Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight I want to talk about how obedience can become Phariseeism. Several years ago, I delivered a recorded message that was entitled " Obedience Is Not Legalism, " in which I explained that obeying the commandments of Jesus Christ is not legalism. In fact, I think people accuse obedient Christians as being " legalistic ", mainly as a way to cover up their own disobedience. After all, Jesus told us, " If you love me, keep my commandments.
" And again, if you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. Those passages are in John chapters 14 and 15. So if we truly love Jesus, we are going to keep and honor His commandments. But tonight I want to look at obedience from another angle. One of the ironies of Christianity is that in trying to do the very thing that Christ wants us to do, that is to be obedient, we can actually end up doing the very thing that alienates us the most from Christ, and that is to become Pharisees.
And often this happens without our even realizing it. Let's start off by talking for a moment about the narrow way. Jesus told us, this is in Matthew 7:13 and 14, " Enter by the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. " Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life. And there are few who find it.
Now I've seen representations made by artists of the narrow way that show it as a narrow path running alongside a mountain. And on one side of it, there's this large ditch or chasm. So to minimize the risk of slipping off into that chasm, the Christian travelers on this narrow way would naturally want to get as far away from that edge as they could, walking along the mountain itself. Well tonight I'm going to propose that that really isn't what the narrow way is like at all.
I think the narrow way is more like a path with ditches or chasms on both sides of it. On the one side is the chasm of worldliness, of materialism and carnality. The one that's generally depicted in these various artist representations. Let's refer to that as chasm number one. Now the slope that leads into this chasm is quite slippery. If you get too close to the edge, you're very likely to slide right down into it. Now, on the other side of the narrow way isn't a mountain, but rather another chasm.
And this is a chasm of self-righteousness and Phariseeism. And I'm going to call that chasm number two. What so many spiritually minded Christians don't realize is that the slope that leads into this chasm, into chasm number two, is just as slippery as the slope on the other side. If you get too close to this edge, you're also likely to slide right down into it. So if a person moves as far away from chasm number 1 as he can, he's very likely to fall into chasm number 2.
So where you want to be is right in the middle of the narrow way, not on either edge of it. Let me give you an illustration of how this works. I think we all know how much so many Muslims in the Middle East really detest the United States, and in fact, the West in general. Now let's imagine that you're a Muslim living in Arabia, and you detest the West so much and what it stands for, that you want to get as far away from it as you possibly can. So you decide that you're going to just head out and start going east.
You're going to go across over into Iraq and Iran and China and just keep going east and east into Japan and so on to get as far away as you can from the west. Now, if you keep heading in that direction, where are you going to end up? Well, as you know, you're going to end up right in the west. If you keep traveling east, keep going in a straight line east, you're going to end up eventually being in the west. Let me give you a similar illustration. Do you know what the westernmost state is of the 50 United States?
Well, the answer is Alaska. Because of where the Aleutian Islands are, it's the westernmost point of the United States. Now let me ask you another question. What is the easternmost state of the United States? Well I would have guessed Maine or something like that, but you know the answer is also Alaska. It's the most western state and it's also the most eastern state. And the reason is because east and west are measured by the 180th meridian, which goes right across the Aleutian Islands.
So once you cross the 180th Meridian, you're now in the east. You're no longer in the west. If you could picture this, let's say you're a person and you were standing right on the 180th meridian. Now theoretically, that's not possible because I assume it has no width to it. But let's say you're standing right on the line, facing north. If you step even one step to the right, then you're going to be in the western hemisphere. And if you step one step to the left, you're going to be in the eastern hemisphere.
Well, it's the same way with the narrow road. If you move very far in either direction, you're no longer on the narrow way. Now, more than likely, you're going to think you're still on the narrow way. After all, there are thousands and thousands of denominations and independent churches throughout the world today. And every single one of them thinks that it's on the narrow way. Now in the minds of some of these churches, this narrow way is extremely broad, but they feel quite certain that they're on that way.
I mean, after all, I've never seen a church yet that advertises itself as being part of the broad way that leads to destruction. Have you? And yet, my guess is that the majority of the persons in these various churches have long ago slid into either chasm number one or chasm number two. But they just keep chugging along as though they're still on the narrow way.
Now since I've already addressed the dangers and issues of chasm number one, of materialism and worldliness and carnality, so often in my books and in my previous recordings, tonight I'm going to be talking only about chasm number two and how we can stay out of it. And again, I'm focusing on it not because I'm minimizing chasm number one, but as I said, I've already addressed that so many times before. To understand the dangers of Phariseeism, I think it's important that we talk about how the Pharisees got started.
To begin with, you need to realize that the Pharisees did not start off as the bad guys. In fact, as a student of history, in looking at their beginnings, I would have probably picked them as the ones that God would have been most pleased with. That's because the Pharisees started out as a reform movement in Judaism during the centuries after Alexander the Great. During the period of the Greek rule over Judah, many Jews had forsaken the law and taken up pagan Greek customs.
The Pharisees realized that God had punished Israel so many times in the past for forsaking His laws. So they worked to strengthen the synagogue system whereby people would hear the law read every Sabbath, and they admonished the people to obey the Mosaic Law. However, the problem was that many applications of the commandments of the law are not spelled out in detail in the Scriptures. So a Jew could not always be certain whether or not he was violating the law.
Realizing this problem, the basic approach of the Pharisees was, " Let's build a hedge around the law. " They said, " Let's draw a line on the safe side of things and define what is a violation of the law and what isn't. " And we'll exhort the people to observe this hedge that we've put around the law. That way, even if they violate our man-made hedge, hopefully they won't have violated the actual law itself. This hedge would be a safeguard for the people. Let me give you an example.
Exodus 35:2 says that whoever does any work on the Sabbath will be put to death. That's a serious thing. Yet the passage in Exodus gives only one application of what constitutes work, and that is kindling of fire on the Sabbath. Now, there are other applications of that commandment not to work on the Sabbath that I think are so natural that probably everyone would say, " Yeah, that constitutes work. " For example, if you're out plowing your field on the Sabbath or harvesting your crops.
But then there's hundreds of gray areas. What about taking a walk on the Sabbath? Is that work? Writing a letter to someone? Tending to an injured person? What about preparing food? Washing dishes? Taking a bath? Can you see how many questions would arise and nowhere in the law does it say this is work or this isn't work? Well the Pharisees felt we better define what is work and what isn't.
And we'll define it again on the safe side of things so that if people will recognize and follow this hedge that we've put around the law, then certainly they will not have violated the Sabbath. Well their applications started off fairly small, but over the years they kept growing and growing until by the time of Jesus they had defined what work means in the most minute detail.
For example, they said if a beggar comes around begging on the Sabbath, if he sticks his begging bowl in through your window or your open door asking for food and you put food in that bowl, well as long as you haven't left your house, you haven't done any work. But the beggar is guilty of violating the Sabbath. He's done work.
On the other hand, if he stands outside your house and begs for food and holds his bowl outside your house and you stick your hand out your window to put food in his bowl or out your doorway, then you're guilty of violating the Sabbath. What about throwing something? Well, they said if you throw it over four cubits, then you've worked. If it's less than four cubits, then no, you haven't violated the Sabbath. Exodus said you're not to kindle a fire on the Sabbath. What about putting out a fire?
Well the Pharisees said no, if you're putting out a lamp, that's work. What about when it's time to go to bed on the Sabbath? You get in your straw mattress and it's all lumpy with the straw having moved around, etc. Can you smooth it out on the Sabbath? They said no, that's work. You should have done that before the Sabbath started. What about filing your fingernails? That's work. What about if a flea bites you? Can you kill it? Though it's the Sabbath? I said no, that's work if you kill the flea.
What if you fall down and break your leg? Well, if someone sets your bone on the Sabbath, they violated the Sabbath. And the Pharisees didn't do this just with the Sabbath commandment, with all of the commandments of the Old Testament. And so pretty soon there was a huge amount of extra biblical tradition of what all of these laws that God had given actually meant. And after the time of Christ, this was collected into a written volume called the Mishna. I've got a copy of that.
And then later, as more and more traditions were added to that, you eventually came up with what's known as the Talmud. And these defined about every issue in life that you could think of telling you what was okay to do and what wasn't. As I've said, the Pharisees had started out as the good guys, and that's how they still saw themselves in the first century.
So understandably, they felt quite certain that when the Messiah appeared, he would praise them for what they had done to preserve the law and to keep the people in obedience to it. They just knew that He would give them positions of responsibility in His kingdom. They would be His right-hand man. But as we all know, that's not what happened. In fact, it was just the opposite. Instead of praising them, when the Messiah did come, he condemned them in the harshest language he could.
In fact, Jesus came down harder on the Pharisees than He did anyone else. Now at this point, when I'm using the term Pharisees, I'm including the scribes and Sadducees along with them. Rather than inviting the Pharisees into His kingdom, He told them that the tax collectors and the prostitutes would enter the Kingdom of God ahead of them. So let's look at some of the reasons why Jesus condemned them so strongly. The scriptures spell out these reasons, which I've summarized into six particular categories.
Referring back to my illustration about the narrow way in the two chasms, two of these things that Jesus condemned them for fall into chasm number one. That's the chasm of worldliness, carnality, materialism, etc. The other four things come under chasm number two. That's the chasm of self-righteousness in what has become known as Phariseeism. Let me briefly describe the two chasm number one condemnations.
Jesus had once told the people, " Do what the Pharisees say, but don't do what they do, because they say but they don't do. " In other words, they're hypocrites. Now a hypocrite might appear as a righteous person and think that he is, but really, they're in the broad way of destruction. They're there in chasm number one along with the prostitutes and everyone else, except it's harder to reform them because they think they're on the narrow way. So one of these category number one sins was their hypocrisy.
The second one, Jesus said that they were money lovers, that they devoured widow's houses. Materialistic. Now let's look at the four chasm number two issues. First, Jesus condemned them because they were more concerned about the minutiae of the law than they were about the most important aspects of it, such as love and mercy. Generally speaking, they had no real love for the people or even concern for their welfare.
Their movement had started off out of concern for the people, but somewhere through the years it had lost its way. Number two, they were more concerned about the externals than they were about the inner person. Number three, by Jesus ' day, they had begun to treat their rules and their traditions, these things that made up this hedge, as though they were actually commandments of God, rather than simply man-made applications. And four, sometimes their teachings and their rules actually negated God's commandments.
As I've mentioned before, tonight we're going to be focusing only on the Chasm 2 issues. Now, if you fall short on any of the first two areas, being a hypocrite or a money lover, you're just as guilty of being a Pharisee. So even though I'm not going to be addressing those issues this evening, they're just as serious as the matters that I will be addressing. Now, my observation has been that the areas where I personally tend to be most blind are the chasm number two sins.
And I think that's true of many of my readers and listeners as well, and of the Christians in the circles where we fellowship. The reason is that we take very seriously the commandments of Jesus and His apostles, and with God's empowerment, we do try to live by them. And I firmly believe that this is what Jesus wants and expects of us. We're all aware of the dangers of worldliness and carnality. The problem is we tend to ignore the dangers of self-righteousness and Phariseeism.
Now I can almost guarantee you that there are persons listening to this message right now who are starting to feel uncomfortable. In fact, you yourself might be thinking, I think I'll just shut David Bercot up before he goes on any further and turn off your CD player or whatever. But please don't do that. Because one of the surest signs that we've already slipped into Phariseeism is when we feel uncomfortable when a person brings up the subject. Or even worse, when we actually start defending the Pharisees.
Or when we deny that Jesus condemned some of the things that He specifically did condemn about the Pharisees. One of the games that often we play is that we want to limit the sins of the Pharisees to those chasm number one sins. Oh, well they were hypocrites, that was their problem. It wasn't what they taught, is that they weren't doing the things they taught. And that was one of the problems is that they were hypocrites. But it wasn't their only problem. We might say, oh, they were money lovers.
See, that was the real issue. Was there materialism grasping for money? And that was a sin, and Jesus denounced them for that. But they were also guilty of these other matters that we're going to be talking about tonight. Let's first talk about this whole hedge approach to spirituality. As we've already discussed, this was the methodology of the Pharisees. God didn't specifically define many terms in His commandments, for example, what constituted working on the Sabbath.
And so the Pharisees made specific applications of that command, which seemed like a very logical thing to do. And this has been the approach of different Christian groups through the ages as well. It was the approach of the Anabaptists in the 16th century. Of most of the reformed or Calvinistic groups, like the Puritans, they made applications of so many of the biblical commandments. And I think beyond any doubt, the hedge approach does produce some genuine results.
As I've mentioned in many of my other writings and recordings, the Anabaptists have successfully held on to many original Christian teachings like modesty of dress, or the prayer veil, or the permanence of marriage, long after conventional churches have all dropped them. And one of the reasons why they've been able to successfully do this is this hedge approach by defining exactly what various commandments in the New Testament mean.
By making a congregation wide or a conference-wide application of a commandment or of a principle in the New Testament. But now it does concern me that the Anabaptists, which is where I fellowship, and other radical Christian groups, often adopt this approach and other radical Christian fellowships that adopt this approach, they treat it like it's the normal Christian way of doing things. Well, of course the church has to define all of these areas.
We act as if there's no danger involved by taking this hedge approach to things. Makes me think of something I did when I was 18 that could have had fatal consequences. Fortunately it didn't. I had been changing the oil on my car and ended up dripping oil on my pants. Now I was very poor. I had no money to take my jeans to the dry cleaners or someone who could get the oil off of them. And I didn't have extra pants that I could just delegate them to be work pants or something.
So I remember I asked a sister in our congregation and she said, " Oh, gasoline will take the oil off. Just soak them in gasoline. " And in fact, that is correct. It's not even a bad idea. Now, she had in mind that I would be doing this outside, but she never said anything about that. And in fact, that's what I did. I bought a plastic bucket and filled it with gasoline, and then put the pants in them, and placed the bucket on the porch of the little apartment I was living in.
But I was fixing to leave and be gone for the day, and I thought, I don't know if I should leave this outside. Maybe I should bring it inside so someone doesn't come and steal my pants or something like that. Now I certainly wasn't blessed with the most common sense when I was 18, but I did know that there was the danger of fire if you bring gasoline inside of a building. So I first made sure there were no lights of any kind in the apartment. It was in September, so I didn't have the heater going yet.
I didn't have a stove in there. I just had an electric hot plate. I searched around everywhere. There was no hot water heater inside the apartment. I thought, okay, this is safe. I brought the bucket in and I put it in my shower stall. And then I went to the bathroom sink and was washing the gasoline off my hands. And the next thing I knew, I heard this and I turned and look and the whole shower stall was on fire.
It had a plastic shower curtain that had immediately caught on fire from the gasoline and it was burning and it looked like the whole place was going to go up in flames. Well I quickly got out of the bathroom and then I went and knocked on my landlord's door and told him my apartment was on fire. Well, as it turned out, since it was in the shower stall, which was a metal shower stall, the flames were contained within there.
All it ended up doing was smoking up the apartment with black smoke and it melted the metal on the shower stall where it was bent and had to get a new shower stall. Well, the landlord's insurance paid for everything. It all had a happy ending. But I was so curious, how did it catch on fire? I asked him, I looked everywhere to make sure there were no pilot lights or any other kind of flame in the apartment. He said, oh, the refrigerator in there is a gas refrigerator.
Now I had never in my life heard of such a thing as a refrigerator that ran on natural gas, so that had never even crossed my mind. So the moral of the story isn't, oh, you should never wash your pants with gasoline, because maybe that is the cheapest and most effective way to get oil off of them. But if you do so, make sure you're doing it outside in a well-ventilated area, because it is inherently dangerous.
And theoretically, you could bring it inside a building, but the danger is so great, even if you tried to make sure there are no flames there, I don't think it would ever be worth the risk. Well the hedge approach works the same way. It is an effective way to keep us from disobeying so many of the commandments of the New Testament. If our church just spells it out, this is what this means, this is what this means, you can't do this, et cetera, that's going to act as a protective hedge.
But it's just like washing your pants with gasoline. It is inherently dangerous. And we need to learn from what happened to the Pharisees. Because like I say, in the end, they were the people who got condemned the most. The very ones who were trying to uphold God's law got condemned the most by God's own Son when He came. Now let's take a look at some of these specific things, some of these chasm number 2 things that Jesus condemned the Pharisees for.
The first one I had listed previously was that they were more concerned about the minutiae of the law than they were about the most important aspects of it, which were love and mercy, things like that. Jesus told them this is Matthew 23:23 and 24. " Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and yet have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done without leaving the others undone.
Blind guides who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. So Jesus didn't say it was wrong that they were following these minutiae of things, tithing their mint and cumin and things like that. He didn't say you don't need to do that. That's what they wanted to do fine and good. But that wasn't what the law was all about. They missed the whole importance of it.
They were worrying about straining out a gnat, making sure they tithe this little bit of mint or something from their garden, making sure they didn't do work on the Sabbath by writing a letter to somebody or sticking their hand out of the door to give a beggar some food. They swallowed a camel. They ended up being unloving, judgmental, awful people that God couldn't stand. Well, what about us today? We who belong to churches of what I call radical discipleship. Does that in any way describe us as well?
Now, as I've mentioned, I personally attend an Anabaptist Church because the Anabaptists are one of the few Christian groups around today who still hold to the historical teachings on non-resistance, on the permanence of marriage, on oaths, on modest dress, on the head covering, and so many other commandments like that in the New Testament.
But I can't help that those of us who are an Anabaptist or what are sometimes called remnant circles, we do tend to place too much emphasis on the less weighty parts of New Testament teachings. Jesus made it clear that not all commandments are on an equal plane. Some are more important than others. He didn't say that in the sense of you can ignore the others. He was saying it in the sense, make sure you're doing the important ones first. And then it's wonderful if you're doing the small ones as well.
But if you're doing the small ones and stumbling over the big ones, well you are indeed foolish. You're straining out gnats and swallowing camels. Now what did Jesus tell us the two greatest commandments were? I think we all know it. It's loving God our Father with our whole heart, mind, and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourself. Those are the two great commandments. If you're not doing those two things, everything else means nothing. It's a total waste of time.
Now Jesus did say, " If you love me, you will keep my commandments. " So keeping these other commandments are part of loving God. But you can keep those commandments and have no love for God whatsoever. Just like the Pharisees kept so much of the Mosaic Law, but had no love for God, or for other people. Or again, when Jesus told us about how He was going to separate the sheep from the goats on the last day, what was his criteria?
Well, it was, did we feed the poor, clothe them, visit the sick and the ones in prison? Things like that. Things that would fall under the category of loving your neighbor. But now when we look at our churches, that is churches of radical discipleship, what do most of our standards concern? Do we have standards that stipulate what we must do to help the poor, to help our neighbor, how many times a week we should be visiting the sick, or how many times a month, whatever it might be?
No, our standards never deal with those sort of things. So many of them deal with the commandments that are certainly not at the top of the list. For example, the head covering. And again, I've written on the subject. I've made recorded messages on the subject of the prayer veil. I believe in it very strongly. My wife and daughter wear one. But it is not one of the chief commandments of the New Testament.
Jesus Himself never even talked about it, which doesn't make it any less a commandment, but it's not one of the things that was closest to his heart. Or again, we have lots of standards that come from 1 Peter 3:1, where the apostle says, " Do not let your adornment be outward, arranging the hair, wearing gold, or putting on apparel. " And those are all very genuine commandments that today most churches totally ignore, and I'm happy to be in a fellowship that pays attention to that commandment.
But so many of our standards deal with applications of that one verse in the Scriptures, as though that was one of the chief things of Christianity. In fact, we Anabaptists often refer to ourselves as the plain people, referring to this commandment. But no one referred to the early Christians as the plain people. They were noted for their love for one another, not primarily for the fact that they dressed modestly and they didn't wear makeup, things like that, which they didn't do.
But that was not the big emphasis of the church, it was just one of those smaller commandments that they were obedient to in addition to the great ones. But when we look at the great ones, do we Anabaptists pray more than other Bible-believing Christians? I don't think so. Do we witness more? For many of us, the answer is we witness far, far less than other churches. Do we reach out to our neighbors more? Some Anabaptists definitely reach out to their neighbors. Some have no contact with them at all.
Do we read God's Word more? No, I don't think we stand out in that regard. Do we do more for the poor? I think I could argue that most Anabaptists do as much as anybody else, but we don't do more. We don't stand out in that regard. The world doesn't look at us as, " Oh, those are the people who really, really help the poor. " No, they look at us and say, " Oh, those are the people who wear head coverings and dress differently and stuff like that.
" Okay, the second thing that Jesus condemned the Pharisees for was that they were more concerned about the externals than they were about the inner man. Let's look at Matthew 23:25 and 26. There Jesus said, " Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence. " Blind Pharisee first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish that the outside of them may be clean also. Now, does that describe us at all?
Well, honestly, I don't think that most Anabaptists or most remnant people are full of extortion and self-indulgence inside, at least not the ones that I know and fellowship with. On the other hand, most of our standards or rules do focus almost exclusively on outward things. They deal with our dress, our method of grooming, our type of transportation, the color of our vehicles, the color of our clothes, various mundane aspects of life. Very few of our standards relate to the inner man.
In fact, offhand, I can't think of any rules or standards in any of the churches I've been around that pertain to the inner man. Now that in and of itself doesn't make us Pharisees, but it does have a real effect on us. It does cause us to start looking at people from primarily an external perspective. We look at others and we think we can size them up spiritually, primarily by how they look outwardly. And so often that's the first thing that we notice about people if they leave our churches.
Oh, they look different on the outside. That's what I usually hear about someone who's left what's called the plain circles or Anabaptist circles. " Oh, well now they're wearing a skirt and a blouse instead of a cape dress. " Or, " Oh, I saw so-and-so, she's no longer wearing a head covering. " Now I certainly believe in the head covering and I believe in modest dress, but those are not among the greatest commandments. And you can be dressed modestly without wearing a cape dress.
But see, can we say about that person? You know, John just doesn't have the love and the mercy that he used to have. So usually that's not the issue, that's not what we're bringing up about them. In fact, it might well be that that person actually has more love for their fellow man than they used to when they were fellowshipping in our circles. Now let's look at the third thing that Jesus condemned the Pharisees for, and that was they began to think of their rules as though they were actual commandments of God.
Matthew chapter 15, the first two verses we read, " Then the scribes and Pharisees who were from Jerusalem came to Jesus saying, " Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread. " Now that's interesting. There's nothing in the mosaic law about having to wash your hands before you eat. But notice how they've elevated their tradition as though it were breaking a commandment. Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders?
In the mind of the scribes and Pharisees, this was just like transgressing one of the commandments of the Mosaic Law. Well, are we any different? I'm not sure. Our standards typically define what is modest, what is worldly, and to a large degree, what is Christian? And there's a definite tendency among us to confuse our standards with actual commandments of God.
Now in this message, I'm not either endorsing or condemning extra biblical standards, and I realize it's going to sound like I'm saying, well, we shouldn't have these things. What I'm condemning, more importantly, what Christ condemns is equating our man-made rules with God's commandments. If we're going to have extra biblical standards, then it's essential that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, what does the Bible actually say? What does it actually forbid? What is the actual commandment?
And what is the application that we have made? And be able to recognize that these are two entirely different things. Our application may be wrong, it may not be what God requires. I remember making a comment to an Anabaptist brother once and I said something about the extra biblical standards that we Anabaptists have. I wasn't even saying it in a negative sense. I was just talking about it. And he quickly responded, " Well, we wouldn't see them as extra biblical. " And that really, really scared me to hear that.
And what I've discovered is that Anabaptists have come up with a human rationalization of why it's alright to just make a proliferation of extra biblical rules. In fact, why it's the biblical thing to do. And that rationalization is the council that's described in Acts 15, sometimes known as the Jerusalem Council. It was the purpose of that council in Jerusalem to make new rules, new standards, to make further applications of existing laws or principles that are in Scripture? Not in the least.
The whole issue was, do Gentiles have to come under these laws that are already existing? And notice what the decision was that the apostles and others came to. Acts 15 verses 28 and 29, they wrote, " For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things. " And then they listed four things that you abstained from things offered to idols. Number two, from blood, number three, from things strangled, and finally, from sexual immorality. So think about that.
Out of the myriads of laws that God had given from the time of Adam up to the close of the Old Testament, the apostles threw out everything except just four commandments. And two of those are essentially identical, so we could say just three commandments. And all three of those predated the law of Moses. All three of them predated Abraham. And they had always been binding on all of mankind. The first one, keep yourselves free from idolatry or things sacrificed to idols. Well this begins with Genesis 1:1.
We learn about the true God who created not only the heavens and earth, but man himself. He didn't set up idolatry as the means to communicate to him for Adam and Eve, or for any of his faithful people like Enoch or Noah. Idolatry was a new thing that had come in, totally foreign, to the pure religion that God had established. Now as I said, the number two and three items are basically the same things that we keep free from blood and from things strangled.
This goes directly back to Genesis 3, verses 3 and 4, a law given to Noah from whom all of us have descended. God had now for the first time allowed humans to eat animals. Up to then all we were allowed to eat were vegetables. But with this opening up of things to allow us to eat meat, God gave a universal commandment in it. He said, " Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs. But you shall not eat flesh with its life. That is its blood.
So that was a commandment that went to every nation on earth because every nation on earth has descended from Noah. It was repeated in the Mosaic Law, but it was there long before the Mosaic Law. And why the Apostles mention things strangled is that when you strangle an animal, you haven't properly bled it, and so when you eat the meat, you're going to be eating the blood along with it.
And then the third item, or the fourth, if you don't group two and three together, was to keep free from sexual immorality, or as I think the King James says, from fornication. Again, this goes right back to the beginning in the Garden of Eden, when marriage was instituted, and it states that the two would become one flesh, the husband and wife, not people who aren't married to one another. So here the apostles stripped away really everything in the law, except for a few things that had predated the law.
So to say that that is a precedent that a church can go and say, " We ' re going to make a new rule. " It's not even in the Bible. Maybe there's a principle there that we are applying. This is binding on the people in either our local church or in our conference of churches, and we have the authority given there in Acts 15. Well, I'm sorry, you do not have the authority. You're doing the opposite of what they did. They said we don't want to add any greater burden.
And like I said, they stripped it down to just some bare essentials, all of which were given to all mankind before the Mosaic Law had ever been around. So we really don't have any New Testament precedent for our approach of making what are called rules or standards. Now I can honestly say that this approach that we have used has borne some very good fruit. In fact, today, about the only churches who obey the commandments that are there in the Scriptures are the ones who have extra biblical standards and rules.
It hasn't always been that way. The New Testament church did not have extra biblical standards and rules, anything other than what the apostles had given them. Now what I would like to encourage you to do is just go through a typical list of standards or rules that we Anabaptist churches have. Maybe look at the list your church has or list that other ones have. I have lists from a number of churches. And ask yourself, how many of these are actually specific commandments of God?
I think you'll find most of them actually are not commandments of God. They might be reasonable applications of commandments or principles that are in the New Testament. But another genuine Christian who truly loves God and His fellow man might make a different application. But if we can't do that, if we think that this list of standards are actually Bible commandments, then we indeed are in dire trouble because we have slid off the narrow road and we're right there in the chasm along with the Pharisees.
And you know what I would really like to do in this message, but I'm not. And that would be to just go down list after list and just point out the things that are not New Testament commandments. I'm going to give just a few examples. Some of the things that should be so obvious we should easily be able to see. No, these are not New Testament commandments. One, that's very common in our circles and other circles that aren't even connected with the Anabaptist, not allowed to have musical instruments.
Now I can definitely demonstrate that the early Christians did not use musical instruments in their church service. But I can't even begin to come up with a principle or a commandment in the New Testament that forbids that. But let's say it is a good idea to follow the precedents that were set by the early Christians. But now what about having a musical instrument at your house, playing a flute, playing the piano, playing a harp?
Well see there I cannot show you that the early church forbid that or that was something you would be put out of the church for. You could not be a Christian, you could not be admitted to communion if you did that. I can quote some early Christian writers who were against them and that's fine. I have no problem if someone says I don't want any of these in my life. But when we start saying, " I'm not gonna have communion with you if you do these things, " then I have a real problem with that. What about another one?
And that is, a woman must wear her hair up in a bun. Now, where do you find that in the Bible? I can't even think of an Old Testament passage, let alone a New Testament commandment. And what's more, you're not going to find anything in the early Christian writings either. There's no commandment there that women wear their hair up in a bun. In fact, it would seem to violate the very thing Paul said in 1 Corinthians 11, when he's talking about the prayer veil, and he uses the analogy of long hair on women.
He says, you know God gave women long hair for a covering. Now if you wear your hair up in a bun, then it's no longer a covering, is it? It might as well be short hair because it doesn't cover your head at all. Now again, there's no New Testament commandment that forbids you to wear it in a bun, so I'm not making a new rule here. But I'm saying to require that, to require something that actually seems to go against a scriptural principle that has no historic foundation. You can look at pictures in the catacombs.
The women's hair there wasn't up in buns. You can see their hair coming down. Some of our churches have a rule you must wear a beard. Some have a rule you must not wear a beard. Some have a rule you must wear a beard, but you cannot have the mustache part of the beard. Now where is any of that in the New Testament? You can go to the Old Testament, and I think every historian would agree that Jewish men all wore beards. I think you can argue from creation that this was the natural thing.
Someone certainly doesn't have to apologize for wearing a beard. I have no problem with the church encouraging it. But again, looking at all of these things, the apostles could have made that as a rule. In the time of Acts 15 when that council was held, Roman men, at least there in Italy, generally did not wear beards. And so this was an issue before them. Are we going to make these Gentiles wear beards like we Jews do?
They would have addressed it then if they wanted to rule on that, and they said, " No, we're not going to add anything on the Gentiles, except things that are absolutely essential. " And they came up with those four things that had been there from early on with the creation of man. And again, in the catacombs, you will find pictures of men with beards, and you'll find pictures of men without beards. What about the plain coat? Nothing in Scripture. I mean, nothing even remotely in Scripture.
If we want to preserve that and say, because this will help us to preserve our Mennonite or Anabaptist heritage, okay, let's look at it from that standpoint, but let's not even pretend that there's anything scriptural that we're dealing with. Let's acknowledge that now we are setting up something to preserve an historic heritage, and then talk about it from that standpoint. Wearing a cape dress, and I've heard all kinds of rationalizations.
Well, the Greek word there actually means this or that, and so a cape dress is the only thing that fits the Greek word. Well that is utter nonsense. The early Christians say nothing about that. And the early pictures we have in the catacombs of women, none of them have anything like a cape dress. They have a dress that's a single covering. It is very, very loose. It is not form-fitting. It is very modest. What about rules like you must wear a black hat or black pants? Drive a car that's black.
Anything like that in the New Testament, any principle? Not even remotely. In fact, in the Bible, black is always used as a symbol of sin. We wash our robes white in the blood of the lamb, not black. The early Christians, several of their writers, encouraged Christians to always wear white. But even there, the church never made such a rule. The apostles never made such a rule, nor did the early church. But many of them encouraged wearing white clothes.
It would only be appropriate, something that symbolized holiness. Wearing black clothes? I mean, the early church would have been scandalized at the thought. And a rule that you must do this or you put out of the church? Well, I could go on and on. I think you can see the point and maybe now you can take your own list and look at that and be able to honestly look at it and say, what is really a commandment of God? I mean, let's acknowledge we are dealing with extra biblical standards.
And then from there let's talk about is it scriptural to do this? Is this an emergency thing that it seems to be the only way to preserve authentic Christianity today? And then go from there. I attend a church that has extra biblical standards like this, and I attend it voluntarily. I don't have to, I'm free to go somewhere else. As I've said, I do see some good fruit that comes from it. But I see good fruit as long as it's a voluntary thing.
As long as we recognize, okay, we're doing something that the New Testament doesn't require, and we're doing it only because of such widespread apostasy in the church. And we should be very supportive of somebody who can live a holy life without having to have these crutches that we use. Instead of looking down upon them as if they're doing something wrong by not having them.
Finally, we come to the fourth and last thing that Jesus condemned the Pharisees for that falls into this Chasm 2 category, and that was that some of their rules and teachings actually negated God's commandments. Right after they jumped on him that His disciples weren't washing their hands before they ate. They said, " Why do they transgress the traditions of the elders? " He answered them, this is Matthew 15 verses 3-6. He said, " Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition?
For God commanded, saying, " Honor your father and your mother, and he who curses father or mother, let him be put to death. " But you say, " Whoever says to his father or mother, whatever profit you might have received from me is a gift of God, then he did not honor his father or mother. Thus you have made the commandment of God of no effect by your tradition.
" Isn't that something a group that started out wanting to make sure that the people of Israel lived by the commandments of God and didn't transgress the law, they ended up coming up with traditions that actually negated God's commandments? What about us? I know most of us would say, well no, our standards don't ever do that. They might expand a law given by God. They might go beyond the minimum that God requires, but they certainly don't invalidate it. Well, I'm not so sure about that.
It's true, usually an individual standard doesn't. But when you put them all together, they have had an effect of invalidating a number of New Testament principles or commandments. One is the Great Commission. Jesus said, " This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come. " He told His disciples what he whispered in their ears, they were to shout from the housetops.
Now there's no specific law that each one of us as a Christian has to be an evangelist. But it's certainly a law upon us as a body, as a church. We're the ones who are entrusted with making sure the good news of the kingdom is preached in all the inhabited earth before the end. But I've noticed that a lot of plain people totally ignore this commission. Now that's not true in the circles where I fellowship.
Most of the churches that I have a lot of interaction with, we have missions in various places in the world, and we have prison ministries going on, things like that. But what I see is that our standards, our extra biblical rules, and the culture that they have created, that have done such a good job of keeping us from some of the sins that so many churches are falling into, like divorce, et cetera. They at the same time have created a barrier that makes it very hard for non-plain people to come in.
And we have an extremely hard time reaching the people in the cities of the world. But the best we can do is try to get them to move out of the city to one of our areas. Our churches nearly always are in rural areas. But that's not the way New Testament Christianity was. In the New Testament, the apostles went first to the large cities. The church was established in the largest city of Judea, Jerusalem, which was a city of considerable size.
The very first place where disciples were called Christians was in Antioch, the third largest city of the Roman Empire. And one of the strongest churches in the New Testament period was the church in Rome. In fact, early Christianity was primarily an urban phenomena. It was true in the days of the apostles, and it was true for the next several centuries after the apostles. In fact, do you know what the word pagan originally meant? It meant a country dweller.
Because it was in the cities where people were first converted to Christianity. And it was the rural areas that were evangelized the last. But we find our churches can't even make it in a city. In fact, most of the people who come to our churches are not people that we convert from an unchurched background, people who never knew anything about Christ, never read the Bible. No, most of our " converts " are simply other Christians who come from non-Anabaptist backgrounds, who've come to a lot of the same convictions.
And yet even there, I would say at least 80%, and it may well be higher, at least 80% of the seekers who come and try to fit into our churches usually aren't able to make it. And I realize the fault is certainly not all ours, that often those people have lots of problems and issues of their own. And yet I think we have to recognize that our standards, our traditions have come close to invalidating an enormously important commandment in the New Testament.
Another commandment that our traditions cause us to transgress is Matthew 7, where Jesus says, " Judge not that you be not judged, for with what judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. " And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or as Paul put it in Romans 14:4, " Who are you to judge another servant? To his own master, he stands or falls.
Indeed, he will be made to stand, for God is able to make him stand. " Our standards create sort of a homogenous kind of Christianity. We all dress alike, we look alike, we do the same things for entertainment, et cetera. And you know pretty soon you get so used to that that you see somebody, they may be a very fine Christian, far ahead of us in the kingdom of God. But they don't dress like we do. Maybe they drive a car we wouldn't drive. Maybe they do things for entertainment that we wouldn't do.
And our conditioned reflex is to look very judgmentally upon them. And I say this from firsthand knowledge. I know how it affects me. You know, your brother and sister, they all look like this, and you see, you know, someone else comes into church who looks totally different, and right away you start looking at them askance. It's just a human reaction. My wife had an experience just here locally.
She was in a store, she saw another woman with a head covering on, which is common here in Pennsylvania, and just so struck up a conversation with this woman who belonged to a conservative Mennonite church. Deborah thinking that, you know, she was going to be able to develop some rapport. We hold to the same basic convictions. Instead, the woman began really rebuking her for wearing a hanging veil instead of a cap type of covering.
See, when we have that kind of judgmental spirit, I mean, even if the woman was right, if that had been the historic practice, it wouldn't have made it any different. That you can't embrace a fellow Christian, you can't even have a simple conversation of encouragement. Instead you have to find out something that's wrong with them. Another commandment of God's that our tradition often makes invalid is that we're not to have divisions among us. Jesus had prayed that we would all be one.
Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 3:1 through 3, " And I brethren could not speak to you as spiritual people, but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with solid food. For until now you are not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able, for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal and behaving like mere men? Well, one of the definite, definite results of our standards is that they've created divisions.
We can't all agree on where we should draw the line on this and on that. And so the Anabaptist people are divided into many, many different sects. And this started out in the very beginning. You know, all the way up to the Reformation, the historic institutional church with all of its sins and shortcomings. It had only four divisions in it. But you know, within 50 years, the Anabaptists had more divisions, and most of these divisions were not over theology.
They were over practice, various standards, various rules, what you allow, what you don't allow. You know the very sad thing is I hear so many Anabaptists today actually justify their divisions. They quote 1 Corinthians 11:17 through 19, where Paul says, " Now, in giving these instructions, I do not praise you since you come together not for the better, but for the worst. For first of all, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and in part I believe it.
" This just continues the same rebuke he had given them earlier in 1 Corinthians. But now imagine this. He says, " For there must also be factions among you that those who are approved may be recognized among you. " So I find that our people take verse 19 there and say, " See, Paul says it's good. Yeah, you need to have divisions so that those who are approved can be recognized. " You mean after calling them carnal and rebuking them for having divisions?
He's now saying, " Oh, well, yeah, despite my rebuke, it's actually good because then those who are approved can be recognized. " Well, if you can do that with Scripture, you can do about anything with Scripture. I mean, to me, there's two things that are obvious. Either he's saying this facetiously, that they think they have to have divisions so that those who are so holy can be recognized.
Or he's saying that the divisions must be there so that the ones who don't take part in division who are the approved ones can be recognized. He's certainly not giving one rebuke and then turning right around in the same sentence and saying, " Oh, it's really okay. " Or we say, " Well, no, we don't have divisions in our body because we make all of these rules, and so when we come together, there's no divisions because we've cut everyone else out.
" You really think that's what Jesus had in mind when He prayed that all of His followers be one? That we make these little cells and we keep everyone else out. And so at least within our little cell, we're one? I don't think so. He said all of us be one, not that every one of our single groups be a separate one by itself apart from everyone else. Well, in conclusion, I hope you can see that the narrow way has two chasms that are equally dangerous.
At the beginning, I purposely called chasm number one as a chasm of carnality and worldliness, lust, materialism, that sort of thing. I hope by now you can recognize that Chasm 2 is actually just as carnal, just as worldly as chasm number one. So I wasn't suggesting that, oh, we don't want to get too far away from worldliness, because we might fall off the road into another chasm. Actually, we do want to get as far away as we can from carnality and worldliness.
And the spot that is the furthest away from that is right in the center of the road. The place that is the furthest from the loose living, the materialism, and immorality of chasm number one, and from the carnal Phariseeism and self-righteousness of chasm number two, both chasms are equally carnal. They both come from the fallen flesh, not from God's Spirit. The Holy Spirit doesn't produce either kind of person. And so to be on the narrow road and to stay on it, we need to be as far away as we can from both.
And I don't know where the perfect balancing spot is. And if our way of staying out of ditch number one is to use this hedge approach of the Pharisees and to make extra biblical standards, then we need to do so with the greatest care and caution. We need to continually be assessing ourselves, or more importantly, let other people assess us. Have we slipped too far? Are we on the edge on the brink of becoming just like the Pharisees? Or even worse, are we already there? Have we already slid into this chasm?
And I think we are in great danger when we just dismiss that whole notion that, oh no, we can pile up all of these extra biblical rules and there's no danger involved. This is how it should be done. We are indeed blind if we think that. Instead, let's adopt the attitude of the Holy Spirit, the attitude of the 12 apostles. Let's try not to add any burden that we just don't have to. Any standard we have, we should look at. Do we really have to have this?
Because we don't want to put this burden on our fellow man if we just don't have to. And yes, for people who've grown up plain, many of these things are very easy. It's the culture you grew up with. It's natural for you. But think about the burden you're putting on other people when you require that for church membership. I know I've said a lot of things tonight that are going to be very controversial and probably even offended some of my listeners.
But I hope you'll be able to get past that and really give some heartfelt consideration to what I've said and that we can all stay together on the narrow road.