rewards far outweigh the momentary pain for this lifetime is a grain of sand compared to enormity of eternity.
Jesus said, "I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness" (John 12:46). If we believe that truth, we are assured that Christ will receive us freely and break us from the whitewashed tomb addiction that so many of us have progressively fallen into over time. And that in and of itself is reason to shout from the mountaintops "that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5).
I praise God for that truth in my life now!
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on January 12, 2010 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
