Chapter 3: The Leaven of the Theologians. Jesus warned his disciples, "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees." Matthew 16:6. The Pharisees and Sadducees were two leading groups of Jewish theologians. When Jesus used the term leaven with regard to these theologians, he was referring to their teaching. However, it wasn't some specific teaching in itself, but their whole approach to teaching and interpreting the law. And their approach to Scripture was something evil in the sight of God.
Four principal evils characterized their approach to Scripture. They missed the big picture of what God was telling mankind. Second, they added human teaching to Scripture. Third, they also negated some of God's commandments. Fourth, they turned the Scriptures into something that only the elite could properly read and interpret. Missing the big picture.
The theologians missed the big picture because they focused on the minute things of the law instead of the major things: love, mercy, faith, justice, and forgiveness. Jesus describes the theologians perfectly when he denounced them saying, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and 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." Matthew 23:23-24. By overanalyzing the law, the theologians ended up missing the whole purpose and spirit of the law. If you had asked the scribes and Pharisees what were the two greatest commandments, probably most of them could have given you the correct answer. One, loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind; and two, loving our neighbor as ourself.
However, it would have been an academic answer, the type of answer that would enable them to get an A on an exam. They knew the answer in their heads rather than in their heart. Sadly, the minute things that theologians spent their time interpreting rarely had anything to do with love. They didn't create detailed regulations on what it meant to love one's neighbor or to be merciful to someone.
Rather, most of the regulations concerned things such as keeping the Sabbath, assessing damages from wrongdoing, the formalities needed for a valid marriage or divorce, Nazarite vows, tithing, and celebrating the Passover. In short, they imagined that the rituals, ceremonies, and holy days were the most important parts of the law. Most of the Jewish theologians were able to correctly identify many of the prophecies in the Old Testament about the coming Messiah.
Yet when the Messiah finally came, they failed to recognize him. In fact, they ended up putting him to death. They had lots of knowledge but little understanding. They never could see the big picture. Yet thousands of Jews who had little understanding about the intricacies of the law had no trouble recognizing Jesus as the Messiah when he did appear. What is God seeking? One purpose of the law was to prepare the Jews for the Christ and his kingdom.
And what sort of people did God want in preparation for his kingdom? People who had entered into an obedient, loving, faithful relationship with him and bore the fruits of such a relationship. As Micah put it, "He has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." But the theologians vainly imagined that God was seeking persons who had stuffed their heads with knowledge from the Scriptures and Jewish tradition.
They invented a path to God that required no godly fruit, just head knowledge and a slavish submission to human traditions. They thought God wanted people who knew better than to throw a stone the wrong distance on the Sabbath. They imagined that they honored God and his word by refusing to say the divine name. They thought they were respecting God's word by making regulations and rituals concerning the proper physical handling of it.
How much space to leave between each letter when copying the law, the height and width of the scrolls used, rituals to follow after touching the sacred scrolls, and rules about burying scrolls once they became worn. But that's not what God was seeking. He was looking for fruit. Fruit such as mercy and love for one's fellow man. Fruit like support and honor for one's parents. As God told the Israelites, "Execute true justice, show mercy and compassion everyone to his brother.
Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. Let none of you plan evil in his heart against his brother." Zechariah 7:9-10. And again, "He who oppresses the poor reproaches his maker, but he who honors him has mercy on the needy." Proverbs 14:31. Adding human teachings to Scripture. The New Testament describes the law as a burden. Acts 15:28. It was onerous enough without any new commandments added to it.
If the scribes and Pharisees had truly grasped the heart and mind of God, they would have realized this. But as we've seen, they couldn't see the big picture. They imagined that what pleased God was a slavish, meticulous obedience to even imaginary details of the law. So they added additional laws to what God had given. Now there is a difference between making new commandments and merely identifying reasonable applications of existing biblical commandments.
After all, the Old Testament community was responsible for enforcing the Mosaic law. So it was reasonable for them to make sensible applications concerning the law. Not working on the Sabbath obviously meant something more than just refraining from kindling a fire, the one application specified by God. A man plowing a field on the Sabbath couldn't claim he was innocent just because God hadn't specifically defined work as including plowing. Applications such as this follow basic common sense.
However, when the theologians included in the definition of work such things as setting a broken bone or flattening a lump in a straw mattress before lying down on it, they were loading senseless, heavy burdens on the backs of the people. They were effectively creating new laws. But there was a second way by which the theologians created new laws.
As I've mentioned, the theologians added to God's laws by claiming that there had been an oral law handed down from Moses to the various generations of scribes through the centuries. And this oral law supposedly contained additional commandments not found in the written law. For example, the theologians required various ritual washings that are not found in Scripture. But the truth is that there never was such an oral law. It was simply an invention of the theologians. Negating God's commandments.
A person would think that because the theologians added so many regulations to the law, at least they didn't take away any of the commandments that the law actually did contain. But here lies the irony of the theologians' leaven. They not only added to the law, but they also took away. Jesus himself pointed this out. For example, one of the principal commandments of the law was to honor one's father and mother. The word honor in English generally carries no connotation other than to show respect.
However, it's obvious from reading the New Testament that the underlying Hebrew and Greek words also carry the sense of providing financial support. In other words, it was a specific commandment of God for the Israelites to support their aged parents. However, the theologians taught that if a person declared that his assets were Corban, he didn't have to use them to support his parents. Declaring property to be Corban meant declaring that it was dedicated to God.
Once it was declared to be Corban, no third party had any claim to it. Now, it was expected that some of the property declared as Corban would be donated to the scribes and Pharisees or the synagogues they controlled. So this whole system of declaring property to be Corban benefited the Jewish theologians. It also made things convenient for grown children who didn't want any obligation to support their parents.
However, the selfish practice contradicted God's express commandment to provide for one's parents, and it left many of the elderly Jews destitute. Taking the Scriptures from the people. Although the Old Testament was copied and preserved under the supervision of the Jewish religious leaders, the scribal system effectively took the Scriptures away from the people. Because of the teachings of these leaders, the ordinary Jew came to view the inspired Scriptures as inadequate.
After all, would a normal person reading Exodus 35:2, "Whoever does any work on the Sabbath shall be put to death," come to the conclusion that he couldn't swat a flea biting him or that he couldn't scribble his name on a piece of paper? Of course not. Yet according to the theologians, he was violating the Sabbath, a sin punishable by death. So the Jewish people were afraid to simply listen to the law and follow a reasonable application of it.
To avoid offending God, the community thought they had better let their theologians tell them what the law really meant. God had inspired the Scriptures to be written for the common people, but the theologians turned them into something for the spiritual elite, for men trained in the rabbinical schools. The total effect of the leaven. The sum total of the scribes and Pharisees' human commandments, commentary, interpretations, hypocrisy, and spiritual elitism constituted the leaven Jesus told us to beware of.
The weight of the theologians' leaven crushed the whole spirit and purpose of the law. The Scriptures in themselves became useless because they only meant whatever the theologians said they meant. There was no point for an individual to try to study the sacred writings on his own. The average Jew felt that he or she couldn't possibly understand the Scriptures without the aid of the theologians. For in the end, the Jewish theologians had made the Scriptures invalid because of their traditions.
The theologians controlled what the people learned about God and his dealings with man. Yet they were themselves in utter darkness. To me, the situation was similar to an ancient sailing ship. When a new ship left forward, it could move with considerable speed. However, barnacles soon began attaching themselves to the hull of the ship. Over the years, more and more barnacles attached themselves to the hull, weighing down the ship. Eventually, the weight of the barnacles slowed the ship to a crawl.
At that point, the ship had to be put in the dry dock and the barnacles removed. Otherwise, the ship would be practically useless. The leaven of the scribes and Pharisees had done the same thing to Scripture. God had given the Israelites the exact inspired writings they needed. But over the years, these Jewish theologians had added so much of their leaven to the Scriptures that they became like a ship weighed down with barnacles. It was time for someone to clean off the barnacles.